Chapter 5 - Peasants and Folklore

Summary

Leo Tolstoy wrote throughout his career about Russian peasants, first at a class-inflected distance but later with admiration for their clothing, labor, and religious and moral feelings. As a Count, he automatically held a particular position vis-à-vis peasants, especially before the 1861 emancipation. His literary works and teaching tales depict peasants variously, sometimes idealizing an individual (from Platon Karataev in War and Peace to Alyosha the Pot), other times looking with distrust or frustration at peasant groups and their stubborn opposition to farming innovations. Eventually, Tolstoy famously adopted peasant garb, practiced many kinds of peasant crafts and labor, and enthusiastically communicated with peasant and sectarian thinkers, admiring their simple Christian faith. His primers for peasant children and collections of teaching tales often picked up folktales, paring their style down to the extreme simplicity that he considered typical and preferable. Toward the end of his life Tolstoy sought out the opinions and experiences of Russian peasant laborers in works of passionately engaged journalism. Major figures in Russian revolutionary movements (Lenin, Plekhanov) admired his insights, letting his authority in depicting peasant life continue into the Soviet period.