Biography | Leo Tolstoy — Buried Without a Cross Where the Green Stick Lay

People look for a tomb, a cross, or a family vault.

There is a mound in the trees.

On 22 November 1910 New Style — 9 November Old Style — Tolstoy was buried at sunset in the Forest of the Old Order, Stary Zakaz, on this estate.

The New York Times dated the Tula dispatch 22 November and described the burial that same afternoon.

A special train had brought the coffin from Astapovo to Zaseka station that morning.

His sons carried it the two miles to the chosen ground.

The spot was one he had named years earlier: a clearing by a ravine where, as children, he and his brothers had buried a green stick.

His brother Nikolai had said that whoever found the stick would know how to make all people happy.

There was no Orthodox funeral. The choir sang "Memory Eternal." Then the coffin went into the ground in silence.

No cross was set on the grave. He had been formally cut off from the Church in 1901, and he had asked for this place rather than a churchyard.

Police watched the crowd. Several thousand people came to the estate that day.

What a visitor finds now is a low earth mound among old trees, still without a monument.

The forest had been protected from felling since the time of his grandfather, Prince Nikolai Volkonsky.

The house museum lies a short walk north. The grave is a separate pin because the burial is a different act from the death at Astapovo and from the vanished birth house.

Stand here and the argument of his last years is physical. He wanted the ground, not a title on a stone.

Photo: Tolstoy House approach at Yasnaya Polyana, SiefkinDR, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons