The Sebastopol Sketches Read online

  THE

  SEBASTOPOL

  SKETCHES

  LEO TOLSTOY

  Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

  DAVID McDUFF

  PENGUIN

  BOOKS

  Translation, Introduction and Notes

  ©1986 by David McDuff

  All rights reserved.

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives

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  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  “Sebastopol in December” and “Sebastopol in May”

  first published 1855

  “Sebastopol in August 1855” first published 1856

  This translation first published 1986

  3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

  Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana in the Tula province, and educated privately. He studied oriental languages and law at the University of Kazan, then led a life of pleasure until 1851 when he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus. He took part in the Crimean war and after the defence of Sebastopol he wrote The Sebastopol Sketches, which established his reputation. After a period in St Petersburg and abroad, where he studied educational methods for use in his school for peasant children in Yasnaya, he married Sophie Andreyevna Behrs in 1862. The next fifteen years was a period of great happiness; they had thirteen children, and Tolstoy managed his vast estates in the Volga Steppes, continued his educational projects, cared for his peasants and wrote War and Peace (1865-8) and Anna Karenina (1874-6). A Confession (1879-82) marked an outward change in his life and works; he became an extreme rationalist and moralist, and in a series of pamphlets after 1880 he expressed theories such as rejection of the state and church, indictment of the demands of the flesh, and denunciation of private property. His teachings earned him numerous followers in Russia and abroad, but also much opposition and in 1901 he was excommunicated by the Russian holy synod. He died in 1910, in the course of a dramatic flight from home, at the small railway station of Astapovo.

  David McDuff was born in 1945. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh, where he took his Ph.D. in 1971 with a thesis on the poetry of the Russian modernist Innokenty Annensky, having spent several periods of study in the Soviet Union. After some years of foreign travel and freelance writing, he worked as a co-editor of the literary quarterly Stand, and also with Anvil Press in London. He is at present engaged in translating other nineteenth-century Russian prose works for the Penguin Classics, in the preparation of an anthology of twentieth-century Finland-Swedish poetry in translation, and in other freelance literary work. His publications comprise a large number of translations of foreign verse and prose, including poems by Joseph Brodsky and Tomas Venclova, as well as contemporary Scandinavian work; the Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (1975 and 1983); and the Complete Poems of Edith Södergran (1984). His first book of verse, Words in Nature, appeared in 1972. His translations of Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead (1985), Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories (1985) and Nikolai Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1987) are published in Penguin Classics.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Sebastopol in December

  Sebastopol in May

  Sebastopol in August 1855

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  On 29 April 1851, at the age of twenty-two, the young Leo Tolstoy set out from Yasnaya Polyana for the Caucasus together with his older brother Nikolai, whose battery was stationed there. Nikolai had entered the Russian army seven years earlier, and it was doubtless with a certain amount of envy that Leo had listened to the vivid tales he had to tell of military life and daring exploits in the campaign against the Muslim hill tribes. To Leo, the thought of making a complete break with the established circumstances of his life must have seemed a tempting and attractive one, holding out the best prospect for his future development. Since leaving the University of Kazan’s Faculty of Jurisprudence without a degree after less than two years’ study, repelled by what had seemed to him the almost total irrelevance of the curriculum to his own concerns and by the “obstruction” of the professors, he had drifted into a series of unsuccessful practical endeavours. His efforts—described in “A Landowner’s Morning,” the only completed part of the pedagogical Novel of a Russian Landowner—to improve the welfare of his serfs appeared to have come largely to nothing. He had been unable to find a niche for himself in fashionable society; he had not found a wife; and he had failed to secure a position in the army or the civil service. His plan now was to travel with Nikolai to his battery, and then to decide on the basis of his own impressions whether or not to serve with the Russian army in the Caucasus.

  Such a break—it followed in the tradition of earlier Russian writers, such as Marlinsky and Lermontov—seemed to promise Leo Tolstoy the best hope of realizing some of the literary ambitions he secretly nursed. Up to then, his most significant literary achievement had been the keeping of an intimate diary, in which he recorded his personal feelings and formulated rules for the conduct of his life. The diary, which he had begun to write in 1847 at the age of eighteen, was to become his lifelong companion. In it he would sketch and give expression to the inner conflicts and debates that in time would bring many of his fictional characters into being. For the present, however, it was not much more than the place in which he set down his hopes, worries, discontents, resolutions and plans for literary works, such as the “tale of gypsy life” (8 December 1850), and the “history of my day” (istoriya moego dnya) which was eventually to develop into the three-part novel Childhood, Boyhood, Youth.

