Moscow: On the trail of Tolstoy

By Lisa Grainger Published: 8:00AM GMT 07 March 2010

Previous of Images Next In annoy of most Russians" passion for Tolstoy"s works, celebrations are being hold everywhere but his own nation Near the finish of his life, the bard became a devout anarchist, a position that resulted in his grave proscription in 1901 The investigate in Moscow"s Tolstoy Museum

Nothing, it seemed, could have gratified the immature sales partner in the Moscow bookshop some-more than me asking for a duplicate of War and Peace. "I vant to appreciate you for your passion," she pronounced earnestly, one palm on her heart, dire an English interpretation in to my hands, prior to presenting Anna Karenina, Resurrection, Childhood and The Death of Ivan Ilych for my inspection, and afterwards job over her colleagues to declare my interest. "He is the passion, too. Our Russian genius. So, appreciate you."

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Tolstoy competence have died 100 years ago, but the bard excites some-more seductiveness right away than he ever has. Already this year Mexico and Cuba have organized book fairs dedicated to him. New translations of Anna Karenina will be published in 4 languages. A 100-volume pick up of his functions is about to be unveiled, and twenty-two functions are to be translated in to English. And The Last Station, an Oscar-nominated movie about the last dual years of the writer"s life, has usually opened. Numerous centenary celebrations are programmed worldwide.

Strangely, though, in annoy of most Russians" passion for his works, celebrations are being hold everywhere but his own country. Here, as I"ve detected in the past week, perplexing to clarity about the bard in his home city, there are no Tolstoy trails, integrate of English-speaking Tolstoy guides and no caller report in languages alternative than Russian.

Why celebrations here are pale is not easy to discover. One reason is that large-scale tourism to the city is comparatively recent. Another is Tolstoy"s attribute with the Russian Orthodox church. Near the finish of his life, the bard became a devout anarchist, a position that resulted in his grave proscription in 1901. With the church"s stream energy ("not distinct that of the Communist Party thirty years ago," as one Russian put it to me), being seen as actively pro-Tolstoy currently competence be noticed by a small as being not usually anti-government, but anti-Russian.

Not so anti-Russian that museums to the bard have been closed, or contention curtailed. But, says Tolstoy"s great-great-grandson, Vladimir Ilyich Tolstoy, with whom I have lunch at the writer"s former nation estate, Yasnaya Polyana, where he is the notable relic director: "The theme of the church is complicated. The authorities are feeling the perspective of the church to Tolstoy. So, nonetheless they [the state] await the [family] celebrations, they cannot take part. They are caught."

Arriving at the gates at Yasnaya Polyana, 125 miles south of Moscow, I"m reminded of the stage in Anna Karenina in that the brave woman arrives in the panorama to find Vronsky watchful in swirling snow.

It is February, and nonetheless the skies are blue, it is 3F (-16C). Sparkling, uninformed sleet covers each surface. To the left of the long, birch-lined drive stretches an icy lake. Beyond are snow-covered log-cabin stables. A integrate of sleighs (sadly sans bells and bearskins) are half-buried in white nearby the stables, seats thick with ice. And over rises the residence in that the bard was innate and lived until a integrate of weeks prior to his death: a large 19th-century, cream-painted double-storey dwelling, ringed by orchards of icicle-hung apple trees.

It is this residence that is portrayed in the movie The Last Station; where Tolstoy (played by Christopher Plummer) and his mom Sophia (Oscar-nominated Helen Mirren) lived with 9 of their flourishing thirteen young kids until he left home in 1910, held pneumonia and died at a internal station-master"s house.

Filming didn"t essentially take place here ("unfortunately, it was less complicated, less costly and less official to movie in Germany," Vladimir Tolstoy says). Having seen the precious art, excellent seat and ethereal wooden floors, that is not indispensably a bad thing. As I travel around the estate with Galina Alexeeva, a Russian Yale-educated educational who has been head of Tolstoy investigate here for twenty-five years, the residence left as it was when Tolstoy lived here becomes a place not usually of pleasing objects, but of unusual tales.

