The festival features performances from different cities of the country; some theatres prepare them specially for the festival. All of them are in one way or another dedicated to Lev Nikolaevich, his prose, plays and dramatizations based on his works. Or his extremely rich biography – from birth and childhood to participation in the Caucasian and Crimean wars, marriage and raising children, and finally his “departure” from his paradise of Yasnaya Polyana and his death in Astapov.
There will also be conferences, thematic film screenings and also outdoors, in a barn (!), games, missions, etc. etc. Read the program.
The theatrical highlight of the festival will be the performance of the play “Resurrection” based on the novel of the same name, which is being prepared by the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg.
This year the festival coincides with several memorable dates associated with Tolstoy and the Tolstoys. These are the ones I would like to talk about.
The wife of the genius Sofya Andreevna Tolstoy is 180 years old. She was born on August 22 (September 3), 1844 at the dacha of her parents Bersov in the village of Pokrovskoye-Streshnevo near Moscow. And she died on November 4, 1919 in Yasnaya Polyana, nine years after the death of her husband. Every day she went to his grave in the forest of the estate, where, according to his will, he was buried in the place where he and his brother Nikolai buried a “green stick” – a symbol of human happiness – when they were children. And she even held a funeral service at his grave together with the invited priest, although Tolstoy was “excommunicated” from the Church. There she took amazing selfies, she was an extraordinary photographer. But most importantly, she created the first Tolstoy museum in her house, even before the revolution. The personality itself is bright and talented! Her diaries and memoirs are an invaluable document of her life with her husband in Yasnaya Polyana. A life span of almost 50 years. Happy, but also conflicted. In my opinion, she managed to write her life apart from the life of a genius. That is the name of her memoirs: “My Life”.
In the same year, another anniversary is celebrated – 160 years since the birth of her eldest daughter, Tatyana Lvovna Tolstoy-Sukhotina. She was born on October 4 (16), 1864 in Yasnaya Polyana, on the couch where her father and almost all of her brothers and sisters were born. And she died on September 21, 1960 in Rome, in exile. In her youth (and even in adulthood) she is a beauty! Almost all the young people of the “golden youth” followed her when the Tolstoys lived in Moscow. She loved balls, masquerades and performances at home. But she left everything and began to help her father in his spiritual quest. As a result, she married very late to the elderly widower Mikhail Sergeevich Sukhotin and moved to live with him in the Kochety estate, where her father loved to go. I could not give birth to a child for a long time. She raised her husband’s children. By the way (a little-known fact), one of his stepsons, Lieutenant Sergei Sukhotin, was one of the participants in the assassination of Grigory Rasputin in December 1916. We know Purishkevich, Prince Yusupov, Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich, we have heard something about the British intelligence officer Reiner, but most have hardly heard that the stepson of Leo Tolstoy’s daughter participated in the conspiracy. However, he was one of those, like Vysotsky, “who did not shoot.” But he suffered a lot of punishment. He died abroad.
Tatyana Lvovna was lucky, so to speak. In emigration she was poor at first. She lived off her garden near Paris. This was helped by the marriage of her only daughter, also Tatiana, to the son of a prominent Italian media magnate. 27-year-old Leonardo Albertini fell in love with Tanechka when he saw her at an amateur performance and proposed to her. After that, the life of the Tolstoy-Sukhotin family changed. In 1975, Tatyana Mikhailovna Albertini visited the USSR and, of course, was in Yasnaya Polyana.
And here is another women’s anniversary – 140 years of Tolstoy’s youngest daughter, Alexandra Lvovna. Novels and novels can be written about this heroic woman. However, she herself described her life in two books: “Father” and “Daughter.” Sasha was born on June 18 (30), 1844 in Yasnaya Polyana on the same couch. Exhausted by endless pregnancies, Sofya Andreevna no longer wanted a new child. Sasha found out about this later and her relationship with her mother deteriorated. But she became her father’s main assistant in his affairs, but, unfortunately, under the influence of VG Chertkova she intrigued her mother and participated in the organization of her father’s “secret will”, which became the main motive of his escape from Yasnaya. After the revolution, she worked with her father’s manuscripts. She became the first director of the Yasnaya Polyana Museum. She was arrested several times. In 1928 she traveled first to Japan and then to the United States. There she created the famous Tolstoy Foundation, which saved the lives of thousands of Russian and non-Russian emigrants around the world. Rachmaninov, Sikorsky, Solzhenitsyn were friends of hers. She lived longer than all of Tolstoy’s children: 95 years old and died in New York in 1979. She never arrived in Russia.
Three destinations of brilliant women and how different! Let’s remember them this year and not only at the Tolstoy festival.
