Frozen pond, frozen finances

I visited Yasnaya Polyana in winter. The Tolstoy estate lies off the main Moscow road on the approaches to the city of Tula, famous for the manufacture of samovars. The Great Pond had been swept of snow to allow the local boys indulge in a furious ice-hockey match. The orchards, many of them planted by the great man himself, lay ice-bound and dormant.

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", second only to Pushkin in Russian hearts.

At first glance these days, all at Yasnaya Polyana seems idyllic - the three white houses, the snow-bound fields and the chalky sky of the Russian winter merged into each other almost magically - but the menace of financial collapse lurks in damp corners and empty cupboards. A group of Chinese stood 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 quaffed champagne outside the thatched coachman's house where Tolstoy set out on the final journey to his death. Downstairs, in the Tolstoy House, are the austere rooms in which 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.

The verandah where summer visitors were entertained is still intact. A photograph of the elderly Count Tolstoy and the young Anton Chekhov seated there came instantly to life. So too did Tolstoy's words from "The Kreutzer Sonata": "It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness." Yasnaya Polyana remains beautiful, but at the time of my visit its very fabric was under threat.

For the first time since Leo Tolstoy's death in 1910, a Tolstoy was again at the helm at Yasnaya Polyana. Vladimir Tolstoy, officially the director of the Yasnaya Polyana museum, felt a double responsibility as a direct descendant of the Count. 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 with his family from exile in Yugoslavia.

Back in Moscow, Aunt Anna, the senior surviving Russian-based Tolstoy, advised the new arrivals 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'."

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. Paradoxically it is the current era, in which personal freedoms have - theoretically, at least - been restored to Russians that has posed most problems for Yasnaya Polyana. Money for the estate's upkeep has not been forthcoming due to Russia's financial crisis.

But there is hope. There is a light for the future. Soon another Tolstoy, Vladimir's son Andrei, will be old enough to join the village boys for hockey on the frozen pond.

Seamus Martin is International Editor of The Irish Times