Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
By Maria Bregman
I’ve been thinking about facial hair lately. Not in a hipster, coffee-shop-barista way, but in a “soul of the artist” way.
It started when I walked past a bookshop window in Charing Cross Road. There was a biography of Tolstoy next to a collection of Oscar Wilde’s plays. It looked like a confrontation. On the left, the great, unruly, Biblical thicket of the Russian sage. On the right, the smooth, powdered, terrifyingly perfect face of the Irish dandy.
They looked like they were about to start a fight. Or maybe just ignore each other so hard the glass would crack.
We tend to think of writers as disembodied voices, don’t we? We focus on the text. But looking at those two faces, it struck me that the way these men presented themselves to the world wasn’t just a fashion choice. It was a manifesto. It was a war over what art – and life – is actually for.
The Sage in the Peasant Shirt
Let’s talk about Tolstoy’s beard.
It wasn’t just hair. It was a barricade. By the time he became the “Tolstoy” we think of – the moralist, the pacifist, the man who wanted to give away his copyright – that beard was doing heavy lifting. It screamed: “I have rejected your salon rules.”
He wore a peasant blouse. He made his own shoes (badly, by all accounts). He was trying to reverse-engineer civilization. His philosophy was all about stripping away the fake layers to find the “truth” underneath. To Tolstoy, the opera, the ballgown, the French phrases – it was all rot. It was a distraction from the serious business of saving your soul.
There’s something admirable about that, sure. But there’s also something exhausting. It’s the performance of authenticity.
I remember visiting Yasnaya Polyana a few years back. The estate is beautiful, but you can feel the weight of his ego in every room. He wanted to be simple, but he was a Count. He wanted to be a peasant, but he had servants to cook his vegetarian meals. The beard was the ultimate prop in his theatre of humility.
It asks a question that still bothers us today: Is “natural” really better? Or is it just another kind of costume?
The Dandy with the Green Carnation
Then you have Wilde.
Oscar didn’t want to be natural. He would have been horrified by the idea. “To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up,” he wrote. He knew the score.
If Tolstoy was trying to dig down to the bedrock of truth, Wilde was trying to build a castle in the clouds. He shaved. He powdered. He wore velvet and green carnations. He turned himself into an object of art.
For Wilde, the surface was the depth. There was no “inner truth” waiting to be discovered if you just peeled off the wallpaper. The wallpaper was the point.
It’s easy to dismiss this as vanity. Tolstoy certainly would have. He’d have called it sinful. But I think there’s a different kind of bravery in Wilde’s artificiality.
Living in Victorian London, being who he was, looking the way he did – that was dangerous. The “clean-shaven” look wasn’t just about hygiene; it was about exposure. It was about presenting a face to the world that said, “Look at me. I am entirely constructed, and I am magnificent.”
While Tolstoy was trying to disappear into the soil, Wilde was trying to shine like a diamond. And we know which one is easier to shatter.
The Clash of the Titans
Imagine them in a room together. The Pub Test, if you will.
Tolstoy sits in the corner, judging the wallpaper, probably refusing a drink, talking about the moral decay of the West. Wilde stands by the bar, probably buying drinks for everyone, dropping paradoxes like confetti, terrified of a silence.
They represent the two poles of the creative mind.
One says: Art must serve a purpose. It must teach. It must moralize. It must be useful, like a plough.
The other says: All art is quite useless. It must be beautiful. It exists for its own sake, like a flower.
We’re still having this argument. Look at the Turner Prize. Look at the bestseller lists. We are constantly torn between the “worthy” art – the stuff that wins awards because it tackles Important Issues – and the “aesthetic” art, the stuff that just looks good and makes us feel something visceral.
We want to be Tolstoy on Mondays, when we’re feeling guilty and productive. We want to be Wilde on Fridays, when we want to escape.
The Truth About the Mask
But here is the friction. Here is the thing that keeps me up at night.
I think they were both lying. Or at least, they were both playing a character.
Tolstoy’s “simplicity” was incredibly complex to maintain. It took a lot of effort to look that effortless. And Wilde? Underneath the velvet and the wit, he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He wrote “De Profundis.” When the artificial life collapsed, he found a depth of suffering that Tolstoy, in his comfortable estate, perhaps only theorized about.
The beard didn’t protect Tolstoy from his own family dramas. The clean shave didn’t save Wilde from the treadmill.
It makes you wonder if we spend too much time worrying about the packaging. We obsess over whether an artist is “authentic” or “commercial,” “deep” or “shallow.” But maybe the packaging is just the armour they need to get through the day.
So, who wins? The Sage or the Dandy?
My head says Tolstoy. We need truth. We need to be grounded. We need to remember the soil.
But my heart? My heart is with Oscar.
Because the world is ugly enough. The world is full of mud and suffering and boring, practical things. Do we really need our artists to remind us of that constantly? Or do we need someone to put on a velvet coat, pin a flower to their lapel, and tell us a beautiful lie?
I looked at those two books in the window for a long time. In the end, I didn’t buy either. I went to the pub.
But as I walked away, I couldn’t shake the image of them. The two faces of our culture. The desire to be good, and the desire to be gorgeous. We’re stuck with both of them, arguing forever in the bookshop window of our collective mind. And honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
