Tolstoy

In October 1859 Tolstoy reopened his school for peasant children at Yasnaya Polyana on a more serious footing than before. The peasants were initially very wary of the enterprise, not least because there was no charge (Tolstoy paid for everything out of his own pocket), but by March 1860 there were fifty pupils enrolled – boys, girls and also some adults. Tolstoy’s main mission as an educator was to introduce freedom into the learning experience, so pupils were allowed to come and go as they pleased, and there was no corporal punishment. There was a solid curriculum of twelve subjects, but Tolstoy placed great importance on the need for flexibility, to suit the needs of his pupils rather than those of the teacher. This was highly innovative. It was the Yasnaya Polyana school which gave Tolstoy an inkling of what he felt might be his true calling, as it was only when he undertook practical measures to redeem Russia’s enormous debt towards its benighted peasantry that the voice of his conscience was stilled. As time went on, he realised it was going to be his destiny to swim against the current, but he was now starting to feel more comfortable in his own skin.

In May 1860 Tolstoy’s brothers Nikolay and Sergey went abroad to Germany. Nikolay was now suffering from tuberculosis, as Dmitry had, and their plan was for him to undertake a cure at the spa town of Soden. Their hypochondriac sister Masha also felt unwell, so she too had decided to go for treatment abroad, taking her three children with her, and Tolstoy elected to accompany them. Classes at the school stopped anyway in the summer, when the children were needed to help in the fields, and he found an excellent deputy in Pyotr Morozov, a former seminary student, to take over from him as teacher at the Yasnaya Polyana school while he was away. He planned now to go to Europe to find out as much as he could about primary education in other countries. He would be away for almost a year.

Four days after leaving St Petersburg, Tolstoy was in Berlin. Masha took, Varya, Nikolay and Liza off to join Nikolay and Sergey in Soden, but Tolstoy went instead to Bad Kissingen, which was about sixty miles away. He was far more interested in finding out about German educational methods than taking the waters. The day after his arrival he set off to inspect the local schools, where he was horrified to observe coerced rote learning and liberal use of corporal punishment. He also started studying and making notes on various theoretical works on pedagogy. Pride of place in his reading list went to the four volumes of Karl Georg von Raumer’s recently published History of Pedagogy from the Revival of Classical Studies to Our Own Time. In this work Tolstoy was pleased to discover that Martin Luther had been a pioneer of popular education, and also that his own belief in the necessity of freedom in teaching and learning had first been voiced by Montaigne in the sixteenth century.⁶⁷ Tolstoy’s next step was to talk to teachers in the village schools around Bad Kissingen. He also met the politician nephew of Friedrich Froebel, who had founded the kindergarten system, and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, who had begun to publish his Natural History of the German People as the Foundation of German Social Politics.

Three months into his stay, Tolstoy received a visit from his sick brother Nikolay, whose condition was now worsening. Nikolay’s doctors recommended he repair to somewhere with a warmer climate, so at the end of August, accompanied by Masha and the children, Tolstoy took him down to Hyères in the south of France. On 20 September, two weeks after they arrived, Nikolay died in Tolstoy’s arms. Writing to Sergey afterwards, Tolstoy recalled that Nikolay had been a person whom they had loved and respected more than anyone else on earth. Indeed, Tolstoy had regarded Nikolay as his best friend, so his death was an incalculable blow.⁶⁸ Nikolay had never quite delivered on his great promise. He published a well-written sketch entitled ‘Hunting in the Caucasus’ in The Contemporary in February 1857, but had not followed it up with anything else. In a haze of grief, Tolstoy took himself off to Marseilles, where he visited eight primary schools and was again dismayed to encounter a narrow, lifeless approach to the education of young minds.