Once he had formulated this idea, he could not get it out of his head. It suddenly became clear to him that literature, music, painting and sculpture were nothing but an amalgam of errors, false notes and dandified sophistication, bccausc they had not been demanded and endorsed by the masses. With iconoclastic zeal he set out to revile the works he had adored, solely and simply bccause Fyodka and Syomka
were unable to appreciate them. Instead of elevating the muzhiks to the level of art, he decided that art must immediately be brought down to them. What was the good of Shakespeare, Racine, Goethe, Rembrandt and Mozart if they bored the village idiot? "I became convinced," he wrote, "that a poem such as 'I remember the Marvelous Moment,'14 or a piece of music such as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, is less worthy of admiration than Vanka's song or the lament of the Volga boatmen, and that we do not like Pushkin and Beethoven because they are expressions of absolute beauty but because they flatter our hideously overstimu- lated sensitivities and our weakness. . . ." And further on: "Why are the beauty of the sun, the beauty of a human face, the beauty of a folksong, the beauty of an act of love or self-denial intelligible to all, without any special training?"10 Tolstoy saw a blinding proof that art, as defended by the aesthetes, was nonsense, in the following arithmetical observation: "We arc thousands and they arc millions."1® The artist must obey the law of the greatest number. Write what they want. And not write at all, if they do not want anything. After all, one could live perfectly well without writing. The people, whose very dirt was sacred, were sufficient unto themselves. They needed no one to satisfy their aspirations for work, pleasure, thought and creativity. Then what was the good of the Yasnaya Polyana school? Ah, but wait a minute! lie was not committing the sacrilege of teaching the children. They were simply being encouraged, with all due caution, to become aware of themselves. Future peasants were being taught the poetic significance of the peasantry. Tolstoy himself sometimes dreamed of abandoning his house and building himself an isba, of tilling the soil and marrying a village girl. "To marry a woman of society," he told his staff of teachers, "is to swallow all the poison of civilization."17 Ilis pupils, to whom he also announced his plan, took him quite seriously and began to look for a suitable fiancee among the girls of Yasnaya Polyana.18 Smiling tenderly, he made no effort to stop them; after all, he had already wanted to marry a Cossack maid, for love of the simple life.
On Shrove Tuesday 1862, blinis were served to all the children, followed by bonbons; for Easter they received lengths of brightly eolored cotton cloth, pencils and harmonicas and hats. Encouraged by his success, he opened more schools in the neighboring villages. Soon there were fourteen of them in the Krapivna district, which had a population of ten thousand. New teachers had to be recruited to guide all these souls: most of them were famished students who flocked in from Moscow with their heads full of revolutionary ideas. But Tolstoy was immovably opposed to politics. He wanted to reveal the people to themselves, not Herzen or Proudhon to the people. In a few hours of
conversation he converted the new arrivals to his theory of spontaneous learning. After listening to him, they went off and burned the subversive tracts they had brought along.19 "Civilization," he told them, "perverts healthy minds. And even though we are all products of civilization, we must not contaminate the common people with this poison; instead, we must purge ourselves through contact with them."-'0
To do this, each young man moved into a village in the heart of a rural community. The school was an isba, with lynches, a table and a board hut in which the teacher slept. Wages: fifty kopecks a month per pupil. General rule: love of children and hatred of constraint. Additional obligation: keep a diary. Tolstoy demanded that every teacher confess his faults, from time to time, in writing; he considered it an excellent exercise for the soul. After all, he had been practicing it all his life. Without much succcss, he did admit. But the habit had stayed with him. Setting the example, he wrote: "Bccamc confused. . . ." "I am the worst of all—I lose my temperl . . ." "Have tried to discover the rule for progress and could not."
Every Saturday he convened a meeting of the teachers at Yasnaya Polyana and discussed their experiments and results with them in such a relaxed manner that they were all perfectly at ease with him, and some felt something akin to veneration for him. They were subjugated by the forcefulness of his look and the heat of his voice. "The school is my whole life, my convent, my church," he said. Impossible to remain indifferent to this devil of a man! You arrived intending to pick up a few rubles without straining yourself and you found yourself ensnared in the devotional rule of a priesthood. The little peasants pried your affection, your strength, your very life out of you, merely by interrogating you with their candid eyes. When Tolstoy went to Moscow for a few days, Scrdobolsky, a student, wrote to him:
"You may rest assured that your cause has now become ours. . . . We are all impatient for you to come back. Without you, it isn't the same. It seems to me that our common task cannot go on without you to lead it, it needs the fire of your dedication. ... I do not know whether all the teachers love their work now, but I am convinced they all will come to love it as I do if they are capable of appreciating the poetry and enthusiasm that emanate from you when you are engaged in it. Therefore, do not deprive us of your presence for too long."
Forty years later, remembering his stay at Yasnaya Polyana, Markov, another of the teachers, wrote: "I have never met a man capable of firing another mind to such white heat. I11 the course of my spiritual relationship with him I felt as though electric sparks were striking into
the depths of my soul and setting in motion all kinds of thoughts and plans and decisions."
To gain a wider audience for his ideas Tolstoy founded a monthly review, Yasnaya Polyana, whose publication was authorized by the censor beginning in January 1862. The epigraph of this periodical was Goethe's aphorism: Glaubst zu schieben und wirst geschoben (You think you're leading and it's you being led).* Tolstoy filled the twelve issues of its existence, defrayed by him, with articles on his theory of education, accounts of the activities of the schools, and reading matter for children. The first number proclaimed the following noble principle: "In order to determine what is good and what is not, he who is being taught must have full power to express his dissatisfaction or, at least, to avoid lessons that do not satisfy him. Let it be established that there is only one criterion in teaching: freedom!"
Having dropped his bomb, he waited for the explosion. . . . There was none. A few Slavophil newspapers praised the new educationist for his confidence in the Russian people, a few liberal papers criticized him for allowing illiterates to choose their form of education; but on the whole, this woolly and inconsistent theory did not stir the public. But in official circles, important persons were pointing out the dangers of propaganda such as this. On October 3, 1S62 Valuycv, the minister of the interior, wrote to his colleague Golovin, the minister of education: "A close perusal of the educational review Yasnaya Polyana, published by Count Tolstoy, inclines me to think that by advocating new teaching methods and principles for the organization of schools for the common people, this periodical is spreading ideas which are not only false but dangerously biased. . . . The continued publication of the periodical would seem undesirable, especially as its author, who has remarkable and persuasive literary powers, is above all suspicion of criminal intention or dishonesty. What is harmful is the inaccuracy and eccentricity of his views which, set forth with exceptional eloquence, may be convincing to inexperienced teachers and may thus orient education in the wrong direction."