by Minka Vazkresenska; photography by Anthony Georgieff

Leo Tolstoy's death in the Astapovo stationmaster's bed on 7 November 1910 received the same wide media coverage as his turbulent marriage to Sophia Andreevna. The writer, who was as popular as a present day Big Brother celebrity in his lifetime, died of heart failure brought on by severe pneumonia. His youngest daughter Sasha and his personal physician were at his deathbed.

The train station was literally besieged by reporters and peasants. The latter had come to say farewell to the man who had devoted his life to their enlightenment.

A few days earlier, 82-year-old Tolstoy had made an important decision, although some people claimed it was the result of senile dementia. The writer decided to leave Sophia and live in the way he had exhorted others to do. He abandoned the secure life of an aristocrat in his Yasnaya Polyana estate and set out to settle in a peasant commune. There, he would share bread, work and lodging with the rest of the communards.

Tolstoy set off without heeding the first symptoms of pneumonia, which had appeared while he was still in Yasnaya Polyana. His journey ended before it actually began.

There was, however, something that the media did not know: where exactly Tolstoy was heading for. According to urban myth in Bulgaria, then as well as now, the final destination of the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina was a tiny village in the Strandzha in Bulgaria.

Yasna Polyana is only six miles inland, but does not look like any other village on the southern Black Sea coast. Nestling in the oak forests of the Strandzha, it has been spared the frenzy that has turned this part of the sea coast into a concrete building site. The current financial crisis froze the construction of the only hotel that was to open in Yasna Polyana. Today, its unfinished brick walls rise as a monument to a bygone era at one end of the village.

Yasna Polyana, which was known as Alan Kayryak until 1934, seems the perfect place for Tolstoyists. With a population of less than 1,000 people, the village faces the hills and, even in summer, the only noise is the fearsome buzz of Strandzha's hornets. In 1906, six Bulgarians and four Russians settled in Alan Kayryak and led a life in accordance with the ideas of their mentor.

Tolstoyists, who appeared in many parts of the world, lived a life according to Tolstoy's teachings. There was no individual property and they worked hard all day for the good of all. The most powerful of the writer's principles was that of non-violent resistance. Mahatma Gandhi, who also founded a Tolstoyist colony in South Africa, was directly influenced by him – and this brought about a change in world history.