YASNAYA POLYANA AND FERNET
Since the end of the nineteenth century to this date, Voltaire’s estate of Ferney and Leo Tolstoy’s Yasnaya Polyana have been compared, by both professional historians of culture and private travelers, as places of literary pilgrimage. Striving to conquer the mass reader, writers inevitably provoke a situation peculiar to mass culture, and the act of worship, even if it does not replace the act of reading, becomes more significant than the reading itself. However, Tolstoy’s resentment against those visits contradict his own desire to be not only a writer, but also a life teacher. Therefore, literary facts should not be separated from everyday ones. Outside an everyday context, many texts lose their significance of literary facts.