Tolstoy's Leo alphabet for children modern editions. Leo Tolstoy - Stories from the “New ABC”

L.N. Tolstoy - teacher and educator - is an outstanding phenomenon in the history of pedagogy;

it is as bright and significant as it is complex and contradictory.

Draft text editing

Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy

Stories from the “New ABC”

Three Bears

(Fairy tale)

One girl left home for the forest. She got lost in the forest and began to look for the way home, but didn’t find it, but came to a house in the forest.

The door was open: she looked at the door, saw that there was no one in the house, and entered. Three bears lived in this house. One bear had a father, his name was Mikhail Ivanovich. He was big and shaggy. The other was a bear. She was smaller, and her name was Nastasya Petrovna. The third was a little bear cub, and his name was Mishutka. The bears were not at home, they went for a walk in the forest.

There were two rooms in the house: one was a dining room, the other was a bedroom. The girl entered the dining room and saw three cups of stew on the table. The first cup, a very large one, was from Mikhail Ivanovich. The second cup, smaller, was Nastasya Petrovnina’s; the third, blue cup, was Mishutkina. Next to each cup lay a spoon: large, medium and small.

The girl took the largest spoon and sipped from the largest cup; then she took a middle spoon and sipped from the middle cup, then she took a small spoon and sipped from the blue cup; and Mishutka’s stew seemed to her the best.

The girl wanted to sit down and saw three chairs at the table: one large, Mikhail Ivanovich’s, another smaller one, Nastasya Petrovnin’s, and a third, small one, with a blue cushion, Mishutkin’s. She climbed onto a large chair and fell; then she sat on the middle chair, it was awkward, then she sat on the small chair and laughed, it felt so good. She took the blue cup on her lap and began to eat. She ate all the stew and began to rock in her chair.

The chair broke and she fell to the floor. She stood up, picked up the chair and went to another room. There were three beds there: one large - Mikhaily Ivanychev's, the other medium - Nastasya Petrovnina's, the third small - Mishenkina's. The girl lay down in the big one; it was too spacious for her; I lay down in the middle - it was too high; She lay down in the small bed - the bed was just right for her, and she fell asleep.

And the bears came home hungry and wanted to have dinner. The big bear took his cup, looked and roared in a terrible voice: “Who drank in my cup!”

Nastasya Petrovna looked at her cup and growled not so loudly: “Who was slurping in my cup!”

And Mishutka saw his empty cup and squealed in a thin voice: “Who sipped in my cup and swallowed it all!”

Mikhailo Ivanovich looked at his chair and growled in a terrible voice: “Who was sitting on my chair and moved it from its place!”

Nastasya Petrovna looked at the empty chair and growled not so loudly: “Who was sitting on my chair and moved it from its place!”

Mishutka looked at his broken chair and squeaked: “Who sat on my chair and broke it!”

The bears came to another room. “Who lay in my bed and rumpled it!” - Mikhailo Ivanovich roared in a terrible voice. “Who lay in my bed and rumpled it!” – Nastasya Petrovna growled not so loudly. And Mishenka set up a little bench, climbed into his crib and squealed in a thin voice: “Who went to my bed!” And suddenly he saw a girl and screamed as if he was being cut: “Here she is!” Hold it, hold it! Here she is! Here she is! Ay-yay! Hold it!”

He wanted to bite her. The girl opened her eyes, saw the bears and rushed to the window. The window was open, she jumped out the window and ran away. And the bears did not catch up with her.

How Uncle Semyon talked about what happened to him in the forest

(Story)

One winter I went to the forest to pick trees, cut down three trees, cut off the branches, trimmed them, I saw it was too late, I had to go home. And the weather was bad: it was snowing and shallow. I think the night will take over and you won’t find the road. I drove the horse; I’m going, I’m going, I’m still not leaving. All forest. I think my fur coat is bad, I’ll freeze. I drove and drove, there was no road and it was dark. I was just about to unharness the sleigh and lie down under the sleigh, when I heard bells rattling nearby. I went to the bells, I saw three Savras horses, their manes were braided with ribbons, the bells were glowing and two young men were sitting.

