The Yasnaya Polyana peasants had their allotments here. Quite often Tolstoy himself ploughed for poor families that had no breadwinner and therefore could not work their land. The well-known painting by Ilya Repin Tolstoy On the Ploughed Field shows the writer working on this very field; in his book The Far -the Near Repin also tells the story of the painting and describes what he witnessed. «For six hours on end, without rest, he furrowed the black land with his plow, now going uphill, now going down the slope to the ravine... Only shadows from the sun would change, and his hempen shirt was getting darker and darker from sweat and black earth dust that settled on it. Now and then, having climbed up the hill on the mellow earth, he left the plow for a minute and went to a ravine to drink from the bottle water with a little white wine added to it. His face shone in the sun from the streams of sweat running down the hollows together with the black coating of dust» (Ilya Repin. The Far – the Near).