Yasnaya Polyana

Yasnaya Polyana , village, central European Russia, just S of Tula. It was the birthplace and residence of Leo Tolstoy, who is buried at his estate there. The writer's home was looted during German occupation of the village in 1941, but it has since been restored and is a museum and literary shrine.

Tolstoy, Count Leo (b Yasnaya Polyana, Tula province, 28 Aug. [9 Sept.] 1828; d Astapovo, Tambov province, 7 [20] Nov. 1910). Russian writer. He is celebrated as one of the greatest of all novelists, but much of his later career was devoted to writing on a broad range of moral issues, expressing the radical ethical views that caused him to repudiate his own earlier works and way of life and try to live like a self-sufficient peasant. His writings in this vein include What is Art? (1898), in which he argues that art is justifiable only if it communicates high moral and religious values in a simple and direct way. His enormous prestige ensured a wide readership for his book (it was immediately translated into English, French, and German), but his extraordinary value judgements—dismissing as worthless Michelangelo's Last Judgement and Shakespeare's King Lear, for example—meant that his ideas were generally considered eccentric.