Tolstoy (20 page)

Tolstoy was by this point bored with regimental life in the Caucasus, dissatisfied with himself and longing for a change of scenery, so before he returned to Starogladkovskaya in October, he applied to be transferred to active duty in the war against Turkey. In January 1854, when his request was granted and he was finally promoted to full officer class as an ensign, he decided to travel to his new regiment in Bucharest via Yasnaya Polyana, a detour of over 600 miles. February was an ecstatic month for Tolstoy. He was overjoyed to see Yasnaya Polyana again, and be reunited with his beloved Aunt Toinette. He went to see his sister Masha at Pokrovskoye, and his brother Dmitry at Shcherbachevka, and in Moscow the four Tolstoy brothers posed for a photograph. It was the last time they would ever be together. The visit was over all too soon. On 3 March Tolstoy set off to join his new artillery brigade, travelling via Kursk, Poltava and Kishinyov before finally arriving in Bucharest ten days later, shortly before France and Britain declared war on Russia.

The Crimean War ostensibly blew up over access to the holy sites in Palestine, but was really about Russia's expansionist ambitions, and the threat that they represented to French and British interests. After the annexation of Georgia in 1801, and Bessarabia in 1812, Russia proceeded to defeat the Ottoman Empire in 1829, thus acquiring new powers and new territories (including part of Armenia). For the allies, it was only a matter of time before Nicholas I gained full access to the eastern Mediterranean. Hostilities between Turkey and Russia began in October 1853, most of them taking place around the mouth of the Danube. When France and Britain became involved in March 1854, and Russia was forced to withdraw from Moldavia and Wallachia, wrongly counting on Austrian support (in return for having sent in troops to quash the rebellion in Hungary in 1850), the Crimean peninsula became the main theatre of war. So Tolstoy was out of luck again, as three months after he arrived in Bucharest the main action was transferred elsewhere.

Tolstoy was pleasantly surprised by the elegance of Bucharest, and enjoyed going to the Italian opera and the French theatre when he first arrived.
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Once he was settled, he carried on with his writing. He concentrated on revising and completing
Boyhood,
and then at the end of March he was posted for two weeks to Oltenita, just north of the Danube, which had been the site of a battle with the Turks the previous November. Then came an attachment to the artillery commander General Serzhputovsky, which meant going on patrol to different parts of Moldavia, Wallachia and Bessarabia. In May Tolstoy observed the last days of the Russian siege of the Ottoman fortress town of Silistra, situated on the south side of the Danube in present-day Bulgaria. Russia needed to take Silistra in order to advance further, and huge numbers of Russian troops had been moved into the area in April when the siege had begun. Tolstoy was not actively involved in the bombardment of the town, but since he was working as an orderly, and for a sadistic superior, he often ended up in the trenches and found himself exposed to mortal danger on more than one occasion. Writing home to Aunt Toinette, he described the strangely magnificent spectacle of watching people killing each other every morning and evening. When he was not relaying orders he was stationed in the Russian camp, located in gardens belonging to Silistra's governor, Mus-tafa-Pasha, which afforded grand views of the Danube and of the besieged town (particularly during the night-time bombardments). A date in June was set for the final storming of Silistra, but at two in the morning, an hour before it was due to commence, Field Marshal Pashkevich sent word that the Tsar, under pressure from Austria, had ordered a retreat. Tolstoy, along with the entire company on the Russian side, was extremely disappointed.
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The Russian forces now began their retreat towards the Russian border, and Tolstoy initially returned to Bucharest, taking with him positive impressions of the Bulgarians he had met in Silistra. It was in Bucharest that a letter sent to him by Nekrasov back in July finally caught up with Tolstoy. Nekrasov was full of praise for the manuscript of
Boyhood,
which greatly raised his spirits, but in August he lost another 3,000 roubles gambling.
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In early September Tolstoy also headed back to Russia, learning on the way that he was to be promoted to sub-lieutenant. He was stationed at the army's new headquarters in Kishinyov, capital of Bessarabia, where once again he had plenty of time for reading and for music: he had a nice flat with a piano.
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At this point he was reading George Sand and
Uncle Tom's Cabin
in German translation. He also had time to put together a proposal with some of his fellow officers to launch a weekly forces newspaper. He was greatly excited by this project, and as soon as he heard his brother-in-law had sold the Yasnaya Polyana house that autumn, he wrote to ask him for 1,500 roubles so he could invest in taking the project further.
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The Yasnaya Polyana house had been sold for 5,000 roubles to a local landowner who dismantled it and rebuilt it on his own estate. Tolstoy's brother-in-law rightly had grave misgivings about releasing the funds.
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Meanwhile, the proposal for the forces newspaper was taken to St Petersburg for Nicholas I to consider.

