Leo Tolstoy

In his stories Tolstoy portrays a city getting on with its regular life at a time of death and destruction. Peasant women sell buns in the crowd on the embankment within immediate reach of the French artillery. A girl jumps across the street trying not to get her pink dress wet near a noble club that had been turned into a hospital for the wounded. Officers are chasing pretty girls and telling dirty stories, knowing that in an hour they will go to the bastion, possibly never to return. Moreover, Tolstoy showed that the sense of duty and self-sacrifice involved in being ready to die for one’s country are compatible with, indeed are actually inseparable from, self-assertion, petty vanity, desire for promotion or the wish to show off to one’s peers.

Siege of Sebastopol, drawing by Vasily Timm, 1854–5.

Developing the technique he had discovered in Childhood, Tolstoy brought together fictional heroes and a more than real narrator who shares with the reader his personal experience and offers a sort of on-site journalistic reportage accompanied by moralistic comments, psychological observations and philosophical conclusions. This combination allowed him to present almost as documentary evidence the inner motives and impulses of his characters, including the last thoughts and feelings of the dying. The reader familiar with War and Peace or any literary description of twentieth-century wars will struggle to see the striking novelty of Tolstoy’s approach, but the mid-nineteenth-century reading public in Russia or anywhere else had never encountered anything remotely similar. In Childhood Tolstoy found the new techniques to speak about a vanishing civilization. In the Sebastopol stories he discovered ways to describe new warfare with its indiscriminate destruction, blurring of the lines between the battlefield and ordinary life, and indifference to the passing of any single individual, whom he portrays as a mere drop in an ocean of death.

Tolstoy’s narrative strategy remained the same throughout the whole cycle, but the actual content of each story depended upon the stages of war. ‘Sebastopol in December’ was devoted to the unassuming and mundane heroism of the defenders of the city. The new emperor who wept over Childhood read the story and immediately ordered that Tolstoy be transferred to a less dangerous place. He believed that ‘the intellectual glory of his country’ required ‘keeping an eye on the life of this young man’.⁴ The emperor must have been less thrilled by the later Sebastopol stories. ‘Sebastopol in May’, mauled by the censors, witnessed the birth of a passionate pacifism that would later become one of the pillars of Tolstoy’s worldview along with a growing understanding of the utter futility of sacrifices made by the Russian people. The author ended the story with the telling observation that his only ‘ever beautiful hero’ (CW, IV, p. 59) was truth. In ‘Sebastopol in August’ Tolstoy described the final assault of the French army and the death of the main character, the young, charming and naively patriotic sub-officer who bravely and uselessly did not leave the trenches as the enemy advanced. ‘Something in a greatcoat was lying at the place, where Volodya stood’ (CW, IV, p. 116), the narrator wryly remarks. The story ends with the powerless fury of Russian soldiers leaving the city they had selflessly defended for eleven months.

Tolstoy was a brave and diligent, but not very disciplined officer. One of his peers later remembered that he used to leave his brigade without permission on quiet days to participate in clashes elsewhere and he constantly argued with superiors. After the fall of Sebastopol Tolstoy decided that a military career was not for him. The Sebastopol stories turned a young and promising beginner into the acknowledged leader of Russian literature and, by default, public opinion. Literature was to become ‘his chief and only occupation’. He also aspired to ‘literary fame’ (Ds, p. 93). Like Thackeray, whom he admired, Tolstoy saw in vanity a powerful engine of human behaviour ‘even among the people ready to die for their principles’ (CW, IV, p. 24), but described this human weakness without the indignation of the British satirist. Now he had plenty of opportunities to satisfy his own vanity.

In the autumn of 1855 Tolstoy was granted leave and left his brigade and military service forever. On his way to St Petersburg he confessed in his diary that ‘sexuality torments him’ (Ds, p. 93) and repented for having gambled away an exorbitant amount of money. To repay at least part of the debt, he asked his brother to sell the mansion at Yasnaya Polyana, in which he had been born. The house was disassembled and moved to a neighbouring estate. For the remaining 55 years of his life, Tolstoy had to live in one of the two remaining wings of the building.