8. STUDENT, TEACHER, FATHER

Poetry is the fire burning in a person's soul. This fire burns, warms and brings light ... There are some people who feel the heat, others who feel the warmth, others who just see the light, and others who do not even see the light ... But the true poet cannot help burning painfully, and burning others.

That's what it is all about.

Diary entry, 28 October 1870¹

BY THE MIDDLE OF 1869, nearly the whole of Russia was engrossed in War and Peace and avidly awaiting its conclusion, according to a Petersburg newspaper.² Tolstoy still had to oversee the publication of the last chapters (which finally went on sale that December), but his mind was racing in all sorts of new directions. In truth, his interest in the novel was already beginning to recede by this time. He spent the following summer immersed in German philosophy, then embarked on an intense study of Russian fairy tales and folk epics, with a view to putting together books to help children learn to read. He read Shakespeare and Molière and started writing a play. He toyed with ideas for a novel about Peter the Great, and at the same time began contemplating another completely different novel about the predicament of a high-society woman in contemporary Russia. He also began learning ancient Greek. But he was happiest when his mind was not racing. In fact, in the weeks and months which followed the completion ofWar and Peace,Tolstoy was happiest when he did not have to think at all. Games of bezique with his aunt were a pleasant diversion on cold winter evenings, and a sign that he was unwinding (he generally switched to playing patience compulsively when he was at the start of a new work), but what he really enjoyed was cross-country skiing out in the woods, and skating on the big pond below his house. He gave lessons to his six-year-old son Sergey, and spent hours mastering complicated manoeuvres on his own.³When summer arrived he worked in the garden, digging up nettles and burdock and tidying up the flowerbeds.⁴ He also took himself off to the fields to spend whole days mowing with the peasants. 'I cannot describe to you not just the enjoyment but the happiness which I experience in doing this,' he wrote to Sergey Urusov, whom he had met and become friends with during the defence of Sebastopol.⁵ He later did describe it, though, when he was writing Anna Karenina: the novel's most lyrical passages are devoted to the ecstasies of scything rather than the blossoming of romance. With the return of autumn Tolstoy went hunting as usual, mostly for woodcock and hare, but the following year he shot two wolves while on an expedition with friends.⁶

When he was engaged in physical pursuits, Tolstoy could stave off the dark thoughts that threatened to encroach on him during what he called the 'dead time' between writing projects.⁷ It was a time of terrible uncertainty, he wrote in the first letter he sent to the Petersburg-based critic and philosopher Nikolay Strakhov, who was to become one of his closest friends and confidants.⁸ A priest's son from the provinces, and a man of formidable intellect, Strakhov had spent the earlier part of his career teaching mathematics and natural science, but was now employed at the St Petersburg Public Library, where he remained until his retirement in 1885.⁹ He and Tolstoy, whom he idolised, were exactly the same age. Strakhov had been the first to recognise the magnitude of Tolstoy's achievement in the three review articles he had written about War and Peace. After the last of them was published in the new Slavophile journal The Dawn in January 1870, ¹⁰ he wrote to Tolstoy to invite him to become a contributor. Tolstoy declined, explaining that he was in an awful state, one minute conceiving wildly ambitious plans and the next succumbing to self-doubt. Perhaps this was the necessary prelude to a period of happy, self-confident work like the one which had just ended, he conceded, but perhaps it meant that he was never going to write anything ever again.¹¹ Tolstoy always found the start of a new work of fiction mentally taxing, as he felt he needed to work out the different trajectories of the characters in his head before he could proceed, as if it were a game of chess. He described this complicated process in a letter he wrote to Afanasy Fet in November 1870:

I'm moping and not writing anything, and finding work torturous. You can't imagine how difficult I find this preparatory work of thoroughly ploughing the field I have to sow. Thinking through and reflecting on everything that could happen to all the future people of my forthcoming work, which is going to be very big, and thinking through millions of possible combinations in order to choose 1/100000 is terribly difficult. And that's what I am busy with.¹²

Far from being able to enjoy a sense of achievement having finished War and Peace, Tolstoy was plagued by fears that he himself was finished as a writer. But his anxieties went deeper, as Sonya later recalled. Occasionally his spirits lifted when he had flashes of inspiration, but he was more often morose, and convinced that 'it was all over for him, that it was time for him to die, and so on and so forth'.¹³ He was forty-one. As it turned out, he had exactly forty-one more years to live.

While he was carried along by the huge wave of creative inspiration that drove the writing of War and Peace, Tolstoy had successfully suppressed his tendencies towards depression, but now he could not help succumbing to melancholy thoughts, and his continuing ill-health also contributed to his low spirits.¹⁴ Two years after he finished War and Peace, he still felt so low that he confided in Sergey Urusov that he had no will to live, and had never felt so miserable in all his life.¹⁵ Misreading the symptoms, which at this point her husband himself did not fully understand, Sonya became increasingly anxious for him to start another book. It would be three years before Tolstoy started Anna Karenina, however, and writing it would prove to be as arduous as the writing ofWar and Peace had been stimulating. More than any other, Anna Karenina is the novel which readers invariably say they cannot put down. Tolstoy, by contrast, had so little desire to finish it that he had to force himself to pick it up. Neither he nor Sonya quite realised it yet, but the happiest years of their marriage were already over.

If Tolstoy was visited by thoughts of his own mortality after finishing War and Peace, it was because he had begun to confront death seriously while he was writing it. The first unwelcome confrontation with death had come through his chance involvement in the court-martial of Private Vasily Shabunin in 1866. This isolated incident exerted a far greater impact on him than he was prepared to admit at the time. That summer the Tolstoys had received a visit from a family friend of the Bers, Grigory Kolokoltsov, an officer serving with a Moscow infantry regiment stationed a few miles down the road from Yasnaya Polyana. On subsequent visits to Yasnaya Polyana, he brought his colonel, Pyotr Yunosha, and another officer called Alexander Stasyulevich, and Tolstoy enjoyed going riding with them.¹⁶ One day Kolokoltsov and Stasyulevich came to ask Tolstoy if he would defend one of the regiment's regular soldiers at his forthcoming court-martial: Private Shabunin had struck his superior, and according to Russian law, this was an offence punishable by death. As an opponent of capital punishment ever since he had witnessed a public execution in Paris, Tolstoy agreed.¹⁷

Despite Tolstoy's plea, Shabunin was convicted and sentenced to be shot by firing squad. Appalled that such a minor infraction could attract such a drastic and inappropriate punishment, Tolstoy immediately appealed to higher channels via his influential cousin Alexandrine in St Petersburg, but to no avail. This was perhaps owing partly to the hysteria at court following the attempt to assassinate Alexander II in St Petersburg a few months earlier. The man wielding the gun, Dmitry Karakozov, who was one of Russia's first revolutionaries, was also sentenced to death. In September, Tolstoy asked the military band which had been obliged to play at Shabunin's execution to come up to Yasnaya Polyana as a surprise for Sonya's name-day party. It was a warm evening, and after dinner on the veranda, at a long table decorated with flowers, the guests had danced into the night - Sonya recorded in her diary that it had been a very jolly evening, and her husband had been in particularly good spirits.¹⁸ Tolstoy then went back to writingWar and Peace. Stasyulevich's suicide the following year, which apparently struck Tolstoy deeply, was not directly related to Private Shabunin's death, but it was a chilling postscript to an event which, as it turned out later, would gnaw at his conscience.¹⁹

Then there were personal losses. He had not been particularly close to his father-in-law Andrey Estafevich, or his philandering uncle Vladimir in Kazan, still less his ghastly brother-in-law Valerian Petrovich Tolstoy, who all died in the 1860s, but he was greatly upset by the deaths of Elizaveta, the sister of his distant cousin Alexandrine, and particularly Darya Alexandrovna, known to all as Dolly—the wife of his best friend Dmitry Dyakov, whom he had known since student days.²⁰ Then, in 1869, Tolstoy's friend Sergey Urusov, already widowed, lost his only daughter Lidia, while another friend Afanasy Fet lost his sister Nadezhda and two brothers-in-law, Nikolay and Vasily Botkin, in quick succession. Tolstoy had himself been friends with Vasily Botkin for well over a decade, and was disturbed to hear that he had died suddenly, in the company of the friends who had gathered at his home to hear a string quartet performed.²¹

In the summer of 1869 Tolstoy had also begun to confront life and death philosophically by reading Schopenhauer (1788-1860), a thinker famed for his pessimistic view of the world. One of the great philosophers of the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer was esteemed by figures as diverse as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Freud and Jung, but he also held particular appeal for creative minds in view of the beauty and simplicity of his exposition, his direct engagement with the real-life problem of existence, rather than with abstractions, and the high value occupied in his philosophical system by art. Schopenhauer was one of the first Western philosophers able to undertake a serious study of Indian philosophy through translations which had become available, and the influence of Buddhist ideas on his view of life as suffering is plain to see. As in Buddhism, Schopenhauer identified suffering with attachment to desires, regarded art, along with resignation and compassion, as one of the few means available to man of experiencing a temporary liberation from suffering. Schopenhauer's ideas about the futility of human striving made perfect sense to Tolstoy, and such was his newfound fervour for them that he acquired a portrait of the philosopher and put it up on the wall of his study.²²Tolstoy was not alone in his veneration of Schopenhauer. There have been many other major artists for whom he has been equally important, including Turgenev, Thomas Mann and Samuel Beckett, not to mention composers such as Richard Wagner, who was engaged while Tolstoy was writing War and Peace in composing the Ring cycle, its musical equivalent not only in terms of scale and ambition, but also technically through its creative use of repetition.

