Yet even after his spiritual crisis Tolstoy was ambivalent: he idealized the peasants and loved to be with them, but for many years he could not bring himself to break from the conventions of society and become one himself. In many ways he only played at being a 'peasant'. When he went out for a walk or rode his horse he put on peasant garb - he was known throughout the world for his peasant shirt and belt, his trousers and bast shoes - but when he went to Moscow, or dined with friends, he dressed in tailored clothes. During the day he would labour in the fields at Yasnaya Polyana - then return to his manor house for a dinner served by waiters in white gloves. The painter Repin visited the writer in 1887 to paint the first in a series of portraits of Tolstoy. A man of genuinely humble origins, Repin was disgusted by the count's behaviour. 'To descend for a day into this darkness of the peasantry's existence and proclaim: "I am with you" - that is just hypocrisy.'58 Nor, it seems, were the peasants taken in. Four years later, at the height of the famine in 1891, Repin visited the count again. Tolstoy insisted on showing him the 'peasant way' to plough a field. 'Several times', Repin recalled, 'some Yasnaya Polyana peasants walked by, doffed their caps, bowed, and then walked on as if taking no notice of the count's exploit. But then another peasant group appears, evidently from the next village. They stop and stare for
a long while. And then a strange thing happens. Never in my life have I seen a clearer expression of irony on a simple peasant's face.'59
Tolstoy was aware of the ambiguity, and for years he agonized. As a writer, and a Russian one at that, he felt the artist's responsibility to provide leadership and enlightenment for the people. This was why he had set up the peasant schools, expended his energy on writing country tales, and started a publishing venture ('The Intermediary') to print the classics (Pushkin, Gogol, Leskov and Chekhov) for the growing mass of readers in the countryside. Yet at the same time he was moving to the view that the peasants were the teachers of society and that neither he nor any other scion of the world's immoral civilizations had anything to give. From his teaching at the village schools, he came to the conclusion that the peasant had a higher moral wisdom than the nobleman - an idea he explained by the peasant's natural and communal way of life. This is what the peasant Karataev teaches Pierre in
Karataev had no attachments, friendships, or love, as Pierre understood them, but he loved and lived affectionately with everything that life brought him in contact with, particularly with man - not any particular man, but those with whom he happened to be… To Pierre he always remained… an unfathomable, rounded, eternal personification of the spirit of simplicity and truth.60
With every passing year, Tolstoy strived to live more and more like a peasant. He learned how to make his own shoes and furniture. He gave up writing and spent his time working in the fields. In a turn from his previous life, he even advocated chastity, and became a vegetarian. Sometimes in the evening he would join the pilgrims walking on the road from Moscow to Kiev, which passed by the estate. He would walk with them for miles, returning barefoot in the early morning hours with a new confirmation of his faith. 'Yes, these people know God,' he would say. 'Despite all their superstitions, their belief in St Nicholas-of-the-spring and St Nicholas-of-the-winter, or the Icon of Three Hands, they are closer to God than we are. They lead moral, working lives, and their simple wisdom is in many ways superior to all the artifices of our culture and philosophy.'61
In 1862, Tolstoy married Sofya (Sonya) Behrs, the daughter of Dr Andrei Behrs, the house doctor of the Kremlin Palace in Moscow, in a ceremony at the Kremlin's Cathedral of the Assumption. Tolstoy drew on this event when he came to write the splendid wedding scene between Kitty and Levin in
Every Russian knows the verses from Pushkin's
