She had traveled to Astapovo as soon as she heard of his illness, but the friends caring for him did not allow her in until Tolstoy was on the very point of death. One of the most haunting images caught on camera is of Sonya herself, peering in through the window of the room in which her sick husband lay. “Tolstoy is Better … The Count Is Very Weak, but the Doctors Say There Is No Immediate Danger,” blazed a headline in the New York Times just a couple days before his death, when he was already drifting in and out of consciousness. His death became one of the first international media “events.” It attracted to the little station not only hundreds of his admirers (and some watchful government spies) but also a Pathé News camera team, eager to catch the great man’s final moments on film, and reporters from all over the world who wired often unreliable stories back to their editors. And there was certainly very little solitude or quiet. In fact, there were to be very few of those “last days.” For whatever Tolstoy’s plans for the future had been (and we can now only guess at them), they were soon interrupted when he was taken ill on board a train and forced to get out at Astapovo, where the stationmaster gave him the use of his house.
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