Tolstoy wanted his novel to bring him money and fame, but these petty goals were secondary to his desire to tackle the most pressing existential problems. What compelled him to spend seven years chained to his desk was his hope of making people fall in love with life. His own drama, however, was that having completed his task he found himself unable to love life himself; moreover, he desperately hated it. He wrote to Fet in January 1871: ‘I’ve stopped writing and will never again write verbose nonsense like War and Peace. I am guilty, but I swear I’ll never do it again’ (LS, I, p. 230).
In 1884, when going over the history of his discord with his wife in his diary, Tolstoy remembered the early 1870s as the time ‘when the string snapped’ and he ‘became aware of his loneliness’ (Ds, p. 188). Never before were his depressions so acute. Sofia, who had already witnessed a lot, was appalled to see her hyperactive husband lying motionless on the sofa, staring at the ceiling and pleading with her to leave him alone and let him die peacefully. He was afraid he would go insane and felt that everything was finished for him.
In the 1850s, during his previous, much less powerful crisis, Tolstoy had turned to teaching, which helped to lift the depression. Now he decided to try the same path and resumed the old challenge. In January 1872 a new school for peasants opened in the house at Yasnaya Polyana, with Sofia and their elder children Sergei and Tatiana helping Tolstoy. The circumstances, however, were very different this time. The introduction of local self-government had yielded remarkably quick results. Popular education was no longer uncharted territory. Village schools had proliferated; hundreds of future teachers were studying new methods in universities and seminaries. Twelve years earlier Tolstoy had tried to popularize his approaches to teaching through an educational magazine. This time he decided that speaking to teachers was useless and that he needed to address pupils themselves. He started compiling the ABC (Azbuka) and Russian Books for Reading (The Primer), which he began to publish the same year with the help of Sofia and Strakhov, who had become an ardent convert to Tolstoy’s way of thinking and an eager assistant in all his enterprises.
The ABC and Russian Books for Reading came out between 1872 and 1875, and again in 1878–9 in different versions. Tolstoy could never republish his work without editing and sometimes completely rewriting it. For the first time in his life he was writing not about, but for ‘the people’. He planned to give lessons in basic reading, arithmetic, natural sciences and morality to millions. His preparations were, as usual, extensive; he perused collections of Russian folk songs, fables and proverbs, the Lives of the Saints that constituted the main source of religious instruction for the majority of peasants, books on mathematics, physics, astronomy and pedagogical literature written by British and American authors involved in organizing summer schools for working-class children.
It was also a painstaking literary experiment; the stylistic idiom he had elaborated over many years of effort was thrown into the dustbin as ‘verbose nonsense’. No longer could he afford rich vocabulary, complicated syntax, expressive details, powerful metaphors, digressions or meticulous psychological analysis. The texts he included in his books vary in length from two or three sentences to several pages and are uniformly plain, dry and simple. Works of art usually lend themselves to different interpretations, but the ABC and The Primer leave no room for ambiguity: the moral lesson needed to be evident to all and without any explanation:
The poor man came to the rich man to beg. The rich man did not give him anything and said: ‘Go away’. The poor man did not leave, then the rich man became angry and threw a stone at him. The poor man took the stone, put it close to his bosom and said: ‘I’ll keep this stone until I can throw it at him’. It happened this way. The rich man did a bad thing; they took everything from him and led him to prison. When he went to prison, the poor man came, wanting to throw the stone at him, and then he thought again and dropped the stone on the ground, saying: For nothing, did I carry this stone: when he was rich and strong, I was afraid of him and now I pity him. (CW, XXII, pp. 84–5)
The story illustrates the Russian saying ‘to keep a stone in one’s bosom’, which means ‘to bear a grudge’. Tolstoy tells the story about the uselessness of revenge and the advantages of forgiveness without abstract words and moral notions, to make it accessible to a six-year-old who has just learned to read. In the same way, when introducing elementary natural sciences he avoided talking about laws, concentrating instead on observable phenomena like the yearly cycle of the seasons, the effects of heat and cold, rain and the evaporation of water. He also invented his own technique for teaching the alphabet that was, from his point of view, better suited to a child who could not attend school regularly.
The first reaction among professional teachers was negative. Tolstoy failed to receive the approval from the Ministry of Education that was required for school textbooks. Reviews were nearly unanimously hostile. His financial loss amounted to 2,000 roubles, not a critical sum of money, but nonetheless substantial. In his response to the critics, Tolstoy wrote that he was so ‘sure that his books meet the basic needs of the Russian people’ that he did not even bother to give explanations; as a baker, giving bread to the hungry, does not explain how they should consume it (CW, XXI, p. 409)
Tolstoy was suggesting a free schooling system with diverse curricula and teaching methods, based on peasants’ immediate needs and the kind of education they wanted to give to their children. He would never agree that academics, educators, government bureaucrats or elected representatives had a right to decide how or what to teach to peasants. His opponents believed in a standardized national educational system that Russia was still lacking. They wanted to prepare pupils for the new life that their parents could not possibly envisage. Tolstoy aspired to give them the necessary tools to improve their traditional way of life without changing it.
Once again, Tolstoy was engaged in an uphill struggle and continued fighting against the odds. In 1874–5 he completely rewrote his book and produced the New ABC, which was finally granted approval for use in schools. Sales soared. In Tolstoy’s lifetime the New ABC and Russian Books for Reading went through 28 editions, selling 2 million copies. They were not accepted as manuals and textbooks, but were considered an essential part of early reading. At the very least, this was a good starting point for the continuation of the crusade, but by the mid-1870s Tolstoy’s interests were already far from the classroom.
During his personal crisis in the late 1850s and early ’60s Tolstoy had stopped publishing, but continued writing and searching for a new path forward. Now he did the same thing. For a while he contemplated turning from prose to drama. In February 1870 he wrote to Fet that ‘all this winter’ he had been ‘occupied solely with drama’ and that ‘characters in a tragedy and comedy begin to act’ (Ls, I, p. 225). He had already authored two rather mediocre comedies directed against nihilism and the emancipation of women. Many years later he would return to writing for the stage with considerable success. This time, however, his dramatic designs remained unrealized. Unlike many nineteenth-century realists, in his novels Tolstoy did not withdraw from the text in order to create an illusion of objectivity. Instead he pushed himself to the front, ceaselessly commenting, moralizing and guiding the reader. A play form did not allow for such authorial projections. Compelled to hide himself behind his characters, he lost confidence.