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Updated: June 2, 2025
Educational enterprise was aroused, and some forty schools for peasant children were started on the model of that opened by Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana . The literary world throbbed with new life, and a brilliant company of young writers came to the surface, counting among them names of European celebrity, such as Dostoevsky, Nekrassov, and Saltykov. Unhappily the reign of Progress was short.
Tolstoy's outlook was, "The gospels are true because they say this or that." You yourself must be the judge, your free reason must be the judge, of truth. There is a writing known to few, for I believe it is still unpublished. It is the Relation by Mihail Novikov the Peasant, concerning the Night of October 21, 1910, spent by him at Yasnaya Polyana.
The old home of the family, Yasnaya Polyana, where Tolstoy, his brothers and sister, spent their early years in charge of two guardian aunts, was not only a halting-place for pilgrims journeying to and from the great monastic shrines, but gave shelter to a number of persons of enfeebled minds belonging to the peasant class, with whom the devout and kindly Aunt Alexandra spent many hours daily in religious conversation and prayer.
The voice that cried from the comfortable wilderness of Yasnaya Polyana furnished unique "copy" for newspapers. Alas! the pity of it all. The moral dyspepsia that overtook Carlyle in middle life was the result of a lean, spoiled, half-starved youth; the moral dyspepsia that seized the soul of the wonderful Tolstoy was the outcome of a riotous youth, a youth overflowing with the "joy of life."
Gorky, a born observer, inheritor of the realistic traditions of his country, could not help turning aside, one day, from this ideological art, visibly influenced by Tolstoy's dramas. The direct part that the romanticist has played in the political events of his country sufficiently proves that he has taken a different road from that taken by the apostle of Yasnaya Polyana.
In the autumn of 1883, after Turgenieff's death, when the family had gone into Moscow for the winter, my father stayed at Yasnaya Polyana alone, with Agafya Mikhailovna, and set earnestly about reading through all Turgenieff's works. This is what he wrote to my mother at the time: I am always thinking about Turgenieff. I am intensely fond of him, and sorry for him, and do nothing but read him.
"Have you ever visited a church of the Old Believers?" Count Tolstoy asked me one evening. We were sitting round the supper-table at Count Tolstoy's house in Moscow. I was just experimenting on some pickled mushrooms from Yasnaya Polyana, the daintiest little mushrooms which I encountered in that mushroom-eating land. The mushrooms and question furnished a diversion which was needed.
Retiring to his estate at Yasnaya Polyana in 1847, he sought, though without success, to ameliorate the condition of his serfs. The Imperial decree of emancipation was not promulgated till 1861. In 1851 Count Tolstoy joined the army in the Caucasus, and shortly afterwards he participated in the defence of Sebastopol during the great Crimean War.
She claims that there was hardly a village in China so abounding in filth and ignorance as the Tula village of Yasnaya Polyana, beside Tolstoy's country home.
If she asked him what it was that he was concealing from her, he would either have to say nothing or to tell her the truth. But that was impossible. So it came about that the long-cherished dream of leaving Yasnaya Polyana presented itself as the only means of escape.
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