  After making short stops in Moscow and Kazan, in the second half of May the brothers embarked by boat from Saratov down the Volga to Astrakhan; from there they travelled by carriage to Kizlyar, finally reaching the Cossack village of Starogladovskaya, where Nikolai’s battery was stationed, on 30 May. The journey made a lasting impression on Tolstoy. Although on reaching Starogladovskaya his first reaction was one of disorientation and bewilderment (“How did I ever end up here? I don’t know. Why have I come here? I don’t know that, either,” reads the diary entry for 30 May), the wealth of visual impressions he had received—the great flat river, the spectacular mountain scenery, the Circassian tribesmen and their beautiful women who lived like noble savages amid peaks and torrents—was to remain with him to the end of his days, and he later considered this to have been the happiest time of his life. Arrival at the Russian battery did, however, mean that he had to decide whether to join the army or not. It was a decision he put off: for some months he roamed about between Starogladovskaya and the nearby fortified camp of Stary Yurt, where he was based, meditating on his past life and present feelings in extensive diary entries. Yet not all his time was devoted to introspection: the diary contains abundant evidence that the exposure to a radiant, transparent southern nature and to the lives of Cossacks, Tartars, Circassian and other tribesmen was having a profound effect on the development of his personality. His participation as a volunteer, in late June or early July, in a raid on a Chechen village, led by Major-General A. I. Baryatinsky, commander of the left flank of the Caucasian army, seemed unsatisfactory to him at the time (“I didn’t act well; unconsciously, I was even afraid of Baryatinsky,” he noted)—yet such activity had the effect of building up
his self-confidence. After the raid he was presented to Baryatinsky by Ilya Tolstoy, one of his relatives who was travelling in the Caucasus. Baryatinsky praised the “young civilian” for his bravery and composure under fire, and recommended him to enlist for active service forthwith. It was, however, another four months before Tolstoy could bring himself to take that step. He set to work on the first part of a novel (Childhood), began to study the Tartar language, sketched and read. In the conversations he had, during hunting and woodcarving, with the Cossack tribesman Yepishka (later faithfully portrayed as Yeroshka in The Cossacks), he began to come under the influence of a world-outlook that was utterly unlike the Russian, one that valued freedom and bravery above all else and was unfettered by formal religion or institutionalized morality.

  At last Tolstoy’s life seemed to be opening out in new and unexpected ways: he was living a free and independent existence away from his family, friends and social circle, and he had the latitude he required for writing and creation. Yet this gypsy nomad existence could not continue indefinitely: more and more he was finding it difficult to be a civilian among soldiers; if he were to remain in this land of colour, vitality and adventure, he would have to find some firm rationale for his presence there. The logical next step was for him to take the examination for entrance into the army. On 1 November 1851 Tolstoy and his brother travelled to Tiflis, where the necessary formalities could be completed. After a two-month stay in the city, he passed the examination to become a cadet; now he was a feyerverker[1], an artillery NCO.

  His passing of the examination and subsequent induction into the army were experienced by Tolstoy as the crossing of a moral and spiritual divide. “Seek out difficult situations,” he had exhorted himself in one of the “rules” contained in his diary of 1850. Filled now with militaristic zeal, he longed to begin his new life as quickly as possible. Sweeping aside official and bureaucratic delays, he used all the influence he could possibly exert in elevated circles in order to have himself assigned at once to his brother’s battery, the 4th of the 20th Artillery Brigade, as a fourth-class NCO, thereby making it possible for him to take part in the winter campaign that was already under way. “With all my strength and with the aid of a cannon I shall assist in destroying the predatory and turbulent Asiatics,” he wrote to his brother Sergei. In a long letter to his aunt, T. A. Yergolskaya, dated 12 January 1852, he portrayed his forthcoming army career as a God-given chance to atone for his faults, the first major test of his character. At the end of this time of danger, discipline and expiation, he would emerge at last as a man worthy of family life:

  This is how I picture it to myself. After an unspecified number of years I am at Yasnaya, neither young nor old—my affairs are in order, I have no anxieties, no worries—and you still live at Yasnaya too. You have aged a little, but are still fresh and in good health. We lead the life that we used to lead; I work in the morning, but we see each other almost the whole day; we have dinner; in the evening I read you something that doesn’t bore you; then we talk. I tell you of my life in the Caucasus, you talk to me of your memories—of my father and mother; you tell me frightening stories that we once listened to with startled eyes and gaping mouths. We recall people who were dear to us and who are now no more; you will weep, I will do the same; but these tears will be sweet. We will talk of my brothers who will come to see us from time to time, and of dear Marya, who will also spend some months of the year at Yasnaya, which she so loves, with all her children. We won’t have any friends—no one will come and bore us and talk gossip. It’s a beautiful dream, but it’s still not all that I allow myself to dream of. I am married—my wife is a sweet, good, affectionate person; she loves you in the same way as I do. We have children who call you “grandmama”; you live in the big house, upstairs—the same room that grandmama used to live in; the whole house is as it was in papa’s time, and we begin the same life again, only changing roles; you take the role of grandmama, but you are even better; I take the role of papa, but I despair of ever deserving it; my wife, that of mama; the children—our own; Marya—the role of the two aunts, excepting their misfortunes. Even Gasha[2] will take the role of Praskovya Isayevna.[3] But we shan’t have anyone to take the role that you have played in our family. Never shall we find a soul as beautiful or as affectionate as yours. You will have no successor. There will be three new persons who will appear on the scene from time to time—my brothers—especially the one who will often be with us—Nikolai—an old bachelor, bald, retired from service, as noble as ever.[4]

