Tolstoy

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.

Tolstoy goes into extraordinary detail in his discussion of pedagogical methods in ‘On Popular Education’, and shows deep knowledge of the educational provision in his own district. He summarised the flaws of Russian primary education as: ‘(1) lack of knowledge of the people, (2) the attraction of teaching what the pupils already know, (3) a tendency to borrow from the Germans, and (4) a criticism of the old without the establishment of new principles.’⁸⁶ Tolstoy had strong ideas about how Russian children should be taught letter and syllable formation, and was adamant that the phonetic method that had been adopted from Germany was not practicable in Russia, and certainly not suitable for disadvantaged peasant children. In some respects, he was ahead of his time, as what he was advocating later became axiomatic in twentieth-century remedial education.⁸⁷ Tolstoy’s ABC was eventually approved by the Russian government in September 1874. Even repackaged, it had continued to sell poorly, and Tolstoy complained that he made a loss of 2,000 roubles,⁸⁸ but he was now keen to revise it.