Tolstoy

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 April: ‘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.