Northern Guests of Leo Tolstoy. Encounters in Life and Creativity

As is well known, Leo Tolstoy hosted a multitude of visitors at Yasnaya Polyana. His legendary estate was visited by journalists, writers, people experiencing a crisis of faith, curious tourists who traveled great distances to meet the greatest writer of... modern times. Many guests came from Northern European countries to later share their impressions in fascinating travel notes and reports. Tolstoy also received hundreds of letters from Scandinavia and Finland. Conversations with visitors often took place by a large, cozy bubbling samovar. The central themes were, of course, Tolstoy's creativity and contemporary literature, but discussions also unfolded about the upheavals Russia was experiencing, questions of religion, philosophy, politics, and management of household affairs were discussed. The monograph by the famous Finnish literary scholar Ben Hellman paints a multifaceted portrait of the writer, a radical critic of the church, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a vegetarian in the context of these encounters. The book is rich in lively details from the everyday life of the Tolstoys, analyzes the reasons for the writer not being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Nobel Peace Prize, and introduces the reader to unexpected northern European prototypes of the characters in the novels "War and Peace," "Anna Karenina," and "Resurrection." Ben Hellman is a Slavic philologist, associate professor at the University of Helsinki.