1874
During the whole of 1874 Tolstoy made strenuous efforts to get his system of education more generally adopted. On 15th January, overcoming his dislike of speaking in public, he addressed the Moscow Society of Literacy on the subject of the best way to teach children to read. The details of his argument need not here detain us, as it will fall to the lot of few of my readers to teach Russian children to read Russian; but briefly, the German Lautiermethode had been adopted by Russian pedagogues in a way that Tolstoy considered arbitrary and pedantic, and his appeal, which in the main has not carried conviction to the educationalists, was against that method.
The large hall in which the meeting took place was crowded. The President of the Society, Mr. Shatílof, invited Tolstoy to open the debate, but Tolstoy preferred to reply to what questions and remarks the other speakers might put. In the course of the animated proceedings, in which several men well known in the Russian educational world took part, the discussion widened out till it covered the question of the whole direction of elementary education; and Tolstoy, from the standpoint of his belief that it is harmful to force upon the people a culture they do not demand and are not prepared for—and much of which, though considered by us to be science, may yet turn out to be no better than the alchemy and astrology of the Middle Ages—denounced the education forced upon the children in elementary schools, and declared that this should be confined in the first place to teaching the Russian language and arithmetic, leaving natural science and history alone. To prove the advantage of his way of teaching reading, Tolstoy offered to give a practical demonstration in one of the schools attached to some of the Moscow mills. Accordingly it was arranged that this should take place the next day and the day after, at the mills owned by Mr. Ganéshin, on the Devítche Pólye just outside Moscow. On the morrow Tolstoy was unwell, and did not appear; but he gave his demonstration on the evening of the following day, with the result that, on the suggestion of Mr. Shatílof, the Society of Literacy decided to start two temporary schools for the express purpose of testing the rival methods during a period of seven weeks. The one school was taught by Mr. M. E. Protopópof, an expert in the Lautiermethode, while in the other school Tolstoy's method was taught by Mr. P. V. Morózof. After seven weeks the children were examined by a Committee, which had to report to the Society at a meeting held on 13th April. The members of the Committee however could not agree, and handed in separate and contradictory reports. At the meeting of the Society there was again a great divergence of opinion; and Tolstoy, who considered that the test had not been made under proper conditions (most of the pupils being too young, and the continual presence of visitors preventing the teacher from holding the children's attention), but that nevertheless his method had shown its superiority, decided to appeal to a wider public, and did so in the form of a letter addressed to Mr. Shatílof.
A full account of what happened from the time the dispute passed into the press, has been given by that powerful and popular critic and essayest, N. K. Mihaylóvsky, who was at this time a colleague of Nekrásof. In 1866 the Contemporary had been prohibited, as a punishment for its too Liberal tendencies. In 1868 Nekrásof and Saltykóf (Stchedrín) had taken over the management of the Fatherland Journal. Tolstoy, who had long dropped out of touch with Nekrásof, now addressed to him a request that the Fatherland Journal should take a hand in his fight with the pedagogic specialists, and should interest a wider public in his educational reforms. As an inducement, he held out a prospect (never fulfilled) that he would contribute some of his works of fiction to their magazine. The outcome of his correspondence with Nekrásof was, that though the whole question of elementary education was somewhat foreign to a literary magazine such as the Fatherland Journal, a long article by Tolstoy (his letter to Shatílof) appeared in the September number, under the title of On the Education of the People.
Tolstoy's educational articles in 1862, when he issued them in his own magazine, had fallen quite flat and attracted no attention, but this article, by the author of War and Peace, in a leading Petersburg magazine, though expressing very similar views, received very much attention, and was criticised, favourably or adversely, in a large number of other publications. Though his views were only adopted to a small extent, yet the severe shock which he administered to the professional pedagogues who looked on school-children as 'a flock existing for the sake of its shepherds,' had a most healthy influence, and that it did not pass without some immediate practical effect is indicated by the rejection from the Moscow Teachers' Seminary of one of the text-books Tolstoy attacked most fiercely.
Following on the storm raised in the press by Tolstoy's article, Mihaylóvsky, in the Fatherland Journal for January 1875, published a long article entitled An Outsider's Notes, in which he took Tolstoy's part against the pedagogues, and said: 'Though I am one of the profane in philosophy and pedagogics, and am writing simply a feuilleton, I nevertheless advise my readers to peruse this feuilleton with great attention, not for my sake, but for Tolstoy's, and for the sake of those fine shades of thought on which I do but comment.'
Before this, however, Tolstoy had made another attempt to improve the state of elementary education, by promoting the establishment of that 'University in bark shoes' to which I have already alluded.
He had found some of the boys in the Yásno-Polyána school anxious to continue their studies after finishing the school course; and an experiment in teaching these lads algebra had been highly successful.
In his last article on Education, Tolstoy had pointed out that a great obstacle to the spread of efficient elementary instruction lay in the fact that the peasants could not afford the salaries (extremely modest as these sound to Western ears) demanded by Russian teachers of the non-peasant classes. It was therefore quite natural that he should now devise a scheme for preparing teachers from among the peasants themselves; and he drew up a project for a training college to be established at Yásnaya, under his own direction and control.
In the summer of this year Tolstoy paid a brief visit to his Samára estate to look after its management; and he took his son Sergius with him.
