About the walk...

Leo Tolstoy, “great writer of the Russian land,” author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina and scores of other literary works, prophetic leader of a revolutionary worldwide movement, was a fidget. After a morning cooped up writing, he loved nothing more than a long walk, a ride on his horse, an afternoon hunting.

In early spring of 1886, when he was nearing sixty, Tolstoy decided to walk from his Moscow home to his ancestral estate, Yasnaya Polyana, outside of Tula, a distance of more than two hundred kilometers. “I am walking, mainly, to recuperate from the luxuries of life and perhaps to take part a bit the real life,” he wrote a friend.

He left, without a clear plan, a pack on his back and a couple friends at his side. He spent the nights on the floor of peasant huts, often sleeping with a dozen other travelers. He ate bread and cabbage soup. He gathered material for future stories. “It was, as I’d assumed it would be, one of the best memories of my life,” he wrote his wife upon arriving at Yasnaya Polyana, complaining of “a little tiredness.”

In August 2010, two American professors of Russian literature, Michael Denner (Stetson University) and Thomas Newlin (Oberlin College), will retrace Tolstoy’s journey, arriving at Yasnaya Polyana on August 11to attend a international Tolstoy conference.