The Crimean War полностью

In March 1854 a young artillery officer by the name of Leo Tolstoy arrived at the headquarters of General Mikhail Gorchakov. He had joined the army in 1852, the year he had first come to the attention of the literary world with the publication of his memoir Childhood in the literary journal the Contemporary, the most important monthly periodical in Russia at that time. Dissatisfied with his frivolous way of life as an aristocrat in St Petersburg and Moscow, he had decided to make a fresh start by following his brother Nikolai to the Caucasus when he returned from leave to his army unit there. Tolstoy was attached to an artillery brigade in the Cossack village of Starogladskaya in the northern Caucasus. He took part in raids against Shamil’s Muslim army, narrowly escaping capture by the rebels on more than one occasion, but after the outbreak of the war against Turkey, he requested a transfer to the Danubian front. As he explained in a letter to his brother Sergei in November 1853, he wanted to take part in a real war: ‘For almost a year now I’ve been thinking only of how I might sheathe my sword, and I can’t do it. But since I’m compelled to fight somewhere or other, I would find it more agreeable to fight in Turkey than here.’¹

In January Tolstoy passed the officer’s examination for the rank of ensign, the lowest-ranking commissioned officer in the tsarist army, and departed for Wallachia, where he was attached to the 12th Artillery Brigade. He travelled sixteen days by sledge through the snows of southern Russia to his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, arriving there on 2 February, and set off again on 3 March, travelling again by sledge, and then, when the snows turned to mud, by horse and cart through the Ukraine to Kishinev, reaching Bucharest on 12 March. Two days later, Tolstoy was received by Prince Gorchakov himself, who treated the young Count as one of the family. ‘He embraced me, made me promise to dine with him every day, and wants to put me on his staff,’ Tolstoy wrote to his aunt Toinette on 17 March.

Leo Tolstoy in 1854

Aristocratic connections went a long way in the Russian army staff. Tolstoy was quickly caught up in the social whirl of Bucharest, attending dinners at the Prince’s house, games of cards and musical soirées in drawing rooms, evenings at the Italian opera and French theatre – a world apart from the bloody battlefields of the Danubian front just a few miles away. ‘While you are imagining me exposed to all the dangers of war, I have not yet smelt Turkish powder, but am very quietly at Bucharest, strolling about, making music, and eating ice-creams,’ he wrote to his aunt at the start of May. ²

Tolstoy arrived in Bucharest in time for the start of the spring offensive on the Danube. The Tsar was determined to push south to Varna and the Black Sea coast as soon as possible, before the Western powers had time to land their troops and stop the Russian advance towards Constantinople. The key to this offensive was the capture of the Turkish fortress at Silistria. It would give the Russians a dominant stronghold in the Danube area, allowing them to convert the river into a supply line from the Black Sea into the interior of the Balkans, and giving them a base from which to recruit the Bulgarians to fight against the Turks. This was the plan that Paskevich had persuaded the Tsar to adopt in order not to alienate the Austrians, who might intervene against a Russian offensive through the Serb-dominated areas of the Danube further to the west, where Serbian uprisings in favour of the Russians might spread into Habsburg lands. ‘The English and the French cannot land their troops for at least another fortnight,’ Nicholas wrote to Gorchakov on 26 March, ‘and I suppose that they will land at Varna to rush towards Silistria … . We must take the fortress before they arrive … With Silistria in our hands, there will be time for volunteers to raise more troops from the Bulgarians, but we must not touch the Serbs, in case we alarm the Austrians.’³