count tolstoy at home

From The Atlantic's archives, an 1891 profile of Leo Tolstoy:

The count, who had been mowing, appeared at dinner in a grayish blouse and trousers and a soft white linen cap. He looked even more weather-beaten in complexion than he had in Moscow during the winter, if that were possible. His broad shoulders seemed to preserve in their enhanced stoop a memory of recent toil. His manner, a combination of gentle simplicity, awkward half-conquered consciousness, and half-discarded polish, was as cordial as ever. His piercing gray-green-blue eyes had lost none of their almost saturnine and withal melancholy expression.

The author, Isabel Hapgood, paints a vivid picture of Tolstoy's life on his estate and evokes a passionate and opinionated man who nevertheless can't help but listen to and absorb the opinions of others. Hapgood delights into getting into arguments with him, and knows she has changed his mind when he "retreats into silence". Or maybe he just wants her to shut up. Anyway, there are many delights here:

One day, during a chat in his study, he had praised Dickens. “There are three requisites which go to make a perfect writer,” he remarked. “First, he must have something worth saying. Second, he must have a proper way of saying it. Third, he must have sincerity. Dickens had all three of these qualities. Thackeray had not much to say; he had a great deal of art in saying it; but he had not enough sincerity. Dostóevsky possessed all three requisites..." He declared that America had not as yet produced any first-class woman writer, like George Eliot and George Sand.

And here is Tolstoy's theory of how to live:

Men should divide their time each day between (1) hard labor unto perspiration and callosities; (2) the exercise of some useful handicraft; (3) exercise of the brain in writing and reading; (4) social intercourse, sixteen hours in all.

Does tapping at a laptop count as hard labour? No, thought not.

Comments

[John F]

No, but I bet the Bakerloo Hop does.