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The photographs taken at Yasnaya Polyana in my later years show a peasant — or a man dressed as one. I wore peasant clothes, worked in the fields, made my own boots. My family found it embarrassing. The peasants found it slightly strange. I found it necessary.

I had written two of the greatest novels in the Russian language and was known across the world. I also owned an estate, serfs — well, former serfs after 1861 — and had spent my youth in dissipation. The peasant costume was not performance. It was penance. It was also, I admit, the costume of the new philosophy I was building — that simplicity is the only honest life and that art which does not serve moral truth is merely entertainment for the comfortable.