Marriage story

摘要

LEO TOLSTOY was an inveterate quitter. All his life, he gave up the things that mattered to him, or tried to. He bolted from university without a degree, left the army, renounced the privileges of aristocracy. He rejected the Orthodox church and abjured fiction as a vanity. He forswore the libertinism of his youth, and-eventually-fled his tortured marriage, in the fatal escape that ended at the railway station in Astapovo. This urge to shed distractions and commitments is one of the continuities that Andrei Zorin, a cultural historian at Oxford, traces in his beautiful account of Tolstoy's long, astonishing life. Born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, a family estate, Tolstoy studied in Kazan, fought in the Caucasus, became the world's most famous author and founded what amounted to a new religion. He was an avid farmer, an education reformer and a champion of famine relief. Strive as he might to repudiate fame, in 1910 the world's media besieged the station-master's house as he lay dying inside.