Tolstoy

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

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.