Somehow Tolstoy's morbid thoughts all came to a head in the autumn of 1869, when he made a trip to Penza province to inspect some land he was thinking of buying. While stopping overnight in the town of Arzamas, he found himself awake at two in the morning, exhausted but unable to sleep. Although physically quite well, he was suddenly gripped by a fear of dying more intense than any he had experienced before, which produced in him a state of existential anguish he found completely terrifying. Many years later he drew on this memory of extreme emotional desolation when he started writing an autobiographical story called 'Notes of a Madman', although he never completed it.

Apart from his fixation with death, another cloud appeared on Tolstoy's horizon after he finished War and Peace: marital difficulties. Tolstoy may have treated his wife as a child to begin with, but in many ways he was also like a child with her. Once they started a family, Sonya became a source of maternal protection, and provided him with the emotional stability he needed to concentrate on his writing. There had been a few troubling incidents which had intruded into the serenity of the fundamentally happy years while Tolstoy was writing War and Peace, but they were exceptions rather than the rule, and had been dismissed as aberrations. Now it began to be the other way round. In August 1871 Sonya noted in her diary that something in their relationship had 'snapped' the previous winter when they had both been unwell. Tolstoy also later referred to becoming aware of his loneliness after 'a string broke' in their marriage at around this time in his diary.²³ They had squabbled before, of course, but this rift was more serious, and initially arose over their differing views of the woman's role in a marriage. Even though Sonya continued to defer to her husband, she was becoming increasingly confident about asserting her own views, sometimes goaded by sheer physical necessity.

In February 1871 Sonya gave birth to their second daughter and fifth child, who was christened Maria after Tolstoy's sister, and who, like her, immediately became known to everybody as Masha. After an extremely difficult delivery, Sonya contracted puerperal fever and nearly died, which understandably made her unwilling to endure the terror and pain of another bout of life-threatening illness. She began to think it would be best for her not to become pregnant again, but her husband had different ideas. It was not just that Tolstoy could not conceive of marriage without children—he regarded a woman's main vocation as being to bear children, breast-feed and raise them, and was therefore horrified at the thought of his wife avoiding future pregnancies. As a matter of fact, in March 1870 he had set out his ideas on this subject in an unsent letter addressed to Nikolay Strakhov, who had immediately followed up his review of War and Peace with an article on 'The Woman Question' in the next issue of The Dawn. Even though he never sent this letter, it is revealing that Tolstoy felt moved to respond straight away. In fact, he had begun to draft an article on the subject himself in 1868, describing men as the 'worker bees in the hive of human society' and women as queens who should not be distracted from their primary role to reproduce the species.²⁴ The 'woman question' exercised him deeply, and would indeed lie at the very heart of Anna Karenina.

Tolstoy generally did not like to read or subscribe to newspapers or journals, but there were a few exceptions. In 1870 Theodor Ries, the German from Oldenburg who had been responsible for printing War and Peace, became founding editor of theMoskauer Deutscher Zeitung. As he started publishing a German translation of War and Peace in its inaugural issue, ²⁵ only one month after producing the last volume in Russian, he sent his newspaper to Tolstoy gratis. The Parisian Revue des deux mondes was for a long time the only journal the Tolstoys actively read, ²⁶ but later in the 1870s, they arranged to share the cost of several subscriptions with Sergey over in Pirogovo.²⁷ Tolstoy affected never to read reviews of his work, remembering how the critics had hounded Pushkin during his lifetime.²⁸ But the truth is, he did read them, and he took criticism very personally, invariably responding to it immediately in writing, although his hurt feelings clearly often soon subsided, as he left most of his ripostes to critics unfinished.²⁹If he made an exception for Strakhov, it was because his review was intelligent and highly positive, and also because The Dawn was also sent to him gratis—that is how he had come to read Strakhov's article on the topic of women's liberation.

The 'woman question' was a hot topic in Russia at this time, as it was all over Europe, so much so that two Russian translations of John Stuart Mill's seminal essay The Subjection of Women were published within months of its original publication in England in 1869, and Strakhov's article followed a few months later, in February 1870. John Stuart Mill, famous for being the first British member of parliament to call for women's suffrage and for his advocacy of women's rights, had plenty of followers in Russia, but as conservatives, Strakhov and Tolstoy were not amongst them. Strakhov, a quiet, scholarly, lifelong bachelor, had celebrated War and Peace for being a family chronicle, and he argued in his article that a woman's place was within the family. Tolstoy wholeheartedly agreed, and took issue only over Strakhov's negative view of prostitutes, arguing that they had an important role to play in preserving the institution of the family. 'Imagine London without its 80,000 magdalenes—what would happen to families?' he wrote.³⁰

Sonya was only twenty-seven when Masha was born, so must have been filled with dread at the thought of complying with her husband's wishes: the intransigence of his views would lead to her having eight more children, only three of whom survived to adulthood. Quite apart from the health risks, each new pregnancy bound her more tightly to Yasnaya Polyana, and meant she had to postpone yet again her hopes of having a life outside the nursery. 'With every child you have to give up a life for yourself even more, and resign yourself to the burden of cares, worries, illnesses and years,' she noted in her diary in June 1870.³¹ Sonya was a devoted mother, and she loved living at Yasnaya Polyana, but she was a young woman who had grown up in a city, and after a while she began to long for a change of scene, some company, and the chance to go to the occasional soirée. She found the solitude depressing.³² The custom for Russian families from their milieu was to spend the winter in the city, and retreat to the country estate or a dacha during the summer months, but the Tolstoys lived the country life all year round. At the beginning of their marriage Tolstoy had dreamed of having a pied-à-terre in Moscow—a flat on Sivtsev-Vrazhek, a quiet back-street in the heart of the city favoured by the well-to-do, where his cousin Fyodor Ivanovich 'the American' had lived. He confided in Sonya's father that he imagined transferring their Yasnaya Polyana life to Moscow for three or four months each winter, complete 'with the same Alexey, the same nanny, the same samovar', in order to be able to enjoy stimulating conversation with new people, visit libraries and go to the theatre.³³ That plan was stymied by lack of funds, however, and by the time the income from War and Peace had made Tolstoy an affluent man, he no longer had the inclination. He became more reclusive as he got older, preferring to be at home for long stretches, when he could work undisturbed. City life soon chafed him, so he was always happy to leave, but he did have the freedom to come and go more or less as he pleased. He did not particularly appreciate hearing operas like Rossini's Mosè in Egitto and Gounod's Faust, but at least he had the opportunity to go to the theatre while he was writing War and Peace. Opera was Sonya's great passion—what would she have given to be able to dress up occasionally for a night at the Bolshoi Theatre!³⁴ She went to Moscow a handful of times during these years, but for the most part she was at home in the countryside: the highlight of the year for her was the summer, when her sister Tanya and other relatives came to stay. 'If all my intellectual and emotional capacities were awakened, and most of all my desires, I would be crying until kingdom come,' she wrote to Tanya in November 1871, and a few months later she wrote to her again about the 'lonely, monastic' life at Yasnaya Polyana.³⁵

Tolstoy also had the freedom to undertake trips elsewhere. Apart from his nightmare experience in Arzamas, he had enjoyed lifting his gaze to the tops of the tall pine trees as he travelled through the dense forests of the Penza region in the autumn of 1869. After crossing the Sura river, teeming with sterlet, he also relished the region's distinctive pebbled black earth. Like the local population, it reminded him of the mighty ploughman of Russian folklore Mikula Selyaninovich, the traditional peasant symbol of Russian strength and the hero of the medieval epics he had been reading.³⁶ In the summer of 1871 Tolstoy went further afield and lived like a Bashkirian nomad again out on the steppe east of Samara. The plan was that Sonya would go too the following year, but by autumn she discovered that she was pregnant again. Writing despondently to tell her sister Tanya about it that October, she spoke about the mud and the monotony, and how having a sixth child would mean having to stay put the following summer: 'it will be impossible to go to Samara, it will be impossible to come and visit you, we'll have to take on another nanny, and so on and so forth'.³⁷ By copying out War and Peace, Sonya felt she was involved, and was contributing to her husband's creative work, albeit in a very minor way, so it is understandable that she was keen for him to start writing a new book. But a 700-page ABC book was not exactly what she had in mind.

