Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana (the name means Bright Glade), lies 120 miles south of Moscow in the Tula region; in his day it covered 4,000 acres and the family “owned” 350 serfs. Tolstoy always said Yasnaya Polyana – the inspiration for many scenes in War and Peace – was “an organic part of myself”, and in his diaries he describes candlelight flickering on the icons in a corner of his grandmother’s bedroom, and a serf orchestra playing as he, a small boy, walked down the alley of beech trees leading to the main porch.

You seldom hear uplifting news from contemporary Russia. But deep in the provinces, far from massing troops and oligarchs, I toured the tranquil houses of that country’s unparalleled 19th-century writers and wondered if I had landed in another Russia. Much of historic Moscow might be at peril as developers gather,but when the will is there, Russians preserve the country estates of their Golden Age masters wonderfully.

On the mound marking Tolstoy’s grave, an oriole pulled at a worm. He and I were alone among shafts of midsummer light filtering through a stand of ashes. Beyond clumps of bluebells and hollyhocks, yolky-yellow lily blooms patterned the surface of a pond. A small sign at the edge of the grave ordered, in Cyrillic, Silent Zone.

The chirruping oriole had not read that sign. The house smelt of polished wood, and lovingly displayed objects included the master’s passport – a sheet of A4 then, with a description rather than a photograph; a whistle with which Sofia Andreevna, the sainted Mrs Tolstoy, checked the nightwatchman was awake; and a portrait of her father, a man so grand that he sent his shirts to Holland to be laundered.

Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana, was the inspiration for many scenes in War and Peace

In Tolstoy’s bedroom at the far end of the house they had preserved his dumbbells. The type of tunic hanging above his bed, worn with a belt, came later to be known in all Russia as a tolstovka, and that, together with shirts buttoned with mother-of-pearl, and a pair of high riding boots, gave the room the look of a page from a fashion catalogue.

Tolstoy had a Shavian fondness for gadgets, and a 1908 Thomas Edison recording device in the house played a crackly reel he made, instructing the children to be good and kind. He learnt to ride a bike at Yasnaya Polyana, careering among the fruit trees, but towards the end of his life he turned away from the world and embraced Orthodoxy, despite his troubled relationship with the religion.

Still owned by the Tolstoy family, Yasnaya Polyana has its own hotel, a crumbling Soviet relic a mile away from the main house. The management billeted me in a cavernous VIP suite, which turned out to have nothing but space and mice. I kept my curtains open at night to watch the moon, and it was not hard to imagine a figure with a long white beard slipping by, crunching lime leaves underfoot, heading off to make trouble – more often than not with a winsome serf girl.

Spasskoye-Lutovinovo, top, was the ancestral home of Turgenev

The empty, arrow-straight E105 south from Tula slices though fields of flaunting sunflowers. On the verges, elderly men in tracksuits and plastic sandals touted pails of the mushrooms Russians call “Horn of Plenty”, perching the goods on the top of their Ladas. The mushrooms were 300 roubles (£3) a pail, compared with 3,000 in Moscow.

I was heading through the wide-open spaces of the Oryol region to the home of my favourite Russian writer, Ivan Turgenev (his novels include Fathers and Sons and his plays A Month in the Country, and like Tolstoy his work is deeply bound up with Russia).

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His ancestral estate, Spasskoye-Lutovinovo, is a couple of miles off the road down a muddy lane, buried in the ubiquitous Russian birch forest. The scent of dog rose hung on the breeze; Turgenev said the air at Spasskoye was “full of ideas”. The estate is a 10th of the size of Tolstoy’s but has more than 7,000 trees, a thousand of them between 150 and 300 years old.

Turgenev spent most of his adult life in Europe, but he returned home often and wrote five of his six novels at Spasskoye. After Paris he must have felt he was out of the world (the journey from St Petersburg alone took a week). He was 6ft 3in and handsome, spoke 15 languages, played chess to an international standard and was a renowned raconteur as well as an immensely popular landlord, and his serfs sang songs in praise of him. In 1834 he planted an oak tree in the grounds, and asked everyone who ever came to bow before it. So I did.

