Leo Tolstoy

Tensions in the literary world were already running high before the proclamation. In the late 1850s the leading writers affiliated to Sovremennik had left the magazine, led by Turgenev, because they were dismayed by the powerful position that had been gained by the magazine’s in-house critics, Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Dobroliubov. These sons of priests, former seminarians, militant atheists and political radicals were challenging the long-established monopoly of the educated liberal nobility in Russian social, cultural and literary life. Nekrasov, a noble himself, took the part of the critics both because of his political sympathies and an astute understanding of the market. In a time of turmoil and loosening of censorship, the direct statements of Sovremennik’s critics defined the spirit of the magazine and excited the readers even more than the most exquisite novels.

Tolstoy had severed his exclusive publishing agreement with Sovremennik earlier. When he entered the literary world, Chernyshevsky had welcomed Youth and Boyhood for their subtlety of psychological analysis and coined the term ‘dialectics of the soul’, which became a catchword for Tolstoy’s style. Still, his attitude to Tolstoy betrayed the condescending arrogance of a hard-working professional intellectual towards an aristocratic dilettante. Tolstoy’s reaction was equally arrogant, but much more emotional. In one of his letters to Nekrasov, he called Chernyshevsky a ‘gentleman who smells of lice’ (Ls, I, p. 59). At the same time, his attitude towards noble liberals was hardly more generous. Their compassion for the plight of the poor seemed to him like the mending of a beggar’s clothes by an elegant noble girl under the guidance of an English governess. Returning to Russia in the aftermath of the liberation of serfs, he felt it necessary to settle scores.

Tolstoy’s reputation as a raw genius, together with his insatiable intellectual curiosity, provoked many highly intelligent people to try to educate him. In the 1850s Boris Chicherin, the prominent historian and legal thinker, was arguably the most powerful mind to take on this impossible task. In a letter to Tolstoy written in April 1861, Chicherin declared that he was finishing an article about the abolition of serfdom and chided Tolstoy for hiding himself from the major problems of his time behind the petty preoccupations of teaching illiterate children. On his way home, Tolstoy responded from Dresden:

You regard convictions acquired not by meticulously following a course, but through the sufferings of the whole life and the most passionate quest for truth that is possible for a human being, as the exaltation of self-love and paucity of thought . . . You find it strange to teach dirty children. I can’t understand how someone, if he respects himself, can write an article. Can you say in an article one millionth of what you know and what should be said, or anything new, or any thought that would be just, truly just. (CW, LX, p. 380)

Whatever one thinks about Tolstoy’s pedagogical pursuits, they were highly successful. In the country, where peasants were almost universally illiterate, their children did not have much choice. The peasants anticipating the coming changes were eager to send their children to schools. The rapidly multiplying numbers of young graduates were willing to teach and the pupils were interested in learning. Tolstoy brought to this enterprise his usual diligence and energy. Having issued the first edition of his magazine Yasnaya Polyana, he wrote a letter to Chernyshevsky asking him to review it in Sovremennik, wanting to disseminate his ideas among the readers of the hugely more popular publication.

Chernyshevsky reacted in an article written with his characteristic sense of papal infallibility. He praised Tolstoy for his good intentions, but was profoundly sceptical about the usefulness of such an unsystematic way of teaching. Tolstoy claimed that the educated people do not understand what lower classes need and thus can have no idea what and how to teach them. In response, Chernyshevsky advised him to go first to university and find out what every teacher needed to know.