what I've just decided,' he would tell the village children at his school. 'I am going to give up my land and my aristocratic way of life and become a peasant. I shall build myself a hut at the edge of the village, marry a country woman, and work the land as you do: mowing, ploughing, and all the rest.' When the children asked what he would do with the estate, Tolstoy said he would divide it up. 'We shall own it all in common, as equals, you and me.' And what, the children asked, if people laughed at him and said he had lost everything: 'Won't you feel ashamed?' 'What do you mean "ashamed"?' the count answered gravely. 'Is it anything to be ashamed of to work for oneself? Have your fathers ever told you they were ashamed to work? They have not. What is there to be ashamed of in a man feeding himself and his family by the sweat of his brow? If anybody laughs at me, here's what I would say: there's nothing to laugh at in a man's working, but there is a great deal of shame and disgrace in his not working, and yet living better than others. That is what I am ashamed of. I eat, drink, ride horseback, play the piano, and still I feel bored. I say to myself: "You're a do-nothing."'47 Did he really mean it? Was he saying this to give the children pride in the life of peasant toil that awaited them or was he really planning to join them? Tolstoy's life was full of contradictions and he never could decide if he should become a peasant or remain a nobleman. On the one hand he embraced the elite culture of the aristocracy. War and Peace is a novel that rejoices in that world. There were times while working on that epic novel - like the day one of the village schools shut down in 1863 - when he gave up on the peasants as a hopeless cause. They were capable neither of being educated nor of being understood. War and Peace would depict only 'princes, counts, ministers, senators and their children', he had promised in an early draft, because, as a nobleman himself, he could no more understand what a peasant might be thinking than he 'could understand what a cow is thinking as it is being milked or what a horse is thinking as it is pulling a barrel'.48 On the other hand, his whole life was a struggle to renounce that elite world of shameful privilege and live 'by the sweat of his own brow'. The quest for a simple life of toil was a constant theme in Tolstoy's works. Take Prince Levin, for example, the peasant-loving squire in Anna Karenina - a character so closely based on Tolstoy's life and dreams that he was virtually autobiographical. Who can forget
that blissful moment when Levin joins the peasant mowers in the field and loses himself in the labour and the team?
After breakfast Levin was not in the same place in the string of mowers as before, but found himself between the old man who had accosted him quizzically, and now invited him to be his neighbour, and a young peasant who had only been married in the autumn and who was mowing this summer for the first time.
The old man, holding himself erect, went in front, moving with long, regular strides, his feet turned out and swinging his scythe as precisely and evenly, and apparently as effortlessly, as a man swings his arms in walking. As if it were child's play, he laid the grass in a high, level ridge. It seemed as if the sharp blade swished of its own accord through the juicy grass.
Behind Levin came the lad Mishka. His pleasant boyish face, with a twist of fresh grass bound round his hair, worked all the time with effort; but whenever anyone looked at him he smiled. He would clearly sooner die than own it was hard work for him.
Levin kept between them. In the very heat of the day the mowing did not seem such hard work. The perspiration with which he was drenched cooled him, while the sun, that burned his back, his head, and his arms, bare to the elbow, gave a vigour and dogged energy to his labour; and more and more often now came those moments of oblivion, when it was possible not to think of what one was doing. The scythe cut of itself. Those were happy moments.49
Tolstoy loved to be among the peasants. He derived intense pleasure - emotional, erotic - from their physical presence. The 'spring-like' smell of their beards would send him into raptures of delight. He loved to kiss the peasant men. The peasant women he found irresistible -sexually attractive and available to him by his 'squire's rights'. Tolstoy's diaries are filled with details of his conquests of the female serfs on his estate - a diary he presented, according to the custom, to his bride Sonya (as Levin does to Kitty) on the eve of their wedding:* '21 April 1858. A wonderful day. Peasant women in the garden and by the well. I'm like a man possessed.'50 Tolstoy was not handsome,
* Similar diaries were presented to their future wives by Tsar Nicholas II, the novelist Vladimir Nabokov and the poet Vladimir Khodasevich.
