Rebels and Reformers: Biographies for Young People

by Baron Arthur Ponsonby Ponsonby; Dorothea Ponsonby

Tolstoy, with characteristic energy and enthusiasm, flung himself into the work of dividing out lands between nobles and peasants. He acted as a judge in his own district, and annoyed his aristocratic neighbors by being fair to the poor: he had seen too often how they had been cheated out of their rights.

It was difficult, rather discouraging work, because years of oppression had made the peasants suspicious and grasping, and Tolstoy’s task was to try to remove this distrust. He became more and more socialistic, and his literary friends were very much disappointed in him, for he seemed to be giving up his writing. One wrote: “Tolstoy has grown a long beard, leaves his hair to fall in curls over his ears, holds newspapers in detestation, and has no soul for anything but his property.”

Tolstoy had also started on another enterprise. This was a school after his own theories at Yasnaya and a monthly magazine which he printed and edited, all about his views on education. He saw how most learning is mechanical, and how a child does not learn because he wants to, but in order not to be punished, or to earn a prize, or to be better than others, but very seldom from a real desire to know. This Tolstoy considered was because the child was so drilled and made to behave unnaturally, and to have a different manner in school than he had out. He was not free, and only when a child was free and natural and lively, and allowed to ask questions and to laugh and talk, could he learn with pleasure and therefore thoroughly. In Tolstoy’s school there was no order as we know it: children sat on the floor or bunches of them in an arm-chair; they did just as they pleased, and ran about from place to place. They answered questions, not in turn but all together, interrupting one another or helping one another to remember. If one child left out a bit of story that he had to tell, another jumped up and put it in.

Tolstoy encouraged the children not to repeat literally what they had heard, but to tell “out of your own head.” As there were very few reading books for young children, Tolstoy wrote stories for them himself, which, as they have been translated into English, we are able to read ourselves and to judge how they must have delighted his small pupils. He also read to them and explained to them Bible stories, of which he was very fond.

There was no doubt that Tolstoy had a gift for teaching and interested the children as no ordinary teacher could. His methods are not for every one.

Tolstoy’s classes came to an end after two years, because he was interfered with by the Government; but he revived them at intervals during his life, and there is no doubt that his views on education helped to make teaching in Russia more reasonable and natural, and put fresh ideas about it into people’s heads.

Tolstoy’s only companion at this time was his aunt Tatiana, but in 1862, when he was thirty-four, he married Miss Sophia Behrs, who was only eighteen. He had known her as a little girl.

Tolstoy now settled down to a very happy life—the life, indeed, which had been his ideal, and which he had described as such in a letter to his aunt, when quite a young man. He pictures himself living with his wife at Yasnaya—

A gentle creature, kind and affectionate, she has the same love for you as I have; you live upstairs in the big house, in what used to be Grandmamma’s room; the whole house is as it was in Papa’s time.... I take Papa’s place, though I despair of ever deserving it. My wife that of Mamma; the children take ours. If they made me Emperor of Russia or gave me Peru—in a word, if a fairy came with her wand asking me what I wished for, I should reply that I only wished that this dream may become reality.

And all this actually came to pass. Aunt Tatiana, when Tolstoy married, continued to live with him. He had many children, managed his estates, taught the peasants, and wrote books, and though he was not living in the same house in which he was born, for the large wooden house had been removed and sold to pay his father’s debts, he lived on the same spot in the stone one erected in its place. His wife helped in everything, in spite of her large family, for they had thirteen children. She found time to copy out all her husband’s manuscripts, which to most people would have been as impossible a task as looking for a needle in a haystack, they were so extraordinarily badly written, and scratched out and rewritten. His first great novel, “War and Peace,” one of the longest novels in existence, is said to have been copied out by Countess Tolstoy seven times.