Tolstoy (21 page)

At the same time that Tolstoy was preoccupied with military matters, he was also thinking deeply about religious questions. On 4 March 1855 he took communion and made a remarkable declaration in his diary about the founding of a new religion. It is often quoted in view of its prophetic nature:

Yesterday a conversation about divinity and faith led me to a great and stupendous idea, the realisation of which I feel capable of devoting my whole life to. This idea is the foundation of a new religion corresponding to the development of mankind - the religion of Christ, but purged of dogma and mystery, a practical religion, not promising future bliss but providing bliss on earth. I realise that to bring this idea to fruition will take generations of people working consciously towards this goal. One generation will bequeath this idea to the next, and one day fanaticism or reason will implement it. Working consciously to unite people with religion is the foundation of the idea which I hope will occupy me.
⁸¹

In a sense, all of Tolstoy's future career is here, as he was always a religious writer, concerned with seeking the truth. In his early works this concern was implicit, but it became increasingly explicit as he evolved as an artist. Tolstoy's literary works, in the compelling argument of Richard Gustafson, can even be seen as 'verbal icons' of his religious view. Until the nineteenth century the icon had fulfilled the role of theology in the Russian Orthodox Church. There simply was no written theological tradition in Russia as there was in the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches, and when the art of icon painting fell into decline in the nineteenth century, after the Orthodox Church was made into a department of state, it was literature which took its place. As Gustafson has commented, people in Russia began instinctively to understand the role of literature as theology: 'the images created by artists were taken seriously as words which reveal the Truth'. Tolstoy's writing is hailed for its realism, but it is a very emblematic, religious kind of realism.
⁸²

At the end of March 1855 Tolstoy began writing properly again. He started
Youth,
which would end up being the third and last instalment of his projected four-part work. He also began reworking the draft of his article about events at Sebastopol. He did not get very far, however, as he was called into action. After the long winter months, during which time the allies built a railway to speed up the delivery of supply of guns and ammunition, French and British troops were ready to resume their bombardment of Russian defences in Sebastopol. Tolstoy's battery was despatched to the fourth bastion in the south of the city, which was the most dangerous owing to its close proximity to the French position. The new allied bombardment ceased on 7 April, except in the case of the fourth bastion, which continued to be pummelled for another five days. Tolstoy was first on duty between 5 and 6 April, and then in stints of four days, followed by eight days' rest, during which time he retreated to a flat in town and played the piano.
⁸³
On 19 April the allies seized the trenches between the fourth and fifth bastions, and the Russian forces began to doubt that they would prevail.

On 25 April Tolstoy finished 'Sebastopol in December', his first, very patriotic and gripping piece of reportage about the realities of fighting in the besieged city, and he sent it straight away to Petersburg. Together with the two other works he wrote which make up the
Sebastopol Sketches,
it constitutes his most sophisticated writing yet. In this first sketch, the narrator takes the reader on a tour of Sebastopol set in the present tense, so that the experience of hostilities is all the more vivid when it begins, and reminiscent of the experience of watching a film:

The whistle, close at hand, of a shell or a cannonball, just at the very moment you start to climb the hill, gives you a nasty sensation. Suddenly you realise, in an entirely new way, the true significance of those sounds of gunfire you heard from the town. Some quiet, happy memory suddenly flickers to life in your brain; you start thinking more about yourself and less about what you observe around you, and are suddenly gripped by an unpleasant sense of indecision...
⁸⁴

Tolstoy, hailed as the first war correspondent, was adept at combining personal impressions, conveyed in a conversational, intimate tone, with the lofty viewpoint of a historian or epic poet able to speak for the nation. Meanwhile he continued his turns of duty on the fourth bastion. The allied bombardment now became fiercer, particularly during a battle beginning on the evening of 10 May, which resulted in heavy casualties (about 2,500 on each side), and further attrition of Russian defences. The experience of living through these events provided Tolstoy with material for his second despatch. On 15 May he was sent to command the guns of a mountain platoon twelve miles out of Sebastopol, and this ended his tour of duty on the fourth bastion.
⁸⁵