Tolstoy literally went back to basics for his next book. From sophisticated fiction about Russian aristocrats and lofty philosophising about history, he turned to helping children learn to read: the first of the four volumes of his ABC begin with the thirty-five letters of the Cyrillic alphabet in large type. He was never short of new ideas for novels, but what was the point of executing them when the vast majority of the population could not even read? He had been carried along by momentum when he was writing War and Peace, but after finishing it he was drawn ineluctably back to the path he had been treading before he had got married. Educating the people once again loomed into Tolstoy's field of vision, and he regarded the ABC he published in 1872 as the culmination of thirteen years of working towards this goal.

If Tolstoy's thoughts turned back to questions of teaching and learning in the early 1870s, it was because he certainly still cared deeply about the cause of popular education, but he was also thinking closer to home: his own children. The Tolstoys' eldest son Sergey was seven when Masha was born in 1871, Tanya was six, Ilya was nearly five and Lev approaching two. Tolstoy may have not been very interested in his children when they were babies, and for much of the 1860s he was preoccupied with War and Peace, but he naturally had very strong ideas about how he wanted his children to be educated, and as soon as they got to school age, he wanted to be involved. He was adamant that his children were to be home-educated, as he had been, and that both he and his wife would give instruction. This was when he discovered the inadequacies of the textbooks available at the time. Tolstoy believed that texts for children learning to read should be comprehensible, varied and interesting, but too many books, he found, were either insufferably dull or too far removed from life. Naturally, he resolved to write a much better textbook himself, and because he was Tolstoy, the most Russian of all Russians, it became an enormous, ambitious project involving the entire family, aimed not just at the junior Tolstoys but at all Russian children learning to read.

Tolstoy put a great deal of thought into the compilation of his ABC (Azbuka) and reading primer. He first planned on publishing these separately, but then combined them into one volume, sub-divided into four books of progressive difficulty. Half of each book was given over to stories, fables and scientific explanations. The other half was split between extracts from the Scriptures, the lives of saints and Russian chronicles (in Church Slavonic and in modern Russian) and the rudiments of mathematics, followed by instructions to teachers. He had first jotted down the idea for a 'First Book for Reading and an ABC for Families and Schools with Instructions to the Teacher by Count L. N. Tolstoy' as a diary entry in September 1868, at the time of Eugene Schuyler's visit.³⁸While they had been rearranging Tolstoy's library, Schuyler had noticed the top shelf began with the German writer Berthold Auerbach, which had led to a discussion of the latter's weighty novel A New Life. Tolstoy took it down from the shelf and told Schuyler to go away and read it, explaining that this was the book which had prompted him to start his Yasnaya Polyana school. When Schuyler happened to meet Auerbach while travelling in Germany after his visit to Yasnaya Polyana, he mentioned this conversation to him, and Auerbach recalled Tolstoy well, saying: 'Yes, I always remember how frightened I was when this strange-looking man announced he was Eugen Baumann, as I feared he was going to threaten me with an action for libel and defamation of character.'³⁹ Tolstoy's conversations with Schuyler in 1868 had resuscitated his interest in popular education, and when he came to start the practical work of compiling his ABC in the autumn of 1871, he consulted a wide variety of textbooks and theoretical works by foreign educationalists such as Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, as well as several American primers that Schuyler had procured for him.

As it turned out, the years immediately following War and Peace were a fallow period only in a manner of speaking, as before Tolstoy got to work on his ABC, he reminded himself of the learning process by taking up ancient Greek. This was partly so he could teach his son Sergey, to whom he wanted to give a classical education, ⁴⁰ but also so he could produce his own translations of Aesop's fables for his ABC.⁴¹ Since the Cyrillic alphabet is based on the Greek one, many letters are familiar, which gives Russians a head-start, but the idiosyncrasies of Greek grammar are not for the faint-hearted. Tolstoy was not a typical pupil, however. At the beginning of December 1870 he invited a seminarist from Tula to come up to Yasnaya Polyana and give him some lessons, and by the end of the month he was already spending whole days reading Greek literature in the original. He began with The Anabasis, Xenophon's account of the campaign led by Cyrus and his army of 10,000 Greek mercenaries against the Persian ruler Artaxerxes II in the fifth century BC. Tolstoy found it thrilling to be able to read and understand on his own, and Greek became his latest obsession. 'I'm completely living in Athens,' he wrote to his friend Fet. 'I speak in Greek in my dreams.' ⁴² No sooner had Sonya recovered from puerperal fever in March 1871 than he graduated to Plato and Homer, producing his own translations of parts of The Iliad, which he compared to the best-known Russian version completed by Nikolay Gnedich in 1829. A few months later, en route for the steppe that summer, he was reading unprepared texts a livre ouvert with Pavel Leontiev, professor of classical philology at Moscow University, whom he even showed up on a few occasions.⁴³

While he was living on a diet of fermented mare's milk out on the steppe in a Bashkirian felt tent, the news that Count Tolstoy had learned Greek in three months became the talk of the town in Moscow.⁴⁴ Tolstoy was by now reading Herodotus, who had described the Scythians amongst whom he was living, he reported, 'in detail and with great precision'.⁴⁵ There was indeed a similarity between the lifestyle of the Bashkirs and the nomadic Scythians, who also lived on mare's milk. As with the beekeeping, Tolstoy's new passion for Greek was for a time all-engulfing, so much so that Sonya and his close friends feared for his mental health (Sergey Urusov wanted him to read the lives of Saints instead).⁴⁶ 'Clearly, nothing in the world interests and enraptures him as much as each new Greek word or phrase he learns,' Sonya noted in her diary.⁴⁷ But Tolstoy's overactive, mercurial mind was soon on the rampage again. Reading the classics of ancient Greek literature ignited an interest in the 'classics' of Russian literature, which in turn made him dream about writing something on the life of ancient Rus.⁴⁸

Obviously there was nothing in the Russian 'classics' comparable to the epic poems of The Iliad and The Odyssey, not least because there was no literature in Russia at all before the year 988, when the Christianisation of Russia brought the need for a written language to help spread the Word of God. The huge upsurge of interest in the pre-Petrine past which began in the 1860s as an offshoot of the Great Reforms nevertheless resulted in Russians discovering and valuing their old literature for the first time. The excitement was contagious, and Tolstoy was able to benefit from the proliferation of new editions, collections and studies which now appeared—the Yasnaya Polyana library began to swell.⁴⁹ His study of medieval Russian literature was personally rewarding, but it was also a necessary preparation for his ABC, since he had decided at the outset to include in his primer a substantial section of religious and historical texts in old Slavonic (the medieval literary language of the Orthodox Church), with parallel translations in modern Russian.

Amongst the sacred works which most inspired Tolstoy was the Cheti-Menei ('monthly readings'), a voluminous compendium of religious texts arranged chronologically, and designed to be read on the feast days of the Orthodox saints.⁵⁰ The policy of the Byzantine Empire had always been for its missionaries to translate the Gospel for the heathen peoples they converted. After the adoption of the cyrillic alphabet, which had been devised by the two Greek monks Cyril and Methodius, literary activity in Russia had accordingly been exclusively religious in character to begin with, and followed Byzantine practice. But in the sixteenth century, after Metropolitan Makary of Novgorod incorporated texts such as the lives of newly canonised Russian saints, the originally Greek but now Russianised Cheti-Menei began to occupy a position of supreme importance in the nation's spiritual and literary life. Another important edition of the Cheti-Menei was later produced in the seventeenth century by Dmitry of Rostov (himself later canonised), and the copy of the 1864 edition Tolstoy acquired was soon densely annotated by him.⁵¹ Tolstoy regarded the texts of the Cheti-Menei as Russia's 'real poetry'⁵² (he famously did not think much of verse written by contemporary poets), and he chose extracts from both collections to include in the reading primer sections of his ABC alongside passages from the Bible and the oldest Russian chronicle, dating back to the twelfth century. One was a miraculous episode from Makary's life of St Simeon Stylites the Younger (a hermit who lived on a pillar near Antioch), in which a robber is inspired to repent of his sins. Another was a shortened version of Dmitry's life of St Sergius of Radonezh, the Patron Saint of Russia and founder of the most important monastery in the Russian Orthodox Church, the fourteenth-century Trinity Lavra of St Sergius outside Moscow.

