For his more advanced young readers, Tolstoy wrote two of his finest works of fiction, ‘God Sees the Truth But Waits’ and ‘Captive of the Caucasus’, whose power lies precisely in their carefully wrought simplicity. From the beginning, Tolstoy had intended the artistic level of his ABC to be in no way inferior to that of War and Peace, and both stories exemplified in fact the devices and the language he declared he would now employ in his adult fiction, as he explained in a letter to Nikolay Strakhov.68
Work on the final compilation began in earnest in September 1871, and Tolstoy inveigled not only Sonya, but her uncle kostya and his niece Varya into helping him as copyists. He was as exacting with his tiny stories for children as he was with his adult fiction, as Sonya commented in a letter to her sister,69 but finally in December 1871 the first of the four books was ready, and Tolstoy set off for Moscow to find a publisher. This proved difficult, partly because of all the old Church Slavonic in the manuscript, forcing Tolstoy to resort to signing a deal with his old publisher Theodor Ries. But once his ABC was finally in press he was clearly excited, and when he wrote to Alexandrine in St Petersburg in January 1872 he told her that if just two generations of all Russian children, from the Romanovs to rural peasants, learned to read with his ABC, and had their first contact with art through it, he could die a happy man.70 He was convinced this was the work he would be remembered for,71 and rated it higher than War and Peace.72
There was now an intense period of work to finish the three remaining books of the ABC. Typically for Tolstoy, the printing process had begun while he was still writing and adding to his manuscript, but he was an inveterate risk-taker and gambler. At times even he had to admit he was overwhelmed by the dimensions of his task. It was enough work for 100 years, he wrote to Alexandrine again in Apriclass="underline" ‘You need to know Greek, Indian and Arabic literature for it, as well all the natural sciences, astronomy and physics, and the work on the language is terrible – everything has to be beautiful, concise, simple, and most important of all, clear.’73 Meanwhile, he was dying to try his ABC out, so in January 1872 he reopened the Yasnaya Polyana school to thirty-five local peasant children.
The school was located in the family house this time – in the front hall and in the rooms on the ground floor. Tolstoy taught the older boys in his study, while Sonya had a group of about ten pupils, mostly girls, whom she taught in another room. In the mornings they taught their own children, and after lunch they all pitched in to help teach at the school, including eight-year-old Sergey and seven-year-old Tanya, who were given the task of teaching the alphabet in the hall to the youngest pupils.74 Five-year-old Ilya started out as a teacher too, but he proved to be far too strict with his pupils. His contract was terminated after he ended up fighting with his charges too often.75 As an adult, Ilya could still remember the intense smell of sheepskin that the village children brought with them into the house, and the delightful anarchy that reigned in the schoolroom. Tolstoy allowed the children to sit where they wanted, get up when they wanted and answer questions all together – it was certainly a long way from regimented learning by rote.76 The school broke up for the summer months, but teaching was not resumed in the autumn: Tolstoy had moved on to new pastures.
Tolstoy itched to see his ABC in print once he had handed over the manuscript, and eventually he lost patience with his publisher, who was proceeding at a snail’s pace. The American primers Eugene Schuyler procured for him had given him the idea of using large typefaces and a particular design in the earlier pages of his ABC in order to make it easier for children to learn pronunciation, but this presented the typographers with a headache, as they were simply not used to printing anything other than with standard type-faces.77 In May 1872 Tolstoy managed to transfer publication to Petersburg, having persuaded his friend Strakhov to oversee operations.78 Strakhov, who had made his first visit to Yasnaya Polyana the previous summer, had already helped by producing modern translations of the old Slavonic texts, and now Tolstoy asked him also to grade the stories in the reading primer according to whether he liked them or not.79 The 758 pages of the ABC finally appeared in November 1872, but its initial print run of 3,600 copies also proved to be its last. The next time the book appeared again in this format was in 1957, when a facsimile edition constituted volume twenty-two of the ‘Jubilee’ edition of Tolstoy’s Complete Collected Works.
Despite the high price of fifty kopecks for each constituent part of the ABC, Tolstoy had high expectations for its success and began thinking about the second edition even before it had been published.80 He was to be bitterly disappointed. First of all, the book did not receive official approval for use in schools, despite Tolstoy sending a letter explaining its virtues to his distant relative Count Dmitry Tolstoy, the Russian Minister of Education.81 Secondly, Tolstoy’s desire to make some money from the publication got the better of him. He offered booksellers a twenty per cent discount, but insisted they paid in cash up-front, and so lost both their goodwill and valuable marketing potential. Sonya’s younger brother Pyotr Bers, who lived in Petersburg, had been put in charge of sales, and he took a dim view of Tolstoy’s attempt to break the power of booksellers in controlling distribution. His flat doubled up as a warehouse, and so he ended up being left with hundreds of unsold copies. The almost uniformly negative reviews which started appearing also did nothing to help sales of the ABC. Some critics objected to the dull grey paper it was printed on and the paucity of illustrations (twenty-eight), while others complained about the lack of any kind of introduction to explain for whom the book was intended.82 They were all suspicious of Tolstoy’s new-fangled methods.
3. Page eight from the 1872 edition of Tolstoy’s ABC book, showing the letters ‘k’ for kolokol (bell), ‘l’ for lozhka (spoon) and ‘m’ for medved (bear).
A writer as thin-skinned as Tolstoy could not fail to be stung by the criticism, but his belief in the ABC never wavered. Once he had published an open letter to the Moscow Gazette in June 1873 setting out what he regarded as the shortcomings of the teaching methods then in use, he calmed down. First, he decided to unbind the 1,500 unsold copies of his ABC and repackage them as twelve individual small volumes – they went on sale for between ten and twenty-five kopecks each.83 Then a dozen young teachers from rural schools in the area came to spend a week at Yasnaya Polyana in October to study his methods.84 In January 1874 Tolstoy was given the opportunity to defend his approach to the Moscow Literacy Committee, which accepted his proposal to conduct an experiment comparing his teaching methods with those that had been officially adopted. When the results of this experiment were inconclusive, he published a fifty-page profession de foi about his teaching methods in the august and widely read journal Notes of the Fatherland which finally provoked wide public debate.85 ‘On Popular Education’ is Tolstoy’s heartfelt pedagogical manifesto.