Tolstoy

At the end of March 1855 Tolstoy began writing properly again. He started Youth, which would end up being the third and last instalment of his projected four-part work. He also began reworking the draft of his article about events at Sebastopol. He did not get very far, however, as he was called into action. After the long winter months, during which time the allies built a railway to speed up the delivery of supply of guns and ammunition, French and British troops were ready to resume their bombardment of Russian defences in Sebastopol. Tolstoy’s battery was despatched to the fourth bastion in the south of the city, which was the most dangerous owing to its close proximity to the French position. The new allied bombardment ceased on 7 April, except in the case of the fourth bastion, which continued to be pummelled for another five days. Tolstoy was first on duty between 5 and 6 April, and then in stints of four days, followed by eight days’ rest, during which time he retreated to a flat in town and played the piano.⁸³ On 19 April the allies seized the trenches between the fourth and fifth bastions, and the Russian forces began to doubt that they would prevail.

On 25 April Tolstoy finished ‘Sebastopol in December’, his first, very patriotic and gripping piece of reportage about the realities of fighting in the besieged city, and he sent it straight away to Petersburg. Together with the two other works he wrote which make up the Sebastopol Sketches, it constitutes his most sophisticated writing yet. In this first sketch, the narrator takes the reader on a tour of Sebastopol set in the present tense, so that the experience of hostilities is all the more vivid when it begins, and reminiscent of the experience of watching a film:

The whistle, close at hand, of a shell or a cannonball, just at the very moment you start to climb the hill, gives you a nasty sensation. Suddenly you realise, in an entirely new way, the true significance of those sounds of gunfire you heard from the town. Some quiet, happy memory suddenly flickers to life in your brain; you start thinking more about yourself and less about what you observe around you, and are suddenly gripped by an unpleasant sense of indecision …⁸⁴

Tolstoy, hailed as the first war correspondent, was adept at combining personal impressions, conveyed in a conversational, intimate tone, with the lofty viewpoint of a historian or epic poet able to speak for the nation. Meanwhile he continued his turns of duty on the fourth bastion. The allied bombardment now became fiercer, particularly during a battle beginning on the evening of 10 May, which resulted in heavy casualties (about 2,500 on each side), and further attrition of Russian defences. The experience of living through these events provided Tolstoy with material for his second despatch. On 15 May he was sent to command the guns of a mountain platoon twelve miles out of Sebastopol, and this ended his tour of duty on the fourth bastion.⁸⁵

In June Tolstoy once again had time to write. He turned first to ‘The Wood-Felling: A Cadet’s Tale’. This was a story he had begun earlier about his army experiences in the Caucasus, which now seemed so distant. He finished the story on 18 June, and sent it off to Nekrasov for publication in The Contemporary, where it appeared that September. Meanwhile, ‘Sebastopol in December’ was published in the June issue, and it created a furore. Russian readers had never been given a true picture of what warfare was like in their literary journals, still less an idea of what it was like for ordinary soldiers while it was still going on. Tolstoy’s descriptions of their heroism and suffering were deeply moving, the more so for the calm, unsensational tone in which they were delivered. Tolstoy learned that the Tsar himself had read ‘Sebastopol in December’, and had ordered it to be translated for publication in the Russian government’s French-language journal Le Nord.⁸⁶ He was flattered, naturally, but his thoughts were now dominated by his longing to retire from the army and concentrate on his writing. The optimism he had expressed in ‘Sebastopol in December’ was misplaced: the situation was becoming bleaker by the day. On 28 June another of the army’s commanders died when Admiral Nakhimov was shot in the head.

On 5 July Tolstoy sent off his second sketch about the siege of Sebastopol to The Contemporary. He was well aware the censor would object to much in ‘Sebastopol in May’, which is a far bleaker work than ‘Sebastopol in December’ and represents the first strong expression of Tolstoy’s views on the futility of war: