Tolstoy's Fables: Tools for a Vision

In the icy-grey of Tsarist Russian dawns, Count Leo Tolstoy often stood in the doorway of his free, experimental school, watching his serfs' children trudge toward him. He was preoccupied with involving the Russian masses in their own art, heritage, and eventual brotherhood, and enlightened education of the present children was his initial contribution to that ultimate goal.

Tolstoy believed that the Russian masses must benefit from literature and the arts before their brotherhood and unity could be contemplated. First, though, he understood the need to expose the Russian children to the basics of the language. To do this, he required relevant, accessible reading material to interest the restless young peasants. While writing his two most famous works, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878), he also produced two primers, The ABC Books (1872 & 1875), and four readers for the children in his schools. Included in these publications were fables, written and adapted to appeal to his audience. Tolstoy used these ancient literary forms to gain his own revolutionary, complex ends.

Tolstoy envisaged that the Russian masses would emerge as the force destined to continue Russian culture. Preparation for this role, he felt, had to include an understanding of the "true" Russian art, which must be coupled with guides to understanding the moral meaning and significance of that art. He identified the art of the peasant as that dealing with the simple feelings of common life: love, hate greed, kindness, and cruelty. In What is Art? he described this simplistic art as a "means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity" (43). This art, though was only useful as long as it was accessible. The art of the upper classes reached only one percent of the people, and the popular art of the day was too costly, too strange, and too far removed from the everyday life of the masses. In What is Art? he wrote, "The remaining ninety-nine percent live and die, generation after generation after generation, crushed by toil, and never tasting this art, which moreover, is of such a nature that, if they could get it, they would not understand anything of it" (59).

Tolstoy concluded that "the business of art lies in just this—to make that understood and feel which, in the form of an argument might be incomprehensible and inaccessible. Usually it seems to the recipient of a truly artistic impression that he knew the thing before but had been unable to express it" (89). Fables often clarify and simplify feelings that are obscure or difficult to put into words. In order to understand these feelings, however, the masses must be taught the fundamentals of reading and writing.

In 1859, Tolstoy opened his first school on his estate, Yasnaya Polyana. He based his teaching on the concept that true education took place in life, not in schools. Current theory, he felt, was the villian; it forced children to learn by heart that which was of no use to them and did not address the realities that confronted his students every day. But, aside from Old Testament stories filled with action and didactic reasoning, he found there was a sad lack of appropriate reading material for his grand experiment. Who better to remedy this situation than the renowned author, Leo Tolstoy?

He went to work. Over the next decade he studied, translated, and adapted collections of Russian proverbs, medieval legends, and folklore. He wrote original stories about people, animals, and everyday occurrences. He wrote vignettes explaining scientific phenomenon. The results of his efforts appear in Novaya Azbuka (The New Speller) and in The ABC Book (1872). Tolstoy wrote that he had put more love and work into the latter than into anything else he had ever done.

Tolstoy had to find a way to teach complicated ideas to primitive children in a simple manner. Given his admiration for ancient literary forms and his pragmatic approach to them, it was almost a certainty that he would turn to fables, and that...