Since the retreat of the Russian army from Silistria, Tolstoy had led a comfortable existence in Kishinev, where Gorchakov had set up his headquarters, but he soon grew bored of attending balls and playing cards, at which he lost heavily, and dreamed of seeing action once again. ‘Now that I have every comfort, good accommodation, a piano, good food, regular occupations and a fine circle of friends, I have begun to yearn for camp life again and envy the men out there,’ Tolstoy wrote to his aunt Toinette on 29 October.68
Inspired by the wish to do something for his fellow-men, Tolstoy and a group of fellow-officers thought of setting up a periodical. The ‘Military Gazette’, as they called their journal, was intended to educate the soldiers, bolster their morale, and reveal their patriotism and humanity to the rest of Russian society. ‘This venture of mine pleases me very much,’ Tolstoy wrote to his brother Sergei. ‘The journal will publish descriptions of battles – not such dull and untruthful ones as in other journals – deeds of bravery, biographies and obituaries of worthy people, especially the little known; war stories, soldiers’ songs, popular articles about the skills of the engineers, etc.’ To finance the ‘Gazette’, which was to be cheap enough for the troops themselves to buy, Tolstoy diverted money from the sale of the family house at Yasnaya Polyana, which he had been forced to sell that autumn to cover his losses at cards. Tolstoy wrote some of his first stories for the periodical: ‘How Russian Soldiers Die’ and ‘Uncle Zhdanov and the Horseman Chernov’, in the second of which he exposed the brutality of an army officer beating a soldier, not for something that he has done wrong, but ‘because he was a soldier and soldiers must be beaten’. Realizing that this would not pass the censor, Tolstoy omitted these two stories before submitting the idea for the periodical to Gorchakov, who sent it on to the War Ministry, but even so publication was rejected by the Tsar, who did not want an unofficial soldiers’ paper to challenge
The defeat of Inkerman made up Tolstoy’s mind to go to the Crimea. One of his closest comrades, Komstadius, with whom he had been planning to edit the ‘Gazette’, was killed at Inkerman. ‘More than anything, it was his death that drove me to ask for a transfer to Sevastopol,’ he wrote in his diary on 14 November. ‘He made me feel somehow ashamed.’ Tolstoy later explained to his brother that his request had been ‘mostly out of patriotism – a sentiment which, I confess, is gaining an increasingly strong hold on me’.70 But perhaps just as important to his decision to go to the Crimea was his sense of destiny as a writer. Tolstoy wanted to see and write about the war: to reveal to the public the whole truth – both the patriotic sacrifice of the ordinary people and the failures of the military leadership – and thereby start the process of political and social reform to which he believed the war must lead.
Tolstoy arrived in Sevastopol on 19 November, almost three weeks after setting out from Kishinev. Promoted to the rank of second lieutenant, he was attached to the 3rd Light Battery of the 14th Artillery Brigade and, to his annoyance, was quartered in the town itself, a long way from the city’s defences. Tolstoy stayed only nine days in Sevastopol that autumn, but he saw enough to inspire much of the patriotic pride and hope in the common Russian people that filled the pages of ‘Sevastopol in December’, the first of his
A wounded soldier, almost dying, told me how they took the 24th French battery, but weren’t reinforced. He was sobbing. A company of marines almost mutinied because they were to be relieved from a battery where they’d withstood bombardment for 30 days. Soldiers extract the fuses from bombs. Women carry water to the bastions and read prayers under fire. In one brigade [at Inkerman], there were 160 wounded men who wouldn’t leave the front. It’s a wonderful time! But now … we’ve quietened down – it’s beautiful in Sevastopol now. The enemy hardly fires at all and everyone is convinced that he won’t take the town, and it really is impossible. There are three assumptions: either he’s going to launch an assault, or he’s diverting our attention with false earthworks in order to disguise his retreat, or he’s fortifying his position for the winter. The first is least likely and the second most likely. I haven’t managed to be in action even once, but I thank God that I’ve seen these people and am living at this glorious time. The bombardment [of the 17th October] will remain as the most brilliant and glorious feat not only in Russian history but in the history of the world.71
9
Generals January and February
