When, on the chilly evening of October 31, 1910, the senior doctor of the railway outpatient clinic at the Astapovo station was urgently called to see a patient, he had no idea. How will this meeting turn out? In the house of the station chief, the great Russian writer, philosopher and at the same time excommunicated heretic, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, was dying. It was the station doctor, a half-educated psychiatrist, who had to become a “confessor” of the genius, understand the contradictions of his life, creativity and intra-family relationships, and also make his medical judgment, making a diagnosis: affective epilepsy. A modest provincial doctor learned terrible, shocking facts, asking unusual questions. Why did the great writer go to watch the autopsy of the dead body of a woman he knew? Why were skeletons of newborns found in the attic of his closest relative's house? Why did the writer’s own son call him rubbish and refuse to communicate with him? Why was the writer’s wife so jealous of her husband’s secretary and publisher? Why did this publisher not allow a confessor to see the dying Tolstoy, preventing him from being reconciled by the church? The narrative is built on the basis of authentic documents, letters and diaries of the writer and his relatives that have come down to us.