Today is Leo Tolstoy Memorial Day

2024 Author: James Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 14:00

Today the world remembers the great Russian writer Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy. November 20 marks exactly one hundred years since the death of the genius prose writer.

On the night of October 27-28, 1910, Lev Nikolaevich left the Yasnaya Polyana estate and went south. Having caught a cold on the road, Tolstoy fell ill with pneumonia and died at the Astapovo station of the Ryazan railway on November 7 (20), 1910.

Lev Nikolaevich died after renouncing the church. His difficult relationship with Orthodoxy officially ended in abdication in February 1901. However, the Synod then, in fact, stated an already accomplished fact, when the writer himself broke with the church.

At the Astapovo station, anticipating death, the writer ordered to send a telegram to Optina Pustyn with a request to send Elder Joseph to him. But when the two priests arrived in Astapovo, the disciples and followers surrounding the dying writer did not allow this meeting.

The writer was buried in Yasnaya Polyana, on the edge of a ravine in the forest, where as a child he was looking for a "green stick" that kept the "secret" of how to make all people happy.

The chronicle has preserved the dramatic footage of those days. A huge crowd, seeing off the writer on his last journey. Somewhere the face of Valery Bryusov and Leonid Pasternak, the artist and father of the poet, flashes.

“Everything that was possible was done to deprive Tolstoy's funeral of their all-Russian significance,” Bryusov noted. According to his testimony, in the three days that have passed since Tolstoy's death, there was no physical opportunity to get from distant areas to Yasnaya Polyana. It was forbidden to send emergency trains from Moscow - this ban was announced only late in the evening, so that it was impossible to use the roundabout routes along the Ryazan and Brest railways. Thousands of those wishing to say goodbye to the great old man remained at the stations - "only residents of the surrounding villages, Tula and a small handful of Muscovites could arrive."

Today, despite the high appreciation of Leo Tolstoy's work, the excommunication of the writer from the Orthodox Church cannot be removed, since the writer excommunicated himself from it, said the executive secretary of the Patriarchal Council for Culture, Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov).

Responding with the blessing of Patriarch Kirill to the president of the Russian Book Union, Sergei Stepashin, Father Tikhon recalled that the Holy Synod, by its decision of February 20, 1901, to excommunicate Leo Tolstoy “only stated an already accomplished fact - Count Tolstoy himself excommunicated himself from the church, completely broke with it, which he not only did not deny, but at every opportunity he emphatically emphasized."

“The Church was very sympathetic to the spiritual fate of the writer,” notes the secretary of the Patriarchal Council for Culture. - Neither before nor after his death, no "anathemas and curses", as unscrupulous historians and publicists asserted a hundred years ago and claim today, were not pronounced on him. Orthodox people still revere the great artistic talent of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, but still do not accept his anti-Christian ideas."