Fruits of Culture

About

Tolstoy's 1889 comedy — sometimes translated as The Fruits of Enlightenment — is a pointed satire of aristocratic spiritualism and class pretension, in which peasants seeking to buy land from a distracted nobleman must navigate his household's craze for séances. Tolstoy's contempt for fashionable mysticism and his sympathy for the peasants who see through it give the play a sharp edge beneath its farcical surface. It is one of the few works in which Tolstoy's gift for comic observation found dramatic form, and it remains a pleasurable and instructive demonstration of how a great novelist can deploy theatrical convention for satirical purpose.