On 20th November 1874 the Countess wrote to her brother:
Our usual serious winter work is now in full swing. Leo is quite taken up with popular education, schools, and colleges for teachers, where teachers for the peasants' schools are to be trained. All this keeps him busy from morning till night. I have my doubts about all this. I am sorry his strength should be spent on these things instead of on writing a novel; and I don't know in how far it will be of use, since all this activity will extend only to one small corner of Russia.
P. F. Samárin, the Marshal of the Nobility of Toúla Government, backed Tolstoy cordially, and pointed out that the Zémstvo (County Council) had a sum of Rs. 30,000 available for educational purposes, and that this might be devoted to starting a teachers' Training College. To attain this end Tolstoy, who heretofore had always refused to stand for election, consented to enter the Zémstvo, and after being returned to that body, was unanimously chosen to serve on its Education Committee.
He presented a report in the sense indicated above, which was at first favourably discussed; but unfortunately one of the oldest members rose, and alluding to the fact that a collection was being made all over Russia for a monument to Catherine the Great, and that it was the centenary of the decree by which she had created the Government of Toúla, proposed that the money should be devoted to the monument of their Benefactress. This loyal sentiment met with approval, and though Tolstoy did not at once abandon his plan, the means to carry it out were never forthcoming, and we do not hear much more of it.
If one did not know how stupidly reactionary the governing classes of Russia were at this period, it would seem extraordinary that the central and the local authorities alike should have so constantly balked and hindered Tolstoy's disinterested projects: forbidding the publication of his newspaper for soldiers, mutilating his stories, sending gendarmes to search his schools, looking askance at his school magazine, and defeating his project for a Training College. Can it be wondered at, that he came more and more to identify Government with all that is most opposed to enlightenment? We know that similar causes were, at that very time, driving men and women of a younger generation to undertake dangerous propaganda work, in more or less definite opposition to the existing order of society, among factory workmen and country peasants.
His devotion to educational matters did not entirely supersede, though no doubt it delayed, his activity as a novelist. In the spring of 1874 he had taken the commencement of Anna Karénina to Moscow, but for some reason none of it appeared that year.
Tourgénef, in collaboration with Madame Viardot, was at this time translating some of Tolstoy's best stories into French. Writing to Fet in March 1874, he says:
The season is now almost over, but all the same I will try to place his [Tolstoy's] Three Deaths in the Revue des Deux Mondes or in the Temps, and in autumn I will without fail get out The Cossacks. The more often I read that story, the more convinced I am that it is the chef d'œuvre of Tolstoy and of all Russian narrative literature.
Meanwhile life and death pursued their course. In April a son was born and christened Nicholas; and before long, death, having a few months previously taken the youngest, returned to claim the oldest members of the household. The first of them to go was his dearly-loved Aunty Tatiána Alexándrovna, to whose good influence through life he owed so much. She died on 20th June, and next year his other aunt followed her.
Tolstoy never refers to his aunt Tatiána without letting us see how he cherishes her memory. Here for instance are one or two of his notes relating to her:
When already beginning to grow feeble, having waited her opportunity, one day when I was in her room she said to us, turning away (I saw that she was ready to cry), 'Look here, mes chers amis, my room is a good one and you will want it. If I die in it,' and her voice trembled, 'the recollection will be unpleasant to you; so move me somewhere else, that I may not die here.' Such she always was, from my earliest childhood, before I was able to understand her goodness.
Again referring to her death, and to the love for his father which had played so large a part in her life, he adds:
She died peacefully, gradually falling asleep; and died as she desired, not in the room that had been hers, lest it should be spoilt for us.
She died recognising hardly any one. But me she always recognised, smiling and brightening up as an electric lamp does when one touches the knob, and sometimes she moved her lips trying to pronounce the name Nicholas: thus in death completely and inseparably uniting me with him she had loved all her life.
The opinion the peasants had of her, was shown by the fact that when her coffin was carried through the village, there was not one hut out of the sixty in Yásnaya Polyána, from which the people did not come out asking to have the procession stopped and a requiem sung for her soul. 'She was a kind lady and did nobody any harm,' said they. Tolstoy adds:
On that account they loved her, and loved her very much. Lao-Tsze says things are valuable for what is not in them. So it is with a life. It is most valuable if there is nothing bad in it; and in the life of Tatiána Alexándrovna there was nothing bad.
Except in the case of his brother Nicholas, Tolstoy has usually not been greatly upset even by the deaths of those near and dear to him. The following letter to Fet shows how he took Tatiána's death:
24 June 1874.
Two days ago we buried Aunt Tatiána Alexándrovna. She died slowly and gradually, and I had grown accustomed to the process; yet her death was, as the death of a near and dear one always is, a quite new, isolated and unexpectedly-stirring event. The others are well, and our house is full. The delightful heat, the bathing and the fruit have brought me to the state of mental laziness I love, with only enough mental life remaining to enable me to remember my friends and think of them.
The next letter, dated the 22nd October, tells its own tale:
Dear Afanásy Afanásyevitch,—I have planned to buy, and must buy, some land at Nikólsky, and for that purpose must borrow Rs. 10,000 for one year on mortgage. It may be that you have money you want to place. If so, write to Iván Ivánovitch Orlóf, Nikólsky village, and he will arrange the affair with you independently of our relations to one another.... How gladly would I come to see you, were I not so overwhelmed with the school, family and estate business, that I have not even time to go out shooting.... I hope to be free when winter comes.