Books: A Billy-Goat Pining for Purity TOLSTOY

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In later years, Sophia's chief rivals were not the muzhiks or the muse but Tolstoy's disciples, led by Vladimir Chertkov, an aristocrat and former guards officer who underwent conversion to Tolstoy's Utopian doctrine of universal peace and brotherhood. In 1908 Chertkov settled near Yasnaya Polyana and made himself indispensable to his teacher. As the master's literary properties came increasingly under Chertkov's control, Sophia's justifiable paranoia worsened. "Everything is a plot against me," she wrote in her diary on June 26, 1910. "It will end only with the death of this poor old man, who has been led astray by the devil Chertkov."

Four months later, after listening to his wife rummaging through his closets late at night, Tolstoy slipped out of the house with his physician, intending to live out his days in a monastery. He boarded a train, but developed a high fever at the village of Astapovo and could not go on. He was put to bed in the stationmaster's house, and word spread by telegraph that Leo Tolstoy was dying. The press and thousands of Russians began to stream toward Astapovo.

In his autobiography Speak Memory, Vladimir Nabokov recalls that he and his family were in Berlin when they got the news. "Good gracious," said his mother. "Time to go home." Charles Pathe, the newsreel pioneer, cabled his cameraman: TRY TO GET CLOSEUP, STATION NAME. TAKE FAMILY, WELL-KNOWN FIGURES, CAR THEY ARE SLEEPING IN. Pathe's drained images survive. Among them is Sophia pacing the platform. Having been barred from entering the station house, she tries to peer through the windows. The curtains are drawn.

There would be no more quarrels with "Lyovochka." Besides, Tolstoy had already had the last word 35 years before, when he began Anna Karenina with the observation that "happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."