A VISIT TO TOLSTOY’S HOME

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19034, 1 April 1930, Page 13

A VISIT TO TOLSTOY’S HOME

(Written for the “ Star ” by

DOROTHY WALTON.)

MOSCOW. A windy, damp October evening. The South Station in Moscow. Murky lights, people seething from trains and to trains, stumbling over the accumulated household goods of scores of travelling peasants using the station as temporary lodgings. In a corner a boy drowsing over his accordion, holding it if he had fallen asleep in the act of i playing a tune. A Rembrandt chiaroJ scuro background for the hurrying j masses elbowing each other through to the tracks. We hurry too, clambering over sleeping babies, bundles, and birdcages, to the train going south to the Crimea. We are bound for Tolstoy’s homestead, six hours from Moscow. There are four of us, two American women, Sonia Tolstoy Yesonin, granddaughter of Russia’s most internationally known author and myself. Sonia is perhaps thirty, clear-eyed, intelligent. She has poise and spirit but her calm face discloses none of the emotions which she must have experienced with all other Russians during last ten years. We clamber into our “soft” shelves, four in a compartment, cover ourselves with our travelling rugs and doze until the porter helps us off the train into the pitch black darkness of 3 a.m. We go alongside the train to the station barely able to see. A country station, similar in looks and smell to a stable, three peasants asleep on benches, a smoky light transforming them into great black lumps. Outside a waggon with two horses is awaiting us. We sit sideways on it back to back, our feet hanging over the edges. A strip of waterproof stretched across our legs keeps us from being pitched off into the mud when the waggon takes a sudden lurch. It is drizzling and we find the waterproof scant protection from the mud which the horse kicks up from in front and the back wheels splatter from behind. Great woolly shadows loom up before us suddenly out of the blackness which ominous and startling shapes like Peter Pan's forest. Then we are upon them and they quite suddenly dissolve into trees and peasant cottages. Once the Czars and their courtiers traversed this same highway before the railway came to be, saw the same shadows, and doubtless were jounced by similar ruts. Finally come the two great white portals marking the entrance to “Yasnia Polyana” (Bright Meadows) the Tolstoy estate and we drive through the avenue of trees to the white house, almost austere in its simplicity. There is a light at the back door and we find cots prepared for us where we gratefully spend the rest of the night. The next morning it has stopped raining but it is still gloomy. Outside the window a hen is cheerfully looking for sustenance in the muddy back yard. A peasant woman empties the slops in her kitchen gardens. A cat sidles along the edge of the cottage anxious to keep her fine lur from getting muddy. We breakfast from a samovar, pledsant companion for a raw winter day. Then rested and refreshed and with Sonia and her little seven-year-old niece, also called Sonia, as our guides we start out to see the buildings and grounds of the estate. Since the Revolution the government has taken over the Tolstoy property and converted it into a State museum. Several of the family are employed as museum experts «nd guides, which is a distinct advantage for the visitor, and two looms in the Tolstoy house are allowed nonJesident members of the family so that they may come and visit when possible. We started off with the building which had first been used by Tolstoy

as a schoolhouse for peasant children and later as a guest house. Now it is entirely a museum. Upstairs is the room of the old aunt who reared the motherless Leo Tolstoy, her fancy work, her ikon, her books. Other rooms are filled with pictures of Tolstoy at every age, of his eight children, of his sisters and brothers and grandchildren. Pictures of Tolstoy on horseback, playing tennis and at the plough in his beloved fields. Here his garments, the linen blouse in which he was so familiar and in a last rather gruesome room, the funeral wreaths sent him at his death, the thousands of telegrams, the carriage in which, unable to tolerate the luxury of his home any longer, he fled in his eighty-second year to his sister in the convent. And finally in a last corner his death-bed picture in the upper room of the little railway station where exhausted by the effort of running away he died. As we too plopped through the mud between the straggling row of peasant huts I wondered what the machine revolution would do to this village. W ould it be an exchange of one slavery for another—robots for serfs—or was a new and joyful life really open- , ing up for these long oppressed toilers in their still primitive setting. Interesting to conjecture what Tolstoy would think and say. We dined in a peasant cottage and watched roast chicken and mashed , potatoes come out of the recesses of one of those wonderful Russian stoves which at once serve for cooking, heat- . ing, and sleeping and even for steam , baths. This was the best food we had yet in Soviet land, where the foreigner is confined to poor hotel diet at prices the Ritz would blush to charge. In the corner of the room was the inevitable ikon—an extremely neat little room, its sleeping quarters divided from its dining quarters by a curtain. A thousand times more dignified than the palace rooms of the late Czarina with their hideous collections of cheap postcards and holy pictures. Then back through the “natural museum” of forest to the big white house where we had spent those early morning hours. Each dying tree on the grounds near the house is replaced by one of the same species in affectionate memory of Tolstoy’s love for nature. Surrounding the house is a quadrangle -of great lindens, a beautiful setting for the simple wooden homestead which has now become almost entirely a museum. The rooms in the house have been left exactly as they were the evening of Tolstoy's flight the summer of 1910. We are shown through it by his niece, Helen Denissenko, the daughter of that nun sister to whom Tolstoy was bound the night he left home for ever. Here is his writing room with book-cases filled with his favourites. There are many of Charles Dickens. two copies of Sinclair’s “Jungle,” Jack London’s novels, Walt Whitman, Jane Addams, and hundreds of books in French, German and Russian. A wall separates his writing room and his wife’s room so that he needed only knock with his cane for her to come and take his manuscripts for copying. There is the big family dining room and sitting room—the samovar in readiness on the table, Tolstoy’s place at the head of the table set for a meal. In the corner is the round table about which the family gathered on an evening, the women sewing while they all discussed questions together. Up against the side wall is the chess table | with the chessmen ready for action—eloquent reminder of the games Tolstoy played with his best friend, Tcherlcoff, and his doctor. Tolstoy’s

bedroom, with its plain little iron bedstead and wooden night table, Madame Tolstoy’s room, with pictures of her children and her ikon, for she always remained faithful to the church, all these are testimony of the homely life the Tolstoy family led. Curtains, rugs, beautiful china and furniture and even the modern, conveniences of life had no appeal for Tolstoy. It is altogether a plain house, not offensi\ r ely tasteless but certainly with no effort towards beauty or comfort. As dusk grew to dark we persuaded Mme Denissenko to open one of the two grand pianos in the family .sitting room and play for us the Chopin and Grieg she used to play to delight her uncle. “He didn’t like Russian music,” she said, “only certain things,” and she played a bit of Tschaikow r sky. She apologised for what she thought imperfections. “My fingers are so swollen from rheumatism,” she smiled, “I make mistakes.” We were silent listening to the strains of Chopin preludes and waltzes, picturing the old man with the long beard and thoughtful eyes sitting nearby, grateful to find love and devotion honouring the memory of a great soul. (Anglo-American N.S. Copyright).