The building was built in 1800-1805 and became one of the few in the area that survived the fire of 1812. The house changed hands several times and finally in 1882 was bought by Leo Tolstoy, who was looking for a secluded place in Moscow with a large garden and vegetable garden. However, the building was too small for an extensive and hospitable family with ten children, so it had to be redeveloped and rebuilt. The renovation, of course, was delayed and did not go according to plan. Lev Nikolaevich wrote to his wife like that: "For the house, I'm kind of shy of you. Please don't be strict..."
The Tolstoy family spent 19 winters in Khamovniki, still leaving for Yasnaya Polyana every summer, and the writer walked to it several times, covering 200 km. More than a hundred works were written in this house, including the novel "Resurrection", the novella "Kreutzer Sonata" and the play "The Living Corpse". It was here that the count finally formulated his "four teams" rule, described in the treatise "So what should we do?": every day in a person's life, physical labor, mental activity, craft and communication with people should alternate. The museum clearly illustrates all these activities. And the last work created in Khamovniki was "Response to the Synod's decision ...", written by Tolstoy in April 1901 on the occasion of his excommunication from the church.
After the writer's death in 1910, his widow sold the house, along with the plot and all the utensils, to the Moscow City Council. Sofya Andreevna wrote so in her autobiography: "I sold my Moscow house to the city for one hundred and twenty-five thousand rubles, and my last edition of the works of Count Leo Tolstoy, and I gave all this money to my children. But there are so many of them, and especially grandchildren! Including my daughters-in-law and me, our entire family consists of 38 people, and my help was far from satisfactory."
We owe the complete preservation of the estate and the interiors to the leader of the world proletariat, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, by whose personal decree a museum was established here in 1921. Since at that time many relatives and regulars of the house were still alive and had not had time to emigrate, they helped restore the situation "as if the Tolstoy family had just left." As a result, 99% of the 6 thousand pieces of furniture, household items and interiors are originals, with the exception of copies of some paintings, the originals of which are on display in Yasnaya Polyana.
The house was elegantly furnished, but without frills. The door to the front hall was never closed, and visitors were asked to undress on their own and go to the second floor, to the front of the house. As the critic Vladimir Stasov recalled, "there were no servants, not the slightest, in the hall, and there was no need, because the door to the street is open all day, and everyone comes and goes when they want and how they want..."
There are two dominants in the great hall. First of all, this is a folding "centipede table", which, if necessary, could expand to the entire room. Ivan Bunin, Maxim Gorky, Alexander Ostrovsky, and Anton Chekhov spent their evenings around him at the samovar. The rest of the room is occupied by a grand piano, with Sergei Rachmaninoff, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Scriabin playing music, and Fyodor Chaliapin singing. There is a bear skin under the piano, a memento of one winter hunt, when a beast suddenly appeared and battered the count and only miraculously did not kill him. Another less noticeable but important element of the setting is the chess table. The writer carried his passion for this game through his whole life, being in an eternal search for strong opponents.
This is followed by an ornately decorated red room decorated in oriental style. Tolstoy called it a "boring living room" where women gathered after tea and, in his opinion, "had empty conversations." Passing through a narrow corridor, for which the nickname "catacombs" was fixed in the family, passing through the servants' rooms, we find ourselves in the farthest and quietest room, where the screams of children, the rumble from descending the stairs on trays and other sounds of everyday life did not reach. This is the holy of holies, Lev Nikolaevich's office. An interesting detail: the legs of the work chair are filed. Due to his short-sightedness, the count, who categorically rejected glasses, was forced to bend low over the manuscripts.
In the adjacent "work room" you can see a bicycle of the most fashionable and by no means cheap brand, on which Tolstoy learned to ride at the age of 67 and even received a mandatory driving permit by passing a special exam. At that time, the rights were valid for a year, but the count was given them indefinitely as a sign of respect. We immediately return to one of the components of the "four teams" formula — craft. Lev Nikolaevich chose shoemaking as a hobby. The exhibition features boots made for Afanasy Fet and his future son-in-law, Mikhail Sukhotin, the district leader of the nobility. Tired of the uncomfortable position, he moved to a lectern, at which he worked standing up.
Returning to the restoration of the estate: partial restoration of the interiors was carried out only once, in 2001. It sounds somewhat improbable, but before that, the museum had no electricity, which is why it worked only during the daytime. However, under Lev Nikolaevich himself, there was no sewage system in the house.
The new restoration is an example of a truly scientific one. For the first time, absolutely everything was taken out of the house, having previously documented the location of the objects, which then returned to their places. As the director of the museum, Tolstoy's great-great-grandson "on the Ilyich line," Vladimir Tolstoy, said, "the Khamovnichesky house has preserved its unique authenticity."
By the way, it was thanks to the new director, the former presidential adviser on culture and Art, that the work was significantly accelerated, which was planned to be completed only in the fall of 2025. After taking office in July 2024, Vladimir Ilyich inspected the work front and decided to finish it in December. The secret to the multiple acceleration of the pace was that instead of the planned phased restoration, the processes went synchronously: as soon as the workers finished one of the rooms, the expositors immediately got down to business. Unfortunately, many rooms are fenced off with ropes, denying visitors access inside and forcing them to stretch their necks to see everything. But this was a necessary measure, since the curators and the management did not want to turn the house into a museum — with glass hoods, showcases and furniture covered with ribbons.