Russia had suffered heavy losses in the war with the allied forces that autumn. The allies had won major battles at Alma, and in September 1854 besieged Sebastopol, Russia's main naval base on the Black Sea. While the Russians started scuttling some of their ships and using the cannons of others to back up their artillery, the allies built trenches and gun redoubts in the south of the city, and were ready for the battle by the middle of October. On the first day of bombardment, on 17 October, a British attack set off the ammunition store on the Malakoff redoubt and killed Admiral Kornilov, but Russian artillery also destroyed a French magazine. Four days earlier, at the end of the Battle of Balaclava, Raglan's Light Brigade had charged into the 'valley of death', and the Russians saw their capture of the British redoubts as a victory. The Battle of Inkerman on 24 October crushed Russian hopes, however, and made it clear that the rest of the war would be fought at Sebastopol.

In Kishinyov, meanwhile, balls were being thrown for two visiting grand dukes, which left a bad taste in Tolstoy's mouth. He began petitioning to be transferred to Sebastopol. First of all he wanted to see the action for himself, but mostly he was driven by his feelings of patriotism, particularly when he learned that the 12th Artillery Brigade he had served with briefly had taken part in the Battle of Balaclava. The Russian military headquarters in St Petersburg finally began sending reinforcements down to the Crimea, and Tolstoy arrived around the same time as the 10th and 11th divisions. By early November he was in Odessa, and a week later he was in the Crimea. He might have arrived earlier, but kissing a pretty young Ukrainian girl through a window in a town south of Kherson led him to spending the night with her.
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When he arrived in Sebastopol, Tolstoy was assigned to the 3rd Battery of the 14th Light Artillery Brigade.
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He was not mobilised to be on active duty at this point, but he remained in the besieged city for nine days, during which time he was able to assess for himself exactly what was going on, by visiting the Russian fortifications and talking to soldiers and officers. He wrote to tell Sergey the harrowing stories he had heard from a wounded soldier who told him about how the taking of a French battery at Inkerman had come to nought, as reinforcements never arrived, and how 160 men in one brigade had valiantly remained at the front, even though they were wounded. Then there were the sailors who had withstood thirty days of constant bombing, and refused to be relieved from their duties. He saw priests with crosses walking along the bastions and saying prayers under fire, and heard about displays of heroism greater than in ancient Greece when Vice Admiral Kornilov had asked the Russian forces if they were prepared to die.
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There were some 35,000 Russian troops stationed in Sebastopol at this point; 13,000 of them would not return home (French and British losses were almost as heavy).
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Tolstoy was greatly moved by the fighting spirit of the troops, but he now could not help seeing why the Russian army was faring so badly. A week after leaving Sebastopol on 15 November and moving north to the Tatar village outside Simferopol where his battery was stationed, he noted in his diary that he had become more convinced than ever before that Russia either needed fundamental reform, or would collapse.
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He had talked to allied prisoners of war in Sebastopol, and was struck by their high self-esteem, and their pride in the contribution they were making to the war effort, confident it was valued. There was none of that in the Russian army, where the military leadership clearly regarded its seemingly inexhaustible supply of infantry as cannon-fodder. Tolstoy also noticed that the artillery used by his brigade was outdated compared to that deployed by the allies, and he started putting together a plan in which he set out a number of detailed reforms.
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Tolstoy had come to see that Russia's military tactics were woefully out of date. He could not fail to be aware that communications between Russia and the Crimea were abysmal, with primitive roads which were often impassable because of mud, and a minuscule railway network. Conditions for rank and file soldiers were also appalling, with military service still set at twenty years and five years in the reserves. Nicholas I's emphasis on drills and parades had meant his troops were not even properly trained.

