Three Days in the Village (Tolstoy)
Short summary
Russian countryside, early 1900s. The Narrator observes that dozens of homeless tramps daily visit his village of eighty households, seeking food and shelter.
The village policeman quarters these vagrants only with peasants, never with the landowner, priest, or shopkeepers. Despite living in cramped single rooms, peasants feed and shelter these desperate people out of Christian duty. The narrator meets various types of beggars: regular ones, administrative exiles, and unemployed workers returning from failed job searches. Many express hatred toward the rich, viewing them as robbers of the people.
On the second day, the narrator encounters more suffering: a soldier's wife whose husband was conscripted, orphaned children whose mother died, and a dying peasant. The contrast between this misery and his own comfortable life with servants, multiple courses at dinner, and roses from Petersburg becomes stark. In the narrator's dream, a voice condemns the wealthy landowners.
They, the people, are alive. They are the tree, and you are harmful growths—fungi on the plant. Realise, then, all your insignificance and their grandeur!
The voice argues that land belongs to all and calls for abolishing private property in land.
Detailed summary
Division into chapters is editorial.
The tramp phenomenon: peasant charity in crisis
A new and unprecedented phenomenon had emerged in the Russian countryside. Every day, between half a dozen to a dozen cold, hungry, tattered tramps came to the village of eighty homesteads, seeking night lodging. These ragged, half-naked, barefoot people, often ill and extremely dirty, approached the village policeman who quartered them not with the wealthy landowners who had spare rooms, but with the peasants whose entire families lived crowded in single rooms.
When you sit down to table yourself, it's impossible not to invite him too, or your own soul accepts nothing. So one feeds him and gives him a drink of tea.
An old peasant householder explained this Christian duty to the narrator. During the day, ten or more such visitors called at each hut, and housewives cut bread for them despite knowing their rye would not last until the next harvest.
An enormous yearly-increasing army of beggars... lives and is actually fed by the hardest-worked and poorest class, the country peasants.
This burden fell entirely on the peasantry throughout Russia.
Different types of beggars: desperation and demands
The narrator observed different types of beggars coming to his house daily. Some were regular beggars who had chosen this livelihood, equipped with sacks and basic clothing. Others were passersby without beggar's equipment, mostly young and uncrippled, all in pitiable states, barefoot and half-naked. When asked where they were going, they invariably answered they were looking for work or returning home after finding none.
One morning, five tramps waited near the porch. The narrator instructed his servant to give them money from the table - five kopecks each as was customary. An hour later, a dreadfully tattered man with swollen eyelids and restless eyes approached, holding out a certificate and demanding more substantial help.
Very well! That means, it seems, that I must put an end to myself! That's all that's left me to do... Give me something, if only a trifle!
The breeding ground for violence: social analysis
Many of these insistent beggars felt entitled to demand their share from the rich, viewing them not as charitable souls but as robbers who sucked the blood of the working classes. The narrator encountered two distinct types: a tall, good-looking man from Petersburg who had lost his office job and was walking home to Toúla Government, and an exiled newspaper distributor.
The narrator warned that these desperate men represented the Vandals foretold by Henry George, bred not in deserts but on highways and in city slums. The government's blindness in using police violence, imprisonments, and executions only increased their numbers and energy, releasing them from moral restraint and creating a breeding ground for revenge.
A mothers desperate plea
A young peasant woman with a long, thin face appeared at the narrator's house, poorly dressed for the weather. She had come about her husband who had been wrongfully taken as a conscript to Krapívny, leaving her alone with three hungry children.
She claimed he was the only man in the family and begged for help, saying the children were starving and she had no milk for the baby. The narrator promised to investigate and arranged to visit her village with the doctor.
The orphaned children: tragedy and resilience
Before reaching the soldier's wife's village, a twelve-year-old girl approached their sledge, asking for help. Her mother had died, leaving five orphans. The narrator visited their brick house where he met the children's aunt, who explained their circumstances. Two years earlier, the father had been killed in a mine, and the widow had struggled alone until her death two months ago.
The eldest girl clearly understood the conversation about placing the children in an orphanage. All the children's eyes fixed on the narrator as if he were a fairy being capable of helping them. An old man praised the eldest girl's motherly care of her siblings.
Among the poorest families: survival and suffering
The narrator found the soldier's wife's hut in a dilapidated state, with crooked walls and slanted windows. Inside, he discovered not just the widow and her children, but also her sister-in-law and mother-in-law. The investigation at the police station revealed that the woman had lied - her husband was not the only man in the family, as he had a brother.