The most difficult, according to Vladimir Tolstoy, was the restoration of stove tiles and tiles, during which it was possible to develop a technology that preserves the texture and even historical cracks — craquelures. Worn-out parquet floors also required special care. All the elements of the flooring had to be removed, cycled separately and re-laid. The only new product is the marble wallpaper, which was printed using preserved samples with precise color matching. According to the results of a giant meticulous work, the estate looks exactly like it did under Lev Nikolaevich, only with ventilation, sewerage and electricity.
The Tolstoy family spent 19 winters in Khamovniki, still leaving for Yasnaya Polyana every summer, and the writer walked to it several times, covering 200 km. More than a hundred works were written in this house, including the novel "Resurrection", the novella "Kreutzer Sonata" and the play "The Living Corpse". It was here that the count finally formulated his "four teams" rule, described in the treatise "So what should we do?": every day in a person's life, physical labor, mental activity, craft and communication with people should alternate. The museum clearly illustrates all these activities. And the last work created in Khamovniki was "Response to the Synod's decision ...", written by Tolstoy in April 1901 on the occasion of his excommunication from the church.
After the writer's death in 1910, his widow sold the house, along with the plot and all the utensils, to the Moscow City Council. Sofya Andreevna wrote so in her autobiography: "I sold my Moscow house to the city for one hundred and twenty-five thousand rubles, and my last edition of the works of Count Leo Tolstoy, and I gave all this money to my children. But there are so many of them, and especially grandchildren! Including my daughters-in-law and me, our entire family consists of 38 people, and my help was far from satisfactory."
We owe the complete preservation of the estate and the interiors to the leader of the world proletariat, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, by whose personal decree a museum was established here in 1921. Since at that time many relatives and regulars of the house were still alive and had not had time to emigrate, they helped restore the situation "as if the Tolstoy family had just left." As a result, 99% of the 6 thousand pieces of furniture, household items and interiors are originals, with the exception of copies of some paintings, the originals of which are on display in Yasnaya Polyana.
The house was elegantly furnished, but without frills. The door to the front hall was never closed, and visitors were asked to undress on their own and go to the second floor, to the front of the house. As the critic Vladimir Stasov recalled, "there were no servants, not the slightest, in the hall, and there was no need, because the door to the street is open all day, and everyone comes and goes when they want and how they want..."
There are two dominants in the great hall. First of all, this is a folding "centipede table", which, if necessary, could expand to the entire room. Ivan Bunin, Maxim Gorky, Alexander Ostrovsky, and Anton Chekhov spent their evenings around him at the samovar. The rest of the room is occupied by a grand piano, with Sergei Rachmaninoff, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Scriabin playing music, and Fyodor Chaliapin singing. There is a bear skin under the piano, a memento of one winter hunt, when a beast suddenly appeared and battered the count and only miraculously did not kill him. Another less noticeable but important element of the setting is the chess table. The writer carried his passion for this game through his whole life, being in an eternal search for strong opponents.
This is followed by an ornately decorated red room decorated in oriental style. Tolstoy called it a "boring living room" where women gathered after tea and, in his opinion, "had empty conversations." Passing through a narrow corridor, for which the nickname "catacombs" was fixed in the family, passing through the servants' rooms, we find ourselves in the farthest and quietest room, where the screams of children, the rumble from descending the stairs on trays and other sounds of everyday life did not reach. This is the holy of holies, Lev Nikolaevich's office. An interesting detail: the legs of the work chair are filed. Due to his short-sightedness, the count, who categorically rejected glasses, was forced to bend low over the manuscripts.
In the adjacent "work room" you can see a bicycle of the most fashionable and by no means cheap brand, on which Tolstoy learned to ride at the age of 67 and even received a mandatory driving permit by passing a special exam. At that time, the rights were valid for a year, but the count was given them indefinitely as a sign of respect. We immediately return to one of the components of the "four teams" formula — craft. Lev Nikolaevich chose shoemaking as a hobby. The exhibition features boots made for Afanasy Fet and his future son-in-law, Mikhail Sukhotin, the district leader of the nobility. Tired of the uncomfortable position, he moved to a lectern, at which he worked standing up.
Returning to the restoration of the estate: partial restoration of the interiors was carried out only once, in 2001. It sounds somewhat improbable, but before that, the museum had no electricity, which is why it worked only during the daytime. However, under Lev Nikolaevich himself, there was no sewage system in the house.
The new restoration is an example of a truly scientific one. For the first time, absolutely everything was taken out of the house, having previously documented the location of the objects, which then returned to their places. As the director of the museum, Tolstoy's great-great-grandson "on the Ilyich line," Vladimir Tolstoy, said, "the Khamovnichesky house has preserved its unique authenticity."
By the way, it was thanks to the new director, the former presidential adviser on culture and Art, that the work was significantly accelerated, which was planned to be completed only in the fall of 2025. After taking office in July 2024, Vladimir Ilyich inspected the work front and decided to finish it in December. The secret to the multiple acceleration of the pace was that instead of the planned phased restoration, the processes went synchronously: as soon as the workers finished one of the rooms, the expositors immediately got down to business. Unfortunately, many rooms are fenced off with ropes, denying visitors access inside and forcing them to stretch their necks to see everything. But this was a necessary measure, since the curators and the management did not want to turn the house into a museum — with glass hoods, showcases and furniture covered with ribbons.
The most difficult, according to Vladimir Tolstoy, was the restoration of stove tiles and tiles, during which it was possible to develop a technology that preserves the texture and even historical cracks — craquelures. Worn-out parquet floors also required special care. All the elements of the flooring had to be removed, cycled separately and re-laid. The only new product is the marble wallpaper, which was printed using preserved samples with precise color matching. According to the results of a giant meticulous work, the estate looks exactly like it did under Lev Nikolaevich, only with ventilation, sewerage and electricity.