The Tolstoy Marriage Revisited-Many Times

The cast of characters is alluring: a supremely great novelist turned prophet in his later years, his much younger wife, a woman of strong character and very considerable culture, a devoted companion during much of their life together, conscientious and loving mother of their thirteen (!) children, of whom only eight lived to adulthood. For a period he turned away from fiction entirely and devoted himself full time to religion, to developing in a series of treatises what he considered a programme capable of saving mankind.\n Vladimir Zhdanov was a lifetime Tolstoy scholar, author of many excellent, well grounded books.