The narrator witnessed the woman strike her hungry child who was begging for food. He then visited a widow who was obsessed with showing him her calf, while an old woman lay dying on the oven-top, forgotten by God and longing for death.
Oh! God has forgotten me! He does not take my soul. If the Lord won't take it, it can't go of itself! Oh!... It must be for my sins!
A mans last moments
The doctor and narrator visited a final patient in a small neighboring village. They found a man in his death agony from pneumonia, lying on the oven with no bedding or pillow, while his wife rocked a screaming baby and worried about finding someone to fetch the priest.
The doctor explained that despite the man's strong constitution, the conditions were deadly - with 105 degrees of fever, he had sat outside in 20-degree weather.
The contrast: wealth amid poverty
Returning home, the narrator found his son's fine horses and carpet-upholstered sledge at the porch. At dinner, served by two footmen with four courses and two kinds of wine, the family discussed expensive roses from Petersburg, costing three shillings each, and a music patron's health trips to Italy. The conversation turned to future possibilities of flight, while one granddaughter dined separately on specially prepared beef-tea and sago.
Tax collection: samovars and sheep seized
Three peasants from the narrator's village came seeking help with tax collection. A well-to-do peasant faced seizure of his cow for twenty-seven roubles in Grain Reserve Fund taxes. An old man's samovar had been noted for seizure over three roubles and seventy kopecks he could not pay. A poor woman with five children faced losing her only sheep.
They have seized my last sheep, and I myself and these brats are barely alive! There now, how's one to keep oneself and them naked brats?
The Village Elder, a strong, intelligent-looking peasant with a grizzly beard, explained he had strict orders to collect all arrears before the New Year. Despite his sympathy for the poor, he was obliged to obey orders, earning thirty roubles monthly for work that troubled his conscience.
The narrator visited the woman whose sheep was seized, finding her children almost naked, wearing only tattered shirts. At the District Office, he learned that seven different types of taxes were being collected with special rigor by order of higher authorities.
The bureaucratic machine at work
At the District Office, the narrator encountered various petitioners: men seeking work passports, a peasant whose homestead was being taken by his uncle's granddaughter under new property laws, and villagers prohibited from digging iron ore on their own land. The District Elder showed less sympathy than the Village Elder, justifying his role in the system.
The narrator reflected on how officials at every level, from local administrators to Ministers, convinced themselves of their usefulness while remaining blind to the suffering their actions caused. They used seized samovars, sheep, and calves from beggars to fund vodka production, weapons, prisons, and their own comfortable lifestyles.
A prophetic dream: the voice of conscience
The narrator experienced a significant dream featuring a figure who was a combination of his dead friend Vladímir Orlóf and Nicholas Andréyevitch, a copyist. This composite figure delivered a powerful speech in response to complaints about peasant theft of oaks and hay from landowners' estates.
The peasants have stolen oaks and hay, and are thieves... But the earth is the Lord's, and common to all; and if the peasants have taken what was grown on the common land...
The dream figure argued that peasants were not thieves but were reclaiming what had been stolen from them. He compared the situation to a Caucasian chieftain who raided villages - when someone recovered their stolen horse, they were not thieves but victims seeking justice.
All you live on... has been made, and is still continually being made, by them. And they know this. They know that these parks... are purchased with the lives of their brothers.
The speech condemned the wealthy for living off peasant labor while calling them immoral, urging recognition of their own insignificance compared to the people's grandeur. The narrator awoke wondering if it was truly a dream, so powerfully had the words affected him.
The land question: the root of all evil
The dream inspired the narrator to address the land question once more. He argued that private property in land was as unjust as serfdom had been - the only difference being that serfdom was direct slavery while land-slavery was indirect. Under serfdom, owners had to care for their serfs' survival; under land-slavery, owners cared nothing if landless workers died or became demoralized.
The land never was, and never can be, anyone's property. If a man has more of it than he requires, while others have none, then he who possesses the surplus land possesses... men.
The narrator explained that abolishing land ownership required no redistribution, just as abolishing serfdom required no distribution of freed people. The government need only cease upholding unjust property rights, and people would naturally arrange equal access to land's benefits, whether through Henry George's Single-Tax system or other means.
He lamented that while Russian peasants held an advanced understanding of land rights, Russian society pursued European-style institutions instead of addressing the fundamental injustice. The government actively tried to corrupt peasants with foreign concepts of land ownership, undermining their natural understanding that all people had equal rights to earth's use. This truth, he concluded, would eventually be acknowledged by all humanity.