We constantly suffer from the strain and indecision of
believing this theory and acting as if we did not believe it, and
this man who years before had tried "to get off the backs of the
peasants," who had at least simplified his life and worked with
his hands, had come to be a prototype to many of his generation.
Doubtless all of the visitors sitting in the Tolstoy garden that
evening had excused themselves from laboring with their hands
upon the theory that they were doing something more valuable for
society in other ways. No one among our contemporaries has
dissented from this point of view so violently as Tolstoy
himself, and yet no man might so easily have excused himself from
hard and rough work on the basis of his genius and of his
intellectual contributions to the world. So far, however, from
considering his time too valuable to be spent in labor in the
field or in making shoes, our great host was too eager to know
life to be willing to give up this companionship of mutual labor.
One instinctively found reasons why it was easier for a Russian
than for the rest of us to reach this conclusion; the Russian
peasants have a proverb which says: "Labor is the house that love
lives in," by which they mean that no two people nor group of
people can come into affectionate relations with each other
unless they carry on together a mutual task, and when the Russian
peasant talks of labor he means labor on the soil, or, to use the
phrase of the great peasant, Bondereff, "bread labor.
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