Tolstoy

To begin with, Tolstoy’s plans for revision were minor, but typically for him, he ended up producing an almost completely new book. Something similar had happened with War and Peace, which he revised in 1873 for a new, third edition. His new frame of mind led him to turn six volumes into four, translate all the French text in the novel into Russian and place all his historical digressions into a separate epilogue. Strakhov was also instrumental in this project. For his New ABC, as it was now called, Tolstoy actually heeded his critics by providing an introduction and reducing the cost.⁸⁹ He wrote more than 100 new miniature stories, but by separating the ‘ABC’ section from the reading primer, he reduced the overall size of the book to ninety-two pages. It went on sale for a much more reasonable fourteen kopecks.⁹⁰ The New ABC proved to be as successful as the first edition had been a failure. It was published in February 1875, was swiftly recommended by the Ministry of Education, and became a best-seller, running into twenty-eight editions during Tolstoy’s lifetime, with print runs of up to 100,000. Over a million copies had been sold by the time of his death. No other textbook was more widely read in pre-revolutionary Russia.⁹¹ The poet Anna Akhmatova was just one of scores of Russians who benefited from Tolstoy’s child-centred approach in learning their alphabet. The new primer, now entitled Russian Books for Reading, was based on the texts used in the first edition and was published later in October 1875. Since most of the first book from the 1872 edition had gone into the New ABC, Tolstoy produced twelve new stories and fables for the first of the four parts.⁹² They proved equally popular with Russian children.

Tolstoy had conclusively proved that he wanted to improve the deplorable literacy levels in Russia, and that he cared deeply about Russian boys and girls of all classes discovering the joys of their native language when they learned to read. But what about his own children? What kind of a teacher was he to them? What was it like being used as a guinea-pig for his educational ideas? What was it like, indeed, growing up with a famous writer for a father? In October 1872 Tolstoy responded to Alexandrine’s request that he for once tell her something about his children – for the most part, his letters to her, as to everyone else, concerned his current projects and intellectual preoccupations. It was indeed rare for Tolstoy to talk much about his family in his letters, and the thumbnail sketches he provides of his six children are thus often quoted.

Tolstoy described fair-haired Sergey, his eldest, as being bright, with a natural ability for mathematics and art. He was a good pupil, he told Alexandrine, and proficient in gymnastics, but rather gauche and absentminded. Tolstoy was flattered to think Sergey reminded some people of his brother Nikolay, who had been famous for his lack of ego. unlike Sergey, sensitive, pink-cheeked Ilya was always healthy, Tolstoy wrote, but he did not like studying much. Also unlike Sergey, he was a great original, and rather pugnacious, but at the same time he had a great capacity for tenderness, and had an infectious laugh. Tolstoy was confident that Sergey would excel in any environment, but he felt that Ilya would always need the strong leadership of someone he respected. Eight-year-old Tanya was very like her mother, Tolstoy wrote, and was already very maternal, liking nothing better than to take care of her younger siblings. Lev junior, then three and a half, he described as lithe, graceful and very capable, but for sickly little Masha, whom he described as ‘very clever and unattractive’, he foresaw a life of seeking and not finding. ‘Skin white as milk, blonde curly hair; strange, large blue eyes – strange because of their deep, serious expression’ – Tolstoy felt she would be a mystery to everyone. He openly confessed to Alexandrine that he found children in general hard to deal with until they were about three years old, but described Pyotr, the youngest, as a wonderful, bouncing six-month-old baby.⁹³