The tree that Tolstoy planted outside the stable
Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of Leo Tolstoy’s death, and there has been quite a lot of press about him here in Moscow. Some of it saying that his political and religious philosophies would be quite challenging even today, and yet he is also revered as one of the world’s great writers. His book The Kingdom of God is within you was apparently a catalyst for Ghandi and Martin Luther King. I have not read it, but have just downloaded it to my Kindle (electronic reading device – more about that later).
I somehow discovered Tolstoy’s writing as a teenager living in Jakarta, Indonesia, and read War and Peace and Anna Karenina by choice at the tender age of 16 or 17. There was something about the descriptions of life in pre-revolutionary Russia that I really resonated with. Dostoyevsky was a bit depressing, but Tolstoy I loved. I recently reread War and Peace on my Kindle to see if it would strike me differently now, all these years later and having lived in Russia. It felt very familiar and I could really hear the way that people speak, even in the English translation, and the Russian feel that touched me so deeply before.
One of my favorite places in Moscow is Tolstoy’s winter home during the 1880s and 1890s, which is open to the public. You go through a gate in a wall to see the wooden, mustard yellow house with green trim, surrounded by a large leafy garden. There is a little old lady selling tickets in what was once the stable. On one visit she insisted on taking me outside to see an old birch tree and then showed a photo of the same tree over a hundred years ago. On entering the house you are asked to put on large felt slippers on top of your shoes to protect the floors. We all felt a bit like hobbits, with very large flat feet! Each room has been left as the family used it and I love the little extra details, like in the dining room there is a note that says “This is where Sophia (his wife) would stand to ladle the soup” and all the place settings are there, Tolstoy’s with a water glass, as he didn’t drink alcohol. In his study, the legs have been cut down on his chair to make it the height he wanted, and many other personal details that really bring the house alive and give you such a feeling of the family who lived in it. In the evenings they would often be visited by writers and musicians of the day, such as Chekhov, Gorky, Rachmaninov and Rimsky-Korsakov and you really get a sense of the creative life of Moscow at that time.
One of the places we have not yet visited is Yasnaya Polyana, his country estate which is a three hour drive from Moscow, mainly because our weekends are usually Sunday and Monday, on Sundays the return journey could be very heavy traffic with everyone returning to the city from their weekend dachas, and and on Mondays all museums are closed. It is definitely on my list of places to go. (Having just read the attached article, I must now look for the Tolstoy Train, which I have never heard of!) Yasnaya Polyana is the setting for a recent film about the last years of Tolstoy’s life, called The Last Station. I saw it on the plane to the US and loved it, wonderful performances by Helen Mirren as Sophia and Christopher Plummer, unrecognizable as Tolstoy himself. Here is a link to an interesting article in the Guardian http://gu.com/p/2dj9f
Tolstoy's Moscow house from the garden
Tolstoy in 1908 - One of the first examples of color photography
Tolstoy painted by Ilya Repin
Message from Moscow 