On September 12, 2025 the memorial site of Victor Astafyev opens the exhibition “The Mosaic of the Epic”.
The exhibition is dedicated to Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace. In addition to materials telling about the creation of the novel and its characters, it features objects from the rare book collection of the Yasnaya Polyana Museum. They are editions of War and Peace published in the author’s lifetime, and translations of the epic novel into foreign languages.
The novel took Tolstoy seven years (1863-1869) of “continuous and exceptional labor against the background of the best possible conditions of life.” This work amazes us with its size and scale. It has more than five hundred characters, and numerous events, both significant and small, that affect the lives of individual people and whole nations. In this book, one can find everything: children’s games and war battles, quiet family happiness and scenes of cruel war, radiant love and high-society scheming, friendship and hatred, birth and death.
“The Mosaic of the Epic exhibition is our attempt to convey Leo Tolstoy’s unimaginable years-long intellectual and spiritual work, whose result was the iconic creation of War and Peace. In this epic novel, a lot of things came together: the life of the authors and his ancestors, Tolstoy’s military experience in the Caucasus and Crimea, the historical sources he studied and the family legends he took in in his childhood,” says Maria Arshakyan, Head of the Exhibition Department of the Yasnaya Polyana Museum.
The exhibition is focused on the history of Tolstoy’s work on the novel, and events that pushed the author towards the creation of the masterpiece. A kind of “frame” for this is the novel’s characters who, thanks to a huge number of the illustrations and screen and theater versions of the novel, have long since been living their own lives, independent of the will of the author. It is as if Leo Tolstoy, his wife and children, Tolstoy’s contemporaries, and the novel’s characters talk to one another. And when our visitors join this conversation, the mosaic of the pages of War and Peace will sparkle for them with new and amazingly vivid colors.
The exhibition runs until November 21, 2025.
The exhibition is dedicated to Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace. In addition to materials telling about the creation of the novel and its characters, it features objects from the rare book collection of the Yasnaya Polyana Museum. They are editions of War and Peace published in the author’s lifetime, and translations of the epic novel into foreign languages.
The novel took Tolstoy seven years (1863-1869) of “continuous and exceptional labor against the background of the best possible conditions of life.” This work amazes us with its size and scale. It has more than five hundred characters, and numerous events, both significant and small, that affect the lives of individual people and whole nations. In this book, one can find everything: children’s games and war battles, quiet family happiness and scenes of cruel war, radiant love and high-society scheming, friendship and hatred, birth and death.
“The Mosaic of the Epic exhibition is our attempt to convey Leo Tolstoy’s unimaginable years-long intellectual and spiritual work, whose result was the iconic creation of War and Peace. In this epic novel, a lot of things came together: the life of the authors and his ancestors, Tolstoy’s military experience in the Caucasus and Crimea, the historical sources he studied and the family legends he took in in his childhood,” says Maria Arshakyan, Head of the Exhibition Department of the Yasnaya Polyana Museum.
The exhibition is focused on the history of Tolstoy’s work on the novel, and events that pushed the author towards the creation of the masterpiece. A kind of “frame” for this is the novel’s characters who, thanks to a huge number of the illustrations and screen and theater versions of the novel, have long since been living their own lives, independent of the will of the author. It is as if Leo Tolstoy, his wife and children, Tolstoy’s contemporaries, and the novel’s characters talk to one another. And when our visitors join this conversation, the mosaic of the pages of War and Peace will sparkle for them with new and amazingly vivid colors.
The exhibition runs until November 21, 2025.
Posted : 12 september 2025