While he was living on a diet of fermented mare’s milk out on the steppe in a Bashkirian felt tent, the news that Count Tolstoy had learned Greek in three months became the talk of the town in Moscow.44 Tolstoy was by now reading Herodotus, who had described the Scythians amongst whom he was living, he reported, ‘in detail and with great precision’.45 There was indeed a similarity between the lifestyle of the Bashkirs and the nomadic Scythians, who also lived on mare’s milk. As with the beekeeping, Tolstoy’s new passion for Greek was for a time all-engulfing, so much so that Sonya and his close friends feared for his mental health (Sergey urusov wanted him to read the lives of Saints instead).46 ‘Clearly, nothing in the world interests and enraptures him as much as each new Greek word or phrase he learns,’ Sonya noted in her diary.47 But Tolstoy’s overactive, mercurial mind was soon on the rampage again. Reading the classics of ancient Greek literature ignited an interest in the ‘classics’ of Russian literature, which in turn made him dream about writing something on the life of ancient Rus.48
Obviously there was nothing in the Russian ‘classics’ comparable to the epic poems of The Iliad and The Odyssey, not least because there was no literature in Russia at all before the year 988, when the Christianisation of Russia brought the need for a written language to help spread the Word of God. The huge upsurge of interest in the pre-Petrine past which began in the 1860s as an offshoot of the Great Reforms nevertheless resulted in Russians discovering and valuing their old literature for the first time. The excitement was contagious, and Tolstoy was able to benefit from the proliferation of new editions, collections and studies which now appeared – the Yasnaya Polyana library began to swell.49 His study of medieval Russian literature was personally rewarding, but it was also a necessary preparation for his ABC, since he had decided at the outset to include in his primer a substantial section of religious and historical texts in old Slavonic (the medieval literary language of the Orthodox Church), with parallel translations in modern Russian.
Amongst the sacred works which most inspired Tolstoy was the ChetiMenei (‘monthly readings’), a voluminous compendium of religious texts arranged chronologically, and designed to be read on the feast days of the Orthodox saints.50 The policy of the Byzantine Empire had always been for its missionaries to translate the Gospel for the heathen peoples they converted. After the adoption of the cyrillic alphabet, which had been devised by the two Greek monks Cyril and Methodius, literary activity in Russia had accordingly been exclusively religious in character to begin with, and followed Byzantine practice. But in the sixteenth century, after Metropolitan Makary of Novgorod incorporated texts such as the lives of newly canonised Russian saints, the originally Greek but now Russianised Cheti-Menei began to occupy a position of supreme importance in the nation’s spiritual and literary life. Another important edition of the Cheti-Menei was later produced in the seventeenth century by Dmitry of Rostov (himself later canonised), and the copy of the 1864 edition Tolstoy acquired was soon densely annotated by him.51 Tolstoy regarded the texts of the Cheti-Menei as Russia’s ‘real poetry’52 (he famously did not think much of verse written by contemporary poets), and he chose extracts from both collections to include in the reading primer sections of his ABC alongside passages from the Bible and the oldest Russian chronicle, dating back to the twelfth century. One was a miraculous episode from Makary’s life of St Simeon Stylites the Younger (a hermit who lived on a pillar near Antioch), in which a robber is inspired to repent of his sins. Another was a shortened version of Dmitry’s life of St Sergius of Radonezh, the Patron Saint of Russia and founder of the most important monastery in the Russian Orthodox Church, the fourteenth-century Trinity Lavra of St Sergius outside Moscow.
If Tolstoy alighted particularly on Sergius, it may have been because the saint’s life resonated with certain of his own aspirations on a subliminal level (although it would not be for another decade that he became fully cognisant of what those aspirations really were). St Sergius, the first great Russian ascetic, had turned his back on his noble background as a boy to seek out a life of poverty and seclusion in the ‘desert’ in emulation of St Antony of Egypt, the founder of monasticism. The rural wilderness was the Russian equivalent of the ‘desert’ – a deep forest in the case of St Sergius – and the disciples he attracted later followed his example by deliberately founding more than forty monasteries in parts of Russia that were similarly remote and inhospitable and far away from cities. Sergius’s life was a model of humility. He turned down the opportunity to assume the pre-eminent position in the Russian ecclesiastical hierarchy he was offered, preferring instead to continue his life of poverty, engaged in hard physical work. Tolstoy would not forget his study of the Cheti-Menei. He would draw on the life of St Sergius in 1890 when he came to write his story ‘Father Sergius’,53 which is about the struggles of a monk and former nobleman to overcome his pride and live up to his Christian ideals. Tolstoy’s Father Sergius finally finds peace living as a Strannik –that specifically Russian type of religious wanderer dependent on alms, whose asceticism is based on a life of constant pilgrimage without material possessions. It also became Tolstoy’s dream to detach himself from the world and become a wanderer, and eventually he would fulfil this dream, but in his own way, like everything else in his life.
Tolstoy was awed by the beauty of the writing in Russian hagiography, and it was aesthetic criteria as much as anything else which guided his selection of texts for the ABC – he wanted young children to be brought into contact with poetic language from the very beginning. But it was the secular legacy of the medieval oral epic, the bylina, which really bewitched him. Collections of narrative poems chronicling the exploits of Russia’s semi-mythological warriors (bogatyry) had first been put together in the eighteenth century,54 but it was not until the 1860s that they began to be made widely available. For Tolstoy, as for many of his contemporaries, they were a thrilling discovery, and even more tantalising was the revelation that this oral tradition had not yet died out. Pavel Rybnikov, an ethnographer who had been exiled to the far north for alleged revolutionary propaganda, found that there were peasants in the region still singing and reciting bylinas. He created a sensation in the 1860s by noting them down and publishing them.55
This living link with the past via the Russian language was thrilling for a writer like Tolstoy, who had an enduring passion for native sayings and proverbs. He was one of the founders of a society set up in Moscow in 1870 to study and preserve Russian folksong,56 and the friendship he later formed with one of the most celebrated of the peasant ‘reciters’ from the Russian north would have a direct impact on his writing. Tolstoy’s enthusiasm even led the author of an 1869 play based on bylinas about the warrior Alyosha Popovich to write an entire book about the structure of old Russian verse.57 At the same time that the bylina tradition was being uncovered, Alexander Afanasiev was following in the footsteps of the Brothers Grimm to publish the first anthologies of Russian fairy tales. His pioneering collection of 640 tales appeared in eight volumes published between 1855 and 1864.58 Since the Russian literary language had been created with the express purpose of translating the Bible, the Church had for centuries considered it blasphemous to use it to write down ‘heathen’ folktales (which first appeared in print in English translation), but now this rich tradition began to be valued too.