TRANSLATORS' NOTE
The circumstances under which this autobiography of Tolstoi's wife has just been discovered and published in Russia are explained in the preface of Vasilii 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 Tolstoi 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 Tolstoi's "going away," and of his relations with his wife, Countess Sophie Tolstoi, 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 it is also due very largely to the fact that Tolstoi's actions were bound up with
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