" Those
monastic orders founded upon agricultural labor, those
philosophical experiments like Brook Farm and many another have
attempted to reduce to action this same truth. Tolstoy himself
has written many times his own convictions and attempts in this
direction, perhaps never more tellingly than in the description
of Lavin's morning spent in the harvest field, when he lost his
sense of grievance and isolation and felt a strange new
brotherhood for the peasants, in proportion as the rhythmic
motion of his scythe became one with theirs.
At the long dinner table laid in the garden were the various
traveling guests, the grown-up daughters, and the younger
children with their governess. The countess presided over the
usual European dinner served by men, but the count and the
daughter, who had worked all day in the fields, ate only porridge
and black bread and drank only kvas, the fare of the hay-making
peasants. Of course we are all accustomed to the fact that those
who perform the heaviest labor eat the coarsest and simplest fare
at the end of the day, but it is not often that we sit at the
same table with them while we ourselves eat the more elaborate
food prepared by someone else's labor. Tolstoy ate his simple
supper without remark or comment upon the food his family and
guests preferred to eat, assuming that they, as well as he, had
settled the matter with their own consciences.
Pages:
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288