CHIEF AUTHORITIES FOR CHAPTER VIII
Tolstoy's Educational articles, and N. V. Ouspensky, Iz Proshlago.
CHAPTER IX
MARRIAGE
The Behrs visit Yásnaya. Proposal by thought-reading. The Diary. Marriage. Ministers on magazine. The school closed and the magazine stopped. Family happiness. Health. Fet's visit. Sergius born. Children. The Cossacks and Polikoúshka. Bees. Plays. Confession. Saving the hay. Decembrists. Samára. Preparations for War and Peace. Collected edition. Translations. Dislocates arm. Tatiána born. Fears of famine. Sergius (brother) and Tánya Behrs. Nikólsky. Visits Borodinó. Tolstoy at home and with the children. Relations with servants. Masquerade. Moscow. Drawing school. Sculpture. Ilyá born. Pleads at court-martial. Dr. Zahárin. Smoke. Fet's Literary Evening. War and Peace. Schopenhauer. Pénza. Death of V. P. Bótkin. The Countess and the children's education. English nurse. Tolstoy's habits. Visitors. Fet. Tolstoy's ardour. Property. Untidiness. Respect for sleep. Newspapers. Characteristics. Studies the drama.
To one who admires Tolstoy's educational work, it is somewhat disconcerting to see how scornfully he spoke of it sixteen years later in his Confession. But that is always his way: the old is useless and worthless and bad; only the new, the unachieved, the fresh ideal, is admirable. For it, he decries all that the past has produced—including himself and his former work. He makes his points broadly and powerfully, but to understand, we must discriminate, and allow for an artistic temperament tempting him to exaggerate. Let him however speak for himself, that the reader may judge:
On returning from abroad I settled in the country, and happened to occupy myself with peasant schools. This work was particularly to my taste, because in it I had not to face the falsity which had become obvious to me and stared me in the face when I tried to teach people by literary means. Here, also, I acted in the name of Progress, but I already regarded Progress itself critically. I said to myself: 'In some of its developments Progress has proceeded wrongly; and with primitive peasant children one must deal in a spirit of perfect freedom, letting them choose what path of Progress they please.' In reality I was ever revolving round one and the same insoluble problem, which was: How to teach without knowing what? In the higher spheres of literary activity I had realised that one could not teach without knowing what; for I saw that people all taught differently, and by quarrelling among themselves succeeded only in hiding their ignorance from one another. But here, with peasant children, I thought to evade this difficulty by letting them learn what they liked. It amuses me now, when I remember how I shuffled in trying to fulfil my desire to teach, while in the depth of my soul I knew very well that I could not teach anything needful, for I did not know what was needful.
After spending a year at school work, I went abroad a second time, to discover how to teach others while myself knowing nothing.
And it seemed to me that I had learnt this abroad, and in the year of the peasants' Emancipation I returned to Russia armed with all this wisdom; and having become an Arbiter, I began to teach both the uneducated peasants in schools, and the educated classes through a magazine I published. Things appeared to be going well, but I felt I was not quite sound mentally, and that matters could not long continue in that way. And I should perhaps then have come to the state of despair at which I arrived fifteen years later, had there not been one side of life still unexplored by me, and which promised me happiness: that was marriage.
For a year I busied myself with Arbitration work, the schools, and the magazine; and I became so worn-out—as a result especially of my mental confusion—and so hard was my struggle as Arbiter, so obscure the results of my activity in the schools, so repulsive my shuffling in the magazine (which always amounted to one and the same thing: a desire to teach everybody, and to hide the fact that I did not know what to teach) that I fell ill, mentally rather than physically, and threw up everything, and went away to the Bashkírs in the steppes, to breathe fresh air, drink koumýs, and live an animal life.