The Sebastopol Sketches (Penguin Classics)
by Leo Tolstoy
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Book Summary Information
Author: Leo TolstoyTranslator: David McDuff
Introduction: David McDuff
Edition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); Russian (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1986-07-01
ISBN: 0140444688
Number of pages: 192
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Book Reviews of The Sebastopol Sketches (Penguin Classics)
Book Review: The education of a pacifist
Summary: 4 Stars
When, in 1854, the Crimean War broke out between Russia and an alliance that included France, Britain, and the Ottomans, Leo Tolstoy (then 25) was undecided as to his career, with writing and the military exerting the strongest claims. In October 1854 the Russian forces won a significant victory at Balaclava (site of the "Charge of the Light Brigade"), but a month later they suffered a major defeat at Inkerman, and they withdrew to the Black Sea port of Sevastopol, to which the Allied forces laid siege for almost a year. Within Russia, the defense of Sevastopol became the focal point of the nation's attentions, with many would-be patriots volunteering to go there and serve the Tsar and Mother Russia and in the process win glory for themselves, Leo Tolstoy included.
Between December 1854 and September 1855, when Sevastopol finally fell to the siege, Tolstoy spent much time in and around the city as an artillery officer. What he saw and experienced further inflamed within him two strong sentiments that he already harbored -- "a fierce and aggressive patriotism" and a correspondingly intense critical despair over the inefficiencies and deficiencies of the Russian military organization. Those impulses spurred him to write, while still serving in the army, three separate "sketches" of the Siege of Sevastopol as it played out over time - the first set in December 1854, the second in May 1855, and the third in September 1855. The first two were published anonymously but the third was published over Tolstoy's name. On the whole, the Sketches were well received within Russia and their favorable reception and the process of writing them convinced Tolstoy that his true vocation was as a writer. He later remarked, "I failed to become a general in the army, but I became one in literature."
THE SEBASTOPOL SKETCHES correspond closely to actual events, but they are fictionalized, in an increasingly greater degree from the first to the third. (Curiously, to me their intrinsic merit or quality declines slightly from first to third.) According to the Introduction to this volume, "Tolstoy has sometimes been called the first modern war correspondent," but the overt fictionalization is at odds with what we currently think journalism to be. Nonetheless, the SKETCHES - especially the accounts of the soldier's ordeal under relentless bombardment and the descriptions of the blood, gore, and amputated limbs of field hospitals - convey to the reader (even one of today but surely more so to the Russian reader of the 1850s) the horror, atrocities, and ultimate senselessness of mechanized war. "[Y]ou will see war not as a beautiful, orderly, and gleaming formation, with music and beaten drums, streaming banners and generals on prancing horses, but war in its authentic expression - as blood, suffering, and death." At one point Tolstoy writes about a soldier unable to recall the details of his fighting at the center of a successful repulse of a French assault because the entire time he had been "lost in a fog of oblivion" -- and is that the first such metaphoric use of fog?
But what most intrigues me about THE SEBASTOPOL SKETCHES is the strong undercurrent of pacifism, Tolstoy's fierce patriotism notwithstanding. He opens the second sketch with the thought experiment, "what if one of the warring sides were to propose to the other that each should dismiss one soldier from its ranks?", with each then continuing to reduce its forces one by one until each had only one soldier left. "[I]f it still appeared that the really complex disputes arising between the rational representatives of rational creatures must be settled by combat, let the fighting be done by these two soldiers: one could lay siege to the town, and the other could defend it." After all, Tolstoy goes on to note, settling a dispute with tens of thousands killed and maimed on each side has no more logical force behind it than settling it based on the death of one of only two combatants. As appealing as this proposal might be, it is of course overly simplistic in several respects. But Tolstoy follows it up with an observation that cannot be easily dismissed, whether in 1855 or now: "One of two things appears to be true: either war is madness, or, if men perpetrate this madness, they thereby demonstrate that they are far from being the rational creatures we for some reason commonly suppose them to be."
Occasionally melodrama and cliché creep into the SKETCHES, but on the whole the writing is quite distinguished (especially for a writer still in his twenties) and it is surprisingly modern for something written over 150 years ago. It is understated, relatively informal, often lyrical and often gently ironic, and it abounds with some wonderfully descriptive passages. SKETCHES doesn't quite strike me as a 5-star work, but it is a noteworthy early effort of one of the greatest of writers.
Summary of The Sebastopol Sketches (Penguin Classics)
In the winter of 1854 Tolstoy, then an officer in the Russian army, arranged to be transferred to the besieged town of Sebastopol. Wishing to see at first hand the action of what would become known as the Crimean War, he was spurred on by a fierce patriotism, but also by an equally fierce desire to alert the authorities to appalling conditions in the army. The three "Sebastopol Sketches" - December', May' and August' - re-create what happened during different phases of the siege and its effect on the ordinary men around him. Writing with the truth as his utmost aim, he brought home to Russia's entire literate public the atrocities of war. In doing so, he realized his own vocation as a writer and established his literary reputation.Ukraine Books
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