If Tolstoy alighted particularly on Sergius, it may have been because the saint's life resonated with certain of his own aspirations on a subliminal level (although it would not be for another decade that he became fully cognisant of what those aspirations really were). St Sergius, the first great Russian ascetic, had turned his back on his noble background as a boy to seek out a life of poverty and seclusion in the 'desert' in emulation of St Antony of Egypt, the founder of monasticism. The rural wilderness was the Russian equivalent of the 'desert'—a deep forest in the case of St Sergius—and the disciples he attracted later followed his example by deliberately founding more than forty monasteries in parts of Russia that were similarly remote and inhospitable and far away from cities. Sergius's life was a model of humility. He turned down the opportunity to assume the pre-eminent position in the Russian ecclesiastical hierarchy he was offered, preferring instead to continue his life of poverty, engaged in hard physical work. Tolstoy would not forget his study of the Cheti-Menei. He would draw on the life of St Sergius in 1890 when he came to write his story 'Father Sergius', ⁵³ which is about the struggles of a monk and former nobleman to overcome his pride and live up to his Christian ideals. Tolstoy's Father Sergius finally finds peace living as a Strannik—that specifically Russian type of religious wanderer dependent on alms, whose asceticism is based on a life of constant pilgrimage without material possessions. It also became Tolstoy's dream to detach himself from the world and become a wanderer, and eventually he would fulfil this dream, but in his own way, like everything else in his life.

Tolstoy was awed by the beauty of the writing in Russian hagiography, and it was aesthetic criteria as much as anything else which guided his selection of texts for the ABC—he wanted young children to be brought into contact with poetic language from the very beginning. But it was the secular legacy of the medieval oral epic, the bylina, which really bewitched him. Collections of narrative poems chronicling the exploits of Russia's semi-mythological warriors (bogatyry) had first been put together in the eighteenth century, ⁵⁴ but it was not until the 1860s that they began to be made widely available. For Tolstoy, as for many of his contemporaries, they were a thrilling discovery, and even more tantalising was the revelation that this oral tradition had not yet died out. Pavel Rybnikov, an ethnographer who had been exiled to the far north for alleged revolutionary propaganda, found that there were peasants in the region still singing and reciting bylinas. He created a sensation in the 1860s by noting them down and publishing them.⁵⁵

This living link with the past via the Russian language was thrilling for a writer like Tolstoy, who had an enduring passion for native sayings and proverbs. He was one of the founders of a society set up in Moscow in 1870 to study and preserve Russian folksong,⁵⁶ and the friendship he later formed with one of the most celebrated of the peasant 'reciters' from the Russian north would have a direct impact on his writing. Tolstoy's enthusiasm even led the author of an 1869 play based on bylinas about the warrior Alyosha Popovich to write an entire book about the structure of old Russian verse.⁵⁷ At the same time that the bylina tradition was being uncovered, Alexander Afanasiev was following in the footsteps of the Brothers Grimm to publish the first anthologies of Russian fairy tales. His pioneering collection of 640 tales appeared in eight volumes published between 1855 and 1864.⁵⁸ Since the Russian literary language had been created with the express purpose of translating the Bible, the Church had for centuries considered it blasphemous to use it to write down 'heathen' folktales (which first appeared in print in English translation), but now this rich tradition began to be valued too.

Tolstoy was completely captivated by the fairy tales and byliny he started reading after completing War and Peace, and it is no wonder when travelling through the fertile agricultural lands of the Penza region in 1869 on his property inspection trip that he should have thought of Mikula Selyaninovich. The bylina about the ploughman who works so fast the prince can only catch up with him after three days on horseback was one of the first he chose to include in his ABC. Tolstoy was also entranced by the tragic legend of the bogatyr Danilo Lovchanin. In one version of this bylina, Prince Vladimir sends Danilo on a dangerous mission to kill a ferocious lion, hoping to marry his beautiful wife in the certain event of his death, but Vasilisa takes the precaution of sending her husband off with 300 arrows to ensure his mission is successful. Danilo then stabs himself in despair rather than cross swords with the assassins next sent by the determined prince, but the faithful widow Vasilisa takes her own life over her husband's body rather than marry him. Tolstoy dreamed of turning this story (the closest Russian equivalent to Romeo and Juliet or Tristan und Isolde in terms of the tragic deaths of two lovers) into a play. Naturally the folk hero who most appealed to him, however, was the mighty Ilya of Murom, whose exploits he had read about when he was a boy. He even began thinking of writing a novel or a popular drama in which he would create characters with the traits of the great bogatyrs.⁵⁹ Ilya would still be a peasant's son, but instead of defeating armies single-handed after lying on the stove for thirty-three years, Tolstoy wanted to cast him as a clever young university student.⁶⁰

A major goal for Tolstoy was to cultivate in his young readers a love of Russia—its landscape, its history, its way of life, and, of course, its language. One of his favourite pastimes became walking down to the high road which passed close to Yasnaya Polyana in order to collect sayings and proverbs from the many pilgrims and religious wanderers making the journey on foot to the great Caves Monastery at Kiev. Sayings such as 'A crow cannot be a falcon' enabled him to explain the idiosyncrasies of Russian pronunciation in a simple and engaging way to children. Tolstoy also wanted to spark in young readers a curiosity for the workings of science in his ABC, but in order to answer questions such as 'Where does the water from the sea go?' and 'What is wind for?' in a way that would be both comprehensible and appealing to children, he felt he needed to have a profound understanding of these phenomena himself. So he threw himself into an intense and wide-ranging study of nearly every branch of science, from zoology to physics. Wherever possible, Tolstoy undertook practical research, which led to him on one occasion spending an entire night in the garden gazing up at the stars, in order to brush up on his astronomy.⁶¹ Understanding and then explaining processes such as galvanism and how crystals form required sustained concentration at his desk indoors, however: his notebooks from this time are littered with references to scientists like Michael Faraday, Humphry Davy and John Tyndall.⁶²

Finally, Tolstoy also wanted to nurture in young children an appreciation for truth, honesty, and the value of hard work, but not in a dry didactic way, like all the foreign textbooks and primers he had pored over and made notes on. He was certainly not impressed by the English books he consulted, including Thomas Ewing's Principles of Elocution, which was a 'model of pointlessness' in demonstrating 'how to be silent', and Abbott's Second Reader, which was far too abstract.⁶³ Like the available Russian books, everything seemed to be cut off from real life. It was the stories and fables which naturally lay at the heart of Tolstoy's ABC. After an enormous amount of reading, as well as months of fastidious work in condensing and simplifying, Tolstoy eventually produced simplified versions of over 600 stories, which he whittled down to 372 for publication. He favoured Aesop over all other authors, including such well-known fables as the 'The Frog and the Lion':

A lion heard a frog croaking loudly and turned towards the sound, thinking that this must be the sound of some huge beast. After a while, the lion saw the frog come up out of the swamp. He went over to the frog and as he crushed him underfoot, the lion said, 'No one should be worried about a sound before the thing itself has been examined.' This fable is for a man with a big mouth who talks and talks without accomplishing anything.⁶⁴

Tolstoy produced his own free translations, subtly changing their meaning, which he then, as a consummate artist, revised endlessly. After he had produced the first draft of his translation of this particular fable, for example, Tolstoy worked on it again, before producing another version, which was then reworked a third and a fourth time.⁶⁵ Changes even went into the proofs before Tolstoy was happy:

A lion heard a frog croaking loudly, and thought it must be a large animal to be shouting that loudly. He went closer and saw the frog coming out of the swamp. The lion crushed it with his paw and said: 'It's tiny—and to think I was scared.' ⁶⁶

While Aesop took pride of place, Tolstoy ranged very widely in terms of authors, including not only more recent writers such as La Fontaine and Grimm, but some really up-to-date ones such as Sofya Tolstaya ('Some Girls Came to See Masha') and Vasily Rumyantsev, a former pupil of the Yasnaya Polyana school ('How a Boy Told About Getting Caught by a Storm When He Was in the Forest'). Tolstoy also fashioned miniature tales from Russian folk anecdotes, and contributed real-life stories about the adventures of his dogs Milton and Bulka in the Caucasus, as well as stories about the lives of birds and animals in the Russian countryside ('Sparrows', 'How Wolves Teach Their Cubs'). Not all the stories and vignettes are set in a world reassuringly familiar to Russian children. Tolstoy carefully juxtaposed stories like 'The Girl and the Mushrooms' with pieces about Eskimos, elephants and silkworms. He wanted to inculcate Russian children with a respect for foreign cultures along with a love of their native land, so he treated his young readers to excerpts from Herodotus and Plutarch, and exotic stories from countries as far-flung as India, America, France and Turkey. Tolstoy also contributed fiction he had written himself, beginning with very simple tales such as 'The Muzhik and the Cucumbers':

One day a muzhik went over to a vegetable patch to steal cucumbers. He got to the cucumbers and thought: 'Suppose I carry off a bag of cucumbers and sell them; I can buy a hen with that money. The hen will give me eggs, and when she is broody she will produce lots of chicks. I'll feed the chicks, sell them, and buy a piglet who will grow into a pig; and my pig will bring me lots of piglets. I'll sell the piglets and buy a mare; the mare will have foals. I'll feed the foals and sell them; then I'll buy a house and have a vegetable patch. I'll have a vegetable patch and plant cucumbers, and I won't let them be stolen because I will keep a strict watch on them. I'll hire watchmen, station them by the cucumbers and I will go along myself and shout: "Hey, keep stricter watch!"' And he shouted that out at the top of his voice. The watchmen heard, jumped out and thrashed the muzhik.⁶⁷

