What Squirrel Said to Wolf
Moral lessons, Leo Tolstoy and Russian education
No parent of a primary school student in Russia would question why Leo Tolstoy’s fables remain a constant school curriculum feature. Starting from Soviet times, those fables were the material from which the younger generation got its moral lessons. While the Russian President and the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church are holding hands and smiling at each other in front of cameras, Russian education marches to its own drumbeat.
A pacifist with strong moral beliefs, Count Leo Tolstoy had a difficult relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church. The highest Orthodox governing body even pronounced him no longer “a member of the Church.” The Church’s position was that Tolstoy’s writing undermined the Christian belief in Jesus Christ, Immaculate Conception, the afterlife, and Divine Retribution.
Rebellious Leo Tolstoy responded in an open letter that worshipping a man named Christ instead of God was sacrilege, and leaving the Orthodox church had made him closer to real God. He wrote that the truth he believed in and loved more than anything in the world had been best expressed by true Christianity, where God was Spirit, Love, and the beginning of everything.
Not being a religious person, I have no vested interest in whose Christianity is more truthful: Toltsoy’s or the Church’s. However, it’s quite important to me what kind of lessons are taught to my child. Some years ago, trying to preserve the Russian language while living in Canada, I started to give home lessons to my youngest. The goal of an exercise in a Russian textbook was to read Tolstoy’s fable and to give your own answer to the question the Wolf asked the Squirrel: “Why are you, squirrels, so cheerful? I’m always vexed, but look at you, always playing and bouncing up there.”
“Because you are a predator, and we are not,” my 10 years-old blurted instantly, ”to eat, we don’t have to kill anybody.”
“No, it couldn’t be the right answer,” he hesitated, “the fable is for children.”
In the fable, the answer was: “You’re vexed because you’re wicked. The anger burns your heart out. And we are cheerful because we are kind and don’t harm anyone.”
It’s hard to argue with the idea that anger is harmful and takes away joy. However, the suggestion that some animals are good by nature and others are evil bothered me then and annoys me still. There is no absolute evil or absolute good in Nature. Wolves kill to survive, not because they’re wicked. But the moral of Tolstoy persists. There is a whole country where it is taught in schools that some of God’s creations are good, but others are not. It’s no surprise that my Russian countrymen are persuaded easily that there are evil forces that mean them harm.
This realization would scare me senseless if I didn’t know that people are not the same. We can read the same book and learn something different. And that fills my heart with hope. One Russian fairy tale website has the following description of the fable in question: “The fable «Squirrel and Wolf» teaches us to work for the common good and bring joy to other people.”
And so it goes. The fable and any other source are more about how you see the world than anything else. I would gladly trade my annoyance with Tolstoy’s fable for the ability to ignore its moral. I would prefer even more to have the fable removed from the school curriculum. Life is full of half-truths as it is, without teaching them at schools.
