We worked from seven in the evening till eleven. They felt neither hunger nor weariness and were even angry with me when I stopped writing; and they set to work to do it themselves turn and turn about, but did not get on well and soon gave it up....
I left the lesson because I was too excited.
'What is the matter with you? Why are you so pale: are you ill?' asked my colleague. Indeed, only two or three times in my life have I experienced such strong emotion as during that evening....
Next day Tolstoy could hardly believe the experience of the night before. It seemed incredible that a peasant boy, hardly able to read, should suddenly display such marvellous command of artistic creative power.
It seemed to me strange and offensive that I, the author of Childhood, who had achieved a certain success and was recognised by the educated Russian public as possessing artistic talent, should in artistic matters not merely be unable to instruct or help eleven-year-old Syómka and Fédka, but should hardly be able, except at a happy moment of excitement, to keep up with them and understand them.
Next day we set to work to continue the story. When I asked Fédka if he had thought of a continuation, he only waved his hand and remarked: 'I know, I know!... Who will do the writing?'... We resumed the work, and again the boys showed the same enthusiasm, and the same sense of artistic truth and proportion.
Half-way through the lesson I had to leave them. They wrote two pages without me, as just in feeling and as true to life as the preceding ones. These two pages were rather poorer in detail, some of the details were not quite happily placed, and there were also a couple of repetitions. All this had evidently occurred because the actual writing was a difficulty for them. On the third day we had similar success.... There could no longer be any doubt or thought of its being a mere accident. We had obviously succeeded in finding a more natural and inspiring method than any we had previously tried.
This unfinished story was accidentally destroyed. Tolstoy was greatly annoyed, and Fédka and Syómka, though they did not understand his vexation, offered to stay the night at his house and reproduce it. After eight o'clock, when school was over, they came, and (to Tolstoy's great pleasure) locked themselves into his study, where at first they were heard laughing but then became very quiet. On listening at the door Tolstoy heard their subdued voices discussing the story, and heard also the scratching of a pen. At midnight he knocked and was admitted. Syómka was standing at the large table, writing busily; his lines running crookedly across the paper and his pen constantly seeking the inkstand. Fédka told Tolstoy to 'wait a bit,' and insisted on Syómka's adding something more, to his dictation. At last Tolstoy took the exercise-book; and the lads, after enjoying a merry supper of potatoes and kvás, divested themselves of their sheepskin coats and lay down to sleep under the writing table; their 'charming, healthy, childish, peasant laughter' still ringing through the room.
The story just mentioned, and other stories written by the children, were published in the magazine; and Tolstoy declares them to be, in their way, superior to anything else in Russian literature. It was largely on the model of these peasant children's stories that, years later, he wrote his own famous stories for the people.
The rules for encouraging composition which he deduces from his experience are these: