Tolstoy Recalled Fondly in Chechen Museum
A museum devoted to Leo Tolstoy reopened recently in the village in Chechnya where he spent his formative years as a writer in the 1850s, and where he warned of the pitfalls of Russia’s quest to tame this restive region in the northern Caucasus.
The museum, in the former Cossack settlement of Starogladovskaya, which served as a military base during czarist campaigns, survived the two more recent wars — begun in 1994 and 1999 — that were fought in this Russian republic and that have destroyed large swaths of the area.
It reopened on Dec. 10 in a new building with the help of Ramzan A. Kadyrov, Chechnya’s strongman president, an ally of the Kremlin who takes pride in projects that underscore this republic’s rise from ruins, and Vladimir Tolstoy, the writer’s great-great grandson and director of Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s estate in the Tula region near Moscow....
“The Chechen people think that Tolstoy wrote most truthfully of the events that happened then and the character of the mountain peoples, their striving to be independent, for freedom, and their religious, ethnic and other particularities,” Mr. Tolstoy said. “Tolstoy, in spite of the fact that he was an aristocrat, a Russian count, was very democratic and open. He had friends among the Chechens.”
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The museum, in the former Cossack settlement of Starogladovskaya, which served as a military base during czarist campaigns, survived the two more recent wars — begun in 1994 and 1999 — that were fought in this Russian republic and that have destroyed large swaths of the area.
It reopened on Dec. 10 in a new building with the help of Ramzan A. Kadyrov, Chechnya’s strongman president, an ally of the Kremlin who takes pride in projects that underscore this republic’s rise from ruins, and Vladimir Tolstoy, the writer’s great-great grandson and director of Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s estate in the Tula region near Moscow....
“The Chechen people think that Tolstoy wrote most truthfully of the events that happened then and the character of the mountain peoples, their striving to be independent, for freedom, and their religious, ethnic and other particularities,” Mr. Tolstoy said. “Tolstoy, in spite of the fact that he was an aristocrat, a Russian count, was very democratic and open. He had friends among the Chechens.”