Tolstoy (26 page)

Tolstoy remained in Hyeres with Masha and the children until the end of the year, and then in early 1861 travelled on to Nice and Florence, where he was excited to meet the recently amnestied Decembrist Prince Sergey Volkonsky, who was his distant relative and now an old man. From Florence Tolstoy travelled to Livorno, and then to Naples and Rome, where he met the painter Nikolay Ge, with whom he would later become great friends.
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Tolstoy enjoyed seeing Italy, but his great passion at this time was still for pedagogy. In February he arrived in Paris, where he set off to visit French schools, armed with a letter of recommendation from the Russian Ministry of Education. He also accumulated large numbers of books on pedagogy which were duly shipped back to Yasnaya Polyana. Then on 1 March he travelled on to London for his first visit to England, where he suffered severe toothache and confirmed his prejudices against the English. There is sadly very little documentation about Tolstoy's only visit to England, but we do know that the well-connected lawyer and journalist Henry Reeve sponsored his honorary membership of the Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall from 5 March to 6 April 1861.
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The most important meeting for Tolstoy in London was with the socialist thinker Alexander Herzen, who had emigrated from Russia in 1847. In 1852 Herzen had settled in London, where he first founded the Free Russian Press and then in 1857 the important newspaper
The Bell,
which campaigned for reform in Russia. Tolstoy made the journey to Herzen's handsome detached residence, Orsett House (located on Westbourne Terrace, near Padding-ton), several times during the sixteen days he spent in England. On 7 March Herzen wrote to Turgenev to tell him he had already quarrelled with Tolstoy, who was in his opinion 'stubborn' and talked 'nonsense', but was nevertheless an 'ingenuous, good person'.
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On 11 March Tolstoy spent three hours at the Houses of Parliament, where he heard the prime minister, Lord Palmerston, give a speech on naval policy, which he found very boring. Of far greater interest to him was the reading given the following evening at St James's Hall, Piccadilly, by Charles Dickens, who was one of his favourite writers (as he was for many Russians). But his priority was to learn about British education. On 12 March, having been assisted by Matthew Arnold, an inspector of schools who had been appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1857, Tolstoy visited the Practising School at the College of St Mark in Chelsea, where he asked the boys in Class 3B to write an essay for him. He took their work back home to Russia.
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Arnold arranged for Tolstoy to visit primary schools in Bethnal Green, Brentford, Spitalfields, Hoxton, Westminster and Stratford, but Tolstoy did not keep a diary while he was in England, and it is not clear where exactly he went. We do know, however, that he enjoyed working in the library attached to the South Kensington Museum, which contained many interesting pedagogical materials. The future Victoria and Albert Museum had opened its doors two years earlier.

On 17 March (5 March in Russia), the day that Tolstoy left London, the Emancipation of Serfdom manifesto, which had been signed on 3 March (19 February), on the sixth anniversary of Alexander II's accession to the throne, was finally published.
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The manifesto had been written by Metropolitan Filaret in a deliberately grandiloquent language suitable to be read in every church and published in every newspaper and Tolstoy was indignant, realising the peasants would never understand it. He was also angered by its tone, which seemed to suggest the manifesto was granting a favour rather than rectifying a grave injustice.
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He was right to be angry. The peasants were no longer the property of landowners, but the terms by which they were freed left them no better off than before.

