Category: Russian Literature

“Cold Autumn” by Ivan Bunin – translation

That year in June he came to stay at our estate. We had always thought of him as one of the family – his late father had been a close friend and neighbour to my own. On the fifteenth of June Ferdinand was killed in Sarajevo. On the morning of the sixteenth, the newspapers arrived from the post office. My father left his study with one of the evening papers in his hands and came into the dining room where I, my mother, and my love were still sitting drinking tea, and said:

“Well, my friends, it’s war! The Austrian crown prince has been killed in Sarajevo. It’s war!”

As it was my father’s Saint’s Day, on St Peter’s Day all sorts of people were coming by, and after lunch, he was declared my betrothed. But on the nineteenth of July Germany declared war on Russia…

In September he came to us, just for twenty-four hours. He wanted to say goodbye before he left for the front. At that point we still thought that the war would not last long; our wedding was simply postponed to the spring. And so, we had our farewell evening. As usual, once supper was over, we put the samovar on. My father looked at the window as it filled up with steam and said:

“Autumn is surprisingly early and cold this year!”

That evening we sat quietly, only occasionally exchanging the most meaningless of words with an exaggerated calm, hiding our true and secret thoughts and feelings. Even my father had spoken about the autumn with forced, false easiness. I went to the French windows and wiped the glass with my shawl. In the garden, against the black sky, the icy stars shone sharp and bright and clear. My father leaned back deep in his armchair and smoked, occasionally glancing uneasily at the lamp burning above the table; my mother, in her glasses, was assiduously stitching up a little silk bag – we all knew which – under its light. It was touching and terrifying all at once. My father asked:

“So, are you sure that you want to go first thing in the morning instead of waiting for breakfast?”

“Yes, if you will allow me to, I must go first thing,” he said. “It’s sad, but I still need to get my things in order at home.”

My father gave a heavy sigh.

“Well, as you wish, my dear. But in that case, we old folks must be getting to bed if we are to see you off tomorrow…”

My mother rose and crossed her future son – he bent towards her hand, and then to my father’s. Alone now, we stayed seated in the dining room a little longer – I had thought to lay out some cards for a game of patience. Meanwhile, he paced the room silently. Finally, he asked:

“Well, would you like to get some fresh air?”

In my heart, everything grew still heavier, but I answered indifferently: “I don’t mind.”

He was still deep in thought about something while we were getting dressed in the front room. With a cute smile he mentioned Fet’s poem:

“Oh, just how cold is this autumn! / Put on your bonnet and shawl.”

“I don’t have a bonnet,” I said. “How does the next part go?”

“I can’t remember. I think it’s something like: “Look how between blackening pines / A fire appears to be rising…””

“What’s the fire?”

“It’s the moon coming up, of course. There’s something wondrously autumnal in all that. “Put on your bonnet and shawl…” The days of our grandfathers and grandmothers… Oh, oh god! Oh God!”

“What?”

“It’s nothing, my friend. But still, I’m sad. Sad and yet, this is all so good too. I really, really love you…”

Once we had finished getting changed, we went through the dining room and out into the garden. At first, it was so dark that I had to hold onto his sleeve. But then I began to make out in the night sky the black branches of trees, showered in the light of the stars. He stopped and turned towards the house.

“Look, how completely different, how autumnal the windows are. So long as I live, I will always remember this evening.”

I looked, and he embraced me and my Swiss wrap. I took my feather scarf from my face and turned my head a little so that he could kiss me. Afterwards, he looked into my face.

“How your eyes shine,” he said. “Are you cold? The air is worthy of winter. If they kill me, you really won’t forget about me at once?”

I thought to myself: “And what if they really do kill him? And would I really forget him in a short while? Like we forget everything in the end…?” And I hurried to answer him, terrified of my thought:

“Don’t talk like that! I would never recover if you died!”

He was silent at first, but then he spoke slowly:

“Well, and so what if I die. I will wait for you there. As for you, just live, find what joy you can, and then come to me.”

