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The article presents the results of a digital editing project devoted to Leo Tolstoy’s The Collected Works, developed as an open access material. Our main source is the ninety-volume critical edition of Leo Tolstoy’s texts. The article portrays the developing of a metadata structure for the texts, which were divided into three categories: literary texts, diaries, and letters. The markers derive from the mechanism of the critical edition, and the mark-up itself allows for a creation of an image of Tolstoy’s evolution as a writer. The critical edition’s index also constitutes an important source of data, which was digitised as part of the project and developed as a specialised web service. This data supports, in particular, the construction of a network of references between the people and texts essential to Tolstoy. Furthermore, the layout of references in itself might become the basis of social network analysis, a methodological technique, popular in contemporary humanities. In the final part of the article, the ‘Textograph’ is discussed – a technical platform serving to render manuscripts digital, which was developed in order to digitise Tolstoy’s manuscripts, but can also be used to work on manuscripts of other writers.