Tolstoy Honoured

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31781, 11 September 1968, Page 20

Tolstoy Honoured

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) YASNAYA POLYANA (U.S.S.R.), Sept. 9.

Leo Tolstoy, the Russian writer whose reputation flowered under communism, was honoured throughout the Soviet Union yesterday, the 140th anniversary of his birth, as one of the giants of world literature.

Russian Communists consider him their own man, even though he was a count in quite another era. His ideas, they claim, expressed the “boiling indignation of the masses” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The feelings Tolstoy described in his works led to the Russian Revolution and the first success of Communist power, and it is this that has helped keep his high place in the university reading lists and, more importantly, in the “approved” category at the tightly-controlled State publishing houses.

“War and Peace” is much in demand in book form and the new Soviet film of that name packs in the crowds in Moscow.

Tolstoy’s birthday is an annual event in the Russian literary community, and this year students, authors and book-lovers, made a mass pilgrimage to his grave in Yasnaya Polyana (“Clear Meadow"), an estate which has been carefully preserved. Tolstoy spent most of his life there. A three-hour drive south of Moscow, it is surrouned by

rolling farmland, birch forests and fields of sunflowers. Tourists, mostly Russians, come in bus-loads to the museum that has been made of Tolstoy’s house, listening in awe as the guides tell how the flamboyant aristrocrat lived. Visitors are asked to wear special slippers inside the bouse. A maximum of 900 people a day are allowed inside to see his library, his scythe, his worn tunic, boots and hat, and his writing tools. A small bench remains in front of his bouse, at the ‘Tree of the Poor,” where he received peasants and others seeking his sympathy, advice and money.