For I saw nothing more magnificent, nothing more moving in Russia than Tolstoy’s grave.
Away from the road and lonely, this noble shrine lies shaded in the forest. A small footpath leads to the mound which is no more than a built-up rectangle of earth, guarded by none and watched by none, merely shaded by a few big trees. These towering trees, as his granddaughter told me at the grave, Leo Tolstoy had planted himself.
His brother Nicolai and he as boys had once heard from some village crone a proverb, that happiness would prevail where trees were planted. So half in play, they had planted a few shoots.
Long afterward when the old man remembered this beautiful prophecy he expressed the wish to be buried under the trees he had planted. That was done, according to his desire, and it proves the most impressive grave in the world, through its overpowering simplicity.
A small rectangular mound amidst the forest, overarched by trees – nulla crux, nulla corona – no cross, no tombstone, no inscription.
Nameless the great man lies buried who like none other suffered from his name and his fame, just like some wayside vagrant, like an unknown soldier.
Anyone may approach his last resting place, the light wooden fence around it is not locked. Nothing guards the last rest of the restless but the respect of mankind which usually throngs curiously around the splendor of a grave. But here the compelling simplicity banishes mere curiosity.
The wind tones like God’s word over the grave of the nameless; no other voice; one might pass it unsuspectingly without knowing more than that a body lies there, that of any Russian man in Russian earth.
Not Napoleon’s crypt under the marble arches of the Invalides, not Goethe’s coffin in the Fürstengruft, not the sepulchers in Westminster Abbey evoke such profound emotion as this gloriously silent, touchingly unmarked grave somewhere in the forest, that hears only whispers of the wind and itself offers no word or message.
You can find this beautiful passage in Stefan Zweig's fantastic memoir, The World of Yesterday.
What a marvelous piece of writing and history
...suggest EPIGRAPH FOR A BANNED BOOK - by Charles Baudelaire - !! (Richard Howard translation)