Sergei Tolstoy Had Difficult Life But Was 'A Lot of Fun' - Family
WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 13th January, 2022) A great-grandson of famous Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, Sergei Tolstoy, who passed away several days ago in the US state of Maryland, had a difficult life but was a lot of fun, his second-cousin Maria Tolstoy Sarandinaki told Sputnik.
Sergei Tolstoy died January 4 in a hospice center in Bethesda, a Washington, DC suburb, at the age of 99.
"I was looking for him last year. I knew he was staying at St. Mary housing, and emailed them. A friend of his, Mary Kay Canarte, answered me that a couple of years ago he had fallen, they found him unconscious," said Sarandinaki, who is Leo Tolstoy's great-granddaughter.
Canarte advised her to write in big black letters, as Sergei Tolstoy was losing his vision at that time.
"Unfortunately, I never did that, and I feel very guilty now," Sarandinaki added.
She got to know Sergei in the early 2000s during the Tolstoy family reunions at his former home in Yasnaya Polyana, Russia.
"Sergei was an incredible flirt.
He was always flirting with the ladies. He was mischievous. He loved to joke, he loved to flirt, he loved to have a shot of vodka. He loved the family," she said. "He was definitely a character. He was a lot of fun. He was eccentric."
However, Tolstoy had a very difficult life, Sarandinaki added. His mother, Vera Tolstoy, left her husband, who was a Muslim, because he met a new wife.
"Actually she gave her son the name Tolstoy. Sergei knew that his mother was Tolstoy, but at the same time he knew that he was not really Tolstoy," she mentioned.
Speaking of Leo Tolstoy's legacy in the US, Sarandinaki noted that almost everybody here read his big novels, like War and Peace, or Anna Karenina, and very few people know nothing about him.
"I have a large portrait of Tolstoy. My nurse, when she saw it, said: 'O my God, I have read everything. I can not believe that you are my patient.' I was amazed that my nurse, who is Vietnamese, knew my great grandfather," she said.