Fruits of Culture (1891) is Tolstoy’s comic play satirizing the enthusiasm for spiritualism — séances, mediums, and table-rapping — that swept through Russia’s educated classes in the late 19th century. A wealthy landowner’s household is thrown into comic chaos as peasants from his estate arrive with a land petition while the drawing room is consumed by the fashionable new obsession.
Lighter in tone than much of Tolstoy’s late work, it is a sharp and funny critique of aristocratic self-indulgence. This free EPUB download makes a rarely staged classic easily available.