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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Monday, August 05, 2002

Tolstoys Celebrate a Milestone

Paus, 87, is one of two surviving grandchildren of Tolstoy and one of some 90 Tolstoy descendants who gathered at the sprawling estate for the start of a weeklong family reunion, billed as the largest-ever gathering of Tolstoy relatives, according to a Moscow Times report Monday.


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Paus, 87, is one of two surviving grandchildren of Tolstoy and one of some 90 Tolstoy descendants who gathered at the sprawling estate for the start of a weeklong family reunion, billed as the largest-ever gathering of Tolstoy relatives, addording to a Moscow Times report Monday.

They are celebrating what great-great-grandson Vladimir Tolstoy calls the birth of the family and the birth of Tolstoy's literary career: This year is the 140th anniversary of the marriage of Tolstoy and his wife, Sofia, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the writer's first story, "Childhood."

There are about 300 known descendants of Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) alive today. It is 150 years since his first, autobiographical, novel was published, and 140 years since he married Sofia. They had 13 children, nine of whom survived to adulthood.

War and Peace, Tolstoy��s most celebrated work, contains more than 550 characters and centres on five aristocratic families at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. In it Tolstoy, revered as one of the great figures in Russian and world literature, played out his view of history as a product of anonymous motives and the interplay of often lowly individuals rather than of great men or grand ideas.

Tolstoy was a passionate supporter of the rights of the peasantry and incurred the wrath of the Russian Orthodox Church and eventual excommunication for allegedly anti-Christian writing.

Earlier in the year Patriarch Aleksiy II, the present head of the Russian Orthodox Church, refused to overturn his conviction for heresy. Undeterred, his descendents attended an Orthodox service to pray for him. The gathering was organised by great-great grandson Vladimir Tolstoy, the director of the Yasnaya Polyana museum and nature preserve. The last family gathering took place in 2000.

Source: Agencies


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