Tolstoy's love of horses, from Pirogovo to Delir in Yasnaya Polyana

Tolstoy was madly fond of horses. At the age of ten he left his first account of the impression made on him by an acquaintance with horses at the stud farm in Pirogovo. This childish rapture he later gave to Nikolenka Irtenyev in "Childhood":

I was in a state of great impatience: I climbed onto my little horse, looked between its ears, and performed various evolutions about the yard.

Tolstoy makes the mare Frou-Frou one of the hidden springs of the intricate mechanism of the novel "Anna Karenina", and he devotes one of his masterly tales, "Kholstomer", to horses. Turgenev recalls the quite special mutual understanding between Lev Nikolayevich and his horses:

We came up to this unfortunate gelding, and Tolstoy began to stroke him and, among other things, to say what, in his opinion, the animal must be feeling and thinking. I was positively spellbound. He not only entered into it himself, but drew me too into the predicament of this wretched creature. I could not help saying: "Listen, Lev Nikolayevich, surely you have been a horse at some time."

We came out into a little glade, and in the glade stood a thin, old, worn-out horse, and Tolstoy turned to me and asked: "Turgenev, would you like me to tell you what this horse feels and thinks?..." And as Tolstoy began, he seemed, truly, to turn into an old nag himself, so vividly, so inexorably logically, so cleverly and so artistically did he unravel everything that was going on in the consciousness of this horse.

The stud farm at Pirogovo belonged to his elder brother, Sergey Nikolayevich. But Lev Nikolayevich himself also tried his hand at horse breeding: on his estates in the Volga region he kept several herds of horses and wished to develop a new breed from steppe and European stock.

Tolstoy's friendship with his horse Delire is well known; his daughter Tatyana gave him the animal in his old age. Delire is captured in many photographs with Lev Nikolayevich, and the two spent Tolstoy's last years together. Delire outlived his master, but when he died he was buried at Yasnaya Polyana beside the writer's grave, in accordance with the writer's will.