Yasnaya Polyana

Tolstoy's ancestral estate in the Tula region, where he was born, wrote his greatest novels, gave away his land, made his own boots, received pilgrims from around the world, and was finally buried beneath the trees he had planted as a child.

Yasnaya Polyana lay about a hundred miles south of Moscow, an estate with an avenue of birches and several hundred serfs when Tolstoy inherited it at nineteen. He ran a school for peasant children in the house and wrote his own primers for it. In old age he renounced the copyright on his later work and tried to give away the land, which set off the family quarrel that drove him out at eighty-two. He lies in the wood under grass, with no stone and no cross.