Tolstoy (34 page)

The 'woman question' was a hot topic in Russia at this time, as it was all over Europe, so much so that two Russian translations of John Stuart Mill's seminal essay
The Subjection of Women
were published within months of its original publication in England in 1869, and Strakhov's article followed a few months later, in February 1870. John Stuart Mill, famous for being the first British member of parliament to call for women's suffrage and for his advocacy of women's rights, had plenty of followers in Russia, but as conservatives, Strakhov and Tolstoy were not amongst them. Strakhov, a quiet, scholarly, lifelong bachelor, had celebrated
War and Peace
for being a family chronicle, and he argued in his article that a woman's place was within the family. Tolstoy wholeheartedly agreed, and took issue only over Strakhov's negative view of prostitutes, arguing that they had an important role to play in preserving the institution of the family. 'Imagine London without its 80,000 magdalenes—what would happen to families?' he wrote.
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Sonya was only twenty-seven when Masha was born, so must have been filled with dread at the thought of complying with her husband's wishes: the intransigence of his views would lead to her having eight more children, only three of whom survived to adulthood. Quite apart from the health risks, each new pregnancy bound her more tightly to Yasnaya Polyana, and meant she had to postpone yet again her hopes of having a life outside the nursery. 'With every child you have to give up a life for yourself even more, and resign yourself to the burden of cares, worries, illnesses and years,' she noted in her diary in June 1870.
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Sonya was a devoted mother, and she loved living at Yasnaya Polyana, but she was a young woman who had grown up in a city, and after a while she began to long for a change of scene, some company, and the chance to go to the occasional soirée. She found the solitude depressing.
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The custom for Russian families from their milieu was to spend the winter in the city, and retreat to the country estate or a dacha during the summer months, but the Tolstoys lived the country life all year round. At the beginning of their marriage Tolstoy had dreamed of having a pied-à-terre in Moscow—a flat on Sivtsev-Vrazhek, a quiet back-street in the heart of the city favoured by the well-to-do, where his cousin Fyodor Ivanovich 'the American' had lived. He confided in Sonya's father that he imagined transferring their Yasnaya Polyana life to Moscow for three or four months each winter, complete 'with the same Alexey, the same nanny, the same samovar', in order to be able to enjoy stimulating conversation with new people, visit libraries and go to the theatre.
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That plan was stymied by lack of funds, however, and by the time the income from
War and Peace
had made Tolstoy an affluent man, he no longer had the inclination. He became more reclusive as he got older, preferring to be at home for long stretches, when he could work undisturbed. City life soon chafed him, so he was always happy to leave, but he did have the freedom to come and go more or less as he pleased. He did not particularly appreciate hearing operas like Rossini's
Mosè in Egitto
and Gounod's
Faust,
but at least he had the opportunity to go to the theatre while he was writing
War and Peace.
Opera was Sonya's great passion—what would she have given to be able to dress up occasionally for a night at the Bolshoi Theatre!
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She went to Moscow a handful of times during these years, but for the most part she was at home in the countryside: the highlight of the year for her was the summer, when her sister Tanya and other relatives came to stay. 'If all my intellectual and emotional capacities were awakened, and most of all my desires, I would be crying until kingdom come,' she wrote to Tanya in November 1871, and a few months later she wrote to her again about the 'lonely, monastic' life at Yasnaya Polyana.
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Tolstoy also had the freedom to undertake trips elsewhere. Apart from his nightmare experience in Arzamas, he had enjoyed lifting his gaze to the tops of the tall pine trees as he travelled through the dense forests of the Penza region in the autumn of 1869. After crossing the Sura river, teeming with sterlet, he also relished the region's distinctive pebbled black earth. Like the local population, it reminded him of the mighty ploughman of Russian folklore Mikula Selyaninovich, the traditional peasant symbol of Russian strength and the hero of the medieval epics he had been reading.
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In the summer of 1871 Tolstoy went further afield and lived like a Bashkirian nomad again out on the steppe east of Samara. The plan was that Sonya would go too the following year, but by autumn she discovered that she was pregnant again. Writing despondently to tell her sister Tanya about it that October, she spoke about the mud and the monotony, and how having a sixth child would mean having to stay put the following summer: 'it will be impossible to go to Samara, it will be impossible to come and visit you, we'll have to take on another nanny, and so on and so forth'.
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By copying out
War and Peace,
Sonya felt she was involved, and was contributing to her husband's creative work, albeit in a very minor way, so it is understandable that she was keen for him to start writing a new book. But a 700-page ABC book was not exactly what she had in mind.

Tolstoy literally went back to basics for his next book. From sophisticated fiction about Russian aristocrats and lofty philosophising about history, he turned to helping children learn to read: the first of the four volumes of his
ABC
begin with the thirty-five letters of the Cyrillic alphabet in large type. He was never short of new ideas for novels, but what was the point of executing them when the vast majority of the population could not even read? He had been carried along by momentum when he was writing
War and Peace,
but after finishing it he was drawn ineluctably back to the path he had been treading before he had got married. Educating the people once again loomed into Tolstoy's field of vision, and he regarded the
ABC
he published in 1872 as the culmination of thirteen years of working towards this goal.