For his more advanced young readers, Tolstoy wrote two of his finest works of fiction, 'God Sees the Truth But Waits' and 'Captive of the Caucasus', whose power lies precisely in their carefully wrought simplicity. From the beginning, Tolstoy had intended the artistic level of his ABC to be in no way inferior to that of War and Peace, and both stories exemplified in fact the devices and the language he declared he would now employ in his adult fiction, as he explained in a letter to Nikolay Strakhov.⁶⁸

Work on the final compilation began in earnest in September 1871, and Tolstoy inveigled not only Sonya, but her uncle Kostya and his niece Varya into helping him as copyists. He was as exacting with his tiny stories for children as he was with his adult fiction, as Sonya commented in a letter to her sister, ⁶⁹ but finally in December 1871 the first of the four books was ready, and Tolstoy set off for Moscow to find a publisher. This proved difficult, partly because of all the old Church Slavonic in the manuscript, forcing Tolstoy to resort to signing a deal with his old publisher Theodor Ries. But once his ABC was finally in press he was clearly excited, and when he wrote to Alexandrine in St Petersburg in January 1872 he told her that ifjust two generations of all Russian children, from the Romanovs to rural peasants, learned to read with his ABC, and had their first contact with art through it, he could die a happy man.⁷⁰ He was convinced this was the work he would be remembered for, ⁷¹ and rated it higher than War and Peace.⁷²

There was now an intense period of work to finish the three remaining books of the ABC. Typically for Tolstoy, the printing process had begun while he was still writing and adding to his manuscript, but he was an inveterate risk-taker and gambler. At times even he had to admit he was overwhelmed by the dimensions of his task. It was enough work for 100 years, he wrote to Alexandrine again in April: 'You need to know Greek, Indian and Arabic literature for it, as well all the natural sciences, astronomy and physics, and the work on the language is terrible—everything has to be beautiful, concise, simple, and most important of all, clear.' ⁷³ Meanwhile, he was dying to try his ABC out, so in January 1872 he reopened the Yasnaya Polyana school to thirty-five local peasant children.

The school was located in the family house this time—in the front hall and in the rooms on the ground floor. Tolstoy taught the older boys in his study, while Sonya had a group of about ten pupils, mostly girls, whom she taught in another room. In the mornings they taught their own children, and after lunch they all pitched in to help teach at the school, including eight-year-old Sergey and seven-year-old Tanya, who were given the task of teaching the alphabet in the hall to the youngest pupils.⁷⁴ Five-year-old Ilya started out as a teacher too, but he proved to be far too strict with his pupils. His contract was terminated after he ended up fighting with his charges too often.⁷⁵ As an adult, Ilya could still remember the intense smell of sheepskin that the village children brought with them into the house, and the delightful anarchy that reigned in the schoolroom. Tolstoy allowed the children to sit where they wanted, get up when they wanted and answer questions all together—it was certainly a long way from regimented learning by rote.⁷⁶The school broke up for the summer months, but teaching was not resumed in the autumn: Tolstoy had moved on to new pastures.

Tolstoy itched to see his ABC in print once he had handed over the manuscript, and eventually he lost patience with his publisher, who was proceeding at a snail's pace. The American primers Eugene Schuyler procured for him had given him the idea of using large typefaces and a particular design in the earlier pages of his ABC in order to make it easier for children to learn pronunciation, but this presented the typographers with a headache, as they were simply not used to printing anything other than with standard typefaces.⁷⁷ In May 1872 Tolstoy managed to transfer publication to Petersburg, having persuaded his friend Strakhov to oversee operations.⁷⁸ Strakhov, who had made his first visit to Yasnaya Polyana the previous summer, had already helped by producing modern translations of the old Slavonic texts, and now Tolstoy asked him also to grade the stories in the reading primer according to whether he liked them or not.⁷⁹ The 758 pages of the ABC finally appeared in November 1872, but its initial print run of 3,600 copies also proved to be its last. The next time the book appeared again in this format was in 1957, when a facsimile edition constituted volume twenty-two of the 'Jubilee' edition of Tolstoy's Complete Collected Works.

Despite the high price of fifty kopecks for each constituent part of the ABC, Tolstoy had high expectations for its success and began thinking about the second edition even before it had been published.⁸⁰ He was to be bitterly disappointed. First of all, the book did not receive official approval for use in schools, despite Tolstoy sending a letter explaining its virtues to his distant relative Count Dmitry Tolstoy, the Russian Minister of Education.⁸¹ Secondly, Tolstoy's desire to make some money from the publication got the better of him. He offered booksellers a twenty per cent discount, but insisted they paid in cash up-front, and so lost both their goodwill and valuable marketing potential. Sonya's younger brother Pyotr Bers, who lived in Petersburg, had been put in charge of sales, and he took a dim view of Tolstoy's attempt to break the power of booksellers in controlling distribution. His flat doubled up as a warehouse, and so he ended up being left with hundreds of unsold copies. The almost uniformly negative reviews which started appearing also did nothing to help sales of the ABC. Some critics objected to the dull grey paper it was printed on and the paucity of illustrations (twenty-eight), while others complained about the lack of any kind of introduction to explain for whom the book was intended.⁸² They were all suspicious of Tolstoy's newfangled methods.

3. Page eight from the 1872 edition of Tolstoy's ABC book, showing the letters 'K for kolokol (bell), T for lozhka (spoon) and'm for medved (bear).

A writer as thin-skinned as Tolstoy could not fail to be stung by the criticism, but his belief in the ABC never wavered. Once he had published an open letter to the Moscow Gazette in June 1873 setting out what he regarded as the shortcomings of the teaching methods then in use, he calmed down. First, he decided to unbind the 1,500 unsold copies of his ABC and repackage them as twelve individual small volumes—they went on sale for between ten and twenty-five kopecks each.⁸³ Then a dozen young teachers from rural schools in the area came to spend a week at Yasnaya Polyana in October to study his methods.⁸⁴ In January 1874 Tolstoy was given the opportunity to defend his approach to the Moscow Literacy Committee, which accepted his proposal to conduct an experiment comparing his teaching methods with those that had been officially adopted. When the results of this experiment were inconclusive, he published a fifty-page profession de foi about his teaching methods in the august and widely read journalNotes of the Fatherland which finally provoked wide public debate.⁸⁵ 'On Popular Education' is Tolstoy's heartfelt pedagogical manifesto.

Tolstoy goes into extraordinary detail in his discussion of pedagogical methods in 'On Popular Education', and shows deep knowledge of the educational provision in his own district. He summarised the flaws of Russian primary education as: '(1) lack of knowledge of the people, (2) the attraction of teaching what the pupils already know, (3) a tendency to borrow from the Germans, and (4) a criticism of the old without the establishment of new principles.' ⁸⁶ Tolstoy had strong ideas about how Russian children should be taught letter and syllable formation, and was adamant that the phonetic method that had been adopted from Germany was not practicable in Russia, and certainly not suitable for disadvantaged peasant children. In some respects, he was ahead of his time, as what he was advocating later became axiomatic in twentieth-century remedial education.⁸⁷ Tolstoy's ABC was eventually approved by the Russian government in September 1874. Even repackaged, it had continued to sell poorly, and Tolstoy complained that he made a loss of 2,000 roubles, ⁸⁸ but he was now keen to revise it.

To begin with, Tolstoy's plans for revision were minor, but typically for him, he ended up producing an almost completely new book. Something similar had happened with War and Peace, which he revised in 1873 for a new, third edition. His new frame of mind led him to turn six volumes into four, translate all the French text in the novel into Russian and place all his historical digressions into a separate epilogue. Strakhov was also instrumental in this project. For his New ABC, as it was now called, Tolstoy actually heeded his critics by providing an introduction and reducing the cost.⁸⁹ He wrote more than 100 new miniature stories, but by separating the 'ABC' section from the reading primer, he reduced the overall size of the book to ninety-two pages. It went on sale for a much more reasonable fourteen kopecks.⁹⁰ The New ABC proved to be as successful as the first edition had been a failure. It was published in February 1875, was swiftly recommended by the Ministry of Education, and became a best-seller, running into twenty-eight editions during Tolstoy's lifetime, with print runs of up to 100,000. Over a million copies had been sold by the time of his death. No other textbook was more widely read in pre-revolutionary Russia.⁹¹ The poet Anna Akhmatova was just one of scores of Russians who benefited from Tolstoy's child-centred approach in learning their alphabet. The new primer, now entitled Russian Books for Reading, was based on the texts used in the first edition and was published later in October 1875. Since most of the first book from the 1872 edition had gone into the New ABC, Tolstoy produced twelve new stories and fables for the first of the four parts.⁹² They proved equally popular with Russian children.

