Before he had even completed his Readers, he wanted to try out his new system of education 011 his usual guinea-pigs: the little muzhiks of Yasnaya Polyana. He opened a school, this time inside the main house instead of the nearby pavilion. Thirty-five local children attended. The teachers were himself, his wife, his son Sergey (age eight) and his daughter Tanya (age seven). The countess soon produced another son (June 13, 1872), Petya. Tolstoy had become a habituЈ of the delivery room and was quite unmoved by this succession of births—he told the news to Strakhov between parentheses: "I am deep in my papers and would have finished today except for my wife's confinement (she gave birth yesterday, a boy). I shall send you the manuscript, etc., in the next few days."16
No mere family occurrence seemed able to tear him away from his teaching. The flock of peasant children gathered anywhere, in the hall, the dining room, under the stairs, in the new study the author had built for himself. A characteristic odor of greased leather and damp goatskin rose from the squirming little group. As he had done ten years before, the count reigned in wide-eyed wonder over his covey of chcrubim with runny noses and dirty hands. The same lack of constraint as in the past, the same familiarity in relations between teacher and pupils. They all talked at once, answered at random, laughed and enjoyed themselves, and learned like birds peeking seeds. "When I see these tattered, underfed, unwashed youngsters with their candid eyes from which the soul of an angel often shines out, a feeling of apprehension and horror comcs over me, as though I were watching someone drown," he said.
To demonstrate the virtues of his method, he invited a dozen schoolteachers to spend a week at the school. A group of totally illiterate children were imported for the test from the hamlets of Telyatinki and Grumond. The object was to see how long it would take them to learn to read and write, using the Reader, and the results were apparently conclusive. Encouraged, Tolstoy began to think seriously of founding a sort of secondary school for peasant children who wanted to continue their education without changing their way of life—a laptis university, was the expression he used:0 higher mathematics and foreign languages for every farmhand. The only thing he lacked was capital. The marshal of nobility of the province, D. F. Samarin, whispered in Tolstoy's ear that the local zemstvo had a grant of thirty thousand rubles for educational purposes. Allured by the prospcct of a subsidy, the author-teacher, who had hitherto strenuously avoided all administrative functions, stood for and was duly elected to the zemstvo. But the actual amount of the grant was only ten thousand rubles and the majority voted that it should be used for fellowships for pupils at the Tula Girls' School in homage to Catherine the Great, civilizer of Russia.f
Tolstoy was undaunted by this setback. Going over his opponents' heads, he dccidcd to defend his educational system before the Moscow "Society for the Education of the People." On the day of the debate he marched into the committee room, where thirty-one professors were seated, as though it were the lion's den; the lions, however, were an elderly and, for the most part, affable lot. After a few growls of protest at the disturbance, they decided that his method would be "tried out" on illiterate factor)' workers in a Moscow school. But it was so hot on the day of the test that the laborers, dripping with perspiration, remained deaf to all their instructor's exhortations. This experiment hav-
• Laptis arc shoes made from woven linden baik, worn by Russian peasants.
I Tolstoy's first biographer, Birvukov, was mistaken when lie sai d the sum of thirty thousand rubles coveted by tfie author had been used for a statue commemorating one of the empress's edicts.
ing proved inconclusive, two factory schools were then selected; the phonetic method was taught in one and the Tolstoy method in the other. At the end of seven weeks a special committee found that the first group was, on the whole, "more advanced" than the second. But no decision was taken, the question was left in mid-air, and Tolstoy resigned himself to continuing his crusade in the press. His "Open Letter to Chairman Shatilov," affirming that "freedom is the sole criterion in pedagogy'," appeared in Fatherland Notes and provoked the ire of some and the admiration of others. At the same time, he was working on a second Reader, the purpose of which, as he stated in the preface, was to "give the pupils, for the smallest price, the greatest quantity of comprehensible material, arranged progressively . . ." He felt as though he were waging a single-handed battle with every bureaucrat in the empire. In 1872 he had time for only a short trip to Samara, to inspect the farm he had bought the previous year and gulp down a few IjowIs of foaming kumys.
Upon his return, there was a fresh collision with the administration. While he was away, a Yasnaya Polyana shepherd had been killed by a young bull. Thereupon, some little greenhorn "who pretended to be an examining magistrate" came to interrogate Tolstoy on the circumstances of the incident and even 011 the particulars of his identity and marital status. Tolstoy took 011 a rather haughty tone, whereupon the greenhorn had the effrontery to ask him whether he was the legitimate son of his parents and presented him with a statement to sign, to the effect that he promised on his honor not to leave Yasnaya Polyana until the investigation was over. To hear this underling talk, it was the owner of the bull who was responsible for the shepherd's death. The judge's deputy was to decide within a week whether to maintain or drop the charge. Tolstoy saw red. A week! Everyone knew that that week could go on for months, years! He, Count Leo Tolstoy, confined to his estate for years! Or, worse yet, dragged into court! lie already saw himself in a tattered shirt lying on the straw pallet in his cell. A miscarriage of justice. A scandal. A crime against humanity! I11 his fury he forgot all about the dead shepherd. If anyone was to be pitied in this business, it was he, Leo Tolstoy, and he alone. As usual, Alexandra Tolstoy, as representative of the court, was the first to hear his grievances.
"With my gray beard and my six children," he wrote, "with my consciousness of living an industrious and useful life, with my firm conviction that I am not guilty, with a contempt I cannot hide for the modem form of justice, with my sole desire to be left in peace as I leave others in peace, I consider it impossible for me to remain in
Russia. . . . You will read the whole story in the press; I shall die of rage if I cannot relieve myself by making it public. ... If I do not die of rage and grief in the prison into which they are undoubtedly going to throw me (I have had proof of their hatred for me), I have decided to emigrate to England for the rest of my days, or at least for as long as personal liberty and honor are not safe here. My wife approves of my plan. She loves everything English. It will be ideal for the children. I shall have enough money: if I sell everything, I shall have nearly two hundred thousand rubles."!
And he enlarged upon his scheme, in deadly earnest: first, the family would settle near London; then they would choosc some pleasant little town by the sea and buy land somewhere in the vicinity, as in Russia. English peasants would do the farming, just as the muzhiks did here. The main tiling was to have an entry into the aristocracy. "For that you can be very useful to me," he went on to Alexandra. "Two or three letters of recommendation would suffice to open the doors of English high society to us. It is essential for the children, who will grow up there."17
To impress the pious Alexandra, he added that he was suffering from his own anger and had just tried to calm himself by reciting a paternoster and thirty-seven psalms, but to no avail. Knowing her nephew's penchant for exaggeration, the old maid of honor did not attach too much importance to his fulminations. Besides, she had little time to act, for a second letter from Tolstoy arrived four days later, announcing that everything had been cleared up: lie had l>ecn given assurance that the charge would not be pressed, the president of the court had apologized for the incident and, in short, everything was back to normal; Russia had become habitable again. "Forgive me if I have worried you," he wrote to Alexandra, "but it wasn't my fault. This month I have been tormenting myself as never before in my entire life and, with proper male selfishness, I wanted everybody else to be tormented along with me."18 A few months later a second shepherd was fatally injured at Yasnaya Polyana, by a mad bull. Tliis time Tolstoy himself nursed the man for three days, but in vain, and he confessed that the man's death weighed on his conscience.