Chapter IV: Part II: Schoolboys and Art

The following account of Tolstoy’s walk with boys from his
school at Yásnaya Polyána is taken from Chapter VIII, The
Schools, in Aylmer Maude’s _Life of Tolstoy_, Volume 1,
(Constable, London). It shows how Tolstoy, for the second
time, found himself faced by the question: What is Art? which
had arisen when he spoke to the Society of Lovers of Russian
Literature. This time it was put to him by a ten-year-old
peasant boy, and it then seemed to him that “we said all that
can be said about utility and plastic and moral beauty.”

The classes generally finish about eight or nine o’clock (unless carpentering keeps the elder boys somewhat later), and the whole band run shouting into the yard, and there, calling to one another, begin to separate, making for different parts of the village. Occasionally they arrange to coast down-hill to the village in a large sledge that stands outside the gate. They tie up the shafts, throw themselves into it, and squealing, disappear from sight in a cloud of snow, leaving here and there on their path black patches of children who have tumbled out. In the open air, out of school (for all its freedom), new relations are formed between pupil and teacher: freer, simpler and more trustful--those very relations which seem to us the ideal which School should aim at.

Not long ago we read Gógol’s story _Viy_[5] in the highest class. The final scenes affected them strongly, and excited their imagination. Some of them played the witch, and kept alluding to the last chapters....

Out of doors it was a moonless winter night, with clouds in the sky, not cold. We stopped at the crossroads. The elder boys, in their third year at school, stopped near me asking me to accompany them further. The younger ones looked at us and rushed off down-hill. They had begun to learn with a new master, and between them and me there is not the same confidence as between the older boys and myself.

“Well, let us go to the wood” (a small wood about one hundred and twenty yards from the house), said one of them. The most insistent was Fédka, a boy of ten, with a tender, receptive, poetic yet daring nature. Danger seems to form the chief condition of pleasure for him. In summer it always frightened me to see how he, with two other boys, would swim out into the very middle of the pond, which is nearly one hundred and twenty yards wide, and would now and then disappear in the hot reflection of the summer sun and swim under water; and how he would then turn on his back, causing fountains of water to rise, and calling with his high-pitched voice to his comrades on the bank to see what a fine fellow he was.

He now knew there were wolves in the wood, and so he wanted to go there. All agreed; and the four of us went to the wood. Another boy, a lad of twelve, physically and morally strong, whom I will call Sëmka, went on in front and kept calling and “ah-ou-ing” with his ringing voice, to some one at a distance. Prónka, a sickly, mild, and very gifted lad, from a poor family (sickly probably chiefly from lack of food), walked by my side. Fédka walked between me and Sëmka, talking all the time in a particularly gentle voice: now relating how he had herded horses in summer, now saying there was nothing to be afraid of, and now asking, “Suppose one should jump out?” and insisting on my giving some reply. We did not go into the wood: that would have been too dreadful; but even where we were, near the wood, it was darker, the road was scarcely visible, and the lights of the village were hidden from view. Sëmka stopped and listened: “Stop, you fellows! What is this?” said he suddenly.

We were silent and, though we heard nothing, things seemed to grow more gruesome.

“What shall we do if it leaps out ... and comes at us?” asked Fédka.

We began to talk about Caucasian robbers. They remembered a Caucasian tale I had told them long ago, and I again told them of “braves,” of Cossacks, and of Hadji Murad.[6] Sëmka went on in front, treading boldly in his big boots, his broad back swaying regularly. Prónka tried to walk by my side, but Fédka pushed him off the path, and Prónka--who, probably on account of his poverty, always submitted--only ran up alongside at the most interesting passages, sinking in the snow up to his knees.

Everyone who knows anything of Russian peasant children knows that they are not accustomed to, and cannot bear, any caresses, affectionate words, kisses, hand-touchings, and so forth. I have seen a lady in a peasant school, wishing to pet a boy, say: “Come, I will give you a kiss, dear!” and actually kiss him; and the boy was ashamed and offended, and could not understand why he had been so treated. Boys of five are already above such caresses--they are no longer babies. I was therefore particularly struck when Fédka, walking beside me, at the most terrible part of the story suddenly touched me lightly with his sleeve, and then clasped two of my fingers in his hand, and kept hold of them. As soon as I stopped speaking, Fédka demanded that I should go on, and did this in such a beseeching and agitated voice that it was impossible not to comply with his wish.

“Now then, don’t get in the way!” said he once angrily to Prónka, who had run in front of us. He was so carried away as even to be cruel; so agitated yet happy was he, holding on to my fingers, that he could let no one dare to interrupt his pleasure.

“More! More! It is fine!” said he.

We had passed the wood and were approaching the village from the other end.

“Let’s go on,” said all the boys when the lights became visible. “Let us take another turn!”

We went on in silence, sinking here and there in the snow, not hardened by much traffic. A white darkness seemed to sway before our eyes; the clouds hung low, as though something had heaped them upon us. There was no end to that whiteness, amid which we alone crunched along the snow. The wind sounded through the bare tops of the aspens, but where we were, behind the woods, it was calm.

I finished my story by telling how a “brave,” surrounded by his enemies, sang his death-song and threw himself on his dagger. All were silent.

“Why did he sing a song when he was surrounded?” asked Sëmka.

“Weren’t you told?--he was preparing for death!” replied Fédka, aggrieved.

“I think he said a prayer,” added Prónka.

All agreed. Fédka suddenly stopped.

“How was it, you told us, your Aunt had her throat cut?” asked he. (He had not yet had enough horrors.) “Tell us! Tell us!”

I again told them that terrible story of the murder of the Countess Tolstoy,[7] and they stood silently about me watching my face.

