Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy was suggesting a free schooling system with diverse curricula and teaching methods, based on peasants’ immediate needs and the kind of education they wanted to give to their children. He would never agree that academics, educators, government bureaucrats or elected representatives had a right to decide how or what to teach to peasants. His opponents believed in a standardized national educational system that Russia was still lacking. They wanted to prepare pupils for the new life that their parents could not possibly envisage. Tolstoy aspired to give them the necessary tools to improve their traditional way of life without changing it.

Once again, Tolstoy was engaged in an uphill struggle and continued fighting against the odds. In 1874–5 he completely rewrote his book and produced the New ABC, which was finally granted approval for use in schools. Sales soared. In Tolstoy’s lifetime the New ABC and Russian Books for Reading went through 28 editions, selling 2 million copies. They were not accepted as manuals and textbooks, but were considered an essential part of early reading. At the very least, this was a good starting point for the continuation of the crusade, but by the mid-1870s Tolstoy’s interests were already far from the classroom.

During his personal crisis in the late 1850s and early ’60s Tolstoy had stopped publishing, but continued writing and searching for a new path forward. Now he did the same thing. For a while he contemplated turning from prose to drama. In February 1870 he wrote to Fet that ‘all this winter’ he had been ‘occupied solely with drama’ and that ‘characters in a tragedy and comedy begin to act’ (Ls, I, p. 225). He had already authored two rather mediocre comedies directed against nihilism and the emancipation of women. Many years later he would return to writing for the stage with considerable success. This time, however, his dramatic designs remained unrealized. Unlike many nineteenth-century realists, in his novels Tolstoy did not withdraw from the text in order to create an illusion of objectivity. Instead he pushed himself to the front, ceaselessly commenting, moralizing and guiding the reader. A play form did not allow for such authorial projections. Compelled to hide himself behind his characters, he lost confidence.

One of his plans concerned the period of Peter the Great and his Westernizing reforms that engendered a Europeanized elite in a profoundly non-European country. In War and Peace Tolstoy had looked for the ways to remedy this rupture; now he wanted to go back to its roots. Having established a subject, Tolstoy decided to shift the form from drama to historical novel, a genre much more comfortable to him.

Historians always emphasized the personal role of the tsar in the Westernization of Russia, but this approach contradicted Tolstoy’s philosophy of history. For the start of the novel, he chose the confrontation between the young tsar and his sister Sophia, then acting as a regent. Peter escaped from Moscow to the Troitsky (Trinity) monastery, leaving his sister in the Kremlin and thus allowing people to switch loyalties, moving from one camp to another. Tolstoy compared this precarious moment to a tilt in the scales: when someone starts pouring grain on one side, the opposite side with the weight stays, at first, solidly in place, but an extra handful suddenly lifts it in the air, where it hangs in the balance and any light touch may tip it either way.

Tolstoy’s research for the new novel was even more intensive and profound than when he had written about 1812. He studied chronicles, copied out words and expressions from historical dictionaries, read books about everyday life in the period. In spite of all this he struggled to empathize with his characters – they were too remote. He could not achieve the desired effect of immediate presence, when the actions and words of the protagonists give the impression of having been recorded from reality rather than invented. His wife was right when she wrote to her sister that ‘all the characters of the time of Peter the Great are ready, dressed and put in their places, but do not breathe’ (CW, XVII, p. 632). She expressed the hope that they might yet come to life.

This was, of course, far from impossible. Tolstoy knew how to rework his drafts and cope with narrative problems. He believed that ‘the whole knot of Russian life resides’ in the Petrine period and wanted to unravel it. But the deeper Tolstoy delved into the end of the seventeenth century, the more clearly he saw that he would be unable to proceed. In December 1872 he wrote to Strakhov that ‘he has surrounded himself with books about Peter I and his time, made efforts to write, but could not’ (CW, XVII, pp. 629–30). Suddenly he found himself writing a novel in which the action was proceeding in the immediate present.