Biography | Leo Tolstoy — He Died at 6:05 in the Stationmaster's House

People imagine Tolstoy dying in his own bed at Yasnaya Polyana.

He died in someone else's house beside a railway.

In the night of 28 October 1910 Old Style — 10 November New Style — the eighty-two-year-old count left the estate in secret with his doctor, Dušan Makovitsky.

He bought a third-class ticket and meant to go south.

On the evening of 31 October Old Style he was taken off train No. 12 at Astapovo, a junction on the Ryazan-Ural line, with a rising fever.

Ivan Ivanovich Ozolin, the stationmaster, gave him the main room in this one-storey wooden house, built to a standard railway design in 1889–90 for staff flats.

Ozolin was a Lutheran of Latvian origin. There were no icons on the walls.

Newspapers and Pathé cameras filled the platform. Telegrams left the station by the hundred.

Sofya Andreyevna chartered a train and was kept from the room until he was no longer conscious.

He received no last rites. A priest from Optina Pustyn was refused at the door.

At 6:05 a.m. on 7 November 1910 Old Style — 20 November New Style — Tolstoy died of pneumonia.

Ozolin stopped the station clock at 6:05.

The room was left as it stood. The shadow of the head on the wallpaper, thrown by the bedside lamp, was later outlined and kept.

The house is now a branch of the State Tolstoy Museum. The settlement and the station were renamed Lev Tolstoy in 1918.

The pin is this cottage, not the brick station next to it.

A man who had spent decades arguing against the machinery of modern fame died inside a railway employee's flat, with the world's press on the platform.

Photo: Leo Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, 23 May 1908, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons