Yasnaya Polyana

Tolstoy was born here in 1828, wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina here, ran a school for peasant children here, and left in October 1910 at the age of eighty-two, dying days later at a railway station. The house is preserved with his library of some twenty-two thousand volumes, his study, the desk he wrote at and the family rooms; his descendants ran the museum for decades, which is part of why it is intact. Beyond the house the estate is orchards, ponds, birch avenues and forest. In the woods at the edge, at a spot he chose - where as a boy he and his brother believed a green stick was buried with the secret of universal happiness written on it - is his grave: a low rectangular mound of earth, grassed, with no headstone, no cross and no inscription, at his own instruction. It is the reason many people come and it is unmarked in every sense.

History

The estate belonged to the Kartsev family and then, in the 18th century, to Prince Sergey Volkonsky and his son Nikolai, the writer's grandfather, who began the main manor house in 1810. Leo Tolstoy was born here on 9 September 1828, wrote War and Peace here between 1862 and 1869 and Anna Karenina between 1873 and 1877, and in June 1921 the estate became a state museum, first run by his daughter Alexandra (Wikipedia, Yasnaya Polyana).

What's there

• The unmarked grave - a grassed mound in the woods with no stone or name.
• The library - some twenty-two thousand volumes kept in the house.
• The study - the desk where War and Peace and Anna Karenina were written.
• The estate grounds - orchards, ponds and birch avenues around the house.

When to go

May to September. Half a day. Closed Mondays; the house is entered on timed guided visits.

Good to know

House visits are timed, guided and often booked out in summer; the grounds ticket is separate. It is a twenty minute drive from Tula and public transport is infrequent. The grave is a fifteen minute walk from the house through woods. Photography inside is restricted.

Nearby

Tula and its kremlin are north; Kochaki, where the family is buried, is nearby.

Key facts