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.
but he had a huge sex drive and, in addition to the thirteen children Sonya bore, there were at least a dozen other children fathered by him in the villages of his estate.
But there was one peasant woman who represented more than a sexual conquest. Aksinia Bazykina was twenty-two - and married to a serf on his estate - when Tolstoy first saw her in 1858. 'I'm in love as never before in my life', he confessed to his diary. 'Today in the wood. I am a fool. A beast. Her bronze flush and her eyes… Have no other thought.'51 This was more than lust. 'It's no longer the feelings of a stag', he wrote in 1860, 'but of a husband for a wife.'52 Tolstoy, it appears, was seriously considering a new life with Aksinia in some 'hut at the edge of the village'. Turgenev, who saw him often at this time, wrote that Tolstoy was 'in love with a peasant woman and did not want to discuss literature'.53 Turgenev himself had several love affairs with his own serfs (one even bore him two children), so he must have understood what Tolstoy felt.54 In 1862, when Tolstoy married Sonya, he tried to break relations with Aksinia; and in the first years of their marriage, when he was working without rest on War and Peace, it is hard to imagine his wandering off to find Aksinia in the woods. But in the 1870s he began to see her once again. She bore him a son by the name of Timofei, who became a coachman at Yasnaya Polyana. Long after that, Tolstoy continued to have dreams about Aksinia. Even in the final year of his long life, half a century after their first encounter, he recorded his joy, on seeing the 'bare legs' of a peasant girl, 'to think that Aksinia is still alive'.55 This was more than the usual attraction of a squire to a serf. Aksinia was Tolstoy's unofficial 'wife', and he continued to love her well into her old age. Aksinia was not beautiful in any conventional sense, but she had a certain quality, a spiritual strength and liveliness, that made her loved by all the villagers. 'Without her', Tolstoy wrote, 'the khorovod was not a khorovod, the women did not sing, the children did not play'.56 Tolstoy saw her as the personification of everything that was good and beautiful in the Russian peasant woman - she was proud and strong and suffering - and that is how he drew her in a number of his works. She appears, for example, in 'The Devil', which tells the story of his love affair with her both before and after his marriage. It may be
significant that Tolstoy did not know how to end the tale. Two different
conclusions were published: one in which the hero kills the peasant woman, the other where he commits suicide.
Tolstoy's own life story was unresolved as well. In the middle of the 1870s, when the 'going to the people' reached its apogee, Tolstoy experienced a moral crisis that led him, like the students, to seek his salvation in the peasantry. As he recounts in A Confession (1879-80), he had suddenly come to realize that everything which had provided meaning in his life - family happiness and artistic creation - was in fact meaningless. None of the great philosophers brought him any comfort. The Orthodox religion, with its oppressive Church, was unacceptable. He thought of suicide. But suddenly he saw that there was a true religion in which to place his faith - in the suffering, labouring and communal life of the Russian peasantry. 'It has been my whole life', he wrote to his cousin. 'It has been my monastery, the church where I escaped and found refuge from all the anxieties, the doubts and temptations of my life.'57
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 War and Peace: