1855 During the Crimean War, Sebastopol, a Russian stronghold, was besieged by the British and French for many months. One of the Russian defenders of the city was Leo Tolstoy, a volunteer and very junior artillery officer. He wrote, as his first serious fiction, a series of short stories and descriptive pieces based on his military experience. They were published in book form as The Sebastopol Sketches in 1856.
Sebastopol, with its blood-drenched and battered bastions, is defended because the generals can think of nothing better to do. The besieged citadel leaks good Russian blood like a severed jugular – but not generals’ or tsar’s blood, of course.
Finally the position is surrendered on 28 August 1855 – for no other reason than that the generals, and their tsarist commander-in-chief, have arbitrarily decided to turn tail and run. The description of the shameful retreat forms a savagely anticlimactic conclusion to the last story of the Sebastopol series:
The enemy saw that something incomprehensible was happening in awe-inspiring Sevastopol … they did not yet dare to believe that their unflinching foe had disappeared … The Sevastopol army, surging and spreading like the sea on a rough dark night, its whole mass anxiously palpitating … away from the place where it was leaving so many brave comrades, from the place saturated with its blood, the place it had held for eleven months against a far stronger foe, but which it was now ordered to abandon without a struggle. The first effect this command had on every Russian was one of oppressive bewilderment.
And, in the case of one young officer, a lifelong scepticism about military ‘strategy’. War is fog, blood and bad generalship. End of story.
During the weary months of the siege, when there was nothing to do but undergo bombardment and the occasional skirmish, Tolstoy read obsessively. His reading matter is interesting: the more so since this was largely the period in which his own authorial personality was being formed. Over 8–9 June 1855, for example, he records: ‘Laziness, laziness. Health bad. Reading [Thackeray’s] Vanity Fair all day.’ The same lazy week he read, for good measure, Thackeray’s Henry Esmond and Pendennis (we should all be so idle – this is about a million words of fiction). Tolstoy, as he dodged English and French shrapnel, read the English novel in French translation.
It is demonstrable (from textual echoes) that Thackeray’s ‘Waterloo Novel’ (i.e. Vanity Fair) influenced Tolstoy powerfully, as did Thackeray’s ‘Showman of Vanity Fair’ technique. It was the arch-Jamesian critic, Percy Lubbock (in The Craft of Fiction, 1921), who linked Tolstoy and Thackeray as the two masters of the ‘panoramic’ novel (in opposition to the ‘dramatic’ and more artistic James). It would seem they had already made the connection themselves.