The undisputed king of football hails from Brazilian—Edson Arantes Do Nascimento or simply Pele. But, literature's GOAT (greatest of all time) is Russian—Leo Tolstoy. He is considered to be one of the most important and prolific writers in history, largely due to his two masterpiece novels, Anna Karenina and War and Peace. On Wednesday, as a part of the host city tour, the media contingent was taken by the World Cup organising committee to Yasnaya Polyana, a sleepy village surrounded by valleys and green meadows, located about 200 kilometres away from the capital city of Moscow. It is where the childhood home and the estate of Tolstoy is located. To visit Yasnaya Polyana, one has to take a train from Moscow to Tula and it’s about a seven-minute taxi ride from the station to the estate. The train journey to Tula offers exciting views of the endless stretch of greenery around, making for quite a spectacular sight. When I told my co-traveller Dr Unni, a native of Tirur who works as an Ayurveda doctor in Moscow, that this beautiful place bears a striking resemblance to Munnar's topography, he was quick to correct me. “No, it is ten times more beautiful than Munnar!” Flanked by majestic hills, Yasnaya Polyana undulates green and is very serene. Green is everywhere, from lush, rolling meadows to rooftops. We got down near a huge lake surrounded by native forest and walked through a natural trail winding through meadows dotted with towering trees to reach the tomb of Tolstoy.
The square-shaped memorial is lined with green grass and plants. There are some flowers and chocolates left by visitors on the grave of the great writer, who died on November 20, 1910, of pneumonia, aged 82. He met death not at his sprawling estate of Yasnaya Polyana, but at a distant railway station known as Astapovo, some 250 miles southeast of Moscow. The station and settlement were renamed Lev Tolstoy in 1932 in his honour. His body was taken to Yasnaya Polyana where he was buried under the trees he had planted as per his wishes. The three main buildings of Yasnaya Polyana are the Tolstoy House Museum, the Volkonsky House, and the Kuzminsky House.. The rooms have been kept just as they were at the time of his death in 1910. Tolstoy, who wrote in small, cramped handwriting, used to seek his wife’s help to rewrite his drafts. His wife Sofia copied out War and Peace seven times, from beginning to end, while the great man himself would write draft after draft. All of the couple’s thirteen children were born on the same leather couch on which Tolstoy himself was born.
The large sofa, that bore so much family history, is now kept behind the writing desk used by Tolstoy. Russian literature’s prominent figures like Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, and Maxim Gorky were regular visitors of Yasnaya Polyana when Tolstoy lived there. In June, 1921, the Soviet government nationalised the estate and converted it into a memorial museum. During World War II, German troops invaded the estate and occupied the house for 45 days. The Nazis set up a hospital in the literary museum and German soldiers who died in the war were buried next to Tolstoy’s grave. After reclamation, the museum was first run by Alexandra Tolstaya, the writer's daughter. The current director of the museum is Tolstoy's great-great-grandson Vladimir Tolstoy. We were about to start the return trip, when my mobile phone buzzed. It was a news alert on Spanish coach Julen Lopetegui’s sacking. Suddenly, the first few lines of Anna Karenina flashed through my mind: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” All the 32 teams in the World Cup could well relate to this philosophical quote, I guess!