A black tanned hide lounge is suggested as the place where Tolstoy and afterwards eleven of his young kids were born. There"s the list at that he wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, flashy with paper, pens, candlesticks and a potion paperweight presented by a workers" union. Also here is a small coronet dog with that he slept as a child, since to him by a dear aunt who looked after him from the age of eighteen months, after his mom died. By it is a chair, whose legs he embellished so as to be closer to the list when he became short-sighted.

Beyond the investigate is the dining room, that played host to Russian greats such as Prokofiev, Gorky, Chekhov and the Russian residence painter Repin, whose functions accoutre the walls. And over that, Sophia"s bedroom, with the small list on that she transcribed, in her tidy handwriting, Tolstoy"s roughly unreadable manuscripts. Sometimes she would repeat the charge twenty times as the bard edited and revised the text.

Seeing the writer"s room is as relocating as station by his desk. Although the great-grandson of Prince Sergey Volkonsky, Tolstoy, as he grew older, increasingly identified with Russian serfs, hoeing dirt with them, flourishing food and sauce similar to a man of the land. While Sophia"s room contains the art, excellent furniture, tapestries, paintings and bullion icons of a 19th-century noblewoman, Tolstoy"s room is friar in the simplicity. On the singular bed stretches a sweeping knitted by his wife. On the walls are paintings of his children. Two white, coarse-linen shirts and a severe hat cling to on hooks (shirts that his supporters subsequently wore). Even his boots are rough, done by the man himself.

What strikes one when on vacation this nation estate, and his locale residence in Moscow (to that he reluctantly changed in 1882 so that his young kids could be improved educated), is how most of the man"s novel mirrored his life.

The same goes for Moscow"s Tolstoy Museum, where one gets a clarity of the absolved universe in to that he was innate (and wrote about in Anna Karenina) by the portraits and effects of his lace-shirted ancestors. A room featuring bullets, bridgehead dirt and medals from Crimea, where he served in the Russian army, helps to insist the energy of the conflict scenes in War and Peace. Shelves holding the 22,000 books he amassed, in the fifteen languages he spoke (including Arabic and Hebrew), assistance insist his immeasurable believe of the world"s religions and cultures. Cabinets of letters from Russian tsars or Mahatma Gandhi (with whom he corresponded about non-violent protest) yield an discernment in to his devout and domestic tour in his after works.

Rather touchingly, in his wooden, country-style Moscow home, where I am guided by a ardent woman, Svetlana Ovsyannikova, who fell in love with the author"s functions at university and has guided here ever since, there are a series of equipment that exhibit some-more about the writer as a man. In his sauce room are his dumbbells and an English bicycle he paid for in his sixties and learnt to float in the Moscow troops horse-riding ring. A bear skin lies underneath the grand piano a sign of his younger days as a hunter and a fasten tape deck plays the writer"s usually piano composition. A fine cloth festooned with visitors" signatures by his daughter Tatiana covers a table. A rocking equine owned by his dear youngest son, Alexis, who died at seven, stands unused, to one side a span of little ice-skates. And on walls all over the residence cling to photographs, most taken and grown by Sophia: of her father on horses, on foot the estate, or sitting kindly with grandchildren.

As one would design of such a storyteller, Tolstoy"s grave has a story to tell, too. As he lay dying, he done his family guarantee that his funeral place would be conjunction ornate nor noted with eremite iconography.

"When he was a child, his hermit Nikolai told him that in the forest, there was a enchanting immature stick. Whoever found this hang would find almighty happiness," pronounced the guide, Galina, as we shivered in a blizzard, around a elementary pine-leaf-covered mound. "His last instruct was to be buried there, where his dear hermit pronounced the immature hang was found."

So, too, were 72 Nazi soldiers, killed in skirmishes when the residence was assigned in the Forties, during what is called here "The Great Patriotic War". Later, the invaders" bodies were changed to the alternative side of the river. But similar to all great Tolstoy tales, that"s another, some-more complicated, story.

GETTING THERE

Abercrombie & Kent (0845 618 2143; www.abercrombiekent.co.uk) offers a five-night outing to Moscow, staying at the Ritz-Carlton, from �1,350. The cost includes b & b in a stand in higher room, economy lapse flight, in isolation transfers, opening fees to the writers Moscow residence and museum, and dual days with a guide.