And I cried bitter tears…

In the morning he left. My mother gave him that fatal bag, the one she had been stitching the evening before. In it, there was a gold ikon, the one that my father and grandfather had carried with them when they too went to war. We crossed him with a kind of despair. We stood on the wing looking after him, in that kind of dumbness that always follows when you see someone off for a long time and can only feel the surprising inappropriateness of the joy that still surrounds us – the sun, the shining frost on the morning grass. Once we had finished, we went into an empty house. I went through the rooms, with my hands behind my back, not knowing anymore what I was supposed to do with myself, whether it would be better to weep or to sing with all my voice…

He was killed – what a strange word! – a month later, in Galicia. And since that time thirty long years have passed. And so much, so much has happened in those years, years which seemed so long, when you think about them. So much magic, so much incomprehensibility, so much confusion – all that we call the Past, and which lies beyond the powers of both mind and heart. In the spring of ’18, when my mother and father were already buried, I was living in Moscow in a basement belonging to a saleswoman at the Smolensk Market. She used to laugh at me: “Well, your highness, how are your circumstances?” I too was a trader of sorts. I sold, like so many others did then, whatever I had left to the soldiers in their papakhas and their overcoats – a little ring, a cross, a fur collar eaten away by moths, and then one day, while I was at work, I made the acquaintance of a person with a rare and beautiful soul – an old soldier who had already retired. Soon I had married him and in April we went together down to Ekaterinodar. We travelled with his nephew, a boy of about seventeen who was also heading to join the volunteer forces. The journey took almost two weeks – me, an old woman, in my bast shoes; my husband, with a greying black beard, was wearing his worn-out Cossack’s caftan. We stayed around the Don and Kuban for over two years. In the winter, in a storm, alongside countless other refugees from Novorossia, we set out across the sea towards Turkey, and on the way, my husband died of typhus. After this, I had only three people left to me upon the earth: my husband’s nephew and his young wife, and their child, a seven-month-old girl. But husband and wife returned later to Crimea to join Wrangel, leaving their child with me. I don’t know what happened to them – they simply disappeared. And so, I lived in Constantinople for some time, earning what I could for myself and the little girl, breaking my back illegally working in awful conditions. Then, as did so many others, I left – and with the girl went almost everywhere. Bulgaria, Serbia, the Czech lands, Belgium, Paris, Nice… The girl grew up a long time ago and decided to stay in Paris. She is a real Frenchwoman now – she’s very beautiful and completely indifferent towards me. She was working in a chocolate shop near the Madeleine, putting together little boxes in coloured paper and then tying them up with gold lace. Her hands are manicured, and her nails are silver. As for me, I still live in Nice by God’s grace… The first time I was in Nice was in 1912… and in those days I could never even begin to have imagined what would happen with me…

And so, I lived, and I survived his death, even though I had once said that I never would. But, when I remember everything that has happened since then, I always ask myself: well, what was really in your life? And I answer: only that cold autumn evening. Did it really happen? Yes, it did. And everything else that I lived through was just a waste, a useless dream. And I believe, I believe with a faith like a fire, that he is waiting for me there – with the same love, the same youth, as on that evening. “Just live, find what joy you can, and then come to me…” I have lived, I have had some joy, and now already it is time for me to come.

3 May 1944

This piece is one of the most famous short stories of Ivan Bunin. Bunin was the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1933, but much of his prose reflects that of an earlier period. Not for nothing is he known as the last representative of aristocratic prose – he was born on the family estate in 1870, befriended Tolstoy, and had a disdain for all that is crass and base. This poise generally means that we either like him or dislike him. To some, he is a dreamy wishy-washy fool, a representative of a class that rightly died out (read – was systematically murdered by the Bolsheviks). He repeatedly writes about love, which is rather tedious after a while. And I have read criticism suggesting he never moved on from the loss of his country in the Revolutions, a bit like Kipling after the first World War.

“Cold Autumn” I think at least counters this final complaint. It is a story precisely about the tragedy and loss of a world, rather than about a refusal to come to terms with it. The narrator has lived, she has existed. We have two paragraphs without her beloved, but they are solid and lengthy. Something lively has exited the prose itself. And how can we blame the narrator, when that autumn eve remains so much more significant in her mind? Whether we like it or not, our memories are incomplete – a part of us decides for ourselves which moments are worthy of remembrance. And that person who cannot find a moment that is seared within their brain has perhaps not truly lived.

