Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

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,

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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,

..

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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

of his own, inveighed against all methods of coercion, especially those

which consisted of forcing children against their will to memorise

facts and dates and figures. In short, he behaved like an original,

enlightened, energetic, opinionated, somewhat eccentric eighteenthcentury landowner who had become a convert to the doctrines of Rousseau or the abbe Mably. His accounts of his theories and experiments fill two stout volumes in the pre-revolutionary editions of his collected works. They are still fascinating, .if only because they contain

some of the best descriptions of village life and especially of children,

both comical and lyrical, that even he had ever composed. He wrote

them in the 1 86os and 70s when he was at the height of his creative

powers. His overriding didactic purpose is easily forgotten in the

unrivalled insight into the twisting, criss-crossing pattern of the

thoughts and feelings of individual village children, and the marvellous

concreteness and imagination with which their talk and behaviour,

and physical nature round them, are described. And side by side with

this direct vision of human experience, there run the clear, firm

dogmas of a fanatically doctrinaire eighteenth-century rationalistdoctrines not fused with the life that he describes, but superimposed upon it, like windows with rigorously symmetrical patterns drawn

upon them, unrelated to the world on which they open, and yet

achieving a kind of illusory artistic and intellectual unity with it,

owing to the unbounded vitality and constructive genius of the

writing itself. It is one of the most extraordinary performances in the

history of literature.

The enemy is always the same: experts, professionals, men who

claim special authority over other men. Universities and professors

are a frequent target for attack. There are intimations of this already

in the section entitled 'Youth' of his earlier autobiographical novel.

There is something eighteenth-century, reminiscent both of Voltaire

and of Bentham, about Tolstoy's devastating accounts of the dull and

incompetent professors and the desperately bored and obsequious

students in Russia in his time. The tone is unusual in the nineteenth

century: dry, ironical, didactic, mordant, at once withering and entertaining; the whole based on the contrast between the harmonious simplicity of nature and the self-destructive complications created by

the malice or stupidity of men-men from whom the author feels

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himself detached, whom he affects not to understand, and mocks from

a distance.

We are at the earliest beginnings of a theme which grew obsessive

in Tolstoy's later life; that the solution to all our perplexities stares

us in the face-that the answer is about us everywhere, like the light

of day, if only we would not close our eyes or look everywhere but

at what is there, staring us in the face, the clear, simple, irresistible

truth.

Like Rousseau and Kant and the believers in natural law, Tolstoy

was convinced that men have certain basic material and spiritual needs,

in all places, at all times. If these needs are fulfilled, they lead harmonious lives, which is the goal of their nature. Moral, aesthetic, and other spiritual values are objective and eternal, and man's inner

harmony depends upon his correct relationship to these. Moreover, all

his life he defended the proposition-which his own novels and sketches

do not embody-that human beings are more harmonious in childhood

than under the corrupting influences of education in later life; and

also that simple people (peasants, Cossacks, and so on) have a more

'natural' and correct attitude towards these basic values than civilised

men; and that they are free and independent in a sense in which

civilised men are not. For (he insists on this over and over again)

peasant communities are in a position to supply their own material and

spiritual needs out of their own resources, provided that they are not

robbed or enslaved by oppressors and exploiters; whereas civilised men

need for their survival the forced labour of others-serfs, slaves, the

exploited masses, called ironically 'dependants', because their masters

depend on them. The masters are parasitic upon others: they are

degraded not merely by the fact that to enslave and exploit others is a

denial of such objective values as justice, equality, human dignity, love

- values which men crave to realise because they cannot help this,

because they are men-but for the further, and to him even more

important reason that to live on robbed or borrowed goods, and so fail

to be self-subsistent, falsifies 'natural' feelings and perceptions, corrodes

men morally, and makes them both wicked and miserable. The human

ideal is a society of free and equal men, who live and think by the

light of what is true and right, and so are not in conflict with each

other or themselves. This is a form-a very simple one-of the classical

doctrine of natural law, whether in its theological or secular, liberalanarchist form. To it Tolstoy adhered all his life; as much in his

'secular' period as after his 'conversion'. His early stories express this

,,

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vividly. The Cossacks Lukashka and Uncle Yeroshka are morally

superior, as well as happier and aesthetically more harmonious beings

than Olenin in The Cossacks; Olenin knows this; indeed that is the

heart of the situation. Pierre in War and Peace and Levin in Anna

Karenina have a sense of this in simple peasants and soldiers; so does

Nekhlyudov in The Morning of a Landowner. This conviction fills

Tolstoy's mind to a greater and greater degree, until it overshadows

all other issues in his later works: Resurrection and The Death of Ivan

Ilich are not intelligible without it.

Tolstoy's critical thought constantly revolves round this central