Tolstoy had conclusively proved that he wanted to improve the deplorable literacy levels in Russia, and that he cared deeply about Russian boys and girls of all classes discovering the joys of their native language when they learned to read. But what about his own children? What kind of a teacher was he to them? What was it like being used as a guinea-pig for his educational ideas? What was it like, indeed, growing up with a famous writer for a father? In October 1872 Tolstoy responded to Alexandrine's request that he for once tell her something about his children—for the most part, his letters to her, as to everyone else, concerned his current projects and intellectual preoccupations. It was indeed rare for Tolstoy to talk much about his family in his letters, and the thumbnail sketches he provides of his six children are thus often quoted.

Tolstoy described fair-haired Sergey, his eldest, as being bright, with a natural ability for mathematics and art. He was a good pupil, he told Alexandrine, and proficient in gymnastics, but rather gauche and absent-minded. Tolstoy was flattered to think Sergey reminded some people of his brother Nikolay, who had been famous for his lack of ego. Unlike Sergey, sensitive, pink-cheeked Ilya was always healthy, Tolstoy wrote, but he did not like studying much. Also unlike Sergey, he was a great original, and rather pugnacious, but at the same time he had a great capacity for tenderness, and had an infectious laugh. Tolstoy was confident that Sergey would excel in any environment, but he felt that Ilya would always need the strong leadership of someone he respected. Eight-year-old Tanya was very like her mother, Tolstoy wrote, and was already very maternal, liking nothing better than to take care of her younger siblings. Lev junior, then three and a half, he described as lithe, graceful and very capable, but for sickly little Masha, whom he described as 'very clever and unattractive', he foresaw a life of seeking and not finding. 'Skin white as milk, blonde curly hair; strange, large blue eyes—strange because of their deep, serious expression'—Tolstoy felt she would be a mystery to everyone. He openly confessed to Alexandrine that he found children in general hard to deal with until they were about three years old, but described Pyotr, the youngest, as a wonderful, bouncing six-month- old baby.⁹³

As Sonya later emphasised, her husband's work was always the most important thing in his life, ⁹⁴ and she would later actually reprove him for his neglect of the younger children when he became a full-time campaigner on behalf of the oppressed. He was the one to make all the decisions about how the children would be educated, however, and was a charismatic figure when they were growing up, all the more so because they saw him less. It was in the 1870s that Tolstoy was most active and involved as a father, particularly in the first half of the decade, before he became swept up by the writing of Anna Karenina and the spiritual crisis which immediately followed it. The elder Tolstoy children consequently received considerably more attention from their father than their younger siblings who grew up in the 1880s, as would become apparent in the case of Andrey and Misha, who later showed no interest whatsoever in living according to their father's teachings. The younger Tolstoy children also grew up with no memory of their parents being happily married, unlike the three eldest, who as adults all wrote revealing memoirs of their idyllic early years at Yasnaya Polyana.⁹⁵

Even though the Tolstoy children saw less of their father than their mother, his influence was certainly greater when they were young: his word was law. When they were very young, it was always an event whenever he appeared in the nursery, and throughout their childhood they cherished the times he spent with them. In the 1870s the Tolstoy children remembered their father still being full of joie de vivre, and somehow life became more interesting for them when he was present, as he seemed to possess a special energy. He hated to be disturbed while he was working, and insisted on complete peace and quiet, but at other times he was often in high spirits, with the exuberance of an overgrown child himself. As an aficionado of physical exercise and the benefits of being outdoors in the fresh air, he enjoyed taking his children riding, swimming and skating. Tolstoy was particularly keen that his sons take up gymnastics, but he was not at all keen on toys, which were banished from the nursery, forcing Sonya to produce horses and dogs out of cardboard, and sew rag-dolls herself so the children had something to play with. Tolstoy compensated for depriving his children of conventional playthings by granting them the greatest possible liberty. What he hated most of all in his children were lies and rudeness, and to see them eating from their knife; he punished their misdemeanours by simply ignoring them. The Tolstoy children found it impossible to lie to their father, and sometimes found it hard to face his steely gaze, as they were convinced he could read their thoughts. They never doubted his love for them, but since he regarded it as a weakness to exhibit tenderness towards his sons, he was not always demonstrative. Indeed, Ilya could not remember ever being caressed by his father. Tolstoy was always much more physically affectionate with his daughters.

With his own children, Tolstoy was a rigorous and exacting teacher, and it was sometimes hard keeping up with him (Tanya dreaded her maths lessons with her father as he could be very impatient). Not only did the word 'can't' not exist in his vocabulary, but he always went at a cracking pace, just like the fast trot he maintained on horseback. The Tolstoy children were taught by both their parents, with their father taking them for mathematics, Latin and Greek, while their mother was responsible for Russian and French lessons. Then there was a local priest who came twice a week to teach the Scriptures, a drawing teacher for Tanya later on, and a succession of resident tutors, several of whom were foreign. Since Tolstoy admired many aspects of British education, the first of the many tutors hired for the three eldest children was an English governess, Hannah Tarsey, who arrived in November 1866. Neither Tolstoy nor Sonya knew English well, so before her arrival they read their way through Wilkie Collins's A Woman in White.

Hannah Tarsey was the daughter of the gardener at Windsor Castle, and she arrived in Russia with her sister Jenny, who was taken on by another family. At nineteen, Hannah was only three years younger than Sonya. The two could not communicate at all at first, ⁹⁶ but she was hard-working and friendly, and was to become an adored member of the family. Soon she had the children on a regime of regular baths, and introduced the family to Christmas pudding and the custom of setting it alight (recipe no. 26 in Sonya's recipe book: 'Plump-puding'). Hannah obviously missed Sunday roasts at home in Berkshire, as she also tried out Yorkshire pudding on the Tolstoys (recipe no. 132: 'Pastry baked for Roast Beef'). Hannah threw herself into Russian life, and stayed with the Tolstoys for six years, but she suffered from poor health and at the end of the summer in 1872 left to become governess to the children of Sonya's sister Tanya in the Caucasus. Her health improved in the more temperate southern climate there and two years later she married into impoverished Georgian royalty by becoming the wife of Prince Dmitry Machutadze (and won over her in-laws by eventually making a success of the family's sheep-cheese business).⁹⁷ Fyodor (Theodor) Kaufmann was installed as the boys' tutor when Hannah left, and he gave all the children German lessons. He fell for the blonde and pretty Dora who replaced Hannah as the girls' governess, but she did not last long, as she proved incapable of exerting any authority. This was partly because Tolstoy had a golden-haired Irish setter of the same name (he liked to name his dogs after characters in novels by Dickens). That made it even harder for anyone to take Dora seriously. Then came Emily, who was quiet and serious and cried a lot.

The Tolstoy children saw far more of their tutors and governesses than they did their father, or even their mother, who was always busy sewing clothes for them or attending to domestic matters when she was not copying out manuscripts. Their upbringing was also influenced by other members of the populous household in which they lived, amongst whom were some eccentric characters. First of all there was the ageing Aunt Toinette in her cap and shawl, whose room was full of icons in silver frames that were polished by her maid Aksinya Maximovna, who by then was equally doddering. The children associated Aunt Toinette with the smell of cypress, and drawers in her commode full of gingerbread, which she would treat them to sometimes. She was kind, but the children found both her and her companion very dull. Natalya Petrovna always mumbled on about landowners, army officers and monasteries, and to Sergey she always seemed to speak as if she had a mouthful of kasha. Then there were all the servants—the family's former serfs. The most venerable of them was Agafya Mikhailovna, the old maid of Tolstoy's grandmother, who had in later years tended the sheep and worked as the family's housekeeper, and was now living on a pension on the estate. She was a tall, thin and slightly scary figure for the children when they were small, but she was a beloved member of the household, who before Tolstoy was married used to sit quietly by the samovar reading the lives of saints on cold winter evenings. She was affectionately known by everyone as the 'dog governess', as she lived, in a state of some squalor, with all the family's borzois and other hunting dogs. The small, round Maria Afanasievna Arbuzova, who was nanny to the five eldest Tolstoy children, was also greatly loved. She became housekeeper after Hannah arrived, and always spoiled the children, furtively giving them Persian dried apricots and other treats from the pantry. Both she and her two sons Pavel and Sergey, also trusted family servants, were very close to the Tolstoy children. Pavel later taught Tolstoy the art of cobbling, while Sergey became Tolstoy's personal servant after the faithful Alexey Ste-panov retired. The mild-mannered Alexey, for whom the children had a great respect, had originally been a Yasnaya Polyana house serf, and had accompanied Tolstoy to the Crimea. He was married to Dunyasha Bannikova, the daughter of Tolstoy's first tutor, and when Ilya was born in 1866, Tolstoy promoted him to become the estate manager. The Tolstoy children had deep connections to nearly everyone in the household. Evlampia Matveyevna, who had acted as Sergey's wet-nurse, for example, was the wife of the Yasnaya Polyana coachman Filipp Rodionov, who looked after the boys' ponies.

