“Little Girls Wiser Than Men” by Leo Tolstoy

“Little Girls Wiser Than Men” by Leo Tolstoy is as straightforward a short story as they come. Two girls, Malasha and Akoulya, disobey their mothers’ rules by playing in the mud after church and watch as their rebellion escalades and leads nearly the entire village into hysterical, mindless bickering. The short story is a dramatic interpretation of Matthew 18:3—Tolstoy is fairly explicit about that, to the point of actually citing the verse at the end of the story. Basically, the verse says that no one will enter the kingdom of Heaven until they change and become like children.

I can read “Little Girls Wiser Than Men” no other way than an allegory for the Biblical fall of man. With the children representing the original sinners Adam and Eve, fallen from a state of perfection (the church they came from before playing in the mud puddle), the mud representing sin, and the people of the town representing every human that has lived since Adam and Eve and had to cope with pre-existing sin, the poem is an allegory about the fall to sin and the way that mankind struggles to cope with it by fixating on casting blame rather than dealing with the sin itself. Like Adam and Eve, the girls had both been warned about and understood the consequences of disobeying the rules but make a conscious decision to anyway. Akoulya tells Malasha “your mother will scold you (if you go in)”. We are to notice patterns throughout the poem, particularly in the way that “different houses,” (or households, collectively) have the same standards of conduct: you keep your clothes clean, you don’t play in the mud, etc.  These are to represent Scripture put in place for our own good as humans.

And how about all the violence? Tolstoy uses violence to show us how sin makes us digress. Three times, various characters respond to conflict by acting on their primal impulses to hit. The first was when Malasha soils Akoulya’s dress by splashing it with muddy water, when “she was angry and ran after Malásha to strike her.” The next, we would probably agree, is even more alarming because it is a woman hitting a child (a child that is not even hers, might I add). Akoulya blames her soiled dress on Malasha, and “at this, Akoúlya's mother seized Malásha, and struck her on the back of her neck”—just like that, no questions asked. This upset Malasha’s mother, who came out onto the street and began quarreling with the woman hitting her child, “till one gave another a push.”

Age isn’t the point here; don’t be misled by the title. Were it not for the older woman of the poem, it might seem that way—that Tolstoy was making an argument very similar to the one that William Blake made in his poem “Infant Joy,” (published in Songs of Innocence): that is, that the wisest among us are those most blameless and pure, and wisdom fades with age. However, the old woman who enters about halfway through the poem has as much insight as the young girls because she understands that fighting is not going to solve anything.

Tolstoy’s concept of wisdom might be oversimplified and unrealistic.  The story resolves with the young girls “laughing” and “delighted,” but we know that sin cannot be laughed off or “forgotten”. Regardless, Tolstoy expertly creates an allegory that makes us look at how humanity deals with its fallen nature. - Elise Cofield