New York, NY, USA, March 11th, 2026, NewsDirect
The International Lev Tolstoy Heritage Foundation and Yandex announced a partnership to preserve and digitize the literary legacy of Lev Tolstoy in preparation for the 200th anniversary of the writer’s birthday in September of 2028. Yandex will serve as the Foundation’s general digital partner, helping preserve the writer’s cultural heritage.
With the support of Yandex, the Lev Tolstoy State Museum-Reserve’s complete manuscript collection, totaling approximately 2 million pages, will be digitized. These materials will form the foundation of the new Tolstoy Manuscript Museum.
The partnership will also develop a digital ecosystem for Tolstoy’s heritage. Using artificial intelligence, Yandex and the Foundation will process and categorize photographs from Tolstoy’s archives, synthesize the writer’s voice, and create a virtual world inspired by his works. This ecosystem will be built upon the “Tolstoy’s Words” project. Over more than a decade, the initiative has digitized the complete 90-volume collection of Tolstoy’s works and created extensive research materials and interactive content about the writer.
The partnership between Yandex and the International Lev Tolstoy Heritage Foundation, ahead of the bicentennial, marks a significant step in preserving and promoting the writer’s cultural heritage. For the first time, archival materials — previously accessible only in the Lev Tolstoy State Museum-Reserve — will become available online. Users worldwide will be able to consult these sources, learn more about Tolstoy’s life and work, and use the digitized manuscripts and documents in their own research.
Beyond Tolstoy’s archives, Yandex is actively working with historical documents through its Archive Search service, which helps find mentions of people and events in handwritten materials. To date, Yandex AI models have already transcribed over 22 million archival documents.
About Us
Founded in 1939 by Alexandra Tolstaya, the youngest daughter of renowned humanitarian and author Leo Tolstoy, the Tolstoy Foundation, Inc. is a longstanding American 501(c)(3) nonprofit headquartered in Valley Cottage, New York. For more than eight decades, the Foundation has championed humanitarian relief, educational programs, cultural preservation, and refugee resettlement — helping displaced individuals and families build new lives across the United States and around the world. Grounded in values of dignity, empowerment, and cross-cultural understanding, the Tolstoy Foundation remains deeply rooted in its U.S. mission to support vulnerable communities through practical aid, advocacy, and community engagement.
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