Delhiwale: To Tolstoy with love

On Tolstoy's 114th death anniversary, his influence on Gandhi and India's cultural ties to Russia are celebrated at Delhi's Russian studies center.

Go to Janpath, and visit a man there with a long flowing beard. Leo Tolstoy stands by the traffic light. It is the Russian writer’s 114th death anniversary.

Delhiwale: To Tolstoy with love

Tolstoy made a most profound impact on the Indian who most profoundly shaped contemporary India. Mahatma Gandhi was famously influenced by Tolstoy’s ideas on non-violence and chastity. He even set up an ashram called Tolstoy Farm during his years in South Africa.

That said, the novelist of Anna Karenina is not the only Russian gracing the Delhi boulevards.

Poet Pushkin stands at Mandi House. And though the Soviet Union founder Lenin was no novelist, he stands tall in Nehru Park.

Indeed, those Delhiwale who came of age reading magazines, such as Soviet Nari, might recall the time when the former Soviet Union, aka USSR, cultivated a deep cultural bond with India. A thriving souvenir of the era is the Centre of Russian studies (CRS) in Jawaharlal Nehru University. It dates to the 1960s, when the USSR was a superpower and Russian language was a tool to boost one’s career.

Currently, the Centre has 250 students in undergraduate, post-graduate and PHD programmes. The other day, its chairperson Professor Richa Sawant emailed her associates, informing that “a delegation from the Union of Writers of Russia will be visiting the Centre… the faculty members and students are requested to kindly be present in the Committee Room.”

The writers of Russia greatly shaped the intellect of Delhi’s elite in the 60s and 70s. Gorky’s Mother commanded a cult status, Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don was a necessary read, and literati held regular addas at the Russian Cultural Centre.

Now known as Russian House, every Tolstoy devotee must visit its third floor library. The vast collection of books includes more than 300 editions of Tolstoy’s works. The Hindi Tolstoys are particularly beautiful, while the shelf containing Tolstoy in original Russian exudes the solemnity of a sacred shrine—see right photo. Librarian Sakshi Sharma says that she studied Tolstoy’s War and Peace as part of her Master’s in Russian from Delhi University’s Department of Slavonic and Finno-Ugrian Studies.

On entering the library, the visitor might also spot a photo of Janpath’s Tolstoy, with a bunch of Russian language students holding flowers under the statue. The group picture commemorates Tolstoy’s 194th birth anniversary two years ago.

As for you, dear reader, whenever you get a chance to visit Tolstoy’s Moscow, do visit a man there in Druzhby Park with a long flowing beard. That’s the statue of our Tagore.