The story is stained with death. The beloved, the husband, the nephew and his wife, the narrator’s mother and father – and even, at the at the beginning, the beloved’s father. Not only is the old world destroyed by the coming of the Bolsheviks, but it is also literally killed off and with it its memories. Like Bunin himself, the narrator works as a living receptacle of a lost world. The Frenchwoman of the next generation is already lost to it.

The beloved quotes Fet – perhaps my favourite Russian poet. But Fet is the poet of haybales and sunsets, a very accessible poet whose main sources of inspiration are love and nature and whose corpus is tainted with a certain proud, aristocratic melancholy – he was the first to translate Schopenhauer into Russian, whence he passed to Fet’s friend Tolstoy. Fet is not a poet for the horrors of the 20th century. By quoting him, the beloved shows that his world is not the one he actually lives in, foreshadowing his swift death later. I particularly like the use of the little bag with the ikon in it too. We expect these items, which have protected previous generations, to offer the same protection now. They do not. The superstitions of the past do not have power anymore either.

Faced with a lost world, we have a choice. Either we succumb to our memories, or we build a new one. I do not think, with the memories that she has and the realities that she has to live in, the narrator of Bunin’s story is worthy of much condemnation. Instead, her faith and at least some of that aristocratic worldview, prove deserving of a certain grudging admiration.

Famine and Affluence; Fathers and Children

The idea of this piece is to compare the radicalism Turgenev portrays in Fathers and Sons with Peter Singer’s ideas about charity as discussed in his 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. The comparison is in some sense arbitrary, but I hope to use it to make the claim that what Singer suggests – essentially, that we in the developed world ought to give a large part of our income away to aid those less fortunate than ourselves – is not particularly radical at all, while Bazarov’s “nihilism”, the demand to “deny” everything, to take nothing on faith, remains a call that most of us would struggle to answer.

I am writing this piece in part for myself. The conclusion, that we probably ought to listen to Singer and give a non-trivial amount of our income away to charity, appears to me to be manifestly correct. But at the same time, I am not doing it and do not see myself doing it in the near future. I cannot argue against him – I am not a philosopher and my ability to reason my way out of abstract arguments is limited. But perhaps by throwing down onto the page what I think about him I may find a handhold by which I may begin to pull myself out of the prison cell of my own guilt at my failure not to act.

I will leave you to judge. First, we will summarise Singer, then we’ll go through Turgenev, and finally, we will attempt to bash the two of them together.

Famine, Affluence, and Morality

Peter Singer’s essay was written in 1971, during the Bangladeshi War of Independence. A large part of that country’s population was living and dying in terrible conditions caused by the war. Rich nations were sending aid, but Singer notes that the aid was not substantial. Britain sent little over 5% of the amount it had then spent on developing the Concorde airplane, while Australia’s contribution amounted to less than a twelfth of the cost of the Sydney opera house. Singer denies neither the value of culture nor rapid intercontinental air travel, but he notes that we would probably consider human life more valuable than either of those things. At least in theory.

Singer does not only criticise the response of states. He notes that people have failed too – “people have not given large sum to relief funds; they have not written to their parliamentary representatives demanding increased government assistance; they have not demonstrated in the streets, held symbolic fasts, or done anything else directed toward providing the refugees with the means to satisfy their essential needs.” While there were exceptions, the average citizen’s response was inaction. And the scale of the famine and its coverage in the media meant that inaction could not have been from ignorance.

Singer argues that such inaction is unjustified. His argument in the short essay, which can be read here, is that “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” He gives the famous example of a drowning child:

“If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.”

If we agree with the principle about preventing bad things from happening, distance should be of no importance, nor should whether we alone can help or whether many can – either way, we should do something. In centuries past, I would scarce have known about suffering on a different continent, let alone how to avert it. But – and Singer is writing in 1971, recalling – “instant communication and swift transportation have changed the situation.” We may say that we are better able to judge who needs the help when we help those closest to us, such as the local homeless. But even this is a somewhat leaky defence. Experts are able to assess the effectiveness of charities, providing reassurance that our money would be put to good use. We do not need to judge, and in fact, we probably lack the tools to judge as effectively as someone whose work has had them spend years honing their judgement.

