Leo Tolstoy & his love for… sports! (PHOTOS)
Leo Tolstoy really did a lot to maintain his physical fitness. And his athletic hobbies were quite varied: He did morning exercises, took long walks (he repeatedly walked almost 200 km from Moscow to his Yasnaya Polyana Estate and back!), skated and once built one of the first tennis courts in Russia on his estate near Tula.
At 67, he learned to ride a bicycle and this new hobby was enthusiastically received by the public. His daughter Tatyana Sukhotina-Tolstaya recalled that an iron bar was installed between the columns in her father's study. He performed exercises on it himself and even supervised his daughter's workouts.
Thanks to this, the writer maintained excellent shape even in his old age. His wife Sofia Andreyevna noted in her diary that, shortly before his 70th birthday, Tolstoy purchased two seven-pound weights for his workouts. Another one of Tolstoy's sporting passions was the game of ‘gorodki’.
The photograph shows the writer holding a ‘gorodki’ bat. In the background, on the right, is his servant's son Alyosha Sidorkov. Valentin Bulgakov, the writer's secretary, recalled that, even at 82, Tolstoy occasionally picked up a ‘gorodki’ bat, although, according to the memoirist, it was more of a practice run than a full-fledged game.
