The Crimean War полностью

The ‘epic of Sevastopol’ turned defeat into a national triumph for Russia. ‘Sevastopol fell, but it did so with such glory that Russians should take pride in such a fall, which is worth a brilliant victory,’ wrote a former Decembrist.²⁵ Upon this grand defeat, the Russians built a patriotic myth, a national narrative of the people’s selfless heroism, resilience and sacrifice. Poets likened it to the patriotic spirit of 1812 – as did Aleksei Apukhtin in his well-known ballad ‘A Soldier’s Song about Sevastopol’ (1869), which came to be learned by many Russian schoolboys in the final decades of the nineteenth century:

The song I’ll sing to you, lads, isn’t a jolly one;

It’s not a mighty song of victory

Like the one our fathers sang at Borodino,

Or our grandfathers sang at Ochakov.

I’ll sing to you of how a cloud of dust

Swirled up from the southern fields,

Of how countless enemies disembarked

And how they came and defeated us.

But such was our defeat that since then

They haven’t come back looking for trouble,

Such was our defeat that they sailed away

With sour faces and bashed noses.

I’ll sing of how leaving hearth and home behind

The rich landowner joined the militia,

Of how the peasant, bidding his wife farewell,

Came out of his hut to serve as a volunteer.

I’ll sing of how the mighty army grew

As warriors came, strong as iron and steel,

Who knew they were heading for death,

And how piously did they die!

Of how our fair women went as nurses

To share their cheerless lot,

And how for every inch of our Russian land

Our foes paid us with their blood;

Of how through smoke and fire, grenades

Thundering, and heavy groans all round,

Redoubts emerged one after another,

Like a grim spectre the bastions grew –

And eleven months lasted the carnage,

And during all these eleven months

The miraculous fortress, shielding Russia,

Buried her courageous sons …

Let the song I sing to you not be joyful:

It’s no less glorious than the song of victory

Our fathers sang at Borodino

Or our grandfathers at Ochakov.²⁶

This was the context in which Tolstoy wrote his own ‘national epic’, War and Peace. Tolstoy’s conception of the war against Napoleon as Russia’s national awakening – the rediscovery of ‘Russian principles’ by the Europeanized nobility and the recognition of the patriotic spirit of the serf soldiers as the basis of a democratic nationhood – was a reflection of his reaction to the heroic deeds of the Russian people during the Crimean War. Written between 1862 and 1865, in the years immediately after the emancipation of the serfs, when Russian liberal society was inspired by ideals of national reform and reconciliation between the landed classes and the peasantry, War and Peace was originally conceived as a Decembrist novel set in the aftermath of the Crimean War. In the novel’s early form (‘The Decembrist’), the hero returns after thirty years of exile in Siberia to the intellectual ferment of the late 1850s. A second Alexandrine reign has just begun, with the accession of Alexander II to the throne, and once again, as in 1825, high hopes for reform are in the air. But the more Tolstoy researched the Decembrists, the more he realized that their intellectual roots lay in the war of 1812, and so set his novel then.

The memory of 1812 was bitterly contested after the Crimean War, which had opened up a new perspective on the national character. Democrats like Tolstoy, inspired by the recent sacrifices of the Russian peasant soldiers, saw 1812 as a people’s war, a victory attained by the patriotic spirit of the whole nation. To conservatives, on the other hand, 1812 represented the holy triumph of the Russian autocratic principle, which alone saved Europe from Napoleon.