While still a young cavalry officer Fet began to write poetry, for which he had real talent; and after leaving the army he continued his literary career as an Art-for-Art's-sake-ist, producing verse translations of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, and Persius, besides original works of his own in prose and verse, and (after Tolstoy's suggestion, already recorded) translations from the German of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea, and Goethe's Faust.
In his dislike, or perhaps one should say ignorance, of politics, commerce, and that great industrial revolution of the Western world that has been the most conspicuous achievement of the last one hundred and fifty years, as well as in his love of pure art, chiefly literary, he had much in common with Tolstoy. They could talk with profound sympathy of all that related to art, and they were alike in their love of country life and in their relation to agriculture, as well as in the fact that the great problems of life centred for them round their own personality rather than around the community to which they belonged. Patriotic by instinct, it was no part of their philosophy to be so; at least they never dreamed of that newer patriotism which seeks to manage the production and distribution of the national wealth so that every member of the community may have an opportunity to live in decent conditions. They had therefore at this period much in common; and one sees by Tolstoy's letters how greatly they enjoyed each other's society, though a time was coming when their friendship would wane.
Tolstoy had a strong dislike of leaving home even for a few days. When it was absolutely necessary for him to go to Moscow he would grumble at his hard fate, and Behrs, when he accompanied him, noticed how town life depressed Tolstoy, making him fidgety and even irritable. When returning from a journey, or a hunting expedition, he would express his anxiety by exclaiming, 'If only all's well at home!' After he had been away from Yásnaya, Tolstoy never failed to give the home party full and amusing accounts of what he had seen and heard.
A distinguishing feature of Tolstoy, already remarked upon, but so strongly marked that it can hardly be insisted on too much, was the ardent and whole-hearted way in which he threw himself into whatever occupation he took up. On this point Prince D. D. Obolénsky says: 'I have seen Count L. N. Tolstoy in all phases of his creative activity.... Whatever his occupation, he did it with conviction, firmly believing in the value of what he was doing, and always fully absorbed by it. I remember him as a man of the world, and have met him at balls, and I remember a remark he once made, "See what poetry there is in women's ball-dresses, what elegance, how much thought, how much charm even in the flowers pinned to the dresses!" I remember him as an ardent sportsman, as a beekeeper, as a gardener; I remember his enthusiasm for farming, for tree planting, fruit culture, horse breeding, and much else.'
A housekeeper who was with him for nine years, said of him:
The Count himself looked after everything, and demanded extreme cleanliness in the cowhouse and in the pig-styes and in the sheep-cot. In particular he delighted in his pigs, of which he had as many as 300, paired off in separate styes.... There the Count would not allow the least dirt. Every day I and my assistants had to wash them all, and wipe the floor and walls of the styes; then the Count, on passing through the piggery of a morning, would be very pleased, and would remark aloud: 'What management!... What good management!' But God have mercy on us if he noticed the least dirt! That at once made him shout out angrily.... The Count was very hasty, and a doctor who used to come to Yásnaya said to him more than once in my presence: 'You must not get so angry, Count, it is very bad for your health....' 'I can't help it,' he would reply. 'I want to restrain myself, but can't do it. That, it seems, is the way I am made!'... His farming gave the Count a good revenue in those days. Besides the pigs and their litters, he had 80 cows, 500 good sheep, and very many fowls. We used to make excellent butter, which we sold in Moscow at 60 copecks [about 19 pence] a lb.
His management of property was characteristically personal. He never took shares in any joint-stock company, but he bought land, bred cattle and horses of good quality, planted a large apple-orchard, as well as a quantity of other trees, and in general he acquired property he could manage himself, or (for he entrusted the management of his Samára estates to stewards) over which he had full control. He has always been more alive to the dangers and evils of commercial companies and large engineering and industrial undertakings, than to the good they have achieved by irrigating arid lands, uniting distant realms, and lightening man's toil by making iron bear some of his burdens for him.
Tolstoy furnishes an example of the well-known fact that men of artistic temperament are often untidy. Though he acknowledges the advantages of neatness in general, he often remarked that it is a quality most frequently found in shallow natures. He himself simply could not, and therefore did not try to, keep his things in order. When he undressed he let his clothes or boots drop where he stood; and if he happened to be moving from place to place, his garments remained strewn about the room, and sometimes on the floor. Behrs remarks.
I noticed that to pack his things for a journey cost him great effort, and when I accompanied him I used very willingly to do it for him, and thereby pleased him very much. I remember that once, for some reason, I did not at all wish to pack for him. He noticed this, and with characteristic delicacy did not ask me to, but put his things into his portmanteau himself; and I can assert positively that no one else, were they to try, could have got them into such fearful disorder as they were in, in that portmanteau.
It was a peculiarity of Tolstoy's that he not only liked to have his own sleep out without being disturbed, but that he never could or would wake any one from sleep, and in cases of absolute necessity would ask some one else to relieve him of that disagreeable task.