May 26, and the local landowners heaved a sigh of relief. But their trials were not yet over. Although Tolstoy was no longer directly concerned in their litigations, his attitude toward the muzhiks, which was held up as an example, prolonged his nuisance value. Even his pedagogical activities were suspect—he was probably training a generation of malcontents in that school of his at Yasnaya Polyana!
The school, which he had reopened with a few young teachcrs selected and paid by himself, was now located in a small, two-story building next to their own house; two rooms for classes, two for the teachers, and one used as a study. A bell and bell-rope hung under the porch roof. Gymnastic apparatus had been installed in the downstairs vestibule; in the upstairs hall, there was a carpenter's bench. A schedule- purely symbolic, since the motto of the establishment was "Do as you like!"—was posted 011 the wall.
At eight in the morning a child rang the bell. Half an hour later, "through fog, rain, or the slanting rays of the autumn sun," the black silhouettes of little muzhiks appeared by twos and threes, swinging their empty arms. As in the previous years, they brought no books or notebooks with them—nothing at all, save the desire to learn. The classrooms were painted pink and blue. In one, mineral samples, butterflies, dried plants and physics apparatus lined the shelves. But no books. Why books? The pupils came to the classroom as though it were home; they sat where they liked, on the floor, on the window- ledge, on a chair or the corner of a table, they listened or did not listen to what the teacher was saying, drew near when he said something that interested them, left the room when work or play called them elsewhere—but were silenced by their fellow pupils at the slightest sound. Self-imposed discipline. The lessons—if these casual chats between an adult and some children could be called that—went on from eight- thirty to noon and from three to six in the afternoon, and covered every conceivable subject from grammar to carpentry, by way of religious history, singing, geography, gymnastics, drawing and composition. Those who lived too far away to go home at night slept in the school. In the summer they sat around their teacher outdoors in the grass. Oncc a week they all went to study plants in the forest.
As a disciplc of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Tolstoy wanted to believe that human nature was basically good, that all evil was a product of civilization and that the teacher must not smother the child under the weight of learning, but must help him, little by little, to shape his own personality. He was even tempted to believe that the stonier the ground, the more chance there was of a rich harvest. Thus Russia, being backward, would inevitably produce more geniuses in the years to come than more advanced countries. There might well be a Lomonosov, Pushkin or Tolstoy among the schoolboys at Yasnaya Polyana, asking only to be brought to life. One must take heed, when planting seeds in these virgin minds—meditate upon the teachings of Montaigne, who said that the main goals in education were "equality and freedom." At all times, start at the opposite pole from the German, French and English methods. Innovate, Russianize! . . .
However hard Tolstoy tried to keep him down, the man of letters kept pushing through the pedagogue. In his inspirational form of teaching, with no curriculum, no punishment and no rewards, he tried to put himself on the level of his young audience, marveled at their every word and solemnly noted, "Should the muzhiks' children learn to write from us, or should we learn to write from them?" He proposed that the group improvise a tale on the theme of a Russian proverb: "He feeds a man with a spoon and then pokes the handle in his eyes." Hie children stared at him blankly. "Suppose," he explained, "a peasant gives shelter to a pauper and then tries to hold his good deed over the other man's head. He will have fed him with a spoon and poked the handle in his eyes." Then, to show them how a story was told, he wrote out the beginning himself. The children leaned over his shoulder and began to dictate: "No, not like that! . . ." "Make him just an ordinary' soldier! . . ." "It would be better if he stole them! . . ." "There has to be a wicked woman in it! . . ." The two most gifted boys were Syomka and Fyodka. Taking down their dictation, Tolstoy felt that he was drinking from a well of truth. This exalting collaboration continued from seven until eleven o'clock in the evening. The children spent the night in Tolstoy's study. Fyodka, overexcited, his eyes feverish and his hands trembling, could not go to sleep. "I cannot describe the emotion, the joy and fear I felt that evening," wrote Tolstoy. "I saw a new world of delight and suffering rising up before him [Fyodka]: the world of art. It seemed to me I had witnessed what no one has the right to see: the opening of the mysterious flower of poetry. ... I felt such joy because, all of a sudden, by sheer chance, 1 saw unveiled before my eyes that philosopher's stone I had been seeking in vain for two years: the art of learning to express one's thoughts. I felt fear because that art created new demands, a flood of desires foreign to the world in which, I believed at first, the pupils lived."12
To interest them in the history of their country he told them his version of the campaign of 1812. The boys' patriotism awoke immediately. They interrupted him with vengeful exclamations: "Alexander'll show that Napoleon!" "Not so hot, Kutuzov; what's he waiting for?"
The burning of Moscow was unanimously approved, there was applause at the retreat of the Grande Armee. It was all Tolstoy could do to wrest a crumb of compassion from his audience for "the frozen French." He probably did not insist upon it, moreover. That evening the German teachcr Keller, who had been listening, reproachcd him for his chauvinism. Tolstoy conceded that he had taken a few liberties with historical truth in order to capture his pupils' attention; but after all, it was no crime to heighten the colors a little, sound the trumpets and the drums. ... lie was better inspired when, on walks in the country, he described the customs of the Caucasians and Cossacks, their merciless combats, Shamil's exploits and the wiles of Hadji Murad. Fyodka gripped two fingers of Tolstoy's hand inside his own and stammered, tripping over his feet, his eyes fixed on his teacher, "Again! There! That's the way!" Occasionally, an argument broke out. "What good is singing or painting?" "What good is a tree if you don't cut it down?" Leo Tolstoy explained, like God the Father, that the good of a tree consisted first of all in its beauty. Another question suddenly dropped into the group like a brick into a pond: "What good are the classes of society?"
The children pondered together and, after a moment, Tolstoy delightedly recorded the following reply:
"Peasants till the soil, house-servants serve their masters, merchants do business, soldiers do their scrvice, coppersmiths make samovars, priests say mass, and gentlemen do nothing!"
Enchanted by the quick wits of his young disciples, Tolstoy tried to interest them in Russian literature. Pic read Pushkin and Gogol to them. Alas, the simple, harmonious verse and rich prose left them cold. Their master should have concluded that they were not ready to savor their country's great authors. But he instinctively wanted the people to be right and the upper classes wrong. If anyone was wrong, it could not be the peasant who was pure by definition; still less a peasant's child, purest of the pure. "Perhaps they do not understand and do not want to understand our literary language," he wrote, "simply because our literary language is not suited to them and they are in the proccss of inventing their own literature."18