Lot n° 294
Estimation :
15000 - 20000
EUR
SHIRT THAT BELONGED TO COUNT LEON TOLSTOY... - Lot 294 - Coutau-Bégarie
SHIRT THAT BELONGED TO COUNT LEON TOLSTOY THE MOST FAMOUS RUSSIAN WRITER.
RUSSIAN WORK, EARLY 20th CENTURY.
Large white linen shirt (blouse), hand-stitched, collar opening with three flat buttons, puffed sleeves with pleats, ending with wide cuffs closing with two flat buttons, applied on the sides of two large flat pockets. With two secret inside pockets, sewn by the writer's wife, to hold her small notebook and pencil. Slight wear and tear, but overall good condition.
H. : 99 cm - W. : 53 cm.
Historical: this moving and precious historical souvenir is inseparable from the image of Leo Tolstoy. For the writer is often represented in documents of the time: photographs, engravings and paintings, posing with this simple shirt, in all circumstances. This shirt is as famous as the bicorn of the Emperor Napoleon, thus allowing the two great men to be identified at once. In his book about Leo Tolstoy, Michel R. Hofmann writes: "Count Tolstoy, dressed in the loose blouse of the muzhiks, had resolutely adopted this outfit, and that in an exclusive and definitive manner, and one can imagine what a revolution this was and the astonishment of people about it." Leo Tolstoy's shirt (blouse) is known today as "tolstovki", it is a peasant garment stylized by the aristocrat and adopted by himself from the 1880s. It should be noted that the writer was 1.82 m tall, but towards the end of his life he was only 1.76 m tall. His wife, Sofia Andryevna Behrs (1844-1919), cut and sewed most of the clothes for her husband and children herself, including the writer's blouses. She made them on the English sewing machine Wheeler & Wilson, inherited from her mother, Lyubov Alexandrovna. Tolstoy's wife seemed to be quite good at this task, as her eldest daughter Tatyana recounts in her Memoirs. At a ball, her mother was the center of attention because of the beautiful dress she wore, attracting the eyes of the guests. The ladies began to ask where they could order such a beautiful dress? To which the countess modestly replied that she had sewn it herself!
Most of Leo Tolstoy's wardrobe consisted of dark-colored shirts (blouses) in winter and light-colored ones in summer made of different materials. But some of them had a special detail: two small inner pockets sewn on the left side to hold a pencil and a small notebook. For in the last years of his life, Leo Tolstoy wrote in all circumstances a diary which he called A Diary for Myself. He also loved to write with a pencil, which he hung through a loop on a piece of canvas thread. Today, a famous Russian ready-to-wear company "Ruskï Len" (Russian linen) produces and successfully markets "tolstovki" in various models.
Provenance: Belonged to Count Lev Nicolaïevitch Tolstoï (1828-1910), known as Leo Tolstoï. Passed on by inheritance to his 10th child, Count Mikhail Lvovich Tolstoy (1879-1944), and then kept by direct descent to this day. It is also interesting to note that according to the information transmitted by the writer's descendants, it is most probably in this shirt that he died on November 20, 1910, and that it has been preciously preserved in the writer's family.
Reference: see another model of a shirt of similar shape that belonged to the famous Russian writer, which can be found in the house where he lived for fifty years in Yasnaya Poliana and is still preserved in his bedroom. See the illustration of this shirt in the book Russian Houses by Elisabeth Gaynor & Kari Haavisto, on pages 144 and 145, published in 1995 by Evergreen
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