Tolstoy also had the freedom to undertake trips elsewhere. Apart from his nightmare experience in Arzamas, he had enjoyed lifting his gaze to the tops of the tall pine trees as he travelled through the dense forests of the Penza region in the autumn of 1869. After crossing the Sura river, teeming with sterlet, he also relished the region’s distinctive pebbled black earth. Like the local population, it reminded him of the mighty ploughman of Russian folklore Mikula Selyaninovich, the traditional peasant symbol of Russian strength and the hero of the medieval epics he had been reading.36 In the summer of 1871 Tolstoy went further afield and lived like a Bashkirian nomad again out on the steppe east of Samara. The plan was that Sonya would go too the following year, but by autumn she discovered that she was pregnant again. Writing despondently to tell her sister Tanya about it that October, she spoke about the mud and the monotony, and how having a sixth child would mean having to stay put the following summer: ‘it will be impossible to go to Samara, it will be impossible to come and visit you, we’ll have to take on another nanny, and so on and so forth’.37 By copying out War and Peace, Sonya felt she was involved, and was contributing to her husband’s creative work, albeit in a very minor way, so it is understandable that she was keen for him to start writing a new book. But a 700-page ABC book was not exactly what she had in mind.
Tolstoy literally went back to basics for his next book. From sophisticated fiction about Russian aristocrats and lofty philosophising about history, he turned to helping children learn to read: the first of the four volumes of his ABC begin with the thirty-five letters of the Cyrillic alphabet in large type. He was never short of new ideas for novels, but what was the point of executing them when the vast majority of the population could not even read? He had been carried along by momentum when he was writing War and Peace, but after finishing it he was drawn ineluctably back to the path he had been treading before he had got married. Educating the people once again loomed into Tolstoy’s field of vision, and he regarded the ABC he published in 1872 as the culmination of thirteen years of working towards this goal.
If Tolstoy’s thoughts turned back to questions of teaching and learning in the early 1870s, it was because he certainly still cared deeply about the cause of popular education, but he was also thinking closer to home: his own children. The Tolstoys’ eldest son Sergey was seven when Masha was born in 1871, Tanya was six, Ilya was nearly five and Lev approaching two. Tolstoy may have not been very interested in his children when they were babies, and for much of the 1860s he was preoccupied with War and Peace, but he naturally had very strong ideas about how he wanted his children to be educated, and as soon as they got to school age, he wanted to be involved. He was adamant that his children were to be home-educated, as he had been, and that both he and his wife would give instruction. This was when he discovered the inadequacies of the textbooks available at the time. Tolstoy believed that texts for children learning to read should be comprehensible, varied and interesting, but too many books, he found, were either insufferably dull or too far removed from life. Naturally, he resolved to write a much better textbook himself, and because he was Tolstoy, the most Russian of all Russians, it became an enormous, ambitious project involving the entire family, aimed not just at the junior Tolstoys but at all Russian children learning to read.
Tolstoy put a great deal of thought into the compilation of his ABC (Azbuka) and reading primer. He first planned on publishing these separately, but then combined them into one volume, sub-divided into four books of progressive difficulty. Half of each book was given over to stories, fables and scientific explanations. The other half was split between extracts from the Scriptures, the lives of saints and Russian chronicles (in Church Slavonic and in modern Russian) and the rudiments of mathematics, followed by instructions to teachers. He had first jotted down the idea for a ‘First Book for Reading and an ABC for Families and Schools with Instructions to the Teacher by Count L. N. Tolstoy’ as a diary entry in September 1868, at the time of Eugene Schuyler’s visit.38 While they had been rearranging Tolstoy’s library, Schuyler had noticed the top shelf began with the German writer Berthold Auerbach, which had led to a discussion of the latter’s weighty novel A New Life. Tolstoy took it down from the shelf and told Schuyler to go away and read it, explaining that this was the book which had prompted him to start his Yasnaya Polyana school. When Schuyler happened to meet Auerbach while travelling in Germany after his visit to Yasnaya Polyana, he mentioned this conversation to him, and Auerbach recalled Tolstoy well, saying: ‘Yes, I always remember how frightened I was when this strange-looking man announced he was Eugen Baumann, as I feared he was going to threaten me with an action for libel and defamation of character.’39 Tolstoy’s conversations with Schuyler in 1868 had resuscitated his interest in popular education, and when he came to start the practical work of compiling his ABC in the autumn of 1871, he consulted a wide variety of textbooks and theoretical works by foreign educationalists such as Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, as well as several American primers that Schuyler had procured for him.
As it turned out, the years immediately following War and Peace were a fallow period only in a manner of speaking, as before Tolstoy got to work on his ABC, he reminded himself of the learning process by taking up ancient Greek. This was partly so he could teach his son Sergey, to whom he wanted to give a classical education,40 but also so he could produce his own translations of Aesop’s fables for his ABC.41 Since the Cyrillic alphabet is based on the Greek one, many letters are familiar, which gives Russians a head-start, but the idiosyncrasies of Greek grammar are not for the faint-hearted. Tolstoy was not a typical pupil, however. At the beginning of December 1870 he invited a seminarist from Tula to come up to Yasnaya Polyana and give him some lessons, and by the end of the month he was already spending whole days reading Greek literature in the original. He began with The Anabasis, Xenophon’s account of the campaign led by Cyrus and his army of 10,000 Greek mercenaries against the Persian ruler Artaxerxes II in the fifth century BC. Tolstoy found it thrilling to be able to read and understand on his own, and Greek became his latest obsession. ‘I’m completely living in Athens,’ he wrote to his friend Fet. ‘I speak in Greek in my dreams.’42 No sooner had Sonya recovered from puerperal fever in March 1871 than he graduated to Plato and Homer, producing his own translations of parts of The Iliad, which he compared to the best-known Russian version completed by Nikolay Gnedich in 1829. A few months later, en route for the steppe that summer, he was reading unprepared texts à livre ouvert with Pavel Leontiev, professor of classical philology at Moscow university, whom he even showed up on a few occasions.43