Upon receiving this letter the minister of education instructed one of his minions to look into Tolstoy's activities. A few days later he found a detailed and on the whole favorable report on his desk: 'To establish a simple, easy and independent relationship between master and pupil; cultivate mutual affcction and trust; free lessons from constraint and learning by rote; transform the school into a kind of family in which the teacher acts as parent: what could be better, more desirable and
* Spoken by Mephistopheles in Faust.
more profitable for all?" However, the anonymous author of this study criticized Tolstoy for dispensing the children from all work—work being "our whole life"—for relying upon their unformed taste as a criterion of quality in literature, and for flatly stating that Pushkin and Beethoven, for example, were inferior to ballads and old folk tunes.
After reading the report the minister of education transmitted it to the minister of the interior with the following comment: "I am bound to say that Count Tolstoy's educational activities command our respect and that it is the duty of the ministry of education to help and encourage him, although it does not share all of his ideas—which, moreover, he will undoubtedly abandon after more thorough investigation."
But lie did not know Tolstoy—although he soon stopped publishing the review and lost all interest in the school, his views on education never changed. In every field, he was determined to oppose administrative coercion. But oddly enough, although he clamored for liberal reforms, he did not stop to think that it was thanks to the existence of aristocratic prerogatives in Russia that he was able to carry out his educational experiments, and that if education were exclusively State- run, it would be impossible for him to teach the children of Yasnaya Polyana according to his own theories.
He was in Moscow when the first issue of the review came off the press. But it was not to complete his educational archives that he had gone there: the emulator of Rousseau, friend of the poor and spurner of civilization had suddenly felt a need to divert himself, to inhale the foul breath of the city. Besides, there were a few decent souls even among the pharisecs. On January 13, 1862 an unknown lady wearing a veil had come to his hotel and offered him a thousand rubiest for the relief of the poor. Moved to tears, lie thanked the donatress and sent the money to Yasnaya Polyana to be distributed among the needy- peasants—and a good thing it was, too, for a few days later he succumbed to his old weakness for gambling and lost exactly the same amount, to a penny, trying his luck at Chinese billiards with a passing officer. What would he have done had the veiled lady's thousand rubles been in his pocket at that moment? Better not think about it! His creditor gave him two days, on his word of honor, to pay his debt. Tolstoy went to Katkov, director of the Russian Ilerald, and offered him the rights to his forthcoming but still unfinished novel, The Cossacks, for 011c thousand rubles. He had been fussing over the manuscript for ten years, adding three lines here and cutting a chapter there. Cross his heart, it was a good story. It could be bought with com-
t Or $2830.
pletc confidence. 'I"he author undertook to deliver the corrected text toward the end of the year. Katkov accepted, the sum was paid over to the creditor, and Tolstoy wrote to his friend Botkin: "When all is said and done, this solution suits me down to the ground, for the novel, of which I've written over half, would otherwise have been left to rot and finally been used to stuff the cracks in the windows."
When Tolstoy told this tale to his friends the Behrs, the doctor's three daughters (Lisa, nineteen; Sonya, eighteen; Tatyana, sixteen) protested that it was madness, that the editor had certainly taken advantage of him. They flounced up and down the room and tears of indignation shone in their eyes. The oldest was quite pretty, serious, passionately interested in intellectual questions. Tolstoy had wondered several times whether it would not be sensible of him to many her. It seemed to him that she took special pains with her dress when he was coming to call. As for the parents, they were already regarding him with worried benevolence, as though they sensed a potential "fiancЈ" in him. Once again, when the idea of marriage assumed concrete form before his eves, he shied away: just then his nerves were more ragged than usual, his health was poor, his labors as teacher and arbiter of the peace had taxed him heavily, the air of Moscow was bad for him. He took an awkward leave of the Behrs family and fled to Yasnaya Polyana.
lie was relying on the country, the school and the children to restore his love of life, but in the spring his health grew worse, he started to cough blood. The specters of his two dead brothers began to haunt him. Tuberculosis! He went to Moscow to consult Dr. Behrs, either because he had confidence in him or, possibly, bccause he wanted to remove all doubt as to his desirability as a son-in-law. After examining him, Dr. Behrs agreed that his lungs were weak and advised him to go to Samara for a kumys treatment. Kumys—fermented and mildly carbonated mare's milk—was highly esteemed in Russia as a tonic. It was made by the Bashkir nomads. Those who went to take the cure lived on the steppe like the nomads, in felt tents or caravans. The idea of a change of scenery delighted Tolstoy: "I shall read no more newspapers, receive no more letters, forget what a book looks like, wallow on my back in the sun, drink kumys, gorge myself on mutton until I turn into a sheep myself, and then I'll be cured!"21 he told his intimates.
On May 19 he left Moscow by rail with his manservant Alexis and two of his pupils who had suspicious-sounding coughs. At Tver they boarded a ship and steamed down the Volga: it was the same trip Tolstoy had made ten years before, with poor Nicholas. Seeing the broad river again, its banks of green mist soaked by the spring floods, he should have felt old at the memory of his first trip. But the air was so bracing, the sun played on the wavelets, at night the stars shone pensively above the water, at every stop a crowd of passengers—dusty-faced pilgrims, bearded monks, muzhiks, Tatars—surged up the gangplank, and it was all so animated, variegated, so "Russian," that lie was unconsciously filled with joy. After a short stop at Kazan—to kiss old Uncle Yushkov —the travelers resumed their voyage in that state of contemplative serenity procured by detachment from the land.
On May 27 they disembarked at Samara and set off again by tarantas for Karalyk, over eighty-five miles across the steppe—an undulating prairie, crossed by little streams, punctuated by ponds, bristling with rocks and bushes. At last, Tolstoy was back in the wilds he so loved. Tic adopted the customs of the Bashkirs, moved into a round felt tent, ate mutton and dried horsemeat, steeped himself in kumys and "brick tea."$ With the old Bashkirs, he talked of times gone by, of different faiths, God, Christ and Mohammed; and with the young ones, he ran and leaped and wrestled. He was so strong that only one of the nomads could match him. 'The days and weeks sped past. His spirits high and his mind at peace, he sadly thought that he would soon have to return to civilization. But had he known what was going on at home during his absence, he would have left by the first dogcart.
On July 6 at dawn, while lie lay sleeping in his tent on the banks of the Karalyk, three swift troikas, their bells jangling for all they were worth, swirled up to the door of Yasnaya Polyana. The gaping peasants watched as a few grim-visaged officers climbed out of the coaches: Durnovo, colonel of the constabulary, who appeared to be directing operations; the chief of police of the Krapivna district, the chief of the rural police, constables. . . . Hearing the rackct, old Aunt Toinette and Marya Tolstoy, who was visiting at her brother's house, rushed into the hall, half-awake and half-dressed, and stopped short in amazement in front of the body of armed men. Colonel Durnovo curtly announced that he had come to search the house, "on orders from my superiors." The two women were thrust protesting back into their rooms. Police encircled the house and the search began. Cupboards, dressers, tables, chests, everything was turned upside-down. 'They had a wonderful time in the study, leafing through Tolstoy's manuscripts, reading his private diary and letters out loud, noting down the names of his correspondents, tapping the walls and floors in search of a secret hiding- place, breaking locks and ripping open the curtain linings. They pried up the flagstones in the stable. They also dragged the ponds, but netted only carp and crayfish, instead of the diabolical instruments they