During and After the Crimean War

However, the great Crimean war began towards the end of the next year (1853), and L.N. Tolstóy did not want to remain inactive in the Caucasus army. He obtained his transfer to the Danube army, took part in the siege of Silistria, and later on in the battle of Balakláva, and from November, 1854, till August, 1855, remained besieged in Sebastopol — partly in the terrible “Fourth bastion,” where he lived through all the dreadful experiences of the heroic defenders of that fortress. He has therefore the right to speak of War: he knows it from within. He knows what it is, even under its very best aspects, in such a significant and inspired phase as was the defence of these forts and bastions which had grown up under the enemy’s shells. He obstinately refused during the siege to become an officer of the Staff, and remained with his battery in the most dangerous spots.

I perfectly well remember, although I was only twelve or thirteen, the profound impression which his sketch, Sebastopol in December, 18 54, followed, after the fall of the fortress, by two more Sebastopol sketches — produced in Russia. The very character of these sketches was original. They were not leaves from a diary, and yet they were as true to reality as such leaves could be; in fact, even more true, because the were not representing one corner only of real life — the corner which accidentally fell under the writer’s observations — but the whole life, the prevailing modes of thought and the habits of life in the besieged fortress. They represented — and this is characteristic of all subsequent works of Tolstóy — an interweaving of Dichtung and Wahrheit, of poetry and truth, truth and poetry, containing much more truth than is usually found in a novel, and more poetry, more poetical creation, than occurs in most works of pure fiction.

Tolstóy apparently never wrote in verse; but during the siege of Sebastopol he composed, in the usual metre and language of soldiers’ songs, a satirical song in which he described the blunders of the commanders which ended in the Balakláva disaster. The song, written in an admirable popular style, could not be printed, but it spread over Russia in thousands of copies and was widely sung, both during and immediately after the campaign. The name of the author also leaked out, but there was some uncertainty as to whether it was the author of the Sebastopol sketches or some other Tolstóy.

On his return from Sebastopol and the conclusion of peace (1856) Tolstóy stayed partly at St. Petersburg and partly at Yásnaya Polyána. In the capital he was received with open arms by all classes of society, both literary and worldly, as a “Sebastopol hero” and as a rising great writer. But of the life he lived then he cannot speak now otherwise than with disgust: it was the life of hundreds of young men-officers of the Guard and jeunesse dorée of his own class — which was passed in the restaurants and cafés chantants of the Russian capital, amidst gamblers, horse dealers, Tsigane choirs, and French adventuresses. He became at that time friendly with Turguéneff and saw much of him, both at St. Petersburg and at Yásnaya Polyána — the estates of the two great writers being not very far from each other; but, although his friend Turguéneff was taking then a lively part in co-editing with Hérzen the famous revolutionary paper, The Bell (see Chapter VIII.), Tolstóy, seems to have taken no interest in it; and while he was well acquainted with the editing staff of the then famous review, The Contemporary, which was fighting the good fight for the liberation of the peasants and for freedom in general, Tolstóy, for one reason or another, never became friendly with the Radical leaders of that review — Tchernyshévsky, Dobrolúboff, Mikháiloff, and their friends.

Altogether, the great intellectual and reform movement which was going on then in Russia seems to have left him cold. He did not join the part of reforms. Still less was he inclined to join those young Nihilists whom Turguéneff had portrayed to the best of his ability in Fathers and Sons, or later on in the seventies, the youth whose watchword became: “Be the people,” and with whom Tolstóy has so much in common at the present time. What was the reason of that estrangement we are unable to say. Was it that a deep chasm separated the young epicuraean aristocrat from the ultra-democratic writers, like Dobrolúboff, who worked at spreading socialistic and democratic ideas in Russia, and still more from those who, like Rakhmétoff in Tchernyshévsky’s novel What is to be done, lived the life of the peasant, thus practising then what Tolstóy began to preach twenty years later?

Or, was it the difference between the two generations — the man of thirty or more, which Tolstóy was, and the young people in their early twenties, possessed of all the haughty intolerance of youth, — which kept them aloof from each other. And was it not, in addition to all this, the result of theories? namely, a fundamental difference in the conceptions of the advanced Russian Radicals, who at that time were mostly admirers of Governmental Jacobinism, and the Populist, the No-Government man which Tolstóy must have already then been, since it distinctly appeared in his negative attitude towards Western civilisation, and especially in the educational work which he began in 1861 in the Yásnaya Polyána school?

The novels which Tolstóy brought out during these years, 1856–1862, do not throw much light upon his state of mind, because, even though they are, to a great extent autobiographical, they mostly relate to earlier periods of his life. Thus, he published two more of his Sebastopol war-sketches. All his powers of observation and war-psychology, all his deep comprehension of the Russian soldier, and especially of the plain, un-theatrical hero who really wins the battles, and a profound understanding of that inner spirit of an army upon which depend success and failure: everything, in short, which developed into the beauty and the truthfulness of War and Peace was already manifested in these sketches, which undoubtedly represented a new departure in war-literature the world over.