The northern guests of Leo Tolstoy. Meetings in life and creativity

As you know, Leo Tolstoy took many visitors in Yasnaya Polyana. Journalists, writers, people who experience the crisis of faith, curious tourists who overcome long distances came to his legendary estate to meet with the greatest writer of our time. Many guests arrived from the countries of Northern Europe, then to tell about their impressions in fascinating travel notes and reports. Also from Scandinavia and Finland, Tolstoy received hundreds of letters. Conversations with visitors often took place at a large, cozy puffing samovar. The central topics were, of course, Tolstoy’s work and modern literature, but the discussions about the shocks experienced by Russia also unfolded, and issues of religion, philosophy, politicians, and spoke about managing the economy. The monograph by the famous Finnish literary critic Ben Hellman draws a multifaceted portrait of the writer, a radical critic of the church, anarchist, pacifist and vegetarian in the context of these meetings. The book is replete with live details from the everyday life of Tolstoy, analyzes the reasons for the non-consumption of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Nobel Prize of the World, as well as introduces the reader with unexpected North European prototypes of the heroes of the novels “War and Peace”, “Anna Karenina” and “Resurrection”. Ben Hellman-Slavist philologist, associate professor of the University of Helsinki