  During February 1852, Tolstoy took part in fighting against the Chechen tribesmen led by their pugnacious and skilful chieftain Shamil. On 17 and 18 February there were pitched battles on the River Michik, and in one of these an enemy shell hit a wheel of the cannon of which Tolstoy was in charge; miraculously, he escaped with his life. He received two citations for bravery and was on each occasion recommended for the St George Cross. For the rest of 1852 he lived a quiet existence, mostly in Pyatigorsk. For more than a year now he had been working on his novel Childhood. In July he sent the manuscript to N. A. Nekrasov, the editor of the Contemporary, a literary journal in St Petersburg. Two months later Nekrasov wrote back enthusiastically, offering to publish the novel. Publication took place in October, and although Nekrasov declined to offer a fee for this first work by an unknown author, he led Tolstoy to suppose that the Contemporary would pay handsomely for any subsequent works of his it published.

  The moral regeneration Tolstoy had hoped to undergo as a result of joining the army was slow to materialize. In particular, he was gambling a great deal at cards, a pastime that was endemic in army life. He justified his gambling to himself and others by representing it as the only chance he had to attempt to make money in order to clear up the troublesome financial affairs of his estate at Yasnaya Polyana. In practice, however, the gambling only made matters worse: he was constantly sending home instructions to Yergolskaya and Sergei to sell off pieces of property to raise money with which to pay off his card debts. With the success of Childhood, authorship seemed to offer another possible source of income (during 1852 he completed The Raid, a story about his recent military experiences). He began to have serious doubts about whether he should remain in the army or return to Yasnaya Polyana and concern himself exclusively with writing. His health was also debilitated at this period, and he spent much time treating himself at the spas of Zheleznovodsk and Kizlyar. In the end, the pledge he had made to Sergei and his aunt Yergolskaya seems to have been too strong. He remained in the service and during 1853 took part in a further campaign against Shamil, again distinguishing himself for bravery, though again failing to obtain the coveted St George Cross. The campaign was a lengthy one, but during 1853 he managed to undertake a relatively large amount of literary activity including work on Boyhood (the continuation of Childhood) and some four or five other tales and novels (among them The Cossacks and The Woodfelling).

  Failure to achieve promotion also contributed to Tolstoy’s uncertainty about remaining in the service. After two years in the army he was still a cadet, and this had much to do with the delays of the military bureaucracy as well as with his own lack of the necessary official documentation. In July 1853 he wrote to General Baryatinsky complaining about the treatment he had received, and a short time later, against the advice of Sergei and Yergolskaya, he applied for a discharge. Lack of documents meant that this too was delayed, and he then applied instead for military leave.

  In the meantime, international political events were about to complicate the situation even further. The vexed question of Russia’s relations with her neighbour Turkey, which had been simmering away ever since the signing of the Treaty of Adrianople in 1829, now began to erupt into open hostilities. The closing of the Bosporus and the Dardenelles to the warships of all foreign countries, including Russia, which had followed the conclusion of the international Straits Convention of 1841, proved an intolerable limitation on Russian sovereignty in the area. On 2 July 1853 Tsar
Nicholas I sent his troops to occupy Moldavia and Wallachia. Much to his dismay, the British and French promptly sent naval forces to the Dardanelles. At the same time they consulted Austria and Prussia, arriving at a general formula in principle for the solution of the difficulty, which Russia accepted. However, the actual wording of the formula was, on the advice of the British ambassador, modified in such a way that made it inevitable that Russia would reject it. On 22 October 1853 the British fleet sailed up the Straits, and on the following day Turkey declared war on Russia.

  It was now out of the question for Tolstoy to leave the army: all retirement was forbidden until the hostilities were at an end. He decided to follow up his application for leave with one for a transfer to the war zone, seeing in this his best chance of obtaining a speedy promotion. In January 1854 his applications for leave and transfer were approved, and on 2 February he arrived back at Yasnaya Polyana before joining the 5th battery of the 12th Artillery Brigade in active service on the Danube.

  In Yasnaya Polyana the news reached Tolstoy that his promotion to the rank of ensign had come through. Together with Nikolai, who had now retired from the army, he went to Moscow and bought a large quantity of military equipment, mostly on his older brother’s advice. On 12 March, exhausted after a journey of some 1,400 miles by way of Poltava and Kishinyov, he arrived in Bucharest. While he was there, the Russian armies crossed the Danube and laid siege to Silistria. Tolstoy was assigned to the 3rd battery of the 11th Artillery Brigade, stationed at Oltenitsa, on the outskirts of Bucharest. From Oltenitsa he made frequent trips into the city, where he attended fashionable balls, visited the Grand Opera and the theatre, and continued his medical treatment. At the end of May he rejoined the staff of General Serzhputovsky before the besieged town of Silistria. Here he had his first whiff of “Turkish powder,” and the “funny sort of pleasure,” as he described it, of watching men kill one another. Sitting in the elegant gardens of Mustapha Pasha, breathing the rose-scented air, he admired the view: