Society and Culture: Exhibition "Leo Tolstoy through the prism of the camera", presented in Moscow

The Multimedia Art Museum and the State Museum of Leo Tolstoy (Moscow) present up to December 11, 2016 the exhibition "Leo Tolstoy through the prism of the camera", dedicated to one of the greatest Russian writers and philosophers Leo Tolstoy.

The exposition includes more than 130 unique images from the collection of the State Museum of Leo Tolstoy, created in the period from 1849 to 1913 that would increase our understanding of the life and character of the great writer, to see Yasnaya Polyana, Crimea, Mesherskoye, the Moscow house in Khamovniki how Leo Tolstoy himself saw them.  

The exhibition includes both works of recognized stars of photographic art at the time, and snapshots, in the performance of his friends, journalists, publicists and family members. According to his contemporaries, Leo Tolstoy sincerely interested in technical innovations, one of which, of course, at that time was a photograph.

The earliest portraits of Leo Tolstoy in the exhibition date from 1849 and 1854. These are shots with daguerreotypes of St. Petersburg and the Moscow photo studio of V. Shenfeldt and the Moscow atelier K. Mather. The first photographic in the modern sense of the word, a portrait of Leo Tolstoy - is Sergei Lvovich Levitsky’s picture of a famous court photographer, "father" of Russian pictures, as it was called by his contemporaries, for the contribution to its development and promotion in Russia.