Yasnaya Polyana

[4] In June 1921, the estate was nationalized and formally became the State Memorial and Nature Reserve "Museum-Estate of L. N. Tolstoy — 'Yasnaya Polyana'" (Ясная Поляна).

[9] The house passed from Nikolai Volkonskiy to his only daughter, Princess Maria Nikolayevna Volkonskaya, the mother of Count Leo Tolstoy.

Her husband, Count Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy, a veteran of the war against Napoleon in 1812, added a second storey to the house, providing accommodation for an extended family of thirteen.

In 1854, to pay off gambling debts, Tolstoy sold the central part of the house to a neighbour, who dismantled it and rebuilt it on his own land.

He wrote the novels in his study by hand in very small handwriting, with many additions and deletions and notes, and gave the draft to his wife, who made a clean copy at night, which Tolstoy then rewrote the next day.

[citation needed] When he was living and working at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy awakened at 7:00 a.m., did physical exercises, and walked in the park, before starting his writing.

His guests are known to have included Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev,[14] Maxim Gorky, the painters Valentin Serov, and Ilya Repin.

[15] In 1911, Tolstoy's widow Sofia Alexandrovna applied to Tsar Nicholas II to have Yasnaya Polyana made into a state museum.

[18] Soviet propaganda made use of the Germans' disregard of the house's cultural value in the 1942 war documentary film Moscow Strikes Back.

[21] Long before he died Tolstoy announced the place where he wanted to be buried: in a small clearing called "the place of the green wand", next to a long ravine in a part of the old forest called the Forest of the Old Order (Старый Заказ, Stariy Zakaz) because cutting trees there had been forbidden since the time of his grandfather, and many trees there were over a hundred years old.

[22] The Bald Hills estate in War and Peace, owned by Prince Bolkonsky and later by Nikolai Rostov, is modelled on Yasnaya Polyana.