If Christ was born in a manger, then one of his most remarkable disciples, the stubborn, inexhaustible ruler Count Tolstoy, chose a no-frills final resting place as well: the small red house of Ozolin, the Astapovo stationmaster, a railway worker. And while three kings from the East visited to honor the infant Savior, bearing gifts that sprinkled the myth with wonder, the death of the literary giant drew a different kind of crowd. A nation’s workers, peasants, and the various powers—Church, State, Police—gathered around his bed, shaping and rehearsing the drama of a life that had become a public monument. This is the essence of Tolstoy is dead, a work by Vladimir Pozner published in French in 1935 and not yet published in the country where the tale was authored.
Pozner builds Tolstoy’s death from two central materials. On one hand, a vast telegraph archive that swept the country in the autumn of that year, recording the news that the author, a living emblem of the homeland, had hobbled his venerable, vast, and ailing humanity toward Astapovo. In 1910, an unnamed railway station in Lipetsk Oblast becomes the stage. On the other hand, fragments from Tolstoy’s private diaries and the forty-eight-year correspondence with his wife, Sofia Behrs, allow a stark, almost Bergman-like X-ray into a marriage where the author’s work remains inseparable from moments of happiness and episodes of pain. The threads of their life echo in his most notorious works, notably the Kreutzer Sonata.
From these documents, Pozner’s method emerges as less pure invention and more montage. The book leans on selection rather than an attempt at seamless transplantation, turning primary sources into a fiction-cum-journalistic composition. It feels like a hybrid—journalism with dramaturgic texture. The information about Tolstoy’s escape and death sits there, raw and accessible, and the author arranges it with clean, effective strokes to guide the reader’s attention. Fragmentation, velocity, and shifting vantage points become the scaffolding of a grand, theatrical tableau that covers the seven days from Tolstoy’s arrival at the Astapovo station to his death. It is a period in which Russia’s last years of tsarist rule seem to be on stage before a fascinated audience.
Pozner surfaces several themes with this colorful collage. The most evident is family, a recurrent thread in Tolstoyan artistry. The intricate relationship with Sofia Behrs becomes a focal point: the tensions with Tolstoy’s publisher, Chertkov, the couple’s prolific brood of thirteen children, and the emotional weight of bodily existence that Sofia voices with frank honesty. A woman’s subordination surfaces as a counterpoint to a man who wrestles with identity, and who bears the weight of patriarchal contradictions. In this battlefield called the family, the Count’s experiences take on a stark, uncompromising tone. Wealth that defies Spartan ideals, the search for a personal gospel in dialogue with national literature’s responsibilities, and a longing for chastity clashing with a volatile masculinity—all illustrate a continuous tension. Tolstoy stands at once as the living marble of the empire’s spirit and as a man drawn to the austerity of a Carthusian temperament.
Yet the nourishment of the family lens opens the door to a larger question: the function of literature in the social fabric of the nineteenth century and, more broadly, the novel’s role in reflecting and shaping public life. The work invites reflection on how writers interpret economic and civic structures, how they become voices for a community’s sensibility, intellect, and meaning. Reading this narrative from that vantage point, Tolstoy is dead presents a contemporary reader with a world that feels abruptly distant, yet still echoes with the idea that literature can perform more than convey ideas or opinions. It can be a staple of historical existence, a force that helps define what a society thinks it is. In this sense, Tolstoy’s death rises again as the disappearance of a symbol, a spiritual father who once carried the weight of a culture. The author’s figure ascends to a near-sublime status, not solely as a chronicler of the era’s events but also as a conduit for a broad, collective voice. On the path to Yasnaya Polyana, as Tolstoy’s body is carried by his children and the faithful townsfolk of Astapovo watch the procession, the moment feels heavier than a simple farewell to a literary giant. It marks the end of a world, a world in which writers embodied the spirit of their time with the same intensity and legitimacy as princes and statesmen.