pThe theme of the peasantry is central throughout most of Tolstoy's long career. His obsession with this class is seen not just as a matter of social or humanitarian concern, but as a response to the questions of how to live a good life and what is the meaning of life that an inevitable death will not destroy These questions plagued him his entire life.ppThe letters he exchanged with the four major peasant sectarian writers Bondarev, Zheltov, Verigin, and Novikov reveal that Tolstoy was matched as a profound thinker by his correspondents, as they converse on religious-moral questions, the meaning of life and how one should strive to find it, and on a wide array of burning social and personal problems. Reading through the analysis and the extensively annotated letters as a unified whole, elucidates the progressive development of the ideas they shared and where these diverged and which guided Tolstoy's and his correspondents' lives.ppJuxtaposing Tolstoy's letters with those of his four s