Frozen between the earth and the sky

THE Great Pond had been swept of snow to allow the small boys of Yasnaya Polyana involve themselves in a riotous ice-hockey match. The vast orchards, much of them planted by the great man himself, lay ice-bound and dormant. At the gates, convoys of battered old Soviet buses, their registration numbers indicating -the towns in European Russia -from which they had travelled, decanted the young and the old.

Parties of schoolchildren were marched towards the Tolstoy house, their teachers constantly urging silence upon them. Older groups steadily crunched through the snow on their uphill journey. Foreigners were there to pay tribute to the man they know as Leo Tolstoy, Russians to give their respects to their beloved "Lev Nikolayevich" who gave Russia and the world War And Peace and Anna Karenina. At first glance these days all at Yasnaya Polyana seems idyllic, but the menace of financial collapse lurks in damp corners and empty cupboards.

The three white houses, the snow-bound fields and the chalky sky of the Russian winter merge into each other almost magically. A group of Chinese people stands silently beside the writer's grave, a simple mound of earth covered against the frosts by a layer of pine branches.

A Russian wedding party quaffs champagne outside the thatched coachman's house where Tolstoy set out on the final journey to his death. In the Tolstoy house the tourists place tapochki. Russian slippers, over their snow boots and are shown around in reverent groups.

Downstairs in austere rooms the great works were written. Upstairs in the salon, with its grand pianos, its left-hand corner for the serious conversation of the adults and its right-hand corner to seat the horde of Tolstoy children, a sense of the past's bustle and stir can still be felt. The Count's bedroom is as it was when his inner torment urged him away towards the tranquillity of his sister's nunnery and his death in a remote railway station.

Only in the Volkonsky House, a low-slung mansion named for the family which originally owned the 2,000-hectare estate, is the sense of today's serious tension felt. It is here that the administrative offices are situated and, for the first time since Leo Tolstoy's death in 1910, a Tolstoy is once again at the helm.

Vladimir Tolstoy is officially the director of the Yasnaya Polyana museum but as a direct descendant of the Count he feels what he describes as a "double responsibility". His great grandfather, Ilya Lvovich Tolstoy, the writer's son, left Russia before the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. His grandfather, at the end of the war in 1945, made the momentous decision to return to Russia from - exile in Yugoslavia - against all the wishes of his relatives, who insisted that he must have lost his mind.

Back in Moscow Aunt Anna, the senior surviving Russian-based Tolstoy, advised them in a single word on how to survive under Stalin's regime.

"Molchitye!"' she whispered to them: "Stay quiet." At a time when most emigres were shot or sent to the camps immediately upon their return, the Tolstoys, Vladimir says, were spared by Stalin.

"It is mentioned in the archives that Beria offered to send the family to the Gulag but Stalin replied: `Let them live. Let history decide'." Despite the repression the returned Tolstoys managed their own type of freedom. They kept silent but behind the scenes Vladimir was, he says, brought up in the traditions of the families of the Russian nobility. All orthodox religious holy days - and there are very many of them - were most strictly observed, and a humanitarian outlook on education, inherited from Lev Nikolayevich, was evident.

"We kept to ourselves and never really felt any totalitarian pressure." Paradoxically it is the current era, in which personal freedoms have - theoretically at least - been restored to Russians that has brought most problems for Yasnaya Polyana, and the current political administration draws much stronger fire from Vladimir Tolstoy than those of Stalin or Khrushchev or Brezhnev.

When asked about the current state of affairs, a torrent of criticism pours out: "The situation here is very bad, indeed I would go as far as to say there is no hope for us in the cultural sphere. As far as Yasnaya Polyana is concerned the state has ignored its financial obligations to us for the past year and a half. It has completely abandoned us to our own devices.

"Not only that, but it did this with no warning whatsoever. For example 1995 was quite a good year and we got almost all our budget and this allowed us do a lot for the museum. It was natural, in fact it was our right, to expect this to continue when we were not told otherwise.

"We prepared a long-term plan which was adopted at every level, by the Ministry of Culture, the Economics Ministry, the Finance Ministry and was supported by the government itself." The plans included returning the estate as closely as possible to its original form. Visitors would be brought round in coaches dating from Lev Nikolayevich's time, rising damp which threatened the Tolstoy house would be eliminated, exhibitions would be held abroad, the writer's personal belongings would be restored and preserved.

In November 1995 the state subventions stopped without warning. Vladimir Tolstoy says that at first he believed the promises made to him. He was told there would be money in January, then it was April and then it was July. No money came.

Leo Tolstoy's personal belongings are now at the restorers in Moscow and there is not enough money to pay for their return to Yasnaya Polyana.

"They are," says Vladimir Tolstoy, "frozen between the earth and the sky as we say in Russia." The dampness, reduced to 20 per cent by the most modern technology, has started to creep back up the walls of the Tolstoy house. Almost £30,000 was due from the state for the past year, about £3,500 has been received and has been used mainly to pay back-wages.

Vladimir Tolstoy is now looking to Russian and international companies and foundations to provided the money to save one of the great physical landmarks of world literature. He will accept help from anywhere, but holds a strong belief that the Russian state should play its part.

"I am absolutely convinced that state responsibility should not be excluded and should not be completely replaced. I keep demanding, in spite of certain difficulties in the economy, that if the state does not take care of education, health, social support and culture, then no economic reforms have a right to exist." He has written, he says, to President Yeltsin and to members of the government and has "received answers from everyone except from those I wrote to".

A walk in the grounds relieves the tension; at the verandah where Leo Tolstoy entertained in the short summer months, Vladimir asks about the contemporary Irish writers he has managed to read in a country in which the distribution of foreign books has been sporadic for decades. He asks about Benedict Kiely and Edna O'Brien, he points to the distant village where he now lives and where his baby son, Andrei, the first Tolstoy to be born at Yasnaya Polyana this century, was a year old on March 1st.

There is still some hope and, according to Vladimir, there will be more Tolstoys on their ancestral land in future. "I am young," he says. "When Lev Nikolayevich was 34, he had no children. He went on to be the father of 1-3."