Footprints in the Snow Lead to Tolstoy’s Home

Winter blows into this city on westbound winds from the Volga Steppes. The snow flurries are hesitant at first, just a handful of flakes. Any minute they could taper off, leaving only a pale sun sliding into a gray eiderdown of clouds.

But in this farmland, 130 miles south of Moscow, villagers know that by nightfall this winter day, the snow will thicken, swirling in over barn and field. The birches lining the long avenue that leads to Leo Tolstoy’s home and birthplace will, by morning, stand deep in snow.

In 1828, when Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya Polyana, the journey from Moscow took three days and six changes of horses. Today it takes three hours along a four-lane highway.

Tolstoy, author of “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina,” lived his most productive years in a simple, white, stone house that stands at the avenue’s end.

The snow squeaks underfoot. Overhead the birch branches are etched black against the white sky.

At the head of the avenue, the path cuts left, passing through stands of fruit trees, descendants of the apple, pear and plum saplings that Tolstoy himself planted.

The one-room structure where Tolstoy, a count by birth, set up a school for the children of serfs, still stands in a clearing, painted blue, closed and shuttered. Beside it, an artist, bundled against the cold, has set his easel.

The house itself, white on white, stands amid snow-laden trees. On a small porch, just inside the door, visitors replace their shoes with tie-on cotton slippers.

The Tolstoy family’s favorite summertime gathering place was this porch. Its balustrade is decorated with fanciful wooden cut-outs of nursery creatures: roosters, gingerbread children and horses. Snow, trapped in their contours, highlights their rustic simplicity.

The rooms within are small, intimate and crowded with memorabilia. Almost every wall contains numerous framed black and white photographs. Poorly lighted and fading with age, they provide a glimpse of the long-ago world, when intellectual pioneers journeyed to this forested retreat to sit and talk with its iconoclastic resident.

Glass-fronted bookcases stand in every room. About 22,000 books in 30 languages have been preserved. In the margins of many, Tolstoy made commentary in his spidery, near-illegible, handwriting.

In contrast to the other rooms, the dining room is generously proportioned. A table, covered with a white cloth, is set for eight with everyday blue and white china.

Through the long windows, a thin, winter light shines on two large portraits. Tolstoy is seated at a crowded desk, and his wife Sofia, who bore him 13 children, laboriously copies his manuscripts by hand. She is painted in black velvet robes, stylishly coiffed and looks untroubled and serene.

In this room are also two grand pianos, at which family members often played in concert.

A charming room, cozy and comfortable, it contains piles of music books, a chess board with a game in play, a handsome fruitwood table set up for a card game and photographs of formally-dressed children in ornate silver frames.

Off the dining room, a picture gallery contains ancestral portraits. A small, unsigned watercolor shows Tolstoy, yoked to a plow and trudging symbolically between two horses.

Beyond is Tolstoy’s work room. The leather couch on which he was born is behind the desk. Pictures of Charles Dickens, Henry James and an American poet, Ernest Crosby, hang above the desk.

Tolstoy’s bedroom is a simple, monastic cell. The snowy landscape outside its windows reflects on the room’s bare, white walls.

A shepherd’s crook, the wide-brimmed cotton hat and white peasant’s robe Tolstoy wore in summer hang from a peg. A crude crutch is propped in a corner.

His ironstone pitcher and basin sit in a washstand. The brass bedstead supports a narrow, hard bed, covered with a white coverlet adorned only by a small hand-embroidered pillow, worked by Tolstoy’s sister, Mary, who was a nun.

On the bedside table is a well-worn book. “Messages From the Life and Writings of William Penn.”

The guest room is no less austere. The bed is low and scarcely wide enough for one. This is the room in which Maxim Gorky and Anton Chekhov slept.

William Jennings Bryan and Leonid Pasternak, father of Boris, and Tolstoy’s close friend and admirer, the great Russian novelist, Ivan Turgenev, all stayed here. Countess Tolstoy’s bedroom, at present, is not open to visitors.

All the books, papers, furnishings and paintings were once removed by local villagers and hidden during World War II. The Germans did not find them. Not until the 1950s was the residence restored.

Outside the front door stands a large elm tree towering over a homemade bench of birch boughs. This was one of Tolstoy’s favorite spots, where he sat to receive the many pilgrims, who, in the last years of his life, arrived in a never-ending stream.

Tolstoy wanted to be buried, without ceremony, in an unmarked grave. It’s a 10-minute walk through the forest to the site that he designated.

The grave stands, just as he decreed, an oblong mount covered only with evergreen branches. The fresh-fallen snow deepens the silence of the small pine-scented clearing.

As I started back, the jingle of bells broke the stillness. I stepped aside to let a sleigh, piled high with birch logs, go by.

The little horse trotted easily, his harness jingling. The driver, cherry cheeks under a black fur cap, lifted a mittened hand in salute.

Round-trip air fare Los Angeles to Moscow begins at $1,124. Pan American flies nonstop New York City to Moscow every Tuesday, Friday and Saturday, with return service Wednesday, Saturday, Sunday.

Arrangements to travel by car between Moscow and Yasnaya Polyana should be made with the Intourist Travel Information Office, 630 Fifth Ave., Suite 868, New York 10111, (212) 757-3884. Admission to the estate and the house is included in the cost of a car, driver and interpreter--about $230.