Leo Tolstoy

In the 1850s, during his previous, much less powerful crisis, Tolstoy had turned to teaching, which helped to lift the depression. Now he decided to try the same path and resumed the old challenge. In January 1872 a new school for peasants opened in the house at Yasnaya Polyana, with Sofia and their elder children Sergei and Tatiana helping Tolstoy. The circumstances, however, were very different this time. The introduction of local self-government had yielded remarkably quick results. Popular education was no longer uncharted territory. Village schools had proliferated; hundreds of future teachers were studying new methods in universities and seminaries. Twelve years earlier Tolstoy had tried to popularize his approaches to teaching through an educational magazine. This time he decided that speaking to teachers was useless and that he needed to address pupils themselves. He started compiling the ABC (Azbuka) and Russian Books for Reading (The Primer), which he began to publish the same year with the help of Sofia and Strakhov, who had become an ardent convert to Tolstoy’s way of thinking and an eager assistant in all his enterprises.

The ABC and Russian Books for Reading came out between 1872 and 1875, and again in 1878–9 in different versions. Tolstoy could never republish his work without editing and sometimes completely rewriting it. For the first time in his life he was writing not about, but for ‘the people’. He planned to give lessons in basic reading, arithmetic, natural sciences and morality to millions. His preparations were, as usual, extensive; he perused collections of Russian folk songs, fables and proverbs, the Lives of the Saints that constituted the main source of religious instruction for the majority of peasants, books on mathematics, physics, astronomy and pedagogical literature written by British and American authors involved in organizing summer schools for working-class children.

It was also a painstaking literary experiment; the stylistic idiom he had elaborated over many years of effort was thrown into the dustbin as ‘verbose nonsense’. No longer could he afford rich vocabulary, complicated syntax, expressive details, powerful metaphors, digressions or meticulous psychological analysis. The texts he included in his books vary in length from two or three sentences to several pages and are uniformly plain, dry and simple. Works of art usually lend themselves to different interpretations, but the ABC and The Primer leave no room for ambiguity: the moral lesson needed to be evident to all and without any explanation:

The poor man came to the rich man to beg. The rich man did not give him anything and said: ‘Go away’. The poor man did not leave, then the rich man became angry and threw a stone at him. The poor man took the stone, put it close to his bosom and said: ‘I’ll keep this stone until I can throw it at him’. It happened this way. The rich man did a bad thing; they took everything from him and led him to prison. When he went to prison, the poor man came, wanting to throw the stone at him, and then he thought again and dropped the stone on the ground, saying: For nothing, did I carry this stone: when he was rich and strong, I was afraid of him and now I pity him. (CW, XXII, pp. 84–5)

The story illustrates the Russian saying ‘to keep a stone in one’s bosom’, which means ‘to bear a grudge’. Tolstoy tells the story about the uselessness of revenge and the advantages of forgiveness without abstract words and moral notions, to make it accessible to a six-year-old who has just learned to read. In the same way, when introducing elementary natural sciences he avoided talking about laws, concentrating instead on observable phenomena like the yearly cycle of the seasons, the effects of heat and cold, rain and the evaporation of water. He also invented his own technique for teaching the alphabet that was, from his point of view, better suited to a child who could not attend school regularly.

The first reaction among professional teachers was negative. Tolstoy failed to receive the approval from the Ministry of Education that was required for school textbooks. Reviews were nearly unanimously hostile. His financial loss amounted to 2,000 roubles, not a critical sum of money, but nonetheless substantial. In his response to the critics, Tolstoy wrote that he was so ‘sure that his books meet the basic needs of the Russian people’ that he did not even bother to give explanations; as a baker, giving bread to the hungry, does not explain how they should consume it (CW, XXI, p. 409)