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TOLSTOY, Leo (1828-1910). Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi

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Moscow: "Svet," 1908 [1910]. 24 of 25 stereo views of the writer and his estate Ysnaya Polyana taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. With descriptive text on verso of each. Numbered. Includes 52 pp., tall 8vo (180 x 95 mm) in original red wrappers as issued. Publisher's advertisements at back. These stereo views were taken in May 1908 to commemorate Tolstoy's eightieth birthday. Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) was a Russian scientist, inventor, entrepreneur and pioneer in color photography who spent two days shooting the great novelist, including the first color portrait (not included here). Tolstoy poses somewhat stiffly on the porch, in his study, in the park, on horseback, with his wife and at the dinner table. There are shots of other members of his family, some exterior and interior views, and various studies of his property including the school he built for peasant children. At the time Tolstoy was Russia's most famous living writer and perhaps its most controversial. Though beloved by many, not everyone was impressed. "Tolstoy has passed his eightieth birthday and now stands before us like an enormous jagged cliff, moss-covered and from a different historical World," said Leon Trotsky. "Conservative anarchist, mortal enemy of liberalism, Tolstoy finds himself on his eightieth birthday a banner and a vehicle for the noisy and tendentious political manifestation of Russian liberalism." Lenin was likewise dismissive of the novelist, writing on the same occasion, "Tolstoy reflected the pent-up hatred, the ripened striving for a better lot, the desire to get rid of the past-and also the immature dreaming, the political inexperience, the revolutionary flabbiness." This set was likely reissued to mark the writer's death in 1910. Only the first photograph ("L. N. Tolstoy's Portrait") is missing from this set.

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