AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF
COUNTESS TOLSTOY
[SOPHIE ANDREEVNA TOLSTOY]

TRANSLATED BY
S. S. KOTELIANSKY
AND
LEONARD WOOLF







NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH, INC. MCMXXII

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
B. W. HUEBSCH, INC.
——
PRINTED IN U. S. A.

TRANSLATORS' NOTE

THE circumstances under which this autobiography of Tolstoy's wife has just been discovered and published in Russia are explained in the preface of Vassili Spiridonov which follows. Spiridonov edited and published it in the first number of a new Russian review, Nachala. We have translated his preface in full and also the greater number of his notes, which contain much material with regard to Tolstoy which has not previously been available for English readers. Such readers may perhaps consider that some of these notes and the documentation generally are over-elaborate. But they must remember that the question of Tolstoy's "going away" and of his relations with his wife, Countess Sophie Tolstoy, and other members of his family, has roused the most passionate interest and controversy in Russia. This is partly due, no doubt, to the dramatic and psychological interest of the whole story, but is also due very largely to the fact that Tolstoy's actions were bound up with his teachings, and his numerous disciples and opponents were watching the struggle of the preacher to put his principles in practice in his own life. The whole question of the will and the going away of Tolstoy, of the difference with his wife, and of the subsequent dealings with his property, has given rise to an immense literature in Russia. As Spiridonov's preface shows, it is treated as a kind of cause célèbre in which the whole of humanity is to