Crimea, that peninsular on the Black Sea where Russia
and Ukraine were recently playing tug of war, has been in the news, and was also in the news when Leo
Tolstoy served as an officer for Russia in the Crimean War in the 1850s. I came
across this article (titled, “How the Horrors of Crimea Shaped Tolstoy”) in the
New Republic by a Charles King on how serving in the
Crimean War shaped Tolstoy’s view of war, which was later infused into his
novels. Mr. King’s bio line says he’s a
professor of International Affairs, so I’m not quite sure what his expertise is
in Tolstoy, but the article seems credible enough and worthy to share.
Leo Tolstoy was 26
years old when he first saw the ramparts of Sevastopol. The weather in Crimea
in the early winter of 1854—subtropical, cool but not cold—was a paradise
compared with the harsh snow and ice farther north. The city itself, though,
was in chaos. The heights above the port were ringed with earthworks of woven
saplings and packed dirt and stone. Below, the narrow entrance to the harbor
was blocked by the hulls of wooden ships deliberately sunk by the Russian navy,
placed there to block the invaders. “There are thousands of different objects,”
Tolstoy wrote, “thrown in heaps here and there; soldiers of different
regiments, some provided with guns and with bags, others with neither guns nor
bags, crowd together; they smoke, they quarrel.”
A junior officer in an
artillery brigade, Tolstoy already knew something of the exhilaration and
horror of battle. For nearly three years, he had been in the Caucasus, the
Russian empire’s mountainous southern frontier, in the middle of a grinding
counterinsurgency campaign against upland Muslims. He had seen native villages
destroyed and besieged, with the great forests of Chechnya whittled down to nothing—a
strategy of the Russian army to deny shelter to Chechen raiding parties. Muslim
gunmen would wait in the underbrush and aim their long guns at the Russian
sappers sent to hack away a clearing on either side of a road. Not that Tolstoy
had placed himself in the line of fire. By his own admission, he spent much of
his time there in a Cossack stanitsa, or fortified village, hunting, drinking,
“running after Cossack women,” and “writing a little,” as he noted in his
diary.
Readers
of my blog might recall Tolstoy’s Chechnya experience led to his novel, The
Cossacks, which I read and examined last year.
You can read about that here.
While
Chechnya was more of a raid, incursion, and reconnaissance between small tribal
factions, Crimea was Tolstoy’s first experience of major set armies in modern
warfare. From King’s article:
When he arrived in
Crimea, Tolstoy found himself in the middle of a war that did not yet have a
name. For years, tensions had been rising between the two great powers in the
Near East, the Russian and Ottoman empires. Czar Nicholas I claimed a right to
protect the lives and property of Orthodox Christians inside Ottoman lands,
including those who controlled access to the holy sites in Jerusalem. The
Ottoman sultan, Abdülmecid I, countered that Orthodox Christians—who formed
more than a third of all his subjects—were under no particular threat. The
czar’s claims, he said, were merely a pretext for interfering in his domestic
affairs.
and
Britain, France, and
Sardinia came to the Ottomans’ aid. By the time Tolstoy arrived in Crimea, most
of the great battles of the war were already past. Russian infantry had been
put to flight by an Anglo-French force at the River Alma, the Light Brigade had
made its doomed cavalry charge at Balaklava, and brutal hand-to-hand combat at
Inkerman had broken Russia’s fighting will and ensured that the rest of the
conflict would be focused on the desperate defense of Sevastopol. The war
became a siege, with the Russians defending the heights against cannonades and
bayonet charges.
Tolstoy was there to
witness the results: British and French ships sitting within cannon shot of the
Crimean coast; creaking wooden carts being pulled up the steep hills, loaded
with corpses; the constant roar of the Russian batteries; and the repeated
thrusts of Allied troops, tripping over their greatcoats and slipping downhill
in the mud.
Tolstoy’s
writing career actually was initiated while serving.
Tolstoy had spent much of the siege writing dispatches
from the city, realistic accounts that, in an era of intense press censorship,
provided Russia’s reading public with some of its first true-life accounts of
battle. They appeared in The Contemporary, an influential St.
Petersburg literary journal, and as hard-nosed pieces of reportage—with as much
gore as could pass the state censor—they made him almost instantly famous.
“On the earth, torn up by a recent explosion, were lying,
here and there, broken beams, crushed bodies of Russians and French,” he wrote
in his final installment from the scene of battle, later collected as Sevastopol
Sketches, “heavy cast-iron cannon overturned into the ditch by a terrible
force, half buried in the ground and forever dumb, bomb-shells, balls,
splinters of beams, ditches, bomb-proofs, and more corpses, in blue or in gray
overcoats, which seemed to have been shaken by supreme convulsions . . .”
Tolstoy had arrived in Crimea as a casual patriot; he was now a committed
skeptic.
King then ends his article with this
interesting observation from the point of view of another writer who happened
to be in Crimea a decade later.
A decade after the war,
in 1867, Mark Twain visited Sevastopol and walked over the old battlefields
with a group of American tourists, kicking up bits of shrapnel and shards of
bone. U.S. newspapers had carried news of the fighting, and photographers had
captured images from the front lines. The telegraph and glass-plate photography
had made their debut as tools of war reporting. “Sevastopol is probably the
worst battered town in Russia or anywhere else,” Twain wrote in The Innocents
Abroad. “But we ought to be pleased with it, nevertheless, for we have been in
no country yet where we have been so kindly received.”
By this stage, Tolstoy
was on the other side of his journey of disillusionment, one that had begun in
the forests of Chechnya and ended on the Black Sea coast. He was nursing the
ideas that would define his work as a mature writer: that battles were a form
of deliberate folly, that the only enduring nation was humanity, that ordinary
Russians were always better than the rulers whom history seemed to give them.
While Twain was looking over the ruins of Sevastopol, Tolstoy was far to the
north, back home on the old family estate at Yasnaya Polyana. He was in the
final stretch of a manuscript he had decided to call War and Peace.
As
it turns out, Russia did take Crimea from the Ottoman Empire, and apparently
has retaken it from Ukraine. History
does sometimes repeat itself, though this second iteration was without any
battle. War is a terrible thing, and
Tolstoy learned firsthand. Read Charles
King’s entire article.
