Tolstoy

Finally, Tolstoy also wanted to nurture in young children an appreciation for truth, honesty, and the value of hard work, but not in a dry didactic way, like all the foreign textbooks and primers he had pored over and made notes on. He was certainly not impressed by the English books he consulted, including Thomas Ewing’s Principles of Elocution, which was a ‘model of pointlessness’ in demonstrating ‘how to be silent’, and Abbott’s Second Reader, which was far too abstract.⁶³ Like the available Russian books, everything seemed to be cut off from real life. It was the stories and fables which naturally lay at the heart of Tolstoy’s ABC. After an enormous amount of reading, as well as months of fastidious work in condensing and simplifying, Tolstoy eventually produced simplified versions of over 600 stories, which he whittled down to 372 for publication. He favoured Aesop over all other authors, including such well-known fables as the ‘The Frog and the Lion’:

A lion heard a frog croaking loudly and turned towards the sound, thinking that this must be the sound of some huge beast. After a while, the lion saw the frog come up out of the swamp. He went over to the frog and as he crushed him underfoot, the lion said, ‘No one should be worried about a sound before the thing itself has been examined.’ This fable is for a man with a big mouth who talks and talks without accomplishing anything.⁶⁴

Tolstoy produced his own free translations, subtly changing their meaning, which he then, as a consummate artist, revised endlessly. After he had produced the first draft of his translation of this particular fable, for example, Tolstoy worked on it again, before producing another version, which was then reworked a third and a fourth time.⁶⁵ Changes even went into the proofs before Tolstoy was happy:

A lion heard a frog croaking loudly, and thought it must be a large animal to be shouting that loudly. He went closer and saw the frog coming out of the swamp. The lion crushed it with his paw and said: ‘It’s tiny – and to think I was scared.’⁶⁶

While Aesop took pride of place, Tolstoy ranged very widely in terms of authors, including not only more recent writers such as La Fontaine and Grimm, but some really up-to-date ones such as Sofya Tolstaya (‘Some Girls Came to See Masha’) and Vasily Rumyantsev, a former pupil of the Yasnaya Polyana school (‘How a Boy Told About Getting Caught by a Storm When He Was in the Forest’). Tolstoy also fashioned miniature tales from Russian folk anecdotes, and contributed real-life stories about the adventures of his dogs Milton and Bulka in the Caucasus, as well as stories about the lives of birds and animals in the Russian countryside (‘Sparrows’, ‘How Wolves Teach Their Cubs’). Not all the stories and vignettes are set in a world reassuringly familiar to Russian children. Tolstoy carefully juxtaposed stories like ‘The Girl and the Mushrooms’ with pieces about Eskimos, elephants and silk-worms. He wanted to inculcate Russian children with a respect for foreign cultures along with a love of their native land, so he treated his young readers to excerpts from Herodotus and Plutarch, and exotic stories from countries as far-flung as India, America, France and Turkey. Tolstoy also contributed fiction he had written himself, beginning with very simple tales such as ‘The Muzhik and the Cucumbers’:

One day a muzhik went over to a vegetable patch to steal cucumbers. He got to the cucumbers and thought: ‘Suppose I carry off a bag of cucumbers and sell them; I can buy a hen with that money. The hen will give me eggs, and when she is broody she will produce lots of chicks. I’ll feed the chicks, sell them, and buy a piglet who will grow into a pig; and my pig will bring me lots of piglets. I’ll sell the piglets and buy a mare; the mare will have foals. I’ll feed the foals and sell them; then I’ll buy a house and have a vegetable patch. I’ll have a vegetable patch and plant cucumbers, and I won’t let them be stolen because I will keep a strict watch on them. I’ll hire watchmen, station them by the cucumbers and I will go along myself and shout: “Hey, keep stricter watch!”’ And he shouted that out at the top of his voice. The watchmen heard, jumped out and thrashed the muzhik.⁶⁷

For his more advanced young readers, Tolstoy wrote two of his finest works of fiction, ‘God Sees the Truth But Waits’ and ‘Captive of the Caucasus’, whose power lies precisely in their carefully wrought simplicity. From the beginning, Tolstoy had intended the artistic level of his ABC to be in no way inferior to that of War and Peace, and both stories exemplified in fact the devices and the language he declared he would now employ in his adult fiction, as he explained in a letter to Nikolay Strakhov.⁶⁸