Yasnaya Polyana

Russia

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History

Yasnaya Polyana, village and former estate of the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, in Tula oblast (region), west-central European Russia. It lies 100 miles (160 km) south of Moscow.

Yasnaya Polyana (“Sunlit Meadows”) was acquired in 1763 by C.F. Volkonsky, Leo Tolstoy’s great grandfather. Leo Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya Polyana in 1828 and after his marriage in 1862 returned and lived there for another 48 years. Following Tolstoy’s conversion to Christian anarchism, Yasnaya Polyana became a pilgrimage centre for his followers. Upon his death in 1910, Tolstoy was buried in a grave marked only by nine oaks on Stary Zakaz (Old Wood) Hill, a few hundred yards from his simply furnished home. Looted during the German occupation in 1941, Tolstoy’s home and the remaining portion of the original estate were preserved under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture of the U.S.S.R.

The Tolstoy Memorial Museum complex includes the Volkonsky mansion built in the Neoclassical style, a servants’ house, coach houses, a park extending to the Voronka River, and Tolstoy’s home, with his library of some 22,000 books. The building where Tolstoy organized a school for peasants in the late 1850s has become a literary museum. An Order of Lenin (an award for special services, ratified by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R.) was bestowed upon the Yasnaya Polyana museum complex in 1978.