- Great, brothers! - Great, man! - Where, brothers, is the road? - Yes, here we are on the road itself. “I went out to them and saw what a miracle it was - the road was smooth and unnoticed. “Follow us, they say,” and they urged the horses. My filly is bad, she can't keep up. I began to shout: wait, brothers! They stopped and laughed. - Sit down, they say, with us. It will be easier for your horse to be empty. - Thank you, I say. - I climbed into the sleigh with them. The sleigh is good, carpeted. As soon as I sat down, they whistled: well, you guys! The Savras horses curled up so that the snow was like a column. I see what a miracle it is. It became brighter, and the road was smooth as ice, and we were burning so hard that it took our breath away, only branches lashed us in the face. I felt really terrified. I look ahead: the mountain is very steep, and there is an abyss under the mountain. The Savras are flying straight into the abyss. I got scared and shouted: fathers! easier, you'll kill me! Where are they, they just laugh and whistle. I see it disappearing. Sleigh over the abyss. I see there is a branch above my head. Well, I think: disappear alone. He stood up, grabbed a branch and hung. I just hung there and shouted: hold it! And I also hear the women shouting: Uncle Semyon! What are you? Women, oh women! blow fire. Something bad is wrong with Uncle Semyon, he screams. They started the fire. I woke up. And I’m in the hut, I grabbed the floor with my hands, I’m hanging and screaming in an unlucky voice. And this is me - I saw everything in a dream.

(True)

The widow Marya lived with her mother and six children. They lived poorly. But with the last money they bought a brown cow so that there would be milk for the children. The older children fed Burenushka in the field and gave her slops at home. One day, the mother came out of the yard, and the eldest boy Misha reached for bread on the shelf, dropped a glass and broke it. Misha was afraid that his mother would scold him, so he picked up the large glasses from the glass, took them out into the yard and buried them in the manure, and picked up all the small glasses and threw them into the basin. The mother grabbed the glass and began to ask, but Misha didn’t say; and so the matter remained.

The next day, after lunch, the mother went to give Burenushka slops from the tub, she saw that Burenushka was boring and did not eat food. They began to treat the cow and called the grandmother. The grandmother said: the cow will not live, we must kill it for meat. They called a man and began to beat the cow. The children heard Burenushka roar in the yard. Everyone gathered on the stove and began to cry. When Burenushka was killed, skinned and cut into pieces, glass was found in her throat.

And they found out that she died because she got glass in the slop. When Misha found out this, he began to cry bitterly and confessed to his mother about the glass. The mother said nothing and began to cry herself. She said: we killed our Burenushka, now we have nothing to buy. How can small children live without milk? Misha began to cry even more and did not get off the stove while they ate the jelly from the cow's head. Every day in his dreams he saw Uncle Vasily carrying Burenushka’s dead, brown head with open eyes and a red neck by the horns. Since then the children have had no milk. Only on holidays there was milk, when Marya asked the neighbors for a pot. It happened that the lady of that village needed a nanny for her child. The old woman says to her daughter: let me go, I’ll go as a nanny, and maybe God will help you manage the children alone. And I, God willing, will earn enough for a cow a year. And so they did. The old lady went to the lady. And it became even harder for Marya with the children. And the children lived without milk for a whole year: they ate only jelly and tyurya and became thin and pale. A year passed, the old woman came home and brought twenty rubles. Well, daughter! He says, now let’s buy a cow. Marya was happy, all the children were happy. Marya and the old woman were going to the market to buy a cow. The neighbor was asked to stay with the children, and the neighbor, Uncle Zakhar, was asked to go with them to choose a cow. We prayed to God and went to the city. The children had lunch and went outside to see if the cow was being led. The children began to judge whether the cow would be brown or black. They began to talk about how they would feed her. They waited, waited all day. They went a mile away to meet the cow, it was getting dark, and they came back. Suddenly, they see: a grandmother is riding along the street in a cart, and a motley cow is walking at the rear wheel, tied by the horns, and the mother is walking behind, urging her on with a twig. The children ran up and began to look at the cow. They gathered bread and herbs and began to feed them. The mother went into the hut, undressed and went out into the yard with a towel and milk pan. She sat down under the cow and wiped the udder. God bless! began to milk the cow, and the children sat around and watched as the milk splashed from the udder into the edge of the milk pan and whistled from under the mother’s fingers. The mother milked half the milk pan, took it to the cellar and poured a pot for the children for dinner.

