IT WAS our first set back in our search for Leo Tolstoy's Moscow home. We knew it was not on the major tourist route and had taken some pains to get it right. At the hotel, the taxi driver had been fully briefed that it was Tolstoy's house we wanted, not the much better known Tolstoy Literary Museum. A fare had been struck, and with the entrepreneurial spirit of Russia, the driver had driven us straight to the museum and sped off.
I was now exercising skills honed in a beginner's Russian class to explain to the museum, desk that we were in the wrong place, would like our admission money back, and be pointed in the right direction.
Off the beaten track
Dom Tolstoya, or Tolstoy's house, is a wooden, country house which was overtaken by the expanding city when the Tolstoy family, eight children and 14 servants, lived there from 1882 until 1909. It was given to the city, lock, stock and bicycle by the family and opened as a museum in 1920, but, for whatever reason, it is not a prime tourist attraction. Perhaps because Tolstoy Street - as the road in which it is now called - is off the beaten track. .The Tolstoy Literary Museum, where we now found ourselves, houses the great writer's manuscripts, is much more accessible, and much more visited.
The museum staff refunded our money without enthusiasm and gave voluble instructions in Russian, the only word of which I could understand was "tramcar". We emerged on to splendid, deserted, Kropinskaya Street, with no tramcars in sight.
The next 10 minutes were spend wandering around this network of magnificent 19th century streets. There was no traffic and few pedestrians. Eventually a smartly dressed army officer carrying a briefcase came towards us. Even today, no Moscow street is complete without its army personnel.
Like the White Rabbit, this one was in a terrible hurry. I stopped him and asked the way to Dom Tolstoya. He looked astonished and proceeded to direct us back to the museum. I then explained that that was not what we wanted, we wanted Dom Tolstoya in Lev Tolstoya Street. I was finding the right words.
He propped the briefcase up on the nearest window ledge and began to go through a vast sheaf of papers. These were detailed maps of Moscow, section by section, with lists of names attached. Within 10 minutes Dom Tolstoya was located and we were marched off to where the streets were wider and inhabited and a queue was waiting for a trolley bus. Our military friend addressed the queue and, after some conversion, he designated a young couple to look after us.
The young man insisted on paying our fares, refusing all offers of roubles. Some distance on, he indicated it was our stop. We got off, on our own again in suburban Moscow. This time, a simple request for directions brought us immediately to Lev Tolstoya street.
Rescued again
It was not too promising. No people, no signs, just apartment houses and offices and no 19th century, wooden farmhouse. We had to be rescued again - this time by a young Russian language teacher escorting an American student along the other side of the street. My halting Russian drew a reply in her halting English. Yes we were in Tolstoy Street and, yes, we were in the right direction of Tolstoy's house, or at least she hoped so, for that was where she was going, though she had never been there before.
Together we found it - what looked like some old sheds among trees, surrounded by a wooden fence. On the gate a small brass plate declared it to be the Tolstoy Estate Museum. Our new friend took us aside: "Don't speak anything. I say you are Russian. I get the tickets. This, as we knew, was a real favour in a country where foreign tourists are expected to pay admission fees up to five times those required of Russians.
Inside the fence, it was everything I expected it to be. The ochre painted house had tall birches and limes spreading their branches to the upper windows. Old sheds and barns formed a farmyard. An old man, head protected by a large folded newspaper hat, toy soldier style, was painting the wall of the house while conducting a lively argument with two babushkas in dark dresses and scarves. At the sight of visitors, the veteran toy soldier was hustled out of sight and we went inside.
There were no guidebooks, no postcards for sale, and we were the only visitors. We donned our felt overshoes and trundled across the entrance hall, where Tolstoy's fur collared top coat still hung and where the bicycle, which he had learned to ride at the age of 67, remained polished, propped and waiting under the stairs.
The place was magical, seemingly unchanged since the Tolstoy family lived there and now cared for by an army of elderly women. Starting with the dining room, with its heavy mahogany furniture and (to us) Victorian wallpaper, they told us exactly where everyone sat at the breakfast table. A stream of stories carried us from room to room, as our teacher friend tried to keep up a discreetly whispered translation.
Simple life
Tolstoy's belief in the simple life imposed some tyranny on the household - no floor coverings and no wall decorations were permitted. But in the salon there still stands the pianola from Zimmermann's music shop which was a gift to the writer on his last stay in Moscow in 1909. He heard Paderewski playing Chopin on it.
We, in our turn, heard Tolstoy himself playing one of his own compositions, written at the age of 20, and recorded when he was 70 - somewhat in the style of a Field nocturne. A rare experience listening to the notes cascading round us as we studied the many portraits and photographs displayed in the room.
Tolstoy's study, cleverly concealed between two floors, is as he described it. The walls are pale green, a worktable is covered in green felt. He had sawn off parts of his chair's legs to bring his eyes closer to the manuscripts on his desk so that he could work without glasses, and with only one candle. Another tall desk allowed him to work while standing.
Then there were the boots. In what Checkhov called "the madness of old age", Tolstoy took up boot making, becoming apprenticed to a cobbler. He liked to give his friends presents of hand made boots. One friend, it is said, placed them on his bookshelf alongside 12 volumes of Tolstoy's and labelled them Vol 13. In a glass case, we saw a genuine pair of Tolstoy boots.
Tolstoy's love of the simple life did not exclude a heating system, with stoves and heating ducts in every room and corridor. Nor did it endear him to the smell of cooking, as all food was prepared outside the house by a chef for the family, and a cook for the servants, and carried in.