Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

friends among the men of letters feel uneasy in his presence. This

worldly, clever young officer could be exceedingly agreeable; his love

for writing was genuine and very deep; but at literary gatherings he

was contemptuous, formidable and reserved; he did not dream of

opening his heart in a milieu dedicated to intimate, unending selfrevelation. He was inscrutable, disdainful, disconcerting, arrogant, a little frightening. He no longer, it was true, lived the life of an

aristocratic officer. The wild nights on which the young radicals looked

with hatred and contempt as characteristic of the dissipated habits of

the reactionary jeunesse diJree no longer amused him. He had married

and settled down, he was in love with his wife, and became for a time

a model (if occasionally exasperating) husband. But he did not trouble

to conceal the fact that he had far more respect for all forms of real

life-whether of the free Cossacks in the Caucasus, or that of the rich

young Guards officers in Moscow with their race-horses and balls

and gypsies- than for the world of books, reviews, critics, professors,

political discussions, and talk about ideals, opinions, and literary values.

Moreover, he was opinionated, quarrelsome and at times unexpectedly

savage; with the result that his literary friends treated him with

nervous respect, and, in the end, drew away from him; or perhaps he

abandoned them. Apart from the poet Fet, who was an eccentric and

deeply conservative country squire himself, Tolstoy had no intimates

among the writers of his own generation. His breach with Turgenev

is well known. He was even remoter from the other litterateurs; he

liked Nekrasov better than his poetry; but then Nekrasov was an

editor of genius and admired and encouraged Tolstoy from his earliest

beginnings.

,,

243

R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S

The sense o f the contrast between life and literature haunted

Tolstoy. It made him doubt his own vocation as a writer. Like other

young Russians of birth and fortune, he was conscience-stricken by

the appalling condition of the peasants. Mere reflection or denunciation seemed to him a way of evading action. He must act, he must start with his own estate. Like the eighteenth-century radicals he

was convinced that men were born equal and were made unequal by

the way in which they were brought up. He established a school for

the boys of his village; and, dissatisfied with the educational theories

then in vogue in Russia, decided to go abroad to study western methods

in theory and in practice. He derived a great deal from his visits to

England, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany-including the

title of his greatest novel. But his conversations with the most advanced

western authorities on education, and observation of their methods,

had convinced him that these methods were at best worthless, at worst

harmful, to the children upon whom they were practised. He did not

stay long in England and paid little attention to its 'antiquated' schools.

In France he found that learning was almost entirely mechanical-by

rote. Prepared questions, lists of dates, for example, were answered

competently, because they had been learnt by heart. But the same

children, when asked for the same facts from some unexpected angle,

often produced absurd replies, which showed that their knowledge

meant nothing to them. The schoolboy who replied that the murderer

of Henri IV of France was Julius Caesar seemed to him typical : the

boy neither understood nor took an interest in the facts he had stored

up: at most all that was gained was a mechanical memory.

But the true home of theory was Germany. The pages which

Tolstoy devotes to describing teaching and teachers in Germany rival

and anticipate the celebrated pages in War and Ptact in which he

makes savage fun of admired experts in another field-the German

strategists employed by the Russian army-whom he represents as

grotesque and pompous dolts.

In Yasnaya Po/ypna, a journal which he had had privately printed

in 1 861-2, Tolstoy speaks of his educational visits to the west and, by

way of example, gives a hair-raising (and exceedingly entertaining)

account of the latest methods of teaching the alphabet, used by a

specialist trained in one of the most advanced of the German teachers'

seminaries. He describes the pedantic, immensely self-satisfied schoolmaster, as he enters the room, and notes with approval that the children are seated at their desks, crushed and obedient, in total silence,

244

TOLSTOY AND E N L I G HTENMENT

as prescribed by German rules of behaviour. 'He casts a look round the

class, and knows already what it is that they ought to understand; he

knows this, and he knows what the children's souls are made of, and

much else that the seminary has taught him.' He is armed with the

latest and most progressive pedagogic volume, called Das Fischbuch. It

contains pictures of a fish.

'What is this, dear children?' 'A fish,' replies the brightest. 'No.'

And he will not rest until some child says that what they see is not a

fish, but a book. That is better. ' And what do books contain?' 'Letters,'

says the boldest boy. 'No, no,' says the schoolmaster sadly, 'you really

must think of what you are saying.' By this time the children are

beginning to be hopelessly demoralised : they have no notion of what

they are meant to say. They have a confused and perfectly correct

feeling that the schoolmaster wants them to say something unintelligible-that the fish is not a fish-that whatever it is he wants them to say, is something they will never think of. Their thoughts begin to

stray. They wonder (this is very Tolstoyan) why the teacher is wearing

spectacles, why he is looking through them instead of taking them off,

and so_ on. The teacher urges them to concentrate, he harries and

tortures them until he manages to make them say that what they see

is not a fish, but a picture, and then, after more torture, that the

picture represents a fish. If that is what he wants them to say, would

it not be easier, Tolstoy asks, to make them learn this piece of profound

wisdom by heart, instead of tormenting them with the Fischhuch

method, which so far from causing them to think 'creatively', merely

stupefies them?

The genuinely intelligent children know that their answers are

always wrong; they cannot tell why; they only know that this.is so;

while the stupid, who occasionally provide the right answers, do not

know why they are praised. All that the German pedagogue is doing

is to feed dead human material -or rather living human beings- into

a grotesque mechanical contraption invented by fanatical fools who

think that this is a way of applying scientific method to the education

of men. Tolstoy assures us that his account (of which I have only

quoted a short fragment) is not a parody, but a faithful reproduction

of what he saw and heard in the advanced schools of Germany and in

'those schools in England that have been fortunate enough to acquire

these wonderful . . . methods'.

Disillusioned and indignant, Tolstoy returned to his Russian estate

and began to teach the village children himself. He huilt schools,

..

245

R U S S I AN T H I N K E R S

continued to study, reject and denounce current doctrines of education,

published periodicals and pamphlets, invented new methods of learning

geography, zoology, physics; composed an entire manual of arithmetic