"New ABC"

The failure that befell “Azbuka” prompted L.N. Tolstoy to re-write a short and accessible manual for children, from which they could learn to read and write. “The New ABC” was published in May 1875 and was significantly different from the previous manual.

It could be used in various methods of teaching literacy: auditory, sound, letter-formative, and even the so-called whole word method. If in “ABC” the primer was only the first part of a set of educational books, then “New ABC” became an independent textbook. The remaining parts of the ABC were reworked into separate textbooks: Arithmetic and the world-famous Russian Reading Books. The “New Alphabet”, having received wide recognition, was approved by the Ministry of Public Education and recommended “for all educational institutions where education begins with the alphabet.”

Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy told one of his friends: “Children are strict judges in literature. It is necessary that the stories be written for them in a clear, entertaining, and moral way.” And Tolstoy presented one more indispensable condition for children's books - simplicity.

So, there are only four commandments. Let's repeat for good measure: clarity, entertainment, morality and simplicity. Four commandments that should guide any author writing for children. Lev Nikolaevich himself, creating his famous “ABC,” followed them strictly.

It would be easiest to call “ABC” an educational book for the little ones. But such a definition will not be entirely accurate. “ABC” is a unique encyclopedia in four volumes, which, in addition to the primer itself, included many stories, fairy tales, fables and scientific educational articles. So “ABC” L.N. Tolstoy not only taught children to read and write, she shaped their views on the world around them.

Lev Nikolaevich spoke willingly and a lot about his beloved brainchild. Even more about “ABC” was written by his followers, connoisseurs and... ill-wishers (there were such people too). In order not to be like them, we will give only a small quote from the classic himself: “It is very difficult to tell that for me this work of many years is the ABC. My proud dreams about this alphabet are this: two generations of all Russian children, from royal to peasant, will learn from this alphabet, and they will receive their first poetic impressions from it.”

This is what Lev Nikolaevich wrote in 1872. More than a century has passed since then. Not two generations, at least five, replaced each other. Two world wars have died down. The Russian kingdom was gone. The Soviet Union, which replaced it, also died. And “The Three Bears”, “Filipka” and “The Lion and the Dog” are still read.

In the writer's notebooks, in all his extensive preparatory material for the ABC, there are many sketches, rough sketches, which indisputably indicate that the book was conceived with a large number of drawings. He accompanied each letter of the ABC with a live drawing depicting animals or objects familiar to the child. For example, for the letter G he drew girls finding mushrooms, for the letter D - a man chopping down a tree, for the letter Z - a hare running away from a dog...

Later, imagining how difficult it would be to find an artist, and also taking into account the difficulties in reproducing the drawings, Tolstoy was forced to abandon the original plan. In the end, instead of plot episodes, the book was left with only images of objects for the alphabet, made with the simplest means of linear drawing.

Over the years, the most famous Russian artists turned to illustrating the ABC: Yu. Vasnetsov, V. Favorsky, M. Romadin. An invaluable gift for the 100th anniversary of the ABC was a series of illustrations by Alexey Pakhomov, awarded the USSR State Prize.

Leo Tolstoy Shklovsky Viktor Borisovich

"ABC"

"ABC"

In the world in which ABC readers live, there are only men and gentlemen. They live nearby. Guys it's hard. The things around them are familiar, many things are familiar, which they usually don’t talk about, but they need to generalize what is familiar - this is more important than assessment.

Tolstoy does not think that children need to know only what he told them first at the Yasnaya Polyana school, and then at Azbuka. He wants to teach Russian children to see and generalize, believing that “science is only a generalization of particulars.”

“The task of pedagogy is, therefore, to guide the mind to generalization...”

What is important are generalizations “...that cannot be foreseen. Science is enriched by these unexpected generalizations.”

