Tolstoy

Yes, white flags have been raised on the bastion and all along the trench, the flowering valley is filled with stinking corpses, the resplendent sun is descending toward the dark blue sea, and the sea’s blue swell is gleaming in the sun’s golden rays. Thousands of men are crowding together, studying one another, speaking to one another, smiling at one another. It might be supposed that when these men – Christians, recognising the same great law of love – see what they have done, they will instantly fall to their knees to repent before Him who, when He gave them life, placed in the soul of each, together with the fear of death, a love of the good and the beautiful, and that they will embrace one another with tears of joy and happiness, like brothers. Not a bit of it! The scraps of white cloth will be put away – and once again the engines of death and suffering will start their whistling; once again the blood of the innocent will flow and the air will be filled with their groans and cursing.⁸⁷

On 24 August the allies started their sixth and final bombardment of the Sebastopol fortress. Tolstoy took part in the defence of the Malakov redoubt, but it was seized on 27 August. That night, the Russian army began to abandon its positions on the south side of Sebastopol and crossed the river over to the north side. After a year-long siege, Sebastopol had fallen to the allied forces. Tolstoy cried when he saw the once beautiful city in flames, with French flags flying on all the bastions.⁸⁸ He was still there on 28 August to witness the city fall strangely silent. It was his twenty-seventh birthday, and he remembered back to another gloomy birthday in 1841, when his aunt Aline had died. On the same day, Ivan Panayev, co-editor of The Contemporary, wrote to Tolstoy to tell him that ‘Sebastopol in May’ had been massacred by the censor, who had reduced its length by about a third. Panayev had wanted to withdraw it from publication, but the censor insisted it be published exactly as it now stood.⁸⁹ The only consolation was that Panayev published it anonymously, as ‘A Night in the Spring of 1855 in Sebastopol’ to spare Tolstoy’s feelings. It appeared in the August issue of The Contemporary, coinciding with the fall of Sebastopol.

Tolstoy felt listless throughout the warm days of September. He began his third and final piece about the siege – ‘Sebastopol in September’ – but his heart was not in it. He was burned out and exhausted, and so surrendered to gambling again. This was a bad sign, and he realised he needed to leave the army sooner rather than later. In early November Tolstoy was sent to St Petersburg as a courier. The next stage of his life was about to begin.

6

LITERARY DUELLIST AND REPENTANT NOBLEMAN

Measuring myself against my former Yasnaya memories, I can feel how much I have changed in the liberal sense.

Diary entry, May 1856

NO PERIOD OF TOLSTOY’S LIFE was uneventful, but the years between the time he left the Crimea in 1855 and married in 1862 were particularly crucial in terms of his artistic and intellectual formation. Tolstoy had been away from Russian metropolitan life for four years, and arriving back in the city was a big shock to the system. He had launched his career from outside the Russian literary establishment, and his talent had catapulted him right into its midst. Now he had to contend with it face to face, which meant living up to expectations – his own, and those of his new colleagues. It also meant confronting insecurities with regard to more established writers, and discovering where his allegiances lay. But during this time of great social change, he began to recognise within himself an impulse which ran counter to the pursuit of an artistic career: a deep moral need to do something about social inequality in Russia. He had taken jejune steps in this direction when he first came into his inheritance, but the experience of standing next to common soldiers in the Crimean War had been more than chastening: Sebastopol marked Tolstoy for life. He began this seven-year period as an ambitious twenty-seven-year-old writer anxious to consolidate his early successes, but he ended it as a village schoolteacher.