Beschreibung:

Photograph album of 49 snapshots, most believed to be taken by the writer's secretary Vladimir Grigorevich Chertkov at Yasnaya Polyana.
N. d.]. 24 pp. 8vo (245 x 160 mm). With one loose photograph laid in at front. Mounted on 12 cardboard leaves, contemporary orange cloth, front cover stamped in green and red, back cover blind stamped. Condition : small closed tear at bottom margin to loose photograph; spine with some wear. Tolstoy was one of the most frequently photographed writers of his time. Both professionals and amateurs stopped by his country home Yasnaya Polyana to take his picture. Countess Tolstoya was also a shutterbug. This album that dates from about 1905 gives an unvarnished picture of life at Yasnaya Polnaya. It shows the novelist at work but mostly at play. He talks to the peasants, poses with members of his family including his wife Sofia, goes strolling or on horseback with the children in the fields and forests of his estate. The most accomplished shots in the book capture the intensity of the great man's stare. He does not always look as amused when photographed in bed. Chertkov (1854-1936) served as Tolstoy's secretary and literary executor. He wrote O Poslednyakh Dnyakh L. N. Tolstogo [On the Last Days of Leo Tolstoy] (1911) only a month after the writer's death at Astapova.