For generalization, fables, a few historical records and records of everyday, strictly realistic, sometimes even naturalistic nature are taken, which surprised and upset the reviewers.

On the first pages of The New ABC, where reading exercises for children are given, the columns read: “Fleas are small. The eyebrows are black."

This was given as ordinary things, without evaluation, and was not liked.

Tolstoy and others corrected Tolstoy for Tolstoy many times during reprints of the ABC. I had to seek an official recommendation of the book to libraries and schools. On July 26, 1891, Sofya Andreevna wrote down: “I spent the whole day correcting the proofs of the ABC. The Scientific Committee did not approve of it due to various words, such as: lice, fleas, devil, bug, and because there were mistakes, and also proposed to throw out the stories: About the fox and fleas, about a stupid man and others, to which Lyovochka did not agree.”

For Tolstoy, this is life, which he often does not like, but has not yet been changed.

In the third book of the ABC (1872) there is a story about how mice gnawed down two hundred young apple trees planted by Tolstoy. The story “Bedbugs” is written next to it: both stories begin with the word “Ya.”

It is written about apple trees just like about people - it’s a pity that the apple trees grew for four years, and then all of them died, except nine, and all this is very well explained: “The bark of trees is the same as the veins of a person: through the veins blood flows through a person, - and through the bark the sap travels through the tree and rises into branches, leaves and flowers.”

Bedbugs are talked about almost without irritation: a person enters into a useless single combat with them. Tolstoy puts the bed at the inn in the middle of the room and under each leg of the bed he puts a wooden cup of water and thinks about the bedbugs: “I have outsmarted you.” But bedbugs jump on him from the ceiling. The master puts on his fur coat and goes out into the yard, deciding: “You can’t be outsmarted.”

These stories upset critics; life is very simple and little happens in it: it is simple-minded and ugly. In addition, critics were upset and surprised that “ABC” did not contain works by other writers - neither Gogol nor Turgenev. Little is said about other life: there is a story about Eskimos, about blacks, but there are no stories about Europeans.

What happens in the books is the simplest and oldest: Aesop's fables are taken and simplified even more. From the new it is told about the railway and about electricity. The story about the railway is very interesting. It seems to contradict the book as a whole - it is called “Speed ​​makes power.” At the bottom the subtitle is “True”.

The road passed Yasnaya Polyana recently, people were still amazed at the steam locomotives, the steam locomotives seemed to be thinner than the current ones, and therefore seemed taller.

The story begins like this: “Once a car was driving very quickly along the railway. And on the road itself, at the crossing, stood a horse with a heavy cart. A man drove a horse across the road, but the horse could not move the cart because the back wheel came off. The conductor shouted to the driver: “Hold it,” but the driver did not listen. He realized that a man could neither drive a horse and cart nor turn it around, and that the cars could not be stopped immediately. He did not stop, but started the car as quickly as possible and ran into the cart at full speed. The man ran away from the cart, and the car, like a piece of wood, threw the cart and horse off the road, but did not shake itself, it ran on.”

The driver explains that they killed the horse and broke the cart, and if they had listened to the conductor, they would have killed themselves and killed all the passengers.

The moral of the conductor is reminiscent of Tolstoy’s conversation with Herzen that if the ice is cracking, then the only salvation is to go faster.

“Speed ​​makes strength” - written against cowardice and procrastination.

Tolstoy himself was brave. From estate to estate, bypassing bridges, in the summer they traveled through crayfish fords, in winter and spring they crossed ice, sometimes unreliable, and crossed into the ice drift by boat.

It's not just a matter of courage - it's a matter of decision and an appreciation of speed. When they say that we need to go faster, the question arises:

Where to go?

What's the hurry?

What do you want to achieve?

But here the idyll begins.

In Tolstoy's "ABC" people live a village life and have nowhere to go; a railway with a steam locomotive appears unexpectedly; without it, these people could live, plow, have a cow, cry when the cow died, grow old, raise children.

