Tolstoy

Turgenev was not the only person Tolstoy had testy conversations with that spring. Soon after returning home from abroad, he had learned that he had been appointed Justice of the Peace in his district by the liberal Tula governor.⁸⁰ The government had decided that arbiters should be elected from amongst the nobility to oversee the implementation of the manifesto and mediate between landowners and peasants. It was not an easy job for any Russian noble, but it was particularly challenging for Tolstoy, who was already loathed by his conservative neighbours for having granted his peasants their freedom ahead of the manifesto. Within a month he had fallen out with all of them. Many of the nobility saw it as their God-given right to have slaves, and so viewed the Emancipation of Serfdom Act as a disaster. In their opinion, Alexander II had robbed them. What on earth was a peasant going to do with his ‘personal freedom’ they wondered. A free peasant in their view was like a stray dog – not worth giving a crust to, as it would eventually come to grief anyway. It never occurred to Russia’s reactionary nobles that the peasants were human beings like themselves, and that they were just as responsible in creating the ignorance and misery which led the peasants to drink as the regime. The reactionary nobility looked to the Justices of the Peace to take care of their interests, and be on their side. Tolstoy, however, had the peasants’ interests at heart, and he now viewed most of his fellow nobles as vile parasites.⁸¹ His neighbours had soon filed a barrage of complaints about him, which they sometimes did en masse, but this only made Tolstoy rub his hands with glee. He took relish in exposing the dishonesty and cruelty of the krepostniki – the defenders of serfdom – and was not deterred even when he received threatening and abusive letters or was summoned to fight duels.

Tolstoy had also not endeared himself to his neighbours by wanting to educate his peasants. It seemed preposterous to the krepostniks that a count, a retired officer, should become a teacher, while the very idea of a school for peasant children seemed outlandish to these hardened apologists of patriarchal Russia. The Yasnaya Polyana school was flourishing, but it was the only one in the whole district. With 9,000 peasants living in the area, however, Tolstoy wanted to do more. using his position as Justice of the Peace, he had twenty-one schools up and running locally by the autumn of 1861. The schools were set up in peasant huts. There were no desks or chairs or blackboards, but the walls were usually so dirty that they served very well to write on with chalk. Some of the teachers were the usual priests and ex-soldiers, but Tolstoy also employed former university students who were in need of employment. Widespread demonstrations had erupted the previous October when the government introduced a series of ill-conceived university reforms, including obligatory attendance and fees which many students could not afford, and large numbers of them had been expelled. Each student teacher was paid fifty kopecks per pupil per month, so monthly salaries averaged about ten roubles. Teachers were also paid an honorarium for contributing to the Yasnaya Polyana journal.⁸²

The first issue of Yasnaya Polyana was published in January 1862, and eleven more followed. Although some articles were written by teachers, the journal’s editor Tolstoy was also its most prolific contributor. In the first issue he provided an account of the day-to-day life at the school in Yasnaya Polyana:

No one brings anything with him, neither books nor copybooks. No homework is set them. Not only do they carry nothing in their hands, they have nothing to carry even in their heads. They are not obliged to remember any lesson, nor any of yesterday’s work. They are not tormented by the thought of the impending lesson. They bring only themselves, their receptive nature, and an assurance that it will be as jolly in school today as it was yesterday … No one is ever scolded for being late … They sit where they like: on the benches, tables, window-sills, floor or in the armchair … By the timetable there should be four lessons before dinner, but sometimes in practice these become three or two, and may be on quite different subjects … In my opinion this external disorder is useful and necessary, however strange and inconvenient it may seem to the teacher … First this disorder, or free order, only frightens us because we were ourselves educated in and are accustomed to something quite different. Secondly, in this as in many similar cases, coercion is used only from hastiness or lack of respect for human nature …⁸³