If Tolstoy's thoughts turned back to questions of teaching and learning in the early 1870s, it was because he certainly still cared deeply about the cause of popular education, but he was also thinking closer to home: his own children. The Tolstoys' eldest son Sergey was seven when Masha was born in 1871, Tanya was six, Ilya was nearly five and Lev approaching two. Tolstoy may have not been very interested in his children when they were babies, and for much of the 1860s he was preoccupied with
War and Peace,
but he naturally had very strong ideas about how he wanted his children to be educated, and as soon as they got to school age, he wanted to be involved. He was adamant that his children were to be home-educated, as he had been, and that both he and his wife would give instruction. This was when he discovered the inadequacies of the textbooks available at the time. Tolstoy believed that texts for children learning to read should be comprehensible, varied and interesting, but too many books, he found, were either insufferably dull or too far removed from life. Naturally, he resolved to write a much better textbook himself, and because he was Tolstoy, the most Russian of all Russians, it became an enormous, ambitious project involving the entire family, aimed not just at the junior Tolstoys but at all Russian children learning to read.

Tolstoy put a great deal of thought into the compilation of his
ABC (Azbuka)
and reading primer. He first planned on publishing these separately, but then combined them into one volume, sub-divided into four books of progressive difficulty. Half of each book was given over to stories, fables and scientific explanations. The other half was split between extracts from the Scriptures, the lives of saints and Russian chronicles (in Church Slavonic and in modern Russian) and the rudiments of mathematics, followed by instructions to teachers. He had first jotted down the idea for a 'First Book for Reading and an ABC for Families and Schools with Instructions to the Teacher by Count L. N. Tolstoy' as a diary entry in September 1868, at the time of Eugene Schuyler's visit.
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While they had been rearranging Tolstoy's library, Schuyler had noticed the top shelf began with the German writer Berthold Auerbach, which had led to a discussion of the latter's weighty novel
A New Life.
Tolstoy took it down from the shelf and told Schuyler to go away and read it, explaining that this was the book which had prompted him to start his Yasnaya Polyana school. When Schuyler happened to meet Auerbach while travelling in Germany after his visit to Yasnaya Polyana, he mentioned this conversation to him, and Auerbach recalled Tolstoy well, saying: 'Yes, I always remember how frightened I was when this strange-looking man announced he was Eugen Baumann, as I feared he was going to threaten me with an action for libel and defamation of character.'
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Tolstoy's conversations with Schuyler in 1868 had resuscitated his interest in popular education, and when he came to start the practical work of compiling his
ABC
in the autumn of 1871, he consulted a wide variety of textbooks and theoretical works by foreign educationalists such as Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, as well as several American primers that Schuyler had procured for him.

As it turned out, the years immediately following
War and Peace
were a fallow period only in a manner of speaking, as before Tolstoy got to work on his
ABC,
he reminded himself of the learning process by taking up ancient Greek. This was partly so he could teach his son Sergey, to whom he wanted to give a classical education,
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but also so he could produce his own translations of Aesop's fables for his ABC.
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Since the Cyrillic alphabet is based on the Greek one, many letters are familiar, which gives Russians a head-start, but the idiosyncrasies of Greek grammar are not for the faint-hearted. Tolstoy was not a typical pupil, however. At the beginning of December 1870 he invited a seminarist from Tula to come up to Yasnaya Polyana and give him some lessons, and by the end of the month he was already spending whole days reading Greek literature in the original. He began with
The Anabasis,
Xenophon's account of the campaign led by Cyrus and his army of 10,000 Greek mercenaries against the Persian ruler Artaxerxes II in the fifth century BC. Tolstoy found it thrilling to be able to read and understand on his own, and Greek became his latest obsession. 'I'm completely living in Athens,' he wrote to his friend Fet. 'I speak in Greek in my dreams.'
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No sooner had Sonya recovered from puerperal fever in March 1871 than he graduated to Plato and Homer, producing his own translations of parts of
The Iliad,
which he compared to the best-known Russian version completed by Nikolay Gnedich in 1829. A few months later, en route for the steppe that summer, he was reading unprepared texts
a livre ouvert
with Pavel Leontiev, professor of classical philology at Moscow University, whom he even showed up on a few occasions.
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While he was living on a diet of fermented mare's milk out on the steppe in a Bashkirian felt tent, the news that Count Tolstoy had learned Greek in three months became the talk of the town in Moscow.
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Tolstoy was by now reading Herodotus, who had described the Scythians amongst whom he was living, he reported, 'in detail and with great precision'.
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There was indeed a similarity between the lifestyle of the Bashkirs and the nomadic Scythians, who also lived on mare's milk. As with the beekeeping, Tolstoy's new passion for Greek was for a time all-engulfing, so much so that Sonya and his close friends feared for his mental health (Sergey Urusov wanted him to read the lives of Saints instead).
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'Clearly, nothing in the world interests and enraptures him as much as each new Greek word or phrase he learns,' Sonya noted in her diary.
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But Tolstoy's overactive, mercurial mind was soon on the rampage again. Reading the classics of ancient Greek literature ignited an interest in the 'classics' of Russian literature, which in turn made him dream about writing something on the life of ancient Rus.
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Obviously there was nothing in the Russian 'classics' comparable to the epic poems of
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey,
not least because there was no literature in Russia at all before the year 988, when the Christianisation of Russia brought the need for a written language to help spread the Word of God. The huge upsurge of interest in the pre-Petrine past which began in the 1860s as an offshoot of the Great Reforms nevertheless resulted in Russians discovering and valuing their old literature for the first time. The excitement was contagious, and Tolstoy was able to benefit from the proliferation of new editions, collections and studies which now appeared—the Yasnaya Polyana library began to swell.
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His study of medieval Russian literature was personally rewarding, but it was also a necessary preparation for his
ABC,
since he had decided at the outset to include in his primer a substantial section of religious and historical texts in old Slavonic (the medieval literary language of the Orthodox Church), with parallel translations in modern Russian.