And somewhere in the grounds of that great garden, they knew, there stood a big house in which a famous gentleman lived.

The notice on the gates said “Yasnaya Polyana,” which in Russian means “Clear Glades.”

CLEAR GLADES
Country House of Count L. N. Tolstoy

That was plain enough. The children knew they had to keep out.

How surprised — and not a little afraid — they were when one day they heard that the Count had summoned them to his mansion. The word soon spread through the village. What did he want them for? Rumor had it that he wanted to teach them to read and write.

What a strange idea!

In those days there were few enough schools in the towns, fewer still in the countryside. “Very, very rarely could a villager read or write. If a letter needed to be written, people went to the deacon and had to pay a tidy sum for it. There were no books in the village, no newspapers, no schools.

Yet now it seemed that the Count had a mind to open a school for poor children. And to teach them himself.

The children were shy But on the appointed day they put on their Sunday best — a clean shirt and fresh birch-bark shoes — smoothed down their unkempt hair with yellow sunflower oil or brown rye juice, and set off in a crowd for the Big House.

The year was 1849. The gold and russet trees of autumn had laid a crisp carpet of leaves along the drive, as the children made their way to the house. Once past the dark, still waters of the lake, a big house suddenly came into view, set back behind the trees. The tall two-story building seemed like a palace to boys and girls who had grown up in squat smoke-begrimed huts under straw-thatched roofs. Nervously, the knots of village children stood before the house, waiting for the Count to appear.

Finally he appeared on the veranda — a tall, broad-shouldered figure with long straggly hair, a large fleshy nose, and a bushy black beard. As he fixed them with his fierce stare, from under the most enormous eyebrows, the children drew back in alarm. Yet the moment he smiled and spoke, their shyness seemed to melt away

The school at Clear Glades was open all day long, and children could come and go as they pleased. No one forced them to attend, and no one forced any lessons upon them. Each child did whatever took her or his fancy — drawing, reading, writing, sports. And, by all accounts, the children came to the school very willingly, some arriving as early as seven in the morning and staying until late evening. Such was their eagerness to learn.

But it was not all sitting at desks. Tolstoy loved games. In summer he taught the children croquet on his lawn, and rigged up a small gym in the bam. He took them on nature rambles through the woods and down to the river to swim. And when the winter snows and ice came, there was no end to the games the children played: speeding downhill on great sleds, snowballing, tumbling in the snow — with the Count himself in the thick of them! They cleared the snow from the big lake to make a skating rink; they held races there, but few could beat Tolstoy, who was an excellent skater.

At Christmastime he decorated a big fir tree inside his house and held a party for all the children on his estate. Of course, the thin ragged village children had never had such a party in their lives.

In those days children’s lives were hard. As soon as they were strong enough — about the age of ten — they had to drive a wooden plow and toil in the fields from dawn to dusk. Childhood ended early in Russia at that time; peasant families were but serfs, slaves to the lords.

Yet here was a lord, Count Tolstoy, who was opening the doors of his house, with its polished wooden floors, lofty ceilings, and bright windows, to the village children. It all seemed a fairy tale.

But it was real enough. And so was their teacher’s love for them. Throughout his long life Tolstoy loved children.