Jasnaja Poljana was the home of writer Leo Tolstoy, where he was born, he wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and is buried. Yasnaya Polyana Tolstoy called his "inaccessible literary stronghold". It is located 12 km southwest of Tula, 200 km from Moscow. In June 1921, the estate was nationalized and formally became his memorial museum. It 'was Alexandra Tolstaya, daughter of the writer the first director of the museum dedicated to the famous father.
The current director of the museum is called Vladimir Tolstoy, one of the descendants of Leo Tolstoy. The museum contains personal effects and furniture, as well as its library of 22,000 volumes. The estate-museum contains the villa of the writer, the school he founded for peasant children and a park where the unadorned tomb of Tolstoy.
The Thirteen children of Tolstoy, of which four died in infancy, were born at Jasnaya Polyana, the same leather couch where he was born the same Tolstoy, who is still in his office next to his desk. When he lived and worked in Jasnaja Poljana, Tolstoy woke at 7:00 am, did physical exercises, and walked in the park, before starting his writing.
During the harvest season often worked in the fields with the farmers, both for exercise and to make his writing on rural life more realistic. Often he visited the school he created for the children of farmers, where he told stories to children. Tolstoy was home to almost all the most important cultural and artistic figures of his time: Anton Chekhov, Turgenev, Maxim Gorky, painters Valentin Serov and Ilya Repin and many others.
The house of Leo Tolstoy was originally a wing of a larger residence, built by his father. Tolstoy was forced to sell the main part of the old house, which was dismantled and moved to another building, there were only the two wings. Leo Tolstoy moved to one of the wings in 1856, where fixed for more than 50 years. He brought his wife to live with him in 1862, and enlarged the house to make more room for his family. The house is now preserved exactly as it appeared when he died in 1910.
Long before dying Tolstoy announced the place where he wanted to be buried, in a small clearing called "the place of the green wand", next to a ravine along a part of the old forest called the Forest of the Old Order. The name "instead of green wand" had been given by the older brother of Tolstoy Nikolai, who said that the person who would find a magic wand would never die or be sick.