Staraya Russa was the only home ever owned by Dostoevsky

All the writers’ houses I visited had one feature in common: a female attendant in each room whose sole job was to close the door after me. As I was almost always the only visitor, these figures were underemployed. They displayed extraordinary hairstyles and colours – Larissa at Spasskoye sported a persimmon bouffant. I got talking to her, and she volunteered the information that she had lived all her life in the region (“among Ivan’s places”) and earned 7,000 roubles (£115) a month working at Spasskoye.

While Tolstoy and Turgenev were based south of Moscow, Pushkin and Dostoevsky gravitated to the north west, nearer to St Petersburg. In 1824, Tsar Alexander I exiled Alexander Pushkin to his mother’s ancestral estate on the western rim of Russia, close to the Estonian border. I arrived at Mikhailovskoe after an overnight train journey from Moscow to Pskov followed by a hard car ride.

A shower had rinsed the beetroot fields bright green. Pushkin was already the national poet when he retreated into exile, and he still is; almost every Russian I have met likes to reel off lines of Eugene Onegin or The Bronze Horseman. My guide Irina broke into Pushkin’s verse every five minutes as we toured Mikhailovskoe.

Irina was touchingly reverent. I became obsessed with making her admit Pushkin wasn’t perfect. Stopping in front of a photo of the poet’s brother Lev, she said, “Lev had many gambling debts which Alexander Sergeyevich [Pushkin] paid off.”

“Alexander was a gambler too, wasn’t he?” I asked. “This is a chair he must have sat in,” said Irina.

We hiked over fields to Trigorskoye (Three Hills), a walk the master took every day, visiting friends at a house I found more moving than Mikhailovskoe itself: a former flag factory, it was a one-storey long barn with rooms off each side and a broad veranda overlooking dips and rivers, lakes and wooden bridges. I loved the chaste simplicity of Trigorskoye – though there was a silver champagne cooler on the dining table – and the bucolic serenity of the landscape.

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Yet Pushkin was the least serene human being ever to have lived. “He had a heart though,” said Irina. She was reluctant to admit that the poet had affairs with the daughters of the Trigorskoye house (and the mother too). But he was a heroic womaniser who only had time to write when indisposed with sexually transmitted diseases. Turgenev once wrote to a mutual friend, “He [Pushkin] is finishing the fourth canto of his poem. Two or three more doses of the clap and it’ll be in the bag.”

The last highlight of my literary tour was Dostoevsky’s house in Staraya Russa, a declining town on the Polist river 100 miles east of Pushkin’s estate. The wooden two-storey house with stained-glass windows wrapped around a closed veranda was the only home Dostoevsky ever owned: he was even more restless than Pushkin.

He arrived in Staraya Russa in 1872 and spent the last eight years of his life watching the river from his study window: the character Grushinka in the epic novel Brothers Karamazov lived in a house modelled on a dwelling on the cobbled embankment still standing on the opposite bank.

Dostoevsky was ludicrously famous in his own day, and he wrote much about the competing tensions between the West and Russia. Looking at Ukraine today, it is hard to see what progress has been made.

Essentials

Sara Wheeler travelled with Steppes Travel (01285 880980; steppestravel.com), which offers an eight-day tour to Russia including visits to Moscow, Tolstoy’s estate of Yasnaya Polyana, the gardens of Spasskoye-Lutovinovo, home and source of inspiration for Ivan Turgenev, and overnight rail travel to Pskov and Mikhailovskoe, where Alexander Pushkin lived while writing Eugene Onegin, finishing with a visit to Staraya Russa, Dostoevsky’s summer retreat.

It costs from £3,895 per person including return flights from London, rail tickets, local guide and accommodation throughout, based on two travelling together.

UK nationals (and many others) need a visa to visit Russia. VSF Global can organise this: vfsglobal.com. Steppes will provide the necessary supporting documentation.

Top tip

Tolstoy’s house (tolstoymuseum.ru) in Moscow is also worth a visit

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