The librarian of the Rumyantsev Museum and philosopher of the "Common Task" Nikolai Fyodorov held that humanity is obliged to resurrect literally all its dead ancestors

The librarian of the Rumyantsev Museum and philosopher of the "Common Task" Nikolai Fyodorov held that humanity is obliged to resurrect literally all its dead ancestors. By what means? By technical effort, or rather by the collective effort of reason. Tolstoy knew him, read him, argued with him, and in the end parted company with him over the excessive mechanism of his views. Now, however, a large-scale project is under way that amounts, in effect, to the resurrection of Tolstoy.

The website slovotolstogo.ru has launched "The Social Network of Leo Tolstoy" and an impressive photographic archive: 9,000 images from the holdings of the museum-reserve, most of them never previously published. The web of Lev Nikolayevich's connections is built from the material of the 90-volume collected works. Tolstoy mentions some 13,000 names. Turgenev, Chekhov, Repin, Stanislavsky, and alongside them teachers, officials, peasants. From any person in the database one can move on to his or her mentions in letters and diaries, to photographs, to the chronicle of a particular day.

Chekhov once remarked in a letter to Suvorin that Tolstoy was "not a man but a superman", and that beside him all other writers looked like small fry. One might quibble over "all other writers", but the grandeur of this crag is undeniably made visible by the project. One man at the centre of a circle of 13,000 faces of his age, each of them joined to him by a meaningful connection, filled out with facts as far as information allows.

The project is led by Fekla Tolstaya, one of the most striking members of Lev Nikolayevich's numerous progeny. It is funded by the Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives.

True, photographs are not yet a resurrection, but a full picture with texts, diary extracts, contacts and an entire ecosystem is already a confident attempt to describe the universe of a great man.