p Looking back and trying to understand my thirty-five years of experience in teaching I am ready to examine and try to evaluate once again the specific professional and human element that was born within me when, at the age of twenty-one 6 I chose to teach under the guidance of Mikhail Fedorovich Parfenov, a remarkable pedagogue, in the far north of the Soviet Union, in the distant settlement of Solenga in the Arkhangelsk Region.

p Today I know for sure that my association with teaching began not with classroom work, but with sentiments of admiration, astonishment and conflict. I was literally shaken by the nature of life in a northern Russian village, and in the course of time it actually produced a fundamental change within me. I was continually surprised at the spiritual purity, kindness and openness of village children, their mothers, fathers, grandfathers and grandmothers. It was partly Parfenov who created this new world of kindness. That is why I came to love him. I loved him for his devotion, sincerity and honesty. Parfenov was an unusual and creative person, and that is why my conflict with him, too, was unusual. It should not really be called a conflict. It was something else—a collision of different approaches to upbringing, different intonations, and moods, generally there were many contradictions.

p But let me be more precise: my mention of the contradictions is deliberate. In my view contradictions constitute the governing principle in the development of both theory and practice. They constitute a knot, as it were, in relation to decisive elements. It is by unraveling that knot that one comes to know essential aspects. While the development of each teacher’s personality is always a unique process, it is also typical in some respects and instructive. I closely associate both my life’s achievements and its failures with my fate as a teacher, which I can now firmly say was a happy one.

p I recall how I first saw the small settlement of Solenga.

p The narrow-gauge line broke out of a narrow corridor into the open. Everything around us—the trees, shrubbery, the fields on the hillsides, the woods beyond them, and then again to the right more houses and fields—was flooded with sunshine, glittering in vivid colours, with the clear sky reflected in the blue waters of the river. My heart filled with joy.

p At that time the settlement to which I had come did not yet have a name. It adjoined the village of Faddeyevo and was known as the DSK—a house-building plant. “Agashka” (as the local rail car had been named) came to a stop and I saw mounds of sawdust and the houses beyond the river, like patches of cadmium yellow on the greenery.

p Two people approached the “agashka”: Mikhail Fedorovich Parfenov, School Director, and Faik Bulatovich Samedov, Head of Curriculum.

p I found myself swept into the rhythm of Solenga’s life from the very first moment. I stayed overnight at Faik’s home and already at about six the next morning I was awakened by Parfenov: we had agreed to go pick mushrooms. This was a first time for me, and perhaps the fact that it took place in the presence of Parfenov played a certain role in shaping my attitude towards him. It was already there, in the woods, that I became aware not so much of Parfenov’s external appearance (his smartness, agility), as of some inner refinement, coming from the depth of his soul, not liberally but sparingly. His quiet and thoughtful speech, the way in which he touched the mushrooms, pointing out various types, and in which he reacted to my delight—all expressed a certain intimacy that invited mutual sympathy.

p If it is true, as I have always believed, that each person is marked by his own specific combination of certain colours, then I can imagine Parfenov in an intensive grey monotone. Not the grey that denotes a lack of distinction, but a refined pattern of white and black that stresses a subdued colour scale. During our mushroom hunt I seemed to acquire an ability to see more vividly and in greater depth. It was as if new forces emerged within me that found and absorbed previously unknown sensations. I now saw a mushroom not only as a perfect tiny creation of nature but as my link with the living world requiring particular care, in a uniquely human sense.

p Much later I formulated for myself the principle of care in upbringing. Much depends on the ability of a teacher to create the most delicate types of relations with children. These may be expressed through glances, smiles, barely perceptible movements, a line from a poem, and forms of play, as well as commands, outbursts of indignation, or well-intentioned enthusiasm. Basically all these forms are both moral and fundamental.

p ...On that day I was stunned by the forest’s magnificent beauty. Every now and then Parfenov would leave me and vanish God knows where, while I both rejoiced at the mushrooms and felt saddened by his absence. I wanted so much to talk with him. I had already heard about Parfenov. People spoke of him with great emotion. "He carried a small volume of Tutchev’s poems with him throughout the war.” "There is no other man as honest as him on the Pechora.” "He is our conscience.”

Parfenov had built the school log by log, stocking up boards, window frames and nails as he came upon one. In planning the equipment of study rooms he sought for technical perfection so that everything would operate like clockwork. He wanted the relationships in the school to be strict and based on respect.