The Tsar turned down the proposal for a forces newspaper in late November, on the grounds that it was not in the government's interests.
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He suggested instead that Tolstoy and his comrades publish articles in
Russian Veteran,
the official newspaper patronised by the Ministry of War, which of course they already were entitled to do. The news angered Tolstoy when it reached him, but after collecting more raw impressions from a sortie to Sebastopol in early December with his platoon, he began sketching out an article with which he hoped to respond. This was the first draft of 'Sebastopol in December', his first piece of war reportage, which would bring him national celebrity. On 11 January Tolstoy wrote to Nekrasov with the proposal that he send him articles on the war which he promised would be of a quality not inferior to anything else published in
The Contemporary.
Nekrasov wrote back by return of post giving Tolstoy carte blanche. It was now that Tolstoy learned that his story 'Notes of a Billiard Marker' had been published in the January issue for 1855, and that
Boyhood
had appeared in the journal back in October. The censor had once again objected to several passages, such as the one where the narrator regrets that some people are poor while his family are rich, and all references to the Church and its rituals, which were at that time prohibited in secular publications (they include the passage about the boy's father making the sign of the cross over the window of the carriage his family is to travel in, and the horse's nickname of 'Deacon').
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Tolstoy was stationed in the quiet Tatar village of Eski-Orda for one and a half months, so he had plenty of time again at his disposal, and enjoyed hunting wild goats, playing duets and dancing with young ladies.
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But in the middle of January 1855 he was transferred to the 3rd Battery of the 11th Artillery Brigade, which was stationed on the Balbek river, six miles outside Sebastopol. On the way, he stopped in the city and picked up money sent him by his brother-in-law from the sale of his house at Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy earned a reputation amongst his new battalion for his physical strength - one day he impressed his comrades by lying on the floor and lifting a twelve-stone man with his bare hands. The officers in his battalion did not impress
him,
however; he felt very alienated in this new posting. He was miserable during that cold winter. He had no books, and no one to talk to. It was not a situation conducive to writing either, and the torpor made him vulnerable to his vices. On 3 February he steeled himself to write a difficult letter to his brother Nikolay. He had succumbed once again to his gambling addiction, and over the course of two days and two nights had lost the 1,500 roubles he had just received as seed money for the forces newspaper. Confessing this lapse to Nikolay was Tolstoy's way of doing penance.
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When news of Russia's latest defeat at Evpatoria reached the Tsar on 12 February 1855, he had wept like a child, and no longer wanted to hear any more despatches from the front. On 18 February Nicholas I died. He had ruled Russia with an iron fist for thirty years and his death at the age of fifty-eight was completely unexpected. As far as most of the educated population of Russia was concerned, however, the news was more a reason for celebration than for mourning. The relaxation in censorship which followed soon after Alexander's accession would make an immediate impact, and Russians would begin to speak about a 'thaw', just as they would a century later after Stalin's death. Down in the Crimea, Tolstoy clearly now felt emboldened to extend his reforming plans for the military, for in early March he began sketching out a plan for modernising the entire army, not just the artillery's weapons. He did not mince his words. 'We don't have an army,' wrote Tolstoy, 'but a mob of oppressed disciplined slaves who have submitted to robbers and mercenaries.' The Russian soldier, he went on, was someone legally constricted from satisfying even his most basic needs, and he was certainly not given enough to prevent him from suffering from hunger and cold. Tolstoy divided Russian soldiers into the oppressed, the oppressors and the desperate. It was hardly surprising that an oppressed soldier spent the niggardly seventy kopecks he received every quarter (a 'bitter mockery of his poverty') on drink, and that morale was low. Tolstoy had nothing good to say about those in charge: a lot of the officers were crooks devoid of any sense of duty or honour, while the generals were more often appointed for their acceptability to the Tsar rather than for their abilities.
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Tolstoy abandoned this ambitious project after a few days, no doubt because he realised it would not go anywhere even in the new climate, but it is important to realise that there was a precedent for speaking out when he began railing in public against social and political injustices thirty years later.