The Living Corpse is a play by Leo Tolstoy, written in 1900 and published posthumously. Although the plot reaches a logical conclusion, the work cannot be considered finished: the author stopped working on the play and left it in draft form. Tolstoy drew inspiration from the divorce proceedings involving the mother of N. N. Sukhanov and from the staged death arranged by Sukhanov’s father on Sofiyskaya Embankment, which was intended to allow him to separate from his wife legally and enable her to remarry.