In a dismal village railway station, on November 7th, 1910, the rich life of Leo Tolstoy came to its melodramatic end. Several months later the Moscow Art Theater announced that rehearsals had begun on an unpublished play left by Tolstoy—“The Living Corpse,” better known in this country as “Redemption”.

At one time of my life I was connected with the Moscow Art Theater as executive assistant to Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, cofounder with Stanislavsky and director of the Art Theater, and it is from my memory of the play's opening and from my conversations with Nemirovich-Danchenko that I am able to reconstruct this history of the origin and production of “The Living Corpse.”