Tolstoy and А.S. Pushkin: Comparative history of private book collections

This paper considers the origin, formation, and destiny of the book collection in Yasnaya Polyana. Its history begins from the time of Nikolai Semenovich Volkonskii (1753–1821). A great contribution to this book collection was made not only by his grandson, Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828–1910), but also by the generation of contemporaries of the writer. Special attention has been paid to the works of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin (1799–1837) and the literature about him. The work is based on the receptive analysis of the source material, because this method allows to involve numerous memories. In particular, we have speculated about L.N. Tolstoy's attitude to A.S. Pushkin's works, as well as about the role played by the “sun of Russian poetry” in his literary work and in the process of educating children based on the memoirs of the following persons: L.N. Tolstoy's sons, Sergey (1866–1933) and Ilya (1866–1933); his family doctor, Dushan Petrovich Makovitskii (1866–1921); Grigory Petrovich Danilevskii (1829–1890), who was the first to develop an idea of the library in Yasnaya Polyana; Alexey Evgen'evich Gruzinskii (1858–1930), a professor of Moscow University, who studied the state of books in 1912 with the permission of Sofia Tolstoya (1844–1919), the widow of the writer et al