Dav here with another guest Blog post from Neal, Dramaturg Extraordinaire.  Spaceba! Tolstoy’s Real-Life Inspiration  In 1881, E.P. Simon, the daughter of an acquaintance of Tolstoy’s, married N.S. Gimer, a middle-ranking clerk in the Ministry of Justice.  Gimer turned out to be a drunkard, and after two years of marriage and the birth of a son, his wife left him.  Her mother then introduced her to P.P. Akimov, a white-collar employee of the railroad.  Although Simon-Gimer never divorced her first husband, she lived as Akimov’s common-law wife for approximately seven years.  Unfortunately Akimov proved no better than Gimer, and Simon-Gimer finally ended the relationship in 1890.  Sometime in the early 1890s she met and fell in love with Chistov, she tried to divorce her first husband, but for reasons that remain unclear, the divorce was not granted.  At this point Simon-Gimer, now desperate, paid her first husband to fake his own suicide.  He pretended to drown himself, and the “widow” soon remarried.  The scheme was uncovered, however, as soon as Gimer attempted to obtain a passport.  Simon-Gimer’s second marriage was annulled, and she and her first husband were put on trial in 1897.  The two were sentenced to Siberian exile, but through the intervention of high-placed friends, the sentence was commuted to a year in prison and then suspended.  Source: Wachtel, Andrew. “Resurrection a la Russe: Tolstoy’s The Living Corpse as Cultural Paradigm”. PMLA 107.2 (1992): 261-73.  (photo courtesy Wikipedia)

Dav here with another guest Blog post from Neal, Dramaturg Extraordinaire.  Spaceba!

Tolstoy’s Real-Life Inspiration 

In 1881, E.P. Simon, the daughter of an acquaintance of Tolstoy’s, married N.S. Gimer, a middle-ranking clerk in the Ministry of Justice.  Gimer turned out to be a drunkard, and after two years of marriage and the birth of a son, his wife left him.  Her mother then introduced her to P.P. Akimov, a white-collar employee of the railroad.  Although Simon-Gimer never divorced her first husband, she lived as Akimov’s common-law wife for approximately seven years.  Unfortunately Akimov proved no better than Gimer, and Simon-Gimer finally ended the relationship in 1890.  Sometime in the early 1890s she met and fell in love with Chistov, she tried to divorce her first husband, but for reasons that remain unclear, the divorce was not granted.  At this point Simon-Gimer, now desperate, paid her first husband to fake his own suicide.  He pretended to drown himself, and the “widow” soon remarried.  The scheme was uncovered, however, as soon as Gimer attempted to obtain a passport.  Simon-Gimer’s second marriage was annulled, and she and her first husband were put on trial in 1897.  The two were sentenced to Siberian exile, but through the intervention of high-placed friends, the sentence was commuted to a year in prison and then suspended. 

Source: Wachtel, Andrew. “Resurrection a la Russe: Tolstoy’s The Living Corpse as Cultural Paradigm”. PMLA 107.2 (1992): 261-73. 

(photo courtesy Wikipedia)

2 years ago
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