I Iowcvcr, when she had the curious idea of sending him a photograph of herself wearing a kerchief (her head had been shaved after the puerperal fever), he could not hide his disappointment: "You looked old, too thin, and pitiful. Besides, after a separation, a portrait, even of the face of the person one more than loves (as I do you) is always a disillusionment. In my imagination I see you the way you are,
• Tolstoy's italics.
only better. But reality is never perfect. However, now I am reconciled to your picture and it is a great source of comfort to me."
Was it the kumys, the open air or the rough life in a tent? Little by little, he regained his balance. The heat was debilitating, but it was good to sweat under his shirt. He became friendly with his neighbors; urged on by him, the Greek professor became a devotee of rope-skipping; a surrogate judge told him law-court anecdotcs; a young landowner entertained him with hunting stories. His old love revived, he bought a dog and a horse and began to amuse himself shooting bustard and wild duck—the steppe was full of them.
Then, with Stcpan Behrs, he toured the surrounding villages and went as far as Buzuluk, where a fair was l>cing held. All the tribes in the region were pouring into the trading post. Tolstoy mingled with Russian muzhiks, Cossacks, Bashkirs and Kirghiz in tribal costume, and talked to them all. Not far from there he met the members of a religious sect, the Molokhans, or milk drinkers; he also went to sec an old hermit who lived in a cave and talked interminably about Holy Scripture. Suddenly he decided to buy a piece of property in the district of Samara. The land was dirt-cheap, and the climate was so bracing! The whole family would come, every summer. And there just happened to be a 67co-acrc tract for sale. Price: twenty thousand rubles.! The temptation was too great. Tolstoy notified his wife that he was about to make a very good deal and gave instructions to the notary.!
Invigorated by the kumys and the option he had taken on the land, he returned to Yasnaya Polyana on August 2, 1871; but at the sight of his wife and children, all the good effects of his treatment seemed to go up in smoke. He was enveloped in tragic indifference. Confronted by his lifeless mask, Sonya did not know what to do. "Lyovochka keeps saying that everything is finished for him," she wrote to her sister on September 15, 1871, "that he is soon going to die, nothing gives him pleasure any more and he wants nothing more out of life."
But then someone appeared to boost his morale: his admirer Strakhov arrived at Yasnaya Polyana, and Tolstoy blossomed anew under his shower of praise. This visit marked the beginning of an exalted correspondence between the two. "A spirit of light radiates from you as from everything you write," said Strakhov to Tolstoy. "It is my only wish to know you are well and happily writing." And, "The more I see you, the fonder I grow of you. ... Be assured that even if you never write another word, you will still be the most original and profound author in all Russian literature. When the Russian empire is no more, new
♦ Or $56,600.
JThc sale was concluded on September 9 that same year (1871).
nations will learn what the Russians were by reading War and Peace." Or, "You will not often meet another man who loves and understands you as I do." He said that for him, Yasnaya Polyana was "like Mecca."11 Tolstoy, however, did not always agree with his admirer's theories. For Strakhov, who had just published a philosophical work entitled The World as a Totality, man was the center of creation and the most highly developed product of nature. "The zoological perfection of man, on which you lay such stress," wrote Tolstoy, "is extremely relative, for the very reason that man himself is the judge of it. The housefly is just as much the center and pinnacle of creation." Also, he could not agree that the goal of man was a sort of organic supremacy, as Strakhov claimed. In his opinion, man's purpose on earth was to strive to elevate his soul by obeying ethical laws, practicing the great religions (Christian or Buddhist) and seeking the good.
It was undoubtedly these ideas that led him back to his pedagogical schemes, which he had abandoned since 1863. While in Moscow in 1868, he had met Skyler, the American Consul there, who had told him about the teaching methods employed in his country and given him some textbooks: The First, Second and Third Readers. From 1870 to 1872, using them as a basis, Tolstoy worked on a series of Readers of his own. This work, seven hundred and fifty-eight pages long, is divided into four parts and contains two hundred short, casy-to-undcrstand stories (anecdotcs about Tolstoy's dogs, adaptations of Chinese and Persian tales, translations of Aesop's Fables, folk legends, episodes based on Les Mistrables, sample pages from Plutarch, ctc.). As a supplement to the literary section the author presented a new method for learning arithmetic. ("The last few days I have worn myself out trying to finish the section on arithmetic. I have finished multiplication and division and am almost done with fractions."12) He even developed a passion for astronomy, and spent whole nights examining the stars. This titanic labor in an unfamiliar field exhausted him. "If these articles have any merit, they will owe it to the simplicity and clarity of the drawing, the line—that is, the language,"13 he wrote to Strakhov. And to his aunt Alexandra, "As for the Reader, my ambitious dream is as follows: for two generations every Russian child, imperial prince or muzhik, should learn with this book, should receive his first impressions of poetry from it, and I, having written it, should be allowed to die in peace."14 As a friendly gesture, Strakhov offered to correct the proofs. Tolstoy hoped the Reader would bring in more money, which he needed to consolidate his family's position and buy more land. But he was afraid that professional teachers would be exasperated by the book.
which was so contrary to all their traditions. If he did not sell 3600 copies by the end of the year, it would be a "financial fiasco."
"When I brought out War and Peace," he wrote to Strakhov, "I knew the book was full of faults, but I was sure it would be exactly as successful as it was; now, publishing my Reader, I know it has hardly any faults and is far superior to every other textbook of the same type, but I am not expecting it to have anything like the success a textbook ought to have."16 He was right. Most critics were opposed to the "aberrant" educational system he advocated. His daring to condemn phonetic reading, which was just beginning to become popular in Russian schools, causcd much indignation. P. M. Polevoy, in the St. Petersburg News, said it was criminal to affirm that a pupil who was sincerely convinced that the earth was held up by "water and fish" showed sounder judgment than one who knew the earth turned on its axis but was incapable of understanding or explaining the phenomenon. "It is a pity," he wrote, "that the talented author of so many admirable works, the pride of Russian literature, should waste his energy composing a Reader such as this, which must have taken him a long time and will certainly not be used in our schools." Other journalists were scornful of the false simplicity of the subject matter, the lack of style, the moralizing pretentiousness of the whole book. However, public, tutors and families gradually began to take an interest in it, new printings followed in rapid succession and, when he was taking stock at the end of his life, Tolstoy found that nearly a million copies of this much-maligned book had been sold.