I was born on August 28, 1828 at Yasnya Polyana, in Tula Province, 120 miles or so south of Moscow. I was the fourth of five children in a very wealthy and ancient family. My parents died when I was a child, my father died whilst traveling with some servants into town, and I was brought up by relatives.
In 1844 I started studying law and oriental languages at Kazan University, but I never took a degree. Dissatisfied with the standard of education, I returned in the middle of my studies back to Yasnya Polyana, which I had inherited fully in 1847. and then spent much of much time in Moscow and St. Petersburg, mostly in brothels.
I was treated for venereal disease in 1847, and for most of the rest of my life was troubled by my tendency to debauch myself on a grand scale. “When my brothers took me for the first time to a brothel and I accomplished this act, I then stood by the woman’s bed and wept.†From this point on my sexual desires and moral beliefs would constantly be at odds with each other. Mostly the sex won out.
I married my 18 year old lover, Sophia Behrs, in 1862 and had thirteen kids, damnit. Sergei, Tatyana, Ilya, Leo, Marya, Peter, Nikolai, Varvara, Andrei, Mikhail, Aleksei, Alexandra, and Ivan
I clearly realized that my biography, if it suppressed all the nastiness and criminality of my life - as they customarily write biographies - would be a lie, and that if one is going to write my biography, one must write the whole truth.
After I finished writing Anna Karenina, I decided everything I wrote before that was godless and otherwise garbage. I immersed myself into a full "conversion", not questioning my religious belief any longer, and renounced hunting, eating meat, smoking, dentists, and even drinking alcohol. Although I believed that my family was full of "insane people", so I left my estate to my disciple Vladimir Chertkov so as to follow the urge to live as a wandering ascetic, and died of pneumonia and heart failure on November 20, 1910, at a Astapova railway junction.
Check out more about my hometown at www.yasnayapolyana.ru.
