Vladimir Tolstoy created the script for a film about his great ancestor

By 2028, Leo Tolstoy’s manuscripts will be scanned, a dictionary of his work will be created, and a biopic will be made.

In Moscow, on the birthday of Vladimir Dahl, a project was presented, designated by its creators as “a guide to the legacy of Leo Tolstoy.” If you delve into the essence, then this is a reference platform created on the basis of a digitized 90-volume collected works of the great classic. The “Word of Tolstoy” library resource posted on the Internet will be of interest, of course, primarily to linguists and literary critics. It is difficult to imagine that someone would prefer to read “Anna Karenina”, as they say, for the soul, on the Internet, and not take a paper book from the shelf. But the meeting that took place on November 22 was unique: at it, in a small location of the capital’s press center, four descendants of Lev Nikolayevich gathered (online and offline) at once.

One of the most famous – Tolstoy’s great-great-grandson, cultural adviser to the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Tolstoy – came to the meeting in a businesslike mood. By the way, his daughter Ekaterina, the great-great-great-granddaughter of the author of War and Peace, arrived with him. Vladimir Ilyich took the floor, in 10 minutes he told about the plans, the implementation of which would take several years, and left to meet with filmmakers. “The President signed a decree on the celebration of the 200th anniversary of Leo Tolstoy, although the anniversary date will be for all of us only in 2028. The decree was issued unprecedentedly early,” Vladimir Ilyich said. He outlined the main task of preparing for the anniversary: ​​to make free access for those who wish to the entire heritage of the writer, including the handwritten one. This fully corresponds to the will of the writer, who during his lifetime partially made his works free for all publishers in the world, and then this process was completed by his daughter Alexandra Lvovna Tolstaya.

“He was the only one of the major writers who gave the right to a heritage to the whole world,” Vladimir Tolstoy emphasized. And he lamented that, although there were a lot of manuscripts of his great great-great-grandfather, they are saved in the “Steel Room” – a special depository, to which mere mortals have no access.

— They need to be scanned. I have a dream that in the center of Moscow, in the Prechistenka area, an open storage facility will appear … I will not talk about all the plans. We will soon convene the organizing committee, – Vladimir Ilyich cut off all questions. And he “let slip” that he had created a literary script for a film about Tolstoy:

– I want to make a large-scale biopic, a film history of his life.

Having intrigued those present, Vladimir Tolstoy went to the Cinema Fund, but before that he managed to mention that many classic prose texts (“Hadji Murad”, “Family Happiness” …) do not have a full-fledged film version, and what they have was created 50 years ago. Therefore, “it is necessary to transfer the works of Leo Tolstoy to the screen in a new, today’s film language.”

By the way, the idea was voiced at the meeting that the literary heritage is now being “repackaged”: by Vladimir Ilyich into a cinematic form, and by Fyokla Tolstoy, the head of a number of Tolstoy projects and an employee of the development department of the State Leo Tolstoy Museum, into a digital one. (Another great-great-granddaughter was seen in the hall – the artist Natalia Olegovna Tolstaya; she “repackages” into a picturesque look.)

And what does the “figure” give researchers? It allows you to collect and mathematically harmonize material from which you can make a dictionary of Leo Tolstoy’s creativity or a dictionary of related personalities. And also find out, for example, how he addressed the addressees of his letters, what rare words he used. Who now knows the word “crixa” with the meaning “unrestrained and prolonged crying of a child”? And who knows the lexeme “amen” – to give something a complete look (derived from “amen”)? But for a reader of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this was part of a completely normal word usage. Statistics and machine counting allow us to establish that Tolstoy used the word “God” less often than “man”, and his frequent antonyms for God were “concert” and “exhibition” – for some reason despicable realities.

By the way, it is very difficult to understand the centuries that separate us from Tolstoy. And Elena Shmeleva, Deputy Director for Research at the Institute of the Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences named after V.V. Vinogradov, managed to “sober up” us in this regard. Elena Yakovlevna relayed a conversation with a familiar teacher who said the following:

Everyone scolds children for not reading enough. But you read a lot of literature of the XVIII century? And this century is two centuries away from us, as from the people of the 21st century – the 19th century!

That is, Leo Tolstoy, if nothing is done, will one day become the same “geological layer” of literature as the tragedies of Sumarokov or the odes of Lomonosov. But, as Shmeleva aptly puts it, he is “unique in that he has so many children and so many wonderful descendants.”

Tolstoy was lucky – and we are all very lucky to have him.