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  LECTURE TITLED 

 TOLSTOY GENERATION 

 

The lecture of the museum-estate "Yasnaya Polyana" TolstoYgeneration is devoted to the connection between the generation of today's young people, millenials, and the era when Leo Tolstoy lived.

The years of life of Leo Tolstoy, 1828-1910, are far from today; 108 years the world lives without him. But Tolstoy is a man who is ahead of time. Already then, in the far away from today's realities of the XIX century, he appealed to the same problems, had the same preferences, interests, views, and adhered to the same principles as representatives of one of the modern generations. Generation Y.

Leo Tolstoy, as a blogger, for 63 years kept diaries in real time. Today they are in the public domain. Diaries occupy more than 10 of the 90 volumes of the Complete Works of the Writer. It seems that there are no topics that Tolstoy did not cover in his diaries, no actions and decisions that he did not explain, and facts of biography that he hid from the reader.

Leo Tolstoy was an active human rights activist and an ardent fighter for justice. He paid special attention to solving the main problems of mankind: financial, social, national and racial inequalities.

An important issue of international pacifism was of concern to the writer. Do not kill! Recognized for thousands of years by all religions, this rule became the basis of Tolstoy's pacifist views: he condemned killing, military actions and corporal punishment, called for the abolition of the death penalty, disarmament non-resistance to evil by violence.

Showing tolerance, Tolstoy actively resisted for many years the massive persecution of people on the basis of racial and religious hatred around the world.

During the famine in the early 1890's, visiting the villages of Tula, Ryazan, Samara provinces, 70-year-old writer was a volunteer: he participated in the organization of canteens for the peasants and their children, collected and distributed donations, provided medical assistance.

Tolstoy, a teacher and educator, possessed the qualities of a professional mentor: the ability to motivate, create psychologically comfortable conditions, promote comfortable rather than forced learning.

Like today's young people, users of social networks, Tolstoy had a "contact list" of people of different countries, professions, ages, who were either close or unfamiliar to him. About 50,000 received and 10,000 sent letters - this is the scale of Tolstoy's epistolary heritage.

Representatives of the modern generation actively use gadgets. Tolstoy showed interest in many technical innovations and modern inventions: a stick-chair accompanied him in many kilometers of walks, the ebonite "eternal pen" that he inked himself, a fashionable device at the time - an electric pencil with a battery - allowed Tolstoy to work in the dark, mimeograph and instrument for recording and reproducing sound was given to Tolstoy by American inventor Thomas Edison.

The interest in photographing shared by most millenials was inherent in the young Tolstoy. The self-portrait he created in 1862 is considered to be one of the first "SELFI", and Tolstoy's 1908 portrait of the work of Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky became the first color photo in Russia.