The book talks about a simple morality – one that doesn’t move. There is almost no city in it, there is only a story, slightly altered by Tolstoy from the story of a student at the Yasnaya Polyana school. The story is called “How they didn’t take me to the city.”

The boy asked to go to the city, but they didn’t take him, he fell asleep from grief, he dreamed of the city. Then he went outside to play, and his father came from the city.

There are ships in ABC; on one ship, the captain's son, chasing a monkey, climbed into such a place that he could not return, and the father, under the threat of a shot from a gun, forced his son to jump into the water. In another story, children are swimming, and a shark approaches them, and the old artilleryman, when he saw the shark fin next to his son, managed to kill the shark with a cannon shot.

These are all stories about amazing cases that speak of human courage and luck.

The ships, of course, are sailing, and all this is almost a fable, although it is all true.

People go about their peasant work, and examples of the structure of matter go, in essence, only to the structure of a tree - it explains why the wheel hub is made of birch and not oak.

So as not to inject myself.

The village is surrounded by fields, and time does not seem to move. There are stories from the chronicle, there are passages from the Bible, there is a story about Ermak, about a conversation between Peter I and a man, and about how men dragged abandoned things from burned-out Moscow.

History is motionless, it is made somewhere beyond the fields and does not come to the fields.

The story about the artilleryman firing from a cannon and the epics retold by Tolstoy stand on the same plane and occurred in some common time.

There is no “machinist” in this world.

There is no speed here.

Life is patriarchal, slow and therefore strong. Tolstoy could have written: “from immobility there is strength.” There is no such story, but Tolstoy was planning to publish the Nesovremennik magazine by that time.

There is also a story about Pugachev: Pugachev came to the village, the gentlemen ran away, they dressed the little master’s girl as a peasant girl, Pugachev liked her, and he gave her a ten-kopeck piece.

Pugachev was, but what happened to Pugachev, because of which he fought with the masters, is not said: it is only said that there were peasants who hid the master’s child from Pugachev.

The gentlemen fight, ride on ships, plant gardens and hunt, their children learn to ride horses in order to hunt and fight. It is told how four brothers, and there were just that many Tolstoys, learned horse riding, how they beat an old horse, whose name was Raven, showing off their prowess, and how the uncle shamed the boy who was torturing the old horse.

Lots of stories about hunting. Seven stories in a row - about Bulka's face. Muzzles were the name of strong dogs with which they hunted large animals. When the master left for the Caucasus, he locked up Bulka, with whom he went bear hunting. Bulka broke the window and caught up with the master. This is very well described: “At the first station, I was about to board another transfer station, when suddenly I saw something black and shiny rolling along the road. It was Bulka in his copper collar, he was flying at full speed towards the station. He rushed towards me, licked my hand and stretched out in the shadows under the cart.”

Then it is told how Bulka fought with a boar. It is also told how Bulka fought with the wolf, how he was friends with other dogs and was jealous of the owner for them.

The stories about dogs are detailed and differ in style from all other stories: there is no moralizing in them; they are full of precise details.

It would seem that Tolstoy should have told about Bulka in “Cossacks”: when Olenin walks through the forest, it is said how a dog runs in front of him and how its black back turns purple from the countless mosquitoes that have settled on it. But Bulka is not named in “Cossacks”. In "Cossacks" big questions are solved. Bulka appeared in “Azbuka” as part of life, Tolstoy’s ordinary life. The master in “Azbuka” remembers the Caucasus, remembers Bulka, so as not to think about Eroshka.

In addition to Bulka, there is also a story about another dog - Druzhka, who fought with a wolf. There is a large, very slow, calm story “Hunting is Worse than Bondage.” It talks about bear hunting, about the winter forest, about spending the night in the forest on spruce branches. “I slept so soundly that I forgot where I fell asleep. I looked around - what a miracle! Where I am? There are some white chambers above me, and the pillars are white, and there are sparkles on everything. I looked up - the stains were white, and between the stains there was some kind of burnished vault, and multi-colored lights were burning. I looked around, remembered that we were in the forest and that these trees in the snow and frost seemed to me like chambers, and the lights were stars in the sky trembling between the branches.

