22 Aug 1994: The Guardian - Page 18
Tolstoy's spirit returns to ancient lands: James Meek finds the power that Count Leo Tolstoy still holds over Russia's soul beating strongly in the heart of the novelist's great great grandson - the new director of his old estate, Yasnaya Polyana
By JAMES MEEK
It has been a sort of homecoming, although the kindly, anxious figure strolling along the wooded pathways of Count Leo Tolstoy's old estate makes no claim to lordship over land and people.
'I do feel responsible - it's a positive proprietorial feeling,' said Vladimir Tolstoy, the writer's great-great-grandson and, since the start of the month, director of the estate-museum 120 miles south of Moscow. 'That doesn't mean I feel these people are my serfs, that I have to order them about. No, all the people who work here are my assistants.'
The appointment of Vladimir, aged 31, is the culmination of a long struggle by Tolstoy's numerous descendants to have a member of the family put in charge of the 1000-acre property and its 150 staff once again.
While the Russian Revolution and civil war swept away the landed aristocracy and their huge estates, the power of the Tolstoy name gave the writer's descendants a hold on Yasnaya Polyana until 1957, when the count's granddaughter, Sophia Tolstoy-Yesenin, died. By that time, the estate had long ceased to be a family home - Sophia was the director of the Soviet Union's network of Tolstoy shrines. After her death, Yasnaya Polyana - 'Bright Clearing' - fell under the control of bureaucrats from nearby Tula. The Tolstoys accused the new administrators of incompetence, and abuse of the great writer's memory. Towards the end of the Mikhail Gorbachev era, the government began to listen, particularly when it emerged that the Tula authorities had allowed 60 dachas to be built on the edge of the estate.
Vladimir, a journalist, was chosen as the family's candidate by a gathering of 150 Tolstoy descendants in Moscow in 1992. It was two years before the incumbent director, Andrei Tyapkin, was promoted out of office and the fifth-generation Tolstoy returned to his ancestral lands.
'I feel very good here, very natural,' Vladimir said. 'I've been coming to Yasnaya Polyana since I was a child so, for me, it's a very close, completely familiar place.'
Watching the Tolstoy family - Vladimir, his wife Maria, an art dealer, and their daughters Anastasia and Yekaterina - in the estate's hallowed grounds, it is easy to imagine them as new-wave Russian aristocats.
But the Tolstoy reclamation is limited. There is no title and no ownership: Vladimir lives on his director's salary of 350,000 roubles a month (about pounds 100) and sleeps in a run-down guesthouse on the estate.
'I've absolutely no ambition to copy Leo Tolstoy or to model myself on his image,' Vladimir said. 'I value myself as I am.'
He wants to increase agricultural and tourist income from the estate without harming its unique character, and without continuing old feuds. The dachas will not be demolished, but no new ones will be built. 'The uniqueness of Yasnaya Polyana is due not just to the preservation of original buildings, but to the preservation of the landscape in which Tolstoy lived,' he said. 'It's the last place of its kind in Russia to be left intact and untouched not just since Tolstoy's time, but since that of his grandfather, Prince Volkonsky.'
Vladimir Tolstoy grew up in Moscow exposed to competing influences. He lived and studied in the Soviet system but his contacts with Tolstoys abroad and his consciousness of his family history broadened his views. His father and grandfather returned to Russia from Yugoslavia only in 1945.
'The family's main concern is to ensure the estate is well managed,' Vladimir said. 'If the former director had been able to run it properly, this would never have arisen. Three years ago I wouldn't have imagined that I'd be here in this role. I worked actively as a journalist.'
A steady stream of wedding parties walk among the orchards and copses of Yasnaya Polyana to have their unions blessed by Tolstoy's spirit.
'People who come here like the fact that they're visiting the Tolstoys. The consciousness that they walked along the paths with Tolstoy has something symbolic about it.'