“The fellow got caught!” said Sëmka.

“He was afraid to go away in the night, while she was lying with her throat cut!” said Fédka; “I should have run away!” and he gathered my two fingers yet more closely in his hand.

We stopped in the thicket beyond the threshing-floor at the very end of the village. Sëmka picked up a dry stick from the snow and began striking it against the frosty trunk of a lime tree. Hoar frost fell from the branches on to our caps, and the noise of the blows resounded in the stillness of the wood.

“Lëv Nikoláevich,” said Fédka to me (I thought he was again going to speak about the Countess), “why does one learn singing? I often think, why, really, does one?”

What made him jump from the terror of the murder to this question heaven only knows; yet by the tone of his voice, the seriousness with which he demanded an answer, and the attentive silence of the other two, one felt that there was some vital and legitimate connection between this question and our preceding talk. Whether the connection lay in some response to my suggestion that crime might be explained by lack of education (I had spoken of that), or whether he was testing himself--transferring himself into the mind of the murderer and remembering his own favourite occupation (he has a wonderful voice and immense musical talent), or whether the connection lay in the fact that he felt that now was the time for sincere conversation, and all the problems demanding solution rose in his mind--at any rate his question surprised none of us.

“And what is drawing for? And why write well?” said I, not knowing at all how to explain to him what art is for.

“What is drawing for?” repeated he thoughtfully. He really was asking, What is Art for? And I neither dared nor could explain.

“What is drawing for?” said Sëmka. “Why, you draw anything, and can then make it from the drawing.”

“No, that is designing,” said Fédka. “But why draw figures?”

Sëmka’s matter-of-fact mind was not perplexed.

“What is a stick for, and what is a lime tree for?” said he, still striking the tree.

“Yes, what is a lime tree for?” said I.

“To make rafters of,” replied Sëmka.

“But what is it for in summer, when not yet cut down?”

“It’s no use then.”

“No, really,” insisted Fédka; “why does a lime tree grow?”

And we began to speak of the fact that not everything exists for use, but that there is also beauty, and that Art is beauty; and we understood one another, and Fédka quite understood why the lime tree grows and what singing is for.

Prónka agreed with us, but he thought rather of moral beauty: goodness.

Sëmka understood with his big brain, but did not acknowledge beauty apart from usefulness. He was in doubt (as often happens to men with great reasoning power): feeling Art to be a force, but not feeling in his soul the need of that force. He, like them, wished to get at Art by his reason, and tried to kindle that fire in himself.

“We’ll sing _Who hath_ to-morrow. I remember my part,” said he. (He has a correct ear, but no taste or refinement in singing.) Fédka, however, fully understood that the lime tree is good when in leaf: good to look at in summer; and that that is enough.

Prónka understood that it is a pity to cut it down, because it, too, has life:

“Why, when we take the sap of a lime, it’s like taking blood.”

Sëmka, though he did not say so, evidently thought that there was little use in a lime when it was sappy.

It feels strange to repeat what we then said, but it seems to me that we said all that can be said about utility, and plastic and moral beauty.

We went on to the village. Fédka still clung to my hand; now, it seemed to me, from gratitude. We all were nearer one another that night than we had been for a long time. Prónka walked beside us along the broad village street.

“See, there is still a light in Masánov’s house,” said he. “As I was going to school this morning, Gavrúka was coming from the pub, as dru-u-nk as could be! His horse all in a lather and he beating it! I am always sorry for such things. Really, why should it be beaten?”

“And the other day, coming from Túla, my daddy gave his horse the reins,” said Sëmka; “and it took him into a snowdrift, and there he slept--quite drunk.”

“And Gavrúka kept on beating his horse over the eyes, and I felt so sorry,” repeated Prónka again. “Why should he beat it? He got down and just flogged it.”

Sëmka suddenly stopped.

“Our folk are already asleep,” said he, looking in at the window of his crooked, dirty hut. “Won’t you walk a little longer?”

“No.”

“Go-o-od-bye, Lëv Nikoláevich!” shouted he suddenly, and tearing himself away from us as it were with an effort, he ran to the house, lifted the latch and disappeared.

“So you will take each of us home? First one and then the other?” said Fédka.

We went on. There was a light in Prónka’s hut, and we looked in at the window. His mother, a tall and handsome but toil-worn woman, with black eyebrows and eyes, sat at the table, peeling potatoes. In the middle of the hut hung a cradle. Prónka’s brother, the mathematician from our second class, was standing at the table, eating potatoes with salt. It was a black, tiny, and dirty hut.

“What a plague you are!” shouted the mother at Prónka. “Where have you been?”

Prónka glanced at the window with a meek, sickly smile. His mother guessed that he had not come alone, and her face immediately assumed a feigned expression that was unpleasant.

Only Fédka was left.

“The travelling tailors are at our house, that is why there’s a light there,” said he in the softened voice that had come to him that evening. “Good-bye, Lëv Nikoláevich!” added he, softly and tenderly, and he began to knock with the ring attached to the closed door. “Let me in!” his high-pitched voice rang out amid the winter stillness of the village. It was long before they opened the door for him. I looked in at the window. The hut was a large one. The father was playing cards with a tailor, and some copper coins lay on the table. The wife, Fédka’s stepmother, was sitting near the torch-stand, looking eagerly at the money. The young tailor, a cunning drunkard, was holding his cards on the table, bending them, and looking triumphantly at his opponent. Fédka’s father, the collar of his shirt unbuttoned, his brow wrinkled with mental exertion and vexation, changed one card for another, and waved his horny hand in perplexity above them.

“Let me in!”

The woman rose and went to the door.

“Good-bye!” repeated Fédka, once again. “Let us always have such walks!”