'Indeed? Well, about that, I neither know nor can know anything.'
1872
Immediately after New Year he re-started his school; and the children (who often numbered thirty to thirty-five) met, not as formerly in another building, but in the hall of the Tolstoys' enlarged house. In the mornings the Countess taught her own children, and in the afternoon she, her husband, and even seven-year-old Tánya and eight-year-old Sergius, taught the peasant children, who came only then, but yet made satisfactory progress, being stimulated by the personal interest the Tolstoys took in them, by the pedagogic genius of the Count, and by a perception that education is a rare and valuable luxury, which seldom comes within the reach of Russian peasants.
In the ABC Book Tolstoy gives several autobiographical stories of how he learned to ride, and of his dogs Milton and Boúlka. Easy as these are, they are admirably written, and combine brevity and simplicity with sincerity; though their sincerity lies not in telling the facts just as they occurred, but in the truth of the feeling conveyed to the reader. Besides these and other stories, popular historical sketches, and a number of translations and adaptations from Esop's Fables and from Indian, Hebrew and Arabic sources, the work contains some popular ballads or folk-stories in verse. To get these poems as perfect as possible, he studied and collated all the versions of them he could collect.
The section on Arithmetic gave him an immense amount of work, for he would not content himself with the usual explanations of the various operations, but devised explanations of his own.
The book contains some elementary natural science, and for the preparation of this, Tolstoy, besides examining all sorts of text-books, consulted specialists on the various subjects, and himself carefully performed most of the experiments he described.
To select the readings in the Church-Slavonic language, he perused the monkish chronicles and the Lives of the Saints.
Intending to include some readings on astronomy, he took up that study himself, and became so interested in it that he sometimes sat up all night examining the stars.
When the news spread that Tolstoy was writing stories for his ABC Book, the magazine editors besieged him with demands, and the first bits of the book to see the light were A Prisoner in the Caucasus, which appeared in one of the monthlies in February, and God Sees the Truth, which came out in another monthly in March.
Owing to some mismanagement, Tolstoy received nothing for the periodical rights of either of these stories, which in What is Art? he names as the best of all his works. They (as well as The Bear Hunt, also from the ABC Book) are given in English in Twenty-three Tales, previously referred to. In rendering them, I did my best to retain the brief simplicity of the originals; but where Russian customs were alluded to, some of that simplicity was inevitably lost.