In June Tolstoy once again had time to write. He turned first to 'The Wood-Felling: A Cadet's Tale'. This was a story he had begun earlier about his army experiences in the Caucasus, which now seemed so distant. He finished the story on 18 June, and sent it off to Nekrasov for publication in
The Contemporary,
where it appeared that September. Meanwhile, 'Sebastopol in December' was published in the June issue, and it created a furore. Russian readers had never been given a true picture of what warfare was like in their literary journals, still less an idea of what it was like for ordinary soldiers while it was still going on. Tolstoy's descriptions of their heroism and suffering were deeply moving, the more so for the calm, unsensational tone in which they were delivered. Tolstoy learned that the Tsar himself had read 'Sebastopol in December', and had ordered it to be translated for publication in the Russian government's French-language journal
Le Nord
.
⁸⁶
He was flattered, naturally, but his thoughts were now dominated by his longing to retire from the army and concentrate on his writing. The optimism he had expressed in 'Sebastopol in December' was misplaced: the situation was becoming bleaker by the day. On 28 June another of the army's commanders died when Admiral Nakhimov was shot in the head.

On 5 July Tolstoy sent off his second sketch about the siege of Sebastopol to
The Contemporary.
He was well aware the censor would object to much in 'Sebastopol in May', which is a far bleaker work than 'Sebastopol in December' and represents the first strong expression of Tolstoy's views on the futility of war:

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.

Tolstoy was rarely at peace with himself during this turbulent time. It was not just that his new writing met with a mixed reception, or that he remained unmarried (it was a matter of great consternation to him that his attempts to find a bride always ended in failure). His family life was also troubled: his brothers Dmitry and Nikolay both died of tuberculosis within a few years of each other, and his sister Masha ended an unhappy marriage. Turgenev now became a major part of Tolstoy's life, but the warm embraces they exchanged when they first met were gradually replaced by fractious disagreements; theirs was a volatile friendship. In 1861 Tolstoy would challenge Turgenev to a duel, and their uneasy reconciliation was followed by a seventeen-year feud. The trajectory of the friendships Tolstoy formed with many other Russian writers followed a similar, albeit less dramatic pattern. It was in the early years following his retirement from the army that Tolstoy had his closest contacts with many of his peers, most of whom were based in St Petersburg. As he shuttled between Yasnaya Polyana, Moscow and the capital, torn by conflicting desires, he discovered that he did not want to be part of the literary community, nor was there any place for him under its rapidly changing agenda. When he returned from his second trip abroad in 1861, he settled in Yasnaya Polyana for good, and made his feelings emphatically clear by not returning to St Petersburg for seventeen years. It was not an outcome he was expecting when he packed his bags in the Crimea, excited at the prospect of the warm reception he was going to receive from his new writer friends.

Tolstoy received his first letter from Turgenev just before leaving Sebastopol in November 1855. The two writers had read each other's work, but never met. Tolstoy was in awe of his elder contemporary, who had been a fixture of the St Petersburg literary scene for almost a decade by the time he made his own debut. A careful re-reading of
A Hunter's Notes
during his second summer in Pyatigorsk had produced the lapidary comment in his diary 'Writing is a bit difficult after him'.
¹
For his part, Turgenev had immediately perceived Tolstoy's literary talent, and was deeply flattered that 'The Wood-Felling' was dedicated to him (no other writer would receive a dedication from Tolstoy). When Turgenev wrote his first letter to Tolstoy, he felt he was addressing someone he already almost knew, as he had met (and rather fallen for) his sister Masha the previous autumn.
²
Her husband Valerian Petrovich's Pokrovskoye estate was only twelve miles from Turgenev's ancestral home, and a shared love of hunting had brought the two neighbours into contact. Naturally, when Tolstoy arrived in St Petersburg, the first person he wanted to see was Turgenev. After checking into a hotel and paying a visit to the bath-house, he went straight round to Turgenev's apartment, only to find the writer on his way out - in the hope of finding him. They exchanged hearty kisses, and Turgenev immediately insisted that Tolstoy share his flat on the Fontanka river.
³
It would be Tolstoy's home for the next month as he readjusted to civilian life.