What this means is that our excuses are inadequate. This leads Singer on to his next point, namely that we have an idea of charity that is wrong. Western societies think of charity as something extra, rather than as a duty. (Whereas it is one of Islam’s five pillars). Because it is something extra, we do not expect people to do it, though we may praise them if they do. However, if we spend our money on fast cars instead of helping those who are literally dying in ways that could be prevented by that same money, we are – according to the premises of Singer’s argument – in some sense guilty. We should give and take action, and we should condemn those who do neither. Giving is not “supererogatory” – it is not something above and beyond goodness, but a constituent component of goodness itself.

That human beings are selfish is not really a good reason not to accept the argument. That nobody else gives is also not a good reason – that is merely a form of cowardice.

And so, Singer draws his rather simple conclusion: “a great change in our way of life is required.” He presents a strong and a weak version of his argument. The former: that we should “prevent bad things from happening unless in doing so we would be sacrificing something of comparable moral significance”, and the latter: “We should prevent bad occurrences unless, to do so, we had to sacrifice something morally significant.” To use an example that has been beaten to death already, the loss of a cup of coffee at one’s local chain is certainly not “something morally significant”. But one could put that money to a good cause and achieve thereby something that truly is morally significant. You know, malaria nets or whatever the charitable flavour-of-the-week is.

In a couple of places, Singer has suggested that giving 5% of our income is a reasonable starting point for answering the question of how much we should give. This is all part of the big Effective Altruism movement and is not worth us fussing over now. For the purposes of this piece, we can summarise Singer’s argument as being that we ought to give more and sacrifice things that do not really matter in comparison with what that money could achieve.

Fathers and Children

Turgenev’s novel, Fathers and Sons, was published in 1862. Russia had suffered a crushing defeat in the Crimean War, with the result that the Empire was taking a long look at itself. The serfs were emancipated in 1861, but with terms that left them still very much shackled to their old masters. Localised revolts caused by peasants who could not read and had been too optimistic in their interpretation of the Tsar’s proclamation were punished with the usual state-sanctioned murder. At the same time, angry with the government’s unwillingness to take further steps to advance Russia into at least the 18th century, young men – and women – became increasingly radicalised. In the same year that the serfs were emancipated the Land and Liberty League was founded, whose most famous act was the murder of the chief of police. Tsar Alexander II himself, who had started his reign with such reforming vigour and then very quickly forgotten all about it, would be blown to pieces a few years after that.

This is all after the novel’s publication, but the best literature tends to identify nascent themes of an age before they become generally apparent, and Fathers and Sons is no exception. It dramatizes a shift in the idea of progressive politics between the older generation, particularly in the figure of Pavel Kirsanov, and the younger, in the figure of Bazarov. The book’s original epigraph gives an idea of the shift we are dealing with:

“Young Man to Middle-Aged Man: “You had content but no force.” Middle-Aged Man to Young Man: “And you have force but no content” – From a contemporary conversation

The older generation in real life had such illustrious figures as Alexander Herzen, whom I’ve written about previously, but it managed to achieve precious little in practice. The new generation was impatient and wanted change now. The anarchist Bakunin (famous phrase, “a destructive urge is also a creative one”) was the most famous member of the older generation to “cross-over”. The young people themselves do not provide many heroic examples. The first one who comes to mind is Sergei Nechaev, who is the model for Pyotr Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky’s Demons, having murdered an innocent man for the sake of trying to improve his revolutionary cell’s cohesion (it did not work).

Pavel Kirsanov, like Dmitry Rudin in Turgenev’s earlier novel of that name, was something of a revolutionary in his youth – both of them fought at the barricades in a France witnessing a revolution. Such action is, funnily enough, reactionary, or at least reactive. They joined a revolution, rather than trying to foment it. The narodniki (this later generation) actually went around the peasants, attempting to stir them into revolt. In practice, the peasants were just as conservative as the Tsars, and most attempts at getting them to revolt failed. Alexander Etkind has noted that the young revolutionaries often followed a particular pattern – “fascination with texts led to fascination with sects; disillusionment with sects led to violence”. Young men from seminaries saw Russia’s long tradition of religious dissent as being the secret to organising political dissent, not realising that the sects simply wanted to be left alone. Disillusioned, they turned to violence.

