Leo Tolstoy

In many respects, this attitude amounted to a total refutation of modernity. In a letter to Turgenev from Switzerland, Tolstoy pleaded with him not to use the railway, which compared to travelling in a carriage was like a brothel compared to love: ‘convenient, but also inhumanly mechanical and deadly monotonous’ (Ls, I, p. 97). He enjoyed walks in the Swiss mountains for the whole summer and planned to continue his Grand Tour to Germany and Italy. Then, in July, he lost all his money at roulette in Baden-Baden and had to cut short his trip. He returned to ‘delightful Yasnaya’ and ‘disgusting Russia’ with its ‘coarse and deceitful life’ (

Ds, p. 127). In a letter to Alexandra Tolstoy he complained about the ‘patriarchal barbarism, thievery and lawlessness’ (Ls

, I, p. 63) of his motherland.

Tolstoy blamed the government for this disastrous state of affairs. For too long it had ignored the overwhelming majority of the nation. Now, cynically or stupidly, it was promising benefits that could never be delivered. In a speech in 1858 the emperor reproached the nobility for sabotaging the reform. In response, Tolstoy drafted a memo arguing that the liberation of the serfs had been the historic dream of the nobility, the only estate that had sent its ‘martyrs in 25 and 48 to exile and the gallows’. He ended the note by claiming that ‘if, God forbid, the fire of peasant rebellion, with which the tsar was threatening landowners, were ever to break out, the best thing it could do would be to destroy the government’ (CW, V, pp. 268, 270). In a unique display of caution, Tolstoy burned the memorandum ‘without showing it to anyone’ (

Ds, p. 136).

Tolstoy searched for ways to take Russia out of patriarchal barbarity without submitting it to the ‘inhumanly mechanistic’ forces of modern civilization. He still believed that the only way to achieve this was to establish some sort of rapprochement between the educated nobles and the peasants, the only two social classes that lived on the land. He started freeing his serfs, but placed his hopes not in the imminent reform, but in educating future generations. Tolstoy started a school for peasant children in one of the two remaining wings of his house. He felt he needed to learn more about current pedagogical practice so, in the summer of 1860, he left the school to the supervision of his assistant and went abroad to study the experiments in primary education. Tolstoy wanted his school to serve as a national model. Upon his return he resumed teaching, but also inaugurated twenty other schools in the neighbouring villages. He founded the pedagogical magazine Yasnaya Polyana

and tried to create a National Society for Education.

Tolstoy devised his own pedagogical system based as much on Rousseau’s Emile as on his own ideas about human nature and the needs of peasant children. He completely abandoned the strict discipline prevalent in nineteenth-century schools and never asked pupils to memorize texts by heart, study calligraphy or learn difficult rules. His school barely had any curriculum at all, instead he relied on free communication between teacher and pupils, engaged children in conversations, joint physical work and physical exercises. He read them books, told stories based on events from Russian history, including the Napoleonic wars, and his own rich and varied experience. The basic sciences were often taught out of the classroom through direct observations of nature. Peasant children were often needed for different sorts of work at home and were free to leave school whenever necessary. Tolstoy wanted to teach his pupils only the things that had practical or moral importance. Corporal punishment, which was the usual practice of the time, was completely forbidden. The school was also open to girls.