Tolstoy blamed the government for this disastrous state of affairs. For too long it had ignored the overwhelming majority of the nation. Now, cynically or stupidly, it was promising benefits that could never be delivered. In a speech in 1858 the emperor reproached the nobility for sabotaging the reform. In response, Tolstoy drafted a memo arguing that the liberation of the serfs had been the historic dream of the nobility, the only estate that had sent its ‘martyrs in 25 and 48 to exile and the gallows’. He ended the note by claiming that ‘if, God forbid, the fire of peasant rebellion, with which the tsar was threatening landowners, were ever to break out, the best thing it could do would be to destroy the government’ (CW, V, pp. 268, 270). In a unique display of caution, Tolstoy burned the memorandum ‘without showing it to anyone’ (Ds, p. 136).
Tolstoy searched for ways to take Russia out of patriarchal barbarity without submitting it to the ‘inhumanly mechanistic’ forces of modern civilization. He still believed that the only way to achieve this was to establish some sort of rapprochement between the educated nobles and the peasants, the only two social classes that lived on the land. He started freeing his serfs, but placed his hopes not in the imminent reform, but in educating future generations. Tolstoy started a school for peasant children in one of the two remaining wings of his house. He felt he needed to learn more about current pedagogical practice so, in the summer of 1860, he left the school to the supervision of his assistant and went abroad to study the experiments in primary education. Tolstoy wanted his school to serve as a national model. Upon his return he resumed teaching, but also inaugurated twenty other schools in the neighbouring villages. He founded the pedagogical magazine Yasnaya Polyana and tried to create a National Society for Education.
Tolstoy devised his own pedagogical system based as much on Rousseau’s Emile as on his own ideas about human nature and the needs of peasant children. He completely abandoned the strict discipline prevalent in nineteenth-century schools and never asked pupils to memorize texts by heart, study calligraphy or learn difficult rules. His school barely had any curriculum at all, instead he relied on free communication between teacher and pupils, engaged children in conversations, joint physical work and physical exercises. He read them books, told stories based on events from Russian history, including the Napoleonic wars, and his own rich and varied experience. The basic sciences were often taught out of the classroom through direct observations of nature. Peasant children were often needed for different sorts of work at home and were free to leave school whenever necessary. Tolstoy wanted to teach his pupils only the things that had practical or moral importance. Corporal punishment, which was the usual practice of the time, was completely forbidden. The school was also open to girls.
Pupils were more than enthusiastic. Tolstoy’s teaching methods could doubtfully be replicated elsewhere, but such a passionate, charismatic and dedicated teacher and the immediate associates he had personally trained could achieve a lot. In 1862 Tolstoy published his famous article ‘Who should learn how to write from whom – peasant children from us or we from the peasant children?’ He expressed admiration for the instinctive creative genius and learning abilities of his pupils. There was, however, less humility on Tolstoy’s part than the title of the article suggested. The process of learning was mutual. To produce writing of such artlessness and simplicity that the great writer was eager to emulate, the peasant children had first to acquire from him not only basic literacy, but the power of imagination, intellectual curiosity and a desire to express themselves. This was exactly the type of communication and trust that Tolstoy the emancipator failed to build with their parents. In one of his pedagogical conversations with his pupils he half jokingly, half seriously, discussed his own wish to renounce his status of a landowner and to start working on the land. Initially incredulous, the children finally started believing their teacher really meant it.
Fascinated by the idea of a miraculous transformation of a barin (landowner) into a muzhik (peasant), children began discussing the prospect of Tolstoy marrying a peasant girl. They understood well that such an outrageous change of social status implied an equally improbable family arrangement. Tolstoy readily engaged in this ridiculous discussion. He was ‘smiling, asking questions, writing something in his notebook’6 and obviously learning from peasant children ‘how to write’. The whole story they were collectively conceiving was strikingly close to some of his literary designs.
Since 1853 Tolstoy had constantly been returning to a story, later known as The Cossacks, dedicated to the part of his life he had not yet transformed into artistic work. The plot was typical of Romantic colonial literature: a young aristocratic officer, whose name Tolstoy changed several times, disappointed with the shallow life of high society, falls in love with a beautiful Cossack girl, or in some versions, a married woman, whose name, Marianna, did not change from the first draft to the last. Tolstoy presents this strong and blatantly erotic passion as an expression of his character’s desire to change his life forever and share the simple, violent and natural life of a Cossack. The outcome of this endeavour was not clear to the author: in some versions the officer fell out of love with Marianna after seducing her, in others he happily married her. Tolstoy was also experimenting with the language, contrasting the sophisticated psychologically nuanced style of the officer’s letters to his friend in St Petersburg with the particularity and directness of Cossack speech.
In parallel with his work on The Cossacks, Tolstoy was also working on an idyllic epic about peasant life in mainland Russia that also revolved around a powerful and sexually attractive woman. The language in these unfinished stories or fragments, provisionally entitled The Idyll and Tikhon and Malanya, is much more thoroughly stylized than in the drafts of The Cossacks, since there is no repentant noble to serve as a narrator. Nevertheless, Tolstoy’s loving and idealizing gaze can be perceived in the way he exoticizes peasant life with the detached admiration of an outsider.
These drafts evoke one of the strongest erotic infatuations of Tolstoy’s life, his affair with a married peasant, Aksinya Bazykina. Tolstoy regularly mentions Aksinya in his diaries for 1858–60 with the usual admixture of frenzied desire and revulsion, but the entries also record a fixation on the same person that was much less usual. Thirty years later, in a completely different period of his life, he recalled this passion in a story with a revealing title, ‘The Devil’. This emotional colouring was clearly present in the affair from the very beginning, but at the same time Tolstoy recorded different feelings in his diary:
I am a fool. A beast. Her neck is red with the sun . . . I am in love as never before in my life. I’ve no other thoughts. I am tormented . . . Had Aksinya, but I am repelled by her . . . Aksinya I recall only with revulsion – her shoulders . . . Continue to see Aksinya exclusively . . . She was nowhere about. I looked for her. It’s no longer the feeling of a stag, but of a husband for a wife. It’s strange. I try to reawaken my former feeling of surfeit and I can’t. (Ds, pp. 134–5, 139; CW, XLVIII, p. 25)
Tolstoy’s female characters based on Aksinya totally lack a satanic dimension. Both Malanya and Marianna are inherently chaste, in spite of their sex appeal, liveliness and playfulness. Their seductive power is morally redeemed because it is rooted in the primordial simplicity of the world the author longed to join.