Within the novel, Bazarov enacts “going to the people”, as it was later called, in miniature. He speaks to the peasants on the Kirsanov estate, where much of the story takes place. But when he actually tries to discuss politics with them, they are bemused and think of him “as a kind of holy fool”. Still, Bazarov’s failure as a revolutionary is not the reason that he has become one of the most well-known characters in Russian literature. Instead, it is his passionately held beliefs that are responsible. He declares that we must deny “everything”. Whereas the other characters are wet and wishy-washy sops who like poetry and music, Bazarov’s language early in the novel is declarative, clear, and forceful.

And what does he suggest, apart from denial? Well, that’s the problem. “We clear the ground”, he says – the most important thing is to destroy. Everything that exists must be subjected to rational criticism as if it is a theory in a book, and if its foundations are unstable, it must be toppled. Religion, the Empire itself – these are things that at that time could certainly have done with a healthy dose of criticism. But Bazarov offers nothing in their place, only the promise that rationality will sort everything out.

Bazarov’s forceful character is in its way inspiring. But that same character disintegrates over the course of Turgenev’s novel. Bazarov falls apart when he falls in love. After all his declarative sentences suddenly it’s all mush with him. And then he dies. Turgenev, who was accused by both conservatives and progressives for his novel, ultimately considered himself a rather boring moderate. “I am, and have always been, a “gradualist”, an old-fashioned liberal in the English dynastic sense, a man expecting reform only from above.” This quote comes from a letter written to a newspaper, but even so, it’s hard to find much in Turgenev’s writing that contradicts it. He dislikes everything that diminishes human life, whether it be authoritarian or radical. But he admires the radicals of the new generation all the same.

Fathers and Sons ends with Bazarov buried and two weddings having taken place. The first of these is between Bazarov’s friend Arkady and Katya, the sister of the woman Bazarov falls in love with; the second is between Arkady’s father and his mistress, a peasant girl. There are few events better reflective of compromise and cohesion than a wedding. Whereas Bazarov’s love for an interesting woman fails, Arkady’s love for a boring girl who gives him an heir is more successful. At the same time, the ending suggests a certain amount of progress, for the second marriage shows that rigid social hierarchies do need to be adjusted from time to time. 

Comparison

We may consider both Singer and Bazarov to present radical ideas, but there is a great difference of degree. Singer asks us to reconsider our idea of duty, whereas Bazarov demands the complete reconfiguration of societies’ fundaments. Although there is an honest desire to improve the lot of the peasant in Bazarov’s views, or at least in the views he is supposed to represent, there is also something horrible. I can’t remember now who said it, and it may be that nobody knows, but one of the nihilists (Pisarev?) once said that a cobbler was worth more than Pushkin. This is blatantly false – it assumes an unbelievably limited view of human nature, one where art has no place. A cobbler is practically valuable, but Pushkin has had a far greater impact than even the best cobbler – he reaches to the soul.

When we go around destroying things, we soon discover that it’s much easier to break than to build. We might agree that religion is generally bad, and most would agree that an Empire is not the best political structure. But we are unlikely to agree about what to replace them with, and Russia’s experience has been that every time they break something, filled with hope, they have replaced it with something worse. Turgenev’s gradualism, as with any gradualism, is something of a cop-out. Martin Luther King Jr’s comments that the greatest enemy of black emancipation is the white moderate are pertinent here. Moderation all-too-easily becomes inaction. And many of the issues people face do cry out for action, not twiddling our thumbs.  

Emotionless Bazarov leads a life that can hardly be called rich. Those emotions that he does have are very much linked to the very structures that he would like to critique – family, love, and so on. I do not think that we cannot love without society, but it would certainly be different, and perhaps not nearly as nice. Perhaps that’s why I found the ending to E.M. Forster’s Maurice so unsatisfying. In that novel, the main character ends up in a relationship with a lower-class man with whom he has nothing in common except their shared homosexuality. This is not a healthy base for a relationship; instead, society needs to be changed so that they can experience full lives within it.