Tolstoy's next stop was Brussels, where he met the socialist politician Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,
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author of
The General Idea of Revolution in the Nineteenth Century
(1851), amongst other works, and the former Polish politician Joachim Lelewel, who had taken part in the 1830 Warsaw Uprising. He also visited Belgian schools and had his photograph taken. The last portrait, taken in St Petersburg, had shown a serious-looking mustachioed officer with short-cropped hair. For his European travels, Tolstoy had dressed to the nines in long frock-coat and top hat, but was now already sporting the beard that would become an intrinsic part of his identity. After Brussels came his last months of travelling - to Antwerp, Frankfurt, Eisenach and Weimar, where there were more schools to inspect. He was hankering to go home at this point, but he wanted to get as much done as he could while he was in Europe, not knowing when he would return. (Never, as it turned out.) There were further stays in Jena, Dresden and Weimar, where he met Gustav Keller, a young mathematics teacher, whom he invited to come and teach at the Yasnaya Polyana school.
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His final stop was Berlin, where he sought out the writer Berthold Auerbach, whose weighty (and now largely forgotten) novel
A New Life
(1851) had been highly influential on his decision to start his school for the Yasnaya Polyana peasant children in the first place. Tolstoy had clearly identified with its protagonist Eugen Baumann, an aristocrat who becomes a village schoolteacher. Without giving his name, Tolstoy simply marched up to Auerbach and announced 'Ich bin Eugen Baumann'.
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He was very excited to meet Auerbach, recording the event with fifteen exclamation marks in his diary.
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On 13 April Tolstoy finally arrived back in St Petersburg. Before returning home he arranged meetings with the Minister of Education in order to ask formal permission to found a pedagogical journal, which was granted (no one in the ministry had any idea at this point quite how subversive Tolstoy's educational ideas would turn out to be). By May he was back in Yasnaya Polyana and holding classes in the apple orchard, but was restless as usual. At the end of the month, he travelled over to Spasskoye-Lutovinovo to visit Turgenev, who had just finished
Fathers and Sons,
the novel which explores the clash between the radical new 'nihilists' of the 1860s and the old-world generation of the 1840s. Turgenev read it aloud, and Tolstoy found it so boring he fell asleep. Turgenev was mortally offended. A couple of days later an argument flared up between them over a trivial matter when they went to visit Fet at his newly acquired country property. Tolstoy this time felt so insulted that he challenged Turgenev to a duel. He sent for arms from his nearby Nikolskoye estate, which he had inherited from his brother Nikolay, and spent a sleepless night, but the duel was never fought. Neither, though, was the friendship ever fully repaired. There followed a flurry of recriminations, apologies and letters which either failed to arrive at the right place or were read too late, and the situation was exacerbated by rumours of copies of these letters circulating in Moscow. Tolstoy considered Turgenev a coward, despised his liberalism and could not forgive him his lack of passion.
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They agreed to cease all communication.

Turgenev was not the only person Tolstoy had testy conversations with that spring. Soon after returning home from abroad, he had learned that he had been appointed Justice of the Peace in his district by the liberal Tula governor.
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The government had decided that arbiters should be elected from amongst the nobility to oversee the implementation of the manifesto and mediate between landowners and peasants. It was not an easy job for any Russian noble, but it was particularly challenging for Tolstoy, who was already loathed by his conservative neighbours for having granted his peasants their freedom ahead of the manifesto. Within a month he had fallen out with all of them. Many of the nobility saw it as their God-given right to have slaves, and so viewed the Emancipation of Serfdom Act as a disaster. In their opinion, Alexander II had robbed them. What on earth was a peasant going to do with his 'personal freedom' they wondered. A free peasant in their view was like a stray dog - not worth giving a crust to, as it would eventually come to grief anyway. It never occurred to Russia's reactionary nobles that the peasants were human beings like themselves, and that they were just as responsible in creating the ignorance and misery which led the peasants to drink as the regime. The reactionary nobility looked to the Justices of the Peace to take care of their interests, and be on their side. Tolstoy, however, had the peasants' interests at heart, and he now viewed most of his fellow nobles as vile parasites.
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His neighbours had soon filed a barrage of complaints about him, which they sometimes did en masse, but this only made Tolstoy rub his hands with glee. He took relish in exposing the dishonesty and cruelty of the
krepostniki
- the defenders of serfdom - and was not deterred even when he received threatening and abusive letters or was summoned to fight duels.