In order to accommodate their burgeoning family, as well as the foreign tutors, the Tolstoys were soon obliged to build a large new extension on to their house. They had built the first extension back in the summer of 1866, and at the end of 1871 they created a large new drawing room and dining room upstairs, and a study for Tolstoy downstairs, with a spacious wooden veranda outside for summer repasts.⁹⁸ The additions destroyed the symmetry of the two identical wings that had once flanked the manor house Tolstoy had sold to pay his gambling debts, but provided much-needed extra room. The second and final extension was completed in December 1871, and was ready for Christmas, which was always one of the most joyous times of year for the Tolstoy children. As well as supervising the scrubbing of floors and the hanging of pictures after all the painting and decorating was finished, Sonya retrieved from storage antique candelabras and old family tableware, as well as sewing masquerade costumes and gilding walnuts in preparation for the arrival of the family's guests just before midnight on Christmas Eve in three sleighs. More guests arrived the following day, and after the tree had been decorated there was ice-skating and tobogganing, with everyone collapsing of fits of laughter when they took a tumble or landed in a snowdrift. That year, as well as the seven Tolstoys plus Hannah, Aunt Toinette and Natalya Petrovna, there was Sonya's uncle Kostya, Tolstoy's aunt Polina and his nephew and nieces Kolya, Varya and Liza, plus the latter's husband Leonid Dmitrievich, Tolstoy's old friend Dmitry Alexeyevich Dyakov and his daughter Masha plus Sofya, her former governess and another visiting English governess, Katie—all in all, twenty sat down to dinner. Late into the evening, Uncle Kostya started playing a waltz, and soon everyone was dancing, followed by the hilarious spectacle of watching the rotund, red-bearded Dmitry Alexeyevich striking up a Cossack dance with Leonid Dmitrievich.

Christmas in Russia was about the only time the Tolstoy children were allowed toys. Tanya in particular cherished the dolls her godfather Dmitry Alexeyevich gave her—they were invariably called Masha, after his daughter, who turned sixteen in 1871, and whom she clearly idolised. Christmas was also the time for wearing masks, cross-dressing, and dressing up as animals, and the second day of festivities that year saw Tanya dressing up as a powdered Marquis in a long blue robe, accompanied by her brother Sergey as the Marquise. Ilya put on a red skirt, Katie transformed herself into a clown, Liza became a muzhik, and Sonya donned Russian national dress. Next came the appearance of Uncle Kostya and Kolya as the traditional dancing bears, led by Dmitry Alexeyevich in bast shoes, who was accompanied by a leaping goat whom the children gleefully recognised as their father.⁹⁹ This was one of the happiest times at Yasnaya Polyana, and also one of the last happy times.

When they were young, the elder children also used to look forward to the summer months when people came to visit. Their father's friends (such as Afanasy Fet and his wife, Sergey Urusov and Nikolay Strakhov) usually came to stay for a few days, but their aunt Tanya and their cousins Dasha, Masha and Vera, who were all under five in 1871, would take up residence in the other wing for over a month every summer. Sonya's younger brother Stepan ('Uncle Styopa') also spent every summer at Yasnaya Polyana from 1866 to 1878 while he was in his teens. Sometimes grandmother Lyubov came to stay (she was now living in Petersburg), and Aunt Polina would make regular visits from the convent in Tula which was now her permanent home. Summer had truly arrived after the buttercups appeared in the lawn in front of the house, and the children's summer clothes had been unpacked and no longer smelled of camphor. It was the time for picnics with the samovar by the stream under the shade of an oak tree, with the girls reading poems aloud. It was the time for mushroom gathering and evening bonfires, sometimes with the thrill of watching the express train speed by the nearby village of Kozlovka. Summer was also the time for jam-making, a ritual that took place every year in the garden under the lime trees, accompanied by clouds of bees and wasps buzzing overhead. Barefoot village girls would come up to the porch on hot afternoons bearing dishes full of mushrooms and strawberries to be exchanged for a few kopecks.

For the two elder Tolstoy boys, summer also meant taking a net into the fields to hunt for butterflies, or riding through oak woods and dewy glades full of forget-me-nots on their Kirghiz ponies, Sharik and Kolpik. If they were lucky, their father would accompany Sergey and Ilya on his English stallion, and more often than not they would tie them to the birch trees next to the bathing hut and go swimming in the pond. Used to having at least a shack to change in when she was growing up, Sonya had been shocked when she had first arrived at Yasnaya Polyana to discover there was nothing but the bare bank, but this was in keeping with Tolstoy's enthusiasm for living the natural life. When Sergey was a baby, Tolstoy also bought some unbleached linen in the village and ordered Sonya to make traditional peasant shirts with a skewed collar for him, like the ones he himself wore and became identified with (which later even came to be named the tolstovka after him). Sonya dutifully complied, but she also made little shirts out of her fine muslin blouses for Sergey to wear under the rough linen.¹⁰⁰

Just twice, in 1873 and in 1875, the Tolstoy family went away for their summer holidays, to their new estate out in the steppe of Samara province, over 500 miles away to the east. It was a huge adventure for the children, and an enormous undertaking for their parents. Tolstoy had made the trip several times already for health reasons: he was a great advocate of koumiss, the fermented mare's milk produced by the nomadic Bashkirs. He made his first trip to the steppe in the summer of 1862, before his marriage, and then returned in 1871 and 1872, leaving Sonya and the children at home. In 1871 he took Stepan Bers (now sixteen) and his old servant Vanya Suvorov with him, and was away for six weeks.¹⁰¹ At that time, there was no railway beyond Nizhny Novgorod, which was already two days away from Yasnaya Polyana, and just to get to the remote steppe village where Tolstoy undertook his koumiss cure required a two-day passage on a Volga steamer, and then a further two days of travel in a tarantass from Samara, which lay on the main highway to Central Asia. What awaited at the end of the journey was mile upon mile of scorched, treeless steppe, a round felt tent, an almost exclusive diet of mutton, and gallons of koumiss.

A primitive Bashkir village in the middle of nowhere was not every Russian's idea of the ideal health resort. Much more fashionable at that time was to go abroad, either to the German spas, or to the French Riviera. Those who wished to stay within the Russian Empire were also now spoiled for choice: they could enjoy the bracing sea air at a lido on the Baltic, take the waters at the resorts that had sprung up around the mineral springs in the Caucasus, such as Kislovodsk or Pyatigorsk, or patronise the increasingly popular seaside town of Yalta in the balmy Crimea, where the Romanovs vacationed. It had been a long time since Tolstoy cared for fashion, however, and he positively relished the lack of amenities, writing merrily to Sonya to tell her the complete absence of beds, crockery and white bread (food was consumed from wooden bowls without cutlery) would be more than her 'Kremlin heart' could stand.¹⁰²

The Bashkirs were originally nomadic horsemen from the southern Urals who lived between the Kama and Ural rivers, east of Samara. A Turkic-speaking Moslem people, they were forced to acknowledge Russian supremacy after the conquest of Kazan in the mid-sixteenth century, but then gradually found themselves becoming a minority as Russians and other ethnic groups from the Volga region settled in the lands they had for centuries believed belonged to them.¹⁰³ This was frontier territory for the Russians, who in the eighteenth century proceeded to build a line of forts from Samara to the new town of Orenburg, in preparation for advancing into Kazakhstan and beyond (Samarkand was conquered for the great White Tsar's new province of Turkestan in 1868). While the Bashkirs had been brutally subjugated by the middle of the eighteenth century, and their lands fully absorbed into the Russian Empire, they were given a special tax status and they tried to maintain their traditional way of life amongst the more numerous Russians who steadily colonised their fertile pastures. One of these Russians was Tolstoy.

