This weekend the Yasnaya Polyana estate-museum hosted a major cultural event: the eighth "Tolstoy" theatre festival

This weekend the Yasnaya Polyana estate-museum hosted a major cultural event: the eighth "Tolstoy" theatre festival. More than a hundred events took place at 13 open-air venues: plays, concerts, film screenings, lectures, promenade performances and workshops. Now that the sounds of theatre, classical music and cinema have died away and the estate has once more been wrapped in its summer slumber, we can take stock of the festival:

The main event was undoubtedly the staging of "Resurrection" by the Alexandrinsky Theatre's main stage, directed by Nikita Kobelev. The festival thus completed the trilogy of Tolstoy's great novels. In 2022 the central event was the Vakhtangov Theatre's "War and Peace", and in 2023 the Bolshoi Theatre's ballet "Anna Karenina".

For the first time the festival welcomed Tolstoy's great-granddaughter Marta Albertini, the eldest of the large family of Leo Tolstoy's descendants, who presented her book "The Two Tatyanas: The Daughter and Granddaughter of Leo Tolstoy" and spoke about her grandmother Tatyana Lvovna in a public interview.

The festival closed with a concert by the pianist Riad Mammadov on the water of the estate's Middle Pond, while the Russian National Orchestra under the conductor Ivan Nikiforchin gave a grand concert of classical works by Glinka, Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff