Tolstoy was completely captivated by the fairy tales and byliny he started reading after completing War and Peace, and it is no wonder when travelling through the fertile agricultural lands of the Penza region in 1869 on his property inspection trip that he should have thought of Mikula Selyaninovich. The bylina about the ploughman who works so fast the prince can only catch up with him after three days on horseback was one of the first he chose to include in his ABC. Tolstoy was also entranced by the tragic legend of the bogatyr Danilo Lovchanin. In one version of this bylina, Prince Vladimir sends Danilo on a dangerous mission to kill a ferocious lion, hoping to marry his beautiful wife in the certain event of his death, but Vasilisa takes the precaution of sending her husband off with 300 arrows to ensure his mission is successful. Danilo then stabs himself in despair rather than cross swords with the assassins next sent by the determined prince, but the faithful widow Vasilisa takes her own life over her husband’s body rather than marry him. Tolstoy dreamed of turning this story (the closest Russian equivalent to Romeo and Juliet or Tristan und Isolde in terms of the tragic deaths of two lovers) into a play. Naturally the folk hero who most appealed to him, however, was the mighty Ilya of Murom, whose exploits he had read about when he was a boy. He even began thinking of writing a novel or a popular drama in which he would create characters with the traits of the great bogatyrs.59 Ilya would still be a peasant’s son, but instead of defeating armies single-handed after lying on the stove for thirty-three years, Tolstoy wanted to cast him as a clever young university student.60
A major goal for Tolstoy was to cultivate in his young readers a love of Russia – its landscape, its history, its way of life, and, of course, its language. One of his favourite pastimes became walking down to the high road which passed close to Yasnaya Polyana in order to collect sayings and proverbs from the many pilgrims and religious wanderers making the journey on foot to the great Caves Monastery at kiev. Sayings such as ‘A crow cannot be a falcon’ enabled him to explain the idiosyncrasies of Russian pronunciation in a simple and engaging way to children. Tolstoy also wanted to spark in young readers a curiosity for the workings of science in his ABC, but in order to answer questions such as ‘Where does the water from the sea go?’ and ‘What is wind for?’ in a way that would be both comprehensible and appealing to children, he felt he needed to have a profound understanding of these phenomena himself. So he threw himself into an intense and wide-ranging study of nearly every branch of science, from zoology to physics. Wherever possible, Tolstoy undertook practical research, which led to him on one occasion spending an entire night in the garden gazing up at the stars, in order to brush up on his astronomy.61 understanding and then explaining processes such as galvanism and how crystals form required sustained concentration at his desk indoors, however: his notebooks from this time are littered with references to scientists like Michael Faraday, Humphry Davy and John Tyndall.62
Finally, Tolstoy also wanted to nurture in young children an appreciation for truth, honesty, and the value of hard work, but not in a dry didactic way, like all the foreign textbooks and primers he had pored over and made notes on. He was certainly not impressed by the English books he consulted, including Thomas Ewing’s Principles of Elocution, which was a ‘model of pointlessness’ in demonstrating ‘how to be silent’, and Abbott’s Second Reader, which was far too abstract.63 Like the available Russian books, everything seemed to be cut off from real life. It was the stories and fables which naturally lay at the heart of Tolstoy’s ABC. After an enormous amount of reading, as well as months of fastidious work in condensing and simplifying, Tolstoy eventually produced simplified versions of over 600 stories, which he whittled down to 372 for publication. He favoured Aesop over all other authors, including such well-known fables as the ‘The Frog and the Lion’:
A lion heard a frog croaking loudly and turned towards the sound, thinking that this must be the sound of some huge beast. After a while, the lion saw the frog come up out of the swamp. He went over to the frog and as he crushed him underfoot, the lion said, ‘No one should be worried about a sound before the thing itself has been examined.’ This fable is for a man with a big mouth who talks and talks without accomplishing anything.64
Tolstoy produced his own free translations, subtly changing their meaning, which he then, as a consummate artist, revised endlessly. After he had produced the first draft of his translation of this particular fable, for example, Tolstoy worked on it again, before producing another version, which was then reworked a third and a fourth time.65 Changes even went into the proofs before Tolstoy was happy:
A lion heard a frog croaking loudly, and thought it must be a large animal to be shouting that loudly. He went closer and saw the frog coming out of the swamp. The lion crushed it with his paw and said: ‘It’s tiny – and to think I was scared.’66
While Aesop took pride of place, Tolstoy ranged very widely in terms of authors, including not only more recent writers such as La Fontaine and Grimm, but some really up-to-date ones such as Sofya Tolstaya (‘Some Girls Came to See Masha’) and Vasily Rumyantsev, a former pupil of the Yasnaya Polyana school (‘How a Boy Told About Getting Caught by a Storm When He Was in the Forest’). Tolstoy also fashioned miniature tales from Russian folk anecdotes, and contributed real-life stories about the adventures of his dogs Milton and Bulka in the Caucasus, as well as stories about the lives of birds and animals in the Russian countryside (‘Sparrows’, ‘How Wolves Teach Their Cubs’). Not all the stories and vignettes are set in a world reassuringly familiar to Russian children. Tolstoy carefully juxtaposed stories like ‘The Girl and the Mushrooms’ with pieces about Eskimos, elephants and silk-worms. He wanted to inculcate Russian children with a respect for foreign cultures along with a love of their native land, so he treated his young readers to excerpts from Herodotus and Plutarch, and exotic stories from countries as far-flung as India, America, France and Turkey. Tolstoy also contributed fiction he had written himself, beginning with very simple tales such as ‘The Muzhik and the Cucumbers’:
One day a muzhik went over to a vegetable patch to steal cucumbers. He got to the cucumbers and thought: ‘Suppose I carry off a bag of cucumbers and sell them; I can buy a hen with that money. The hen will give me eggs, and when she is broody she will produce lots of chicks. I’ll feed the chicks, sell them, and buy a piglet who will grow into a pig; and my pig will bring me lots of piglets. I’ll sell the piglets and buy a mare; the mare will have foals. I’ll feed the foals and sell them; then I’ll buy a house and have a vegetable patch. I’ll have a vegetable patch and plant cucumbers, and I won’t let them be stolen because I will keep a strict watch on them. I’ll hire watchmen, station them by the cucumbers and I will go along myself and shout: “Hey, keep stricter watch!”’ And he shouted that out at the top of his voice. The watchmen heard, jumped out and thrashed the muzhik.67