Singer does not say that we need to change society. Or rather, he does not demand the destruction of our values in the same way that Bazarov does. Instead, he asks merely that we readjust our idea of charity and give a little more away. Society, and indeed the world, would be very different if we all started giving to good causes. But our values would not be much changed, though we would almost certainly be better people for it. Bazarov’s ideas retain their radicalism today because they reflect a fundamental impatience to improve things. There are many problems with modern society that I think are in need of urgent redress – wealth inequality, various societal divisions, global warming, mental health, political and institutional distrust, etc etc – but I am not entirely convinced that we are capable of solving them as quickly as their severity demands. Probably we’d make things worse.

Taken over time, everyone giving to charities that actually work to improve people’s lives would actually improve people’s lives. Richer, happier people would build better institutions and feel more engaged in their societies, solving a whole host of problems. Engaging in charitable work will build social cohesion within developed countries too, and deal with some of our own many and varied problems. In short, in a boring way, Singer’s view can be considered gradualist. Our own world is arguably getting better already (I mean discounting climate change and growing wealth inequality, generally we are becoming richer and better educated worldwide). Redistributionist charitable giving (because any giving is redistributional, after all) will only speed things up.

And yet I know that there are Bazarovs among us. One of the main criticisms of Singer’s work is that it reinforces existing systems, rather than proposing new ones. In this view the reason we are all depressed and in unequal circumstances on a burning planet is because our current economic paradigm (capitalism) has brought us to this, and unless we change things up, it will continue to do so. Giving money away doesn’t help this. I am not sure how far I can agree with this view. I like to blame capitalism for everything as much as the next person, but it’s hard to deny the concrete good that charitable giving can achieve. Ideally, we should probably both aim to change the system while supporting people within it.

I myself have an instinctive preference towards local solutions, but it’s hard to defend this view without saying I care more about the people around me than those further away. If we work to engage with the local community, we build strong structures of the sort that can’t quite be quantified – things like trust. We make places better to live in for ourselves and others. And if everyone acted like this, we would all be happier. This is essentially what someone like Wendell Berry is all about. But the difficulty I see with this is that we cannot focus on the local issues without being aware of the global ones. Global news and global charities mean that Pandora’s box has been opened – now we humans have considerably more power, and alas, more responsibility. Too much, in fact, which is why we have failed, and Peter Singer and others yell at us.

Conclusion

Which brings us to the problem. “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” doesn’t really ask that much of us, but it asks more of us than we are probably willing to do. It does not ask us to give up all luxuries (at least the weak form of the argument, which is already asking enough), it still allows us art and music and friendship and fun. But it would deny us much that we have grown used to and think we cannot live without.

A society where we all give, even a little, is clearly a better and more moral society than one where we do not. It is a more responsible one too. We can argue that giving doesn’t work because it doesn’t correctly deal with pernicious systems, or that a local approach is better – but there is one way that we cannot, I think, argue. We cannot say that doing nothing is morally alright. One can try, of course. But it seems that we must, if we are to go to sleep guiltlessly, act.

The things that make life worth living – our friends, our families, our communities, our learning, our experiencing this rich and wondrous world – are not lost by giving. If anything, the loss of excess luxuries, of things we can go without, would only strengthen them all. With fewer distractions we would have a better, more direct, appreciation for friends and partners, have more time for communities and art. It is not a great ask, but at the same time, it is almost impossible. For I am a selfish one: I want to save and invest, I think already about my own descendants, about my own future. I think about all this even though I know I will have a roof over my head whatever happens, whereas the same cannot be said of those who today go to sleep hungry.

I want grand, heroic, solutions – if blowing up a pipeline or two would save the world, I’d be there planting the C4. But I don’t even appear capable of the unflashy and easy solution right in front of me – siphoning off a little of my large-enough pay check.

The world is a mess, but it is our mess, and I am desperately fond of it really. But it can be better. And Singer’s piece offers a clear guide on how to make it so. I cannot despise it for that. