The sculptor Pavel Troubetskoy was friends with Leo Tolstoy. The writer spoke of Troubetskoy as a smart and nice man. Tolstoy willingly posed for Troubetskoy. His first sitting took place in the sculptor’s studio in Moscow in 1898, when Troubetskoy was working on a statue of Tolstoy on horseback. A cast of this work is currently on display at the Literary Museum. Another meeting took place at Yasnaya Polyana, where a bust of Tolstoy was made.

The photograph taken by Sophia Andreyevna Tolstaya, the writer’s spouse, captures a work-in-progress moment. Tolstoy sits on a chair with his legs crossed and arms crossed over his chest, wearing a dark-colored blouse. To his left, Pavel Troubetskoy stands in front of the sculpture. On the right side of the picture, Ivan Gorbunov-Posadov sits holding a book: he was a writer, educator, editor, and publisher of children’s books, and an associate of Lev Nikolayevich. Gorbunov-Posadov reads aloud during this session to make it less tedious for Tolstoy, who thought it was a waste of his time.

Together with Vladimir Chertkov and Pavel Biryukov, Ivan Gorbunov-Posadov formed a close-knit group of individuals in the final years of Tolstoy’s life. It is likely that Gorbunov-Posadov’s primary occupation was working at “Posrednik”, which published educational pamphlets. Under his leadership, the publishing house significantly expanded, with the introduction of the series “Library for Children and Young Adults” and “Library for Intelligent Readers”. Tolstoy communicated with Ivan Gorbunov-Posadov mainly because of his role as head of “Posrednik”, which published a number of Tolstoy’s texts in cheap editions.

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Gorbunov-Posadov was a proponent of the so-called “free education” approach. This is a pedagogical philosophy and practice that views education as a means of facilitating the natural development of children. According to this approach, children should be allowed to naturally explore and discover the world around them, and make their own decisions about how to learn and grow. Between 1907 and 1918, along with Nadezhda Krupskaya and Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich, Gorbunov-Posadov served as the editor of the radical pedagogical journal “Free Education”.