From Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia by Orlando Figes (2002):
Tolstoy loved to be among the peasants. He derived intense pleasure — emotional, erotic — from their physical presence. The ‘spring-like’ smell of their beards would send him into raptures of delight. He loved to kiss the peasant men. The peasant women he found irresistible — sexually attractive and available to him by his ‘squire’s rights’. Tolstoy’s diaries are filled with details of his conquests of the female serfs on his estate — a diary he presented, according to custom, to his bride Sonya (as Levin does to Kitty [in Anna Karenina]) on the eve of their wedding.*
* Similar diaries were presented to their future wives by Tsar Nicholas II, the novelist Vladimir Nabokov and the poet Vladimir Khodasevich.
Alex Good 
Them wer’t days eh?
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Even for pre-Revolution Russia this struck me as a really weird custom.
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Yep, I’d be running for the hills, not the church!
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I bet he did. Bet you would like to do the same if you got the chance, eh Bunty?
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Kiss bearded peasants? Or keep a diary?
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Both, wouldn’t surprise me at all. I’ve heard the stories on the dark web about your antics. Probably did them both at the same time for kicks.
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You’re the guy who didn’t show up for the Speedos-and-syrup cage match we had scheduled yesterday after your copycat 300 post, so you’re in no position to talk.
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I think I was awarded a win in your absence.
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