among the writers of his own generation. His breach with Turgenev
is well known. He was even remoter from the other litterateurs; he
liked Nekrasov better than his poetry; but then Nekrasov was an
editor of genius and admired and encouraged Tolstoy from his earliest
beginnings.
,,
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R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S
The sense o f the contrast between life and literature haunted
Tolstoy. It made him doubt his own vocation as a writer. Like other
young Russians of birth and fortune, he was conscience-stricken by
the appalling condition of the peasants. Mere reflection or denunciation seemed to him a way of evading action. He must act, he must start with his own estate. Like the eighteenth-century radicals he
was convinced that men were born equal and were made unequal by
the way in which they were brought up. He established a school for
the boys of his village; and, dissatisfied with the educational theories
then in vogue in Russia, decided to go abroad to study western methods
in theory and in practice. He derived a great deal from his visits to
England, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany-including the
title of his greatest novel. But his conversations with the most advanced
western authorities on education, and observation of their methods,
had convinced him that these methods were at best worthless, at worst
harmful, to the children upon whom they were practised. He did not
stay long in England and paid little attention to its 'antiquated' schools.
In France he found that learning was almost entirely mechanical-by
rote. Prepared questions, lists of dates, for example, were answered
competently, because they had been learnt by heart. But the same
children, when asked for the same facts from some unexpected angle,
often produced absurd replies, which showed that their knowledge
meant nothing to them. The schoolboy who replied that the murderer
of Henri IV of France was Julius Caesar seemed to him typical : the
boy neither understood nor took an interest in the facts he had stored
up: at most all that was gained was a mechanical memory.
But the true home of theory was Germany. The pages which
Tolstoy devotes to describing teaching and teachers in Germany rival
and anticipate the celebrated pages in War and Ptact in which he
makes savage fun of admired experts in another field-the German
strategists employed by the Russian army-whom he represents as
grotesque and pompous dolts.
In Yasnaya Po/ypna, a journal which he had had privately printed
in 1 861-2, Tolstoy speaks of his educational visits to the west and, by
way of example, gives a hair-raising (and exceedingly entertaining)
account of the latest methods of teaching the alphabet, used by a
specialist trained in one of the most advanced of the German teachers'
seminaries. He describes the pedantic, immensely self-satisfied schoolmaster, as he enters the room, and notes with approval that the children are seated at their desks, crushed and obedient, in total silence,
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TOLSTOY AND E N L I G HTENMENT
as prescribed by German rules of behaviour. 'He casts a look round the
class, and knows already what it is that they ought to understand; he
knows this, and he knows what the children's souls are made of, and
much else that the seminary has taught him.' He is armed with the
latest and most progressive pedagogic volume, called Das Fischbuch. It
contains pictures of a fish.
'What is this, dear children?' 'A fish,' replies the brightest. 'No.'
And he will not rest until some child says that what they see is not a
fish, but a book. That is better. ' And what do books contain?' 'Letters,'
says the boldest boy. 'No, no,' says the schoolmaster sadly, 'you really
must think of what you are saying.' By this time the children are
beginning to be hopelessly demoralised : they have no notion of what
they are meant to say. They have a confused and perfectly correct
feeling that the schoolmaster wants them to say something unintelligible-that the fish is not a fish-that whatever it is he wants them to say, is something they will never think of. Their thoughts begin to
stray. They wonder (this is very Tolstoyan) why the teacher is wearing
spectacles, why he is looking through them instead of taking them off,
and so_ on. The teacher urges them to concentrate, he harries and
tortures them until he manages to make them say that what they see
is not a fish, but a picture, and then, after more torture, that the
picture represents a fish. If that is what he wants them to say, would
it not be easier, Tolstoy asks, to make them learn this piece of profound
wisdom by heart, instead of tormenting them with the Fischhuch
method, which so far from causing them to think 'creatively', merely
stupefies them?
The genuinely intelligent children know that their answers are
always wrong; they cannot tell why; they only know that this.is so;
while the stupid, who occasionally provide the right answers, do not
know why they are praised. All that the German pedagogue is doing
is to feed dead human material -or rather living human beings- into
a grotesque mechanical contraption invented by fanatical fools who
think that this is a way of applying scientific method to the education
of men. Tolstoy assures us that his account (of which I have only
quoted a short fragment) is not a parody, but a faithful reproduction
of what he saw and heard in the advanced schools of Germany and in
'those schools in England that have been fortunate enough to acquire
these wonderful . . . methods'.
Disillusioned and indignant, Tolstoy returned to his Russian estate
and began to teach the village children himself. He huilt schools,
..
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R U S S I AN T H I N K E R S
continued to study, reject and denounce current doctrines of education,
published periodicals and pamphlets, invented new methods of learning
geography, zoology, physics; composed an entire manual of arithmetic
of his own, inveighed against all methods of coercion, especially those
which consisted of forcing children against their will to memorise
facts and dates and figures. In short, he behaved like an original,
enlightened, energetic, opinionated, somewhat eccentric eighteenthcentury landowner who had become a convert to the doctrines of Rousseau or the abbe Mably. His accounts of his theories and experiments fill two stout volumes in the pre-revolutionary editions of his collected works. They are still fascinating, .if only because they contain
some of the best descriptions of village life and especially of children,
both comical and lyrical, that even he had ever composed. He wrote
them in the 1 86os and 70s when he was at the height of his creative
powers. His overriding didactic purpose is easily forgotten in the
unrivalled insight into the twisting, criss-crossing pattern of the
thoughts and feelings of individual village children, and the marvellous
concreteness and imagination with which their talk and behaviour,
and physical nature round them, are described. And side by side with
this direct vision of human experience, there run the clear, firm
dogmas of a fanatically doctrinaire eighteenth-century rationalistdoctrines not fused with the life that he describes, but superimposed upon it, like windows with rigorously symmetrical patterns drawn