by David Selzer.
Tolstoy, unshriven, died from pneumonia
at Astapovo – a busy provincial
railway junction – in the station master’s house.
The old man’s last days were a media
sensation – much of the world’s press was there,
and a film crew from Pathé News, Paris.
In the November of 1910, Tolstoy,
trying to escape nearly fifty years
of marriage by finding peace in the Urals,
travelling, by train, in an unheated,
crowded, smoky Third Class carriage – the author
of Anna Karenina, re-writer
of the Gospels, ex-communicant
of Holy Mother Church, aristocrat
who lived as a peasant on his own estate –
fell ill. His wife, Sophia, and some of their
thirteen children, caught up with him,
travelling first class in hired railway cars.
They stayed in a siding, Tolstoy refusing
to see Sophia, though his children
pleaded with him. The newspaper headlines
were predictable: ‘Salacious Novelist
Loses Plot,’ ‘Count Tolstoy all War no Peace,’
or some such. Comatose, the death rattle
begun, there being no one to bar her,
Sophia sat with him until the end.
In 1918 Astapovo
was renamed Lev Tolstoy but the legend
persists that he died in the Waiting Room –
well chosen, of course. So maybe this story
is really about Anna and Ivan
Ozolin – names not often mentioned
in its retelling – the station master
and his wife, twenty years married, choosing
to care for a dying stranger in their home.