After they were married, Tolstoy and Sonya settled into family life on his bestate/b at Yasnaya Polyana (the model for Otradnoe, the Rostov bestate/b, in the novel), where Tolstoy had spent the first years of his life, and which he had ... The decision to set the novel fifty years before the present also defied the literary fashion of the time, championed by Turgenev and bNekrasov/b, the editor of The Contemporary, which sought to fashion literature into a medium of social change ...
