Down on the Farm with Tolstoy.
A much more famous writer than Lermontov and Turgenev is the author of War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina - (1877) Leo Tolstoy. In the second novel, the rural aristocrat Konstantin "Kostya" Dmitrievich Lëvin is thought to be a self-portrait. Retiring to his rural estate from Moscow, Levin often follows the peasants out into the fields, and in one memorable episode in the novel spends a whole day scything which induces a sense of mysticism in nature and an acceptance into the collective of the peasants working on his land.[1] Tolstoy often worked on his own estate, and was drawn and painted in the act of ploughing a field by Ilya Repin (above). Influenced by the Moravian brothers and their colony at Hernhut, Tolstoy wrote: “In my mind there is much from my childhood, from the Quakers, from the Herrnhuters.” The Germanic settlement of Volga territory led to the creation of peasant communes, a romanticised notion of community which clashed with the westernized Russian elite. Fed by his own experience of Jewish colonists in the Ukraine, Tolstoy embraced this way of life. He also studied the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer which encouraged the Russian author to practice a form of asceticism in which work is the road towards compensation and salvation. Reading such spiritual guides as St Francis and Buddha who were born into wealth but chose “voluntary poverty,” yet abandoned everything and wandered through the land as mendicants, Tolstoy dressed like a peasant and farmed his own estates. Artists of the realist movement represented the great writer in this way. Leo Tolstoy was painted by Russia’s finest artists: Kramskoi painted his portrait and Repin depicted him ploughing and dressed in peasant costume. These portraits originated as a result of Tretyakov’s wish to have a portrait gallery of famous Russian figures executed, though it was mainly due to Kramskoi’s own initiative that his portrait of Tolstoy was made. The portrait was done on Tolstoy’s estate of Yasnaya Polyana at the time he was working on the novel Anna Karenina. Tolstoy acknowledged that the portrait was a success, and as the Tretyakov’s website puts it: “the emphatic simplicity of artistic language was dictated by the writer’s aesthetic views.”[2]
[1] Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part III, Chap 4.
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