Tolstoy had also not endeared himself to his neighbours by wanting to educate his peasants. It seemed preposterous to the krepostniks that a count, a retired officer, should become a teacher, while the very idea of a school for peasant children seemed outlandish to these hardened apologists of patriarchal Russia. The Yasnaya Polyana school was flourishing, but it was the only one in the whole district. With 9,000 peasants living in the area, however, Tolstoy wanted to do more. Using his position as Justice of the Peace, he had twenty-one schools up and running locally by the autumn of 1861. The schools were set up in peasant huts. There were no desks or chairs or blackboards, but the walls were usually so dirty that they served very well to write on with chalk. Some of the teachers were the usual priests and ex-soldiers, but Tolstoy also employed former university students who were in need of employment. Widespread demonstrations had erupted the previous October when the government introduced a series of ill-conceived university reforms, including obligatory attendance and fees which many students could not afford, and large numbers of them had been expelled. Each student teacher was paid fifty kopecks per pupil per month, so monthly salaries averaged about ten roubles. Teachers were also paid an honorarium for contributing to the
Yasnaya Polyana
journal.
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The first issue of
Yasnaya Polyana
was published in January 1862, and eleven more followed. Although some articles were written by teachers, the journal's editor Tolstoy was also its most prolific contributor. In the first issue he provided an account of the day-to-day life at the school in Yasnaya Polyana:

No one brings anything with him, neither books nor copybooks. No homework is set them. Not only do they carry nothing in their hands, they have nothing to carry even in their heads. They are not obliged to remember any lesson, nor any of yesterday's work. They are not tormented by the thought of the impending lesson. They bring only themselves, their receptive nature, and an assurance that it will be as jolly in school today as it was yesterday ... No one is ever scolded for being late ... They sit where they like: on the benches, tables, window-sills, floor or in the armchair ... By the timetable there should be four lessons before dinner, but sometimes in practice these become three or two, and may be on quite different subjects ... In my opinion this external disorder is useful and necessary, however strange and inconvenient it may seem to the teacher ... First this disorder, or free order, only frightens us because we were ourselves educated in and are accustomed to something quite different. Secondly, in this as in many similar cases, coercion is used only from hastiness or lack of respect for human nature...
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Tolstoy's child-centred approach, then, was based on there being a complete freedom to learn. In addition to accounts of the activities of his schools, Tolstoy contributed lengthy articles about his teaching methods to the
Yasnaya Polyana
journal, arguing that the much-vaunted European system was fundamentally flawed, and inapplicable to Russia, which had to find its own way.
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The journal issues were accompanied by supplements of reading matter for children. These contained stories written by the pupils at Tolstoy's schools, or written down by their teachers, and brief articles written in a clear, simplified language on historical topics. Tolstoy invested an enormous amount of effort in his schools, and he loved all his peasant pupils. The feeling was mutual, and was helped by the fact that he had begun to dress like a peasant, and never stood on ceremony. He was a marvellous storyteller, of course, but he also threw himself into other extra-mural activities, such as snowball fights and tobogganing in the winter. For Shrovetide in 1862 Tolstoy invited 100 pupils from different villages to Yasnaya Polyana for
bliny.
At Easter the children received gifts of pencils, mouth-organs and pieces of calico which could be used by their mothers to make shirts for them.
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While the Ministry of Education approved of Tolstoy's pedagogical activities, the Ministry of Internal Affairs took a very different view. Along with Tolstoy's adversaries amongst the landowners in his district, the Ministry of Internal Affairs perceived Tolstoy's schools as hotbeds of anarchy and revolution. The arrival of radical students was the last straw, and a secret police file was opened on Tolstoy in January 1862. It detailed Tolstoy's contacts abroad with dangerous figures like Herzen and Lelewel, his employment of politically active students and the trouble that had been caused by his actions as a Justice of the Peace. Tolstoy's landowner neighbours were delighted to supply the police with regular denunciations, including the spurious charge that Tolstoy had set up an underground printing press. A fat file of evidence against Tolstoy started to build up.