During the night, frost fell: there was frost on the branches, and on my fur coat, and Demyan was all under frost, and frost was falling from above.”

In 1858, in the winter, they walked around the she-bear - Lev Nikolaevich went bear hunting. Tolstoy stood in his place with two guns to wait for the bear, but did not trample the space around him. He always did everything his own way and decided everything anew.

Fet tells it this way: “When the hunters, each with two loaded guns, were placed along a clearing that ran through a forest furrowed in a checkerboard pattern with clearings, they were advised to trample the deep snow around them as widely as possible, in order to thus gain the greatest possible freedom of movement. But Lev Nikolayevich, standing at the indicated place, almost waist-deep in snow, declared trampling unnecessary, since the point was shooting at the bear, and not fighting with it.”

The beaters went; the bear suddenly ran out towards Tolstoy; Lev Nikolaevich fired; then he fired a second time, hit, but could not grab the second gun, he stumbled in the snow, the bear fell on him and began to gnaw his head. Tolstoy pulled his head into his shoulders, placing his fur hat into the mouth of the beast.

The leader of the bears, Astashkov, ran up to the bear and, hitting her with a twig, shouted quietly: “Where are you going? Where are you going?"

The bear got scared and ran away: she was killed the next day. Tolstoy had a torn cheek under his left eye and skin on the left side of his forehead.

Fet assures that Tolstoy, standing up while he was being bandaged, said: “Will Fet say something?”

Fet is a great poet, but he told an incident around Christmas 1859 to his own praise: how he foresaw everything well and how, because they did not listen to him, a misfortune almost happened.

Fourteen years later, Tolstoy tells everything calmly and scary. His main character, Demyan, is the leader, and the main thing is not danger, but the hunt: “And Demyan, without a gun, with only a twig, set off along the path, shouting: “He’s eaten his master!” The master is eaten!” He runs and shouts at the bear: “Oh, you troublemaker!” What is he doing! Give it up! Give it up!“

The bear obeyed, threw me and ran. When I got up, there was blood in the snow, as if a sheep had been slaughtered, and the meat hung in rags over my eyes, but in the heat of the moment it didn’t hurt.

A comrade came running, people gathered, they looked at my wound, and soaked it in snow. And I forgot about the wound, I asked: “Where is the bear, where did it go?” Suddenly we hear: “Here he is! here he is!" We see: the bear is running towards us again. We grabbed our guns, but before anyone had time to shoot, he ran away.” What follows is a detailed story of how this bear was taken.

An entire section of three stories is devoted in ABC to a description of how trees are cut down. The whole piece is written in one piece, together: a landowner is building a garden for himself and unwittingly spoils nature, he wants to cut down dry land and game, he sees a large poplar tree with two girths, the poplar is surrounded by shoots. The master wants the place to be cheerful; it seems to him that the old poplar is drowned out by the young ones. He cuts down the young poplars, and the old poplar dries up. These were his children who came from his root, and he was about to transfer his power to them; the man intervened clumsily, the old poplar tree dried up in vain.

In vain does the landowner cut down the bird cherry tree. They cut down a tree and leaned on it. “At the same time, something seemed to scream - it crunched in the middle of the tree; we lay down, and it seemed to cry - there was a crackling sound in the middle, and the tree fell down. It tore at the cut and, swaying, lay like branches and flowers on the grass. The branches and flowers trembled after the fall and stopped.

“Oh, something important! - said the man. “It’s such a pity!” And I was so sorry that I quickly went to other workers.”

The third story is called “How Trees Walk.” The landowner again cleans out the garden near the pond, found a bird cherry tree and remembers that the garden was cleaned, and the bird cherry tree was large and thick. It turns out that the bird cherry crawled here from under the linden tree, where it was dying, but it had already thrown off the old root and grabbed the ground “with a twig and made a root out of the twig.”

It turns out that a person only gets confused in life and interferes with the life of the trees.

