Welcome to Significant Others, a podcast that takes a look at the less familiar side of history.

My name is Liza Powell O'Brien.

I'm a playwright, which means you've probably never heard of me, but it also means I like drama,

especially between characters who know each other really well.

And I've always been curious about what kind of drama might have existed around historically significant figures,

like famous artists or transformative scientists or even the guys on the money.

What was it like to be married to Gandhi, or to be the child of baby care guru Dr. Spock?

And how did Abraham Lincoln fall in love with the emotionally volatile Mary Todd?

I wondered about all this even before I met and married a notable person myself,

and I finally collected enough of these stories to start sharing them.

So here's the first of the bunch.

It's about a woman who, at 18, won the heart of a 34-year-old bachelor and a man who happened to be one of the greatest writers of his time.

Their marriage was long and grueling, but it was also inextricably linked to his work,

which is still considered among the best that literature has to offer.

This time, on significant others, meet Countess Sophia Tolstoy.

All happy families are alike.

Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

That is one of the best-known sentences in all of literature.

And the man who wrote it, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, knew what he was talking about.

The family he was born into was hardly intact through his childhood.

He lost his mother by the age of two, and by ten, had lost his father as well.

His siblings and servants, and the rather eccentric aunt who took them all in,

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