Biography | Leo Tolstoy — Born in the Manor That Was Sold for Card Debts

People point at the wooden house on this estate and call it the room where Tolstoy was born.

It is not.

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born here on 28 August 1828 Old Style, which is 9 September 1828 on the Gregorian calendar, in the three-storey manor his father had finished in 1824.

The child was the fourth of five born to Count Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy, a veteran of 1812, and Princess Mariya Nikolayevna Volkonskaya.

He was baptised the next day in the Church of St Nicholas at Kochaki, the neighbouring village.

The house he was born in had some thirty-six rooms on a masonry ground floor under two wooden storeys and a portico.

His mother died in 1830, when he was two. His father died in 1837.

Relatives kept the children on this estate and later in Moscow and Kazan.

By 1854 the young count, serving in the Caucasus and losing at cards, authorised a relative to sell the central house.

A neighbour, Gorokhov, bought it for five thousand paper roubles and carted it to the village of Dolgoe, about twenty versts away.

The money went to settle gambling debts. Tolstoy later told his son Ilya as much.

The relocated house stood at Dolgoe until a village meeting had it pulled down in 1913.

On the empty plot at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy planted trees. He used to point at a tall larch and say that was where he had been born.

The two flanking wings were left standing. From 1856 he lived in one of them. That wing, later extended, is the house a visitor walks through today.

The pin is the estate, not a vanished interior. The foundations of the birth house survive as rubble-filled trenches between the wings.

What stands now is a museum-estate declared in June 1921, with the writer's later rooms kept as he left them.

The birth itself happened in a building that is no longer here.

Photo: early-twentieth-century view of the surviving house at Yasnaya Polyana, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons