Tolstoy

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.

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