Tolstoy was already urging the Russian revolution: "For three or four years now men have cursed us on the highway and called us sluggards and skulkers. The hatred and contempt of the downtrodden people are becoming more intense." (_What shall we do?_) [8] The peasant-revolutionist Bondarev would have had this law recognised as a universal obligation. Tolstoy was then subject to his influence, as also to that of another peasant, Sutayev.--"During the whole of my life two Russian thinkers have had a great moral influence over me, have enriched my mind, and have elucidated for me my own conception of the world. They were two peasants, Sutayev and Bondarev." (_What shall we do?_) In the same book Tolstoy gives us a portrait of Sutayev, and records a conversation with him. [9] _Vicious Pleasures,_ or in the French translation _Alcohol and Tobacco,_ 1895. [10] _Cruel Pleasures_ (_the Meat-eaters; War; Hunting_), 1895. [11] The sacrifice was difficult; the passion inherited. He was not sentimental; he never felt much pity for animals. For him all things fell into three planes: "1. Reasoning beings; 2. animals and plants; 3. inanimate matter." He was not without a trace of native cruelty. He relates the pleasure he felt in watching the struggles of a wolf which he killed. Remorse was of later growth. CHAPTER XII ART AND CONSCIENCE This moral revolution of Tolstoy's met with little sympathy from his immediate world; his family and his relatives were appalled by it. For a long time Countess Tolstoy had been anxiously watching the progress of a symptom against which she had fought in vain. As early as 1874 she had seen with indignation the amount of time and energy which her husband spent in connection with the schools. "This spelling-book, this arithmetic, this grammar--I feel a contempt for them, and I cannot assume a semblance of interest in them." Matters were very different when pedagogy was succeeded by religion. So hostile was the Countess's reception of the first confidences of the convert that Tolstoy felt obliged to apologise when he spoke of God in his letters: "Do not be vexed, as you so often are when I mention God; I cannot help it, for He is the very basis of my thought."[1] The Countess was touched, no doubt; she tried to conceal her impatience; but she did not understand; and she watched her husband anxiously. "His eyes are strange and fixed. He scarcely speaks. He does not seem to belong to this world." She feared he was ill. "Leo is always working, by what he tells me. Alas! he is writing religious discussions of some kind. He reads and he ponders until he gives himself the headache, and all this to prove that the Church is not in agreement with the teaching of the Gospel. He will hardly find a dozen people in Russia whom the matter could possibly interest. But there is nothing to be done. I have only one hope: that he will be done with it all the sooner, and that it will pass off like an illness."