Eveline Passet and Raimund Petschner:
Ein Dorf im neuen Russland (A Village in the New Russia)
Yasnaya Polyana and Tolstoy’s legacy
Yasnaya Polyana - the very village and estate in the Russian region of Tula where Leo Tolstoy was born and spent most of his life - still exists today, and is, one hundred years after the author’s death, a place trying out many things. On the one hand, the author’s great-great-grandson wants to extend Tolstoy’s literary, philosophical, and religious legacy into the present. On the other, the town is planning on systematically promoting cultural tourism and its cultural industry, turning Yasnaya Polyana and its museum into the force behind regional development. A chemical concern and steel factory in the immediate vicinity make it necessary to withstand as well as balance out the tension between concrete interests and moral and spiritual goals in the tradition of Tolstoy. Besides that, residents also need to just live their daily lives, exactly like anywhere else, whether at school, at nursery school, around the neighborhood, at the dacha, at the hospital, or at work.
How does Yasnaya Polyana move - or better said: how is it moved - between power and intellect?
Does culture have the chance of being something more there than just a location factor - namely, to have an influence on people’s self-reflection and self-discipline in the way that Tolstoy probably had in mind?
Yasnaya Polyana and Tolstoy’s legacy
Yasnaya Polyana - the very village and estate in the Russian region of Tula where Leo Tolstoy was born and spent most of his life - still exists today, and is, one hundred years after the author’s death, a place trying out many things. On the one hand, the author’s great-great-grandson wants to extend Tolstoy’s literary, philosophical, and religious legacy into the present. On the other, the town is planning on systematically promoting cultural tourism and its cultural industry, turning Yasnaya Polyana and its museum into the force behind regional development. A chemical concern and steel factory in the immediate vicinity make it necessary to withstand as well as balance out the tension between concrete interests and moral and spiritual goals in the tradition of Tolstoy. Besides that, residents also need to just live their daily lives, exactly like anywhere else, whether at school, at nursery school, around the neighborhood, at the dacha, at the hospital, or at work.
How does Yasnaya Polyana move - or better said: how is it moved - between power and intellect?
Does culture have the chance of being something more there than just a location factor - namely, to have an influence on people’s self-reflection and self-discipline in the way that Tolstoy probably had in mind?
- First broadcast: Deutschlandfunk, August 21, 2009, 8:10 p.m.
Editor: Sabine Küchler, Director: Anna Panknin
The collage from Raimund Petschner was created using medical documents from the 1960s that were found lying around in an abandoned outpatient clinic in Krapivna (40 kilometers away from Yasnaya Polyana). If everything goes as planned, the clinic’s rooms will be restored in the near future and used for cultural and social purposes. The Yasnaya museum is involved in the project. Incidentally, Krapivna is where Tolstoy acted as a justice of the peace, advising and mediating issues stemming from the distribution of land after the abolishment of serfdom in 1861.
