As you know, Leo Tolstoy received many visitors in Yasnaya Polyana. Journalists, writers, people experiencing a crisis of faith, curious tourists came to his legendary estate, traveling long distances to meet the greatest writer of our time. Many guests arrived from the Nordic countries to later talk about their impressions in fascinating travelogues and reports. Also from Scandinavia and Finland, Tolstoy received hundreds of letters. Conversations with visitors often took place around a large, comfortably chugging samovar. The central topics were, of course, the work of Tolstoy and modern literature, but there were also discussions about the upheavals Russia was experiencing, issues of religion, philosophy, politics were discussed, and economic management was discussed. The monograph by the famous Finnish literary critic Ben Hellman paints a multifaceted portrait of the writer, radical critic of the church, anarchist, pacifist and vegetarian in the context of these meetings. The book is replete with vivid details from the daily life of Tolstoy, analyzes the reasons for not awarding the writer the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Nobel Peace Prize, and also introduces the reader to the unexpected Northern European prototypes of the heroes of the novels War and Peace, Anna Karenina and Resurrection. Ben Hellman is a Slavic philologist and associate professor at the University of Helsinki.