Lev Nikolaevich loved patriarchal life, he loved the fragrant Samara steppes, the slopes of the hills, the grass along which herds of horses walked, the healthy, calm Bashkir people, and he also loved the village. In order to understand Bashkir life, he read old books and decided that the Bashkirs are similar to the Scythians, about whom the Greek historian and geographer Herodotus once spoke. Somehow it turned out that both the desire to write more simply, unadornedly, about the most important and simple things, and the knowledge of the Bashkirs who are now living and have not changed the old way of life led Tolstoy to study the Greek language.

Greek literature and the simplicity of the old story helped Tolstoy write his “ABC”.

But Tolstoy, looking at the Bashkirs, bought land there, or rather, outbid it, and very inexpensively - ten rubles per tithe. (This is almost a hectare.)

Then a year later I saw that everything had changed, that there was no open space, the steppe was plowed up, and peasants lived there, and then famine came.

Tolstoy loved patriarchy, but as the owner he himself carried its destruction, and therefore “ABC” is a book about an old village that is disappearing.

What will happen after is unknown.

“Speed ​​is power,” but Tolstoy is against speed, because he does not know where to go and why to go.

The biggest story in ABC was the story “Prisoner of the Caucasus.” Tolstoy was almost captured by the Chechens near the Grozny fortress; many Russian officers were captured then; their families ransomed them with difficulty and at great cost. The theme “Russian among the Chechens” is the theme of Pushkin’s “Prisoner of the Caucasus”. Tolstoy took the same title, but told everything differently. His prisoner is a Russian officer from the poor nobles, the kind of man who knows how to do everything with his own hands. He's almost not a gentleman. He is captured because another, noble officer, rode away with a gun, did not help him, and was also captured.

Zhilin – that’s the prisoner’s name – understands why the mountaineers don’t like Russians. The Chechens are strangers, but not hostile to him, and they respect his courage and ability to fix the watch. The prisoner is freed not by a woman who is in love with him, but by a girl who takes pity on him. He tries to save his comrade, he took him with him, but he was timid and lacking energy.

Zhilin was dragging Kostylin on his shoulders, but was caught with him, and then ran away alone.

Tolstoy is proud of this story. This is wonderful prose - calm, there are no decorations in it and there is not even what is called psychological analysis. Human interests collide, and we sympathize with Zhilin - a good person, and what we know about him is enough for us, but he himself doesn’t want to know much about himself.

In addition to reading exercises and short stories, the ABC also contained arithmetic and instructions for the teacher.

There was a lot of controversy surrounding this book. Tolstoy himself wrote an article in Otechestvennye zapiski. The point of the article is that teachers usually assume that a child comes to school without knowing how to think, and they teach him how to think and count. Meanwhile, the guys, already playing with each other, know how to count; they have already entered into life. The book wisdom and book conversations that teachers teach them is not the road forward, but the road back.

Tolstoy believed that logical reasoning and saying everything in full words is not the main thing and not only not the most necessary, but probably not necessary at all. Lev Nikolaevich defended a different type of person. Therefore, in the article “On Public Education” the question is not only about the alphabet, but about the type of civilization that they wanted to impose on the children.

Tolstoy said that the main thing is knowledge of language, a living language and Church Slavonic - a dead language for understanding a living one, and arithmetic as the basis of mathematics. Tolstoy was right about this.

But he was wrong when he considered all the progress of life false, he wanted to stop it, but speed was needed.

Lev Nikolaevich believed that “Azbuka” was persecuted, and was very sensitive to negative reviews. But during Tolstoy’s lifetime, “The ABC,” despite its expensive price—it cost twenty kopecks—was revised and published twenty-eight times. Sofya Andreevna herself sold books.

The old scribe Mironov told me how he served as a boy in a bookstore on Nikolskaya Street, where they sold mainly books for the people. The boy was sent to Khamovniki to the house of Lev Nikolaevich. Barns opened into the dark garden, the barn door was opened, and bundles were taken out. Books were sold not by count, but by weight, knowing how many copies were per pound. They sent money with the boy for a pound of ABC.

Sometimes Lev Nikolaevich, already old, helped the boy lift the ABC book from the ground and put it on his head: he showed how it would be easier to carry it.

From Khamovniki to Nikolskaya Street the road is very long, but is the horse tram expensive?