Leo Tolstoy

Pupils were more than enthusiastic. Tolstoy’s teaching methods could doubtfully be replicated elsewhere, but such a passionate, charismatic and dedicated teacher and the immediate associates he had personally trained could achieve a lot. In 1862 Tolstoy published his famous article ‘Who should learn how to write from whom – peasant children from us or we from the peasant children?’ He expressed admiration for the instinctive creative genius and learning abilities of his pupils. There was, however, less humility on Tolstoy’s part than the title of the article suggested. The process of learning was mutual. To produce writing of such artlessness and simplicity that the great writer was eager to emulate, the peasant children had first to acquire from him not only basic literacy, but the power of imagination, intellectual curiosity and a desire to express themselves. This was exactly the type of communication and trust that Tolstoy the emancipator failed to build with their parents. In one of his pedagogical conversations with his pupils he half jokingly, half seriously, discussed his own wish to renounce his status of a landowner and to start working on the land. Initially incredulous, the children finally started believing their teacher really meant it.

Fascinated by the idea of a miraculous transformation of a barin (landowner) into a muzhik (peasant), children began discussing the prospect of Tolstoy marrying a peasant girl. They understood well that such an outrageous change of social status implied an equally improbable family arrangement. Tolstoy readily engaged in this ridiculous discussion. He was ‘smiling, asking questions, writing something in his notebook’⁶ and obviously learning from peasant children ‘how to write’. The whole story they were collectively conceiving was strikingly close to some of his literary designs.

Since 1853 Tolstoy had constantly been returning to a story, later known as The Cossacks, dedicated to the part of his life he had not yet transformed into artistic work. The plot was typical of Romantic colonial literature: a young aristocratic officer, whose name Tolstoy changed several times, disappointed with the shallow life of high society, falls in love with a beautiful Cossack girl, or in some versions, a married woman, whose name, Marianna, did not change from the first draft to the last. Tolstoy presents this strong and blatantly erotic passion as an expression of his character’s desire to change his life forever and share the simple, violent and natural life of a Cossack. The outcome of this endeavour was not clear to the author: in some versions the officer fell out of love with Marianna after seducing her, in others he happily married her. Tolstoy was also experimenting with the language, contrasting the sophisticated psychologically nuanced style of the officer’s letters to his friend in St Petersburg with the particularity and directness of Cossack speech.

In parallel with his work on The Cossacks, Tolstoy was also working on an idyllic epic about peasant life in mainland Russia that also revolved around a powerful and sexually attractive woman. The language in these unfinished stories or fragments, provisionally entitled The Idyll and Tikhon and Malanya, is much more thoroughly stylized than in the drafts of The Cossacks, since there is no repentant noble to serve as a narrator. Nevertheless, Tolstoy’s loving and idealizing gaze can be perceived in the way he exoticizes peasant life with the detached admiration of an outsider.

These drafts evoke one of the strongest erotic infatuations of Tolstoy’s life, his affair with a married peasant, Aksinya Bazykina. Tolstoy regularly mentions Aksinya in his diaries for 1858–60 with the usual admixture of frenzied desire and revulsion, but the entries also record a fixation on the same person that was much less usual. Thirty years later, in a completely different period of his life, he recalled this passion in a story with a revealing title, ‘The Devil’. This emotional colouring was clearly present in the affair from the very beginning, but at the same time Tolstoy recorded different feelings in his diary:

I am a fool. A beast. Her neck is red with the sun . . . I am in love as never before in my life. I’ve no other thoughts. I am tormented . . . Had Aksinya, but I am repelled by her . . . Aksinya I recall only with revulsion – her shoulders . . . Continue to see Aksinya exclusively . . . She was nowhere about. I looked for her. It’s no longer the feeling of a stag, but of a husband for a wife. It’s strange. I try to reawaken my former feeling of surfeit and I can’t. (Ds, pp. 134–5, 139; CW, XLVIII, p. 25)