It's impossible to imagine Russian literature without its commanding genius, Leo Tolstoy. And it's impossible to understand Count Tolstoy's work without understanding what his estate, Yasnaya Polyana, meant to him and how his life there influenced his writing. The estate became the central metaphor in Tolstoy's life--a substitute for the mother he never knew, the root system from which sprang War and Peace and Anna Karenina. This was the Golden Age of Yasnaya Polyana and it was in this idyllic, natural setting that Tolstoy felt most at home and developed his early moral preoccupations. Here he lived and wrote, corresponded with leading figures of the day, ploughed the fields with his peasants, played joyous games with his children, and in 1880 underwent his profound spiritual crisis. With a novelist's eye, Patricia Chute gives us an intimate portrait of daily life on these two thousand acres and how it all found its way into Tolstoy's fiction. She explores the relationship between the property and its master, showing the specific influence of the estate on Tolstoy's life and writings. Many of Tolstoy's most memorable characters were inspired by friends and family who lived on and visited the estate. Natasha Rostov, the heroine of War and Peace, was based on his sister-in-law. Patricia Chute brings us into this world of prerevolutionary Russia. Tolstoy has been described as the conscience of the nineteenth century. From his study he denounced serfdom, the formal church, his social class, and all forms of violence. Yet through the last half of his life Tolstoy would be in constant conflict over the ownership of his estate. To own property is a sin, he said. He would grapple with the issue of his inheritance for the rest of his life. His final years were spent in a kind of trench warfare as his wife, Sonya, and his principal disciple, Vladimir Chertkov, fought for possession of his papers and his soul. Finally, before dawn on October 29, 1910, with his doctor and his daughter, Alexandra, he fled Yasnaya Polyana never to return. He died eleven days later in a stationmaster's house in a nearby village.