Page:Leo Tolstoy - Father Sergius and Other Stories and Plays - ed. Charles Theodore Hagberg Wright (1911).djvu/28

 22 Fruits of Culture found its way on to the public stage in Russia before The Power of Darkness, and both there and abroad the two plays have been almost equally successful. It is often treated as pure comedy, and the peasants presented as simply comic characters. This Tolstoy did not intend, and did not like. He meant the hardness of their lot and their urgent need of land to stand out in sharp contrast to the waste of wealth by the cultured crowd.

During the last thirty years of his life Tolstoy himself used, as is well known, to dress much like a peasant, though never in the beggar-pilgrim garb in which he is made to figure in a "Life" of him recently published in this country; and it happened that one winter's day, when Fruits of Culture was being rehearsed in Túla (the nearest town to Yásnaya Polyána), he went, by request, to the hall where it was being staged. Wearing his rough sheepskin overcoat, he attempted to enter, but was roughly shoved out by the doorkeeper, who told him it was no place for the likes of him!

The same year the play was presented at Tsarskoye Selo by amateurs drawn from the highest circles of Court society, and was witnessed by a dozen Grand-Dukes and Grand-Duchesses as well as by the Tsar himself, who warmly thanked the performers for the pleasure it had given him.