Tolstoy might have poured a lot of his own money into publishing the first edition of his ABC, but he had large reserves from sales of War and Peace, and at this stage of his life he was eager to increase them. Bashkir land was very cheap, and Tolstoy had an eye to making a profitable deal by buying some land, and pocketing the proceeds of its cultivation. Two weeks after his arrival he made a decision to buy nearly 7,000 acres for a total cost of 17,500 roubles. He explained to Sonya by letter that with two good harvests he would recoup his investment, but that they would need to spend the following summer living there to make that possible. He described the hilly landscape to his wife as picturesque, although he admitted there were no trees, and he also acknowledged there was no shade at all, but to compensate there was 'steppe air, bathing, koumiss, and riding'. Tolstoy assured Sonya that he wanted her approval first, but he went ahead anyway, even before he had received her reply. As it happened, she was not at all enthusiastic: 'If it's profitable, that's your business, and I don't have an opinion on the matter. But it would have to be extreme necessity that would want to force a person to live in the steppe without a single tree for hundreds of miles, as one would never go there willingly, particularly with five children.'¹⁰⁴

In the summer of 1871 Tolstoy and his two companions lived in a huge Bashkirian kibitka (tent) belonging to the local mullah, with feather grass serving as flooring. It had formerly been a mosque, and featured a table and one chair, oats for the horses, a black dog and lots of hens who brought disorder, but also a regular supply of eggs. Tolstoy got up at dawn every day, he wrote to Sonya, and after three cups of tea, would go outside to watch the herds of horses coming back over the hills (about 1,000 of them, he reckoned). Then it was time to drink koumiss, produced in leather churns behind curtains by the Bashkir women, but served always by the men. Afterwards, he told Sonya, he would usually walk into the village to consort with other people who had come from Russia for the koumiss cure, including a Greek teacher who helped him read Herodotus. Sometimes there was some shooting (for bustard, ruff, and the occasional wolf), and there was always a great deal of hospitality from the Bashkirs they visited due to Tolstoy's aristocratic title. At the end of June Tolstoy and Stepan travelled fifty miles east, in a cart pulled by the horse he had bought for sixty roubles when he arrived, to Buzuluk, a town with several churches, mostly wooden houses and a bustling trade in grain, tallow and hides.¹⁰⁵ After spending a rough night at the halfway point in their exhausting journey across the steppe, Tolstoy slept soundly when they finally arrived—indeed, he slept so deeply he did not notice the bedbugs crawling all over him—but soon his mind was taken up with the colourful fair they had come to see. About a dozen different nationalities had converged to trade Kirghiz, Cossack and Siberian horses.

Tolstoy returned home to Yasnaya Polyana that year in high spirits, and in much better health, having gloried in the dry heat of the steppe, the clear air and bright skies. In the end he went back to Samara the following summer without Sonya, since she had just given birth to Pyotr (Petya), their sixth child, and as his companion he took with him instead Timofey Fokanov, a Yasnaya Polyana peasant, who was going to become the first manager of his property. This trip was more difficult in many respects. The harvest in 1871 had been very poor, but the harvest in 1872 was the worst in decades, causing problems which would only worsen the following year. Tolstoy was staying in a house rather than a tent this time—the house on his new khutor (homestead), but it left something to be desired. The first impression was very pleasant, he wrote to Sonya, although there was no water in the pond. He also admitted that the house was old and drab, and had only two rooms, but it would be absolutely fine for all of them, he reassured her brightly.¹⁰⁶ That summer Tolstoy was very preoccupied with his first ABC book, which was now finally being printed, so in the end he came back early, after only three weeks.

Whatever qualms Sonya had about living out in the steppe, she managed to suppress them the following summer, when the entire family headed east. In June 1873 sixteen members of the Tolstoy household gathered in the drawing room, shut the doors and sat in silence for a few moments to prepare for the journey ahead, then completed the ritual by getting up and crossing themselves. A caravan of carriages and carts then transported them to Tula to catch a train, and in Nizhny Novgorod they boarded the steamer for Samara. When they stepped on board, they already felt they were in Asia when they saw the exotic robes and skullcaps of the various Tatars and Persians travelling in third class, and particularly when they heard them speak. During a refuelling stop in Kazan, Tolstoy got off with the eldest boys, Sergey and Ilya, to show them where he used to live, and it was not until the boat had travelled several miles further down the Volga that Sonya realised they had failed to re-embark. As she notes in her autobiography, the captain would not have turned back for a 'mere mortal', but since Tolstoy was a count, it was different.¹⁰⁷ From Samara the family travelled in an enormous old carriage pulled by six horses, donated by Tolstoy's friend Urusov, which had been brought from Yasnaya Polyana. It was a long, hot and dusty journey, punctuated by a night spent at a peasant coaching inn. For the elder children, who slept outside on hay under the stars, and had never seen such a strange landscape, everything was a great novelty.

When they finally arrived, the Tolstoys had difficulty cramming themselves into the small and extremely basic residence on their new estate. In the end, Tolstoy and Stepan took up residence in a kibitka, and the boys and their German tutor slept in the barn. Sonya's qualms, it turned out, were fully justified. The dried dung used as fuel did not burn well, and smelled disgusting; there were clouds of flies everywhere during the day, while large black beetles would drop from the ceiling and start running all over the tablecloth as soon as the candles were lit. The only neighbours for miles around were Bashkirs and peasants. Sonya put on a brave face, however, and did her best to make sure everyone enjoyed their stay. Tolstoy was conscious they were all there because of him, and also did his best to keep everyone amused. He invited an elderly Bashkir to provide the koumiss that summer, which he had almost on tap. Muhammed Shah brought along his wives and daughters-in-law plus ten mares, and pitched his kibitka near to the Tolstoys' house. Every morning various members of the family, plus Hannah, who had come up from the Caucasus to join them, went to sit cross-legged on the carpets in the kibitka and drink from the wooden bowls proffered by Muhammed. The Bashkirs had not adapted well to leading sedentary lives, like the Russian settlers, and Muhammed spoke wistfully about the lands they had lost to peasant farmers from Tambov or Ryazan, who were distinguishable by the colour and styling of their clothes.

Tolstoy certainly derived health benefits from downing up to eight bowls of koumiss at a sitting, and he loved going to Orenburg and Buzuluk to the horse fairs, on one occasion buying a whole herd of wild steppe horses. But that summer he was preoccupied with the drought, and the famine in the area that was beginning to follow the third consecutive failed harvest. There was absolutely no prospect that his optimistic forecast of being able to recoup his investment in two years was possible now. Sonya egged him on to do something, and the new governor's staggering lack of concern goaded him into action.¹⁰⁸ Indeed, the new governor's only action was to put pressure on those peasants who were in tax arrears with the administration. Tolstoy spent two weeks travelling round each of the districts in a fifty-mile radius of his homestead in order to assess the problem, and then he put together a detailed inventory of twenty-three households in Gavrilovka, the nearest village. It included information about the number of cattle each family owned, the size of their property, how much they had sown and harvested that year and the extent of their debts. Then he sat down and wrote a letter to the editors of the Moscow Gazette to ask for the government and the public to come forward with aid. He also wrote to Alexandrine, asking her to raise the issue at court.

There was no area of Russia so dependent on the outcome of the harvest each year as Samara province, he wrote in his letter. Everywhere he had gone, he wrote, he had encountered the same situation: signs of approaching famine which threatened to engulf ninety per cent of the population in the province: 'There are no men anywhere, they have all gone off to look for work, leaving at home thin women, with thin and ailing children, and old people. There is still grain, but it is running out; dogs, cats, calves, and chickens are thin and hungry, while beggars keep coming up to the window and they are given tiny crusts or refused.'¹⁰⁹ Aware that the authorities' preferred course of action was simply to ignore this disaster (they had already tried to pin the blame for the approaching famine on the peasants by arguing it was due to their drunkenness and laziness), Tolstoy included in his letter all the data he had collected, verified in writing by the local priest, and endorsed with a stamp by the village elder, who of course was illiterate. His research had been very thorough:

1. Savinkin [household]. Old man of 65 and old woman, 2 sons, one married, 2 girls. 7 mouths to feed, 2 workers. No animals: no horse, no cow, no sheep. The last horses were stolen, the cow died last year, the sheep have been sold. They sowed eleven acres [last year]. Nothing grew, so there was nothing to sow [this year]. No stores of grain. Poll tax of 30 roubles due for the last two periods; for loans from last year 10 and a half roubles; private debt for borrowing train 13 roubles; total 53 and a half roubles...

19. Khramov [household]. Six mouths to feed and one baby, one worker. Animals: 2 horses, 3 cows, 5 sheep. Sown: 9 and a half acres and nothing has grown. Debt: 28 roubles and 48 kopecks...¹¹⁰

Tolstoy's letter was published on 17 August, while the family was travelling home to Yasnaya Polyana, and quickly reproduced in many other newspapers. It was the factual detail of Tolstoy's inventory which struck Russian readers, for he was not just warning of imminent tragedy on a large scale, but providing some of the very first statistical information about the peasantry ever collected. Liberal politicians in Europe had been championing the collection of empirical data from populations as a valuable tool of social progress since the early nineteenth century, but the spectre of politics had severely impeded the development of the new discipline of statistics in Russia. Nicholas I had been so cautious about Russian society being placed under the microscope (particularly where serfdom and state institutions were concerned) that he had simply censored a lot of statistical work. As a consequence, next to no statistical knowledge of the Russian peasantry was acquired prior to the Emancipation of Serfdom Act of 1861, despite peasants representing the vast majority of the population. Attitudes predictably changed in the 1860s, but it was not until the 1880s that poorly paid members of the intelligentsia began conducting censuses in villages on behalf of the zemstvo (local government), and it was not until 1897 that the first national census took place. Tolstoy's letter about the famine in 1873 caused a national outcry, and resulted in donations of nearly 2 million roubles and 344,000 kilograms of grain. Through these donations, which came both from central government and from the populace at large, much of the suffering was either prevented or alleviated. This was Tolstoy's first clarion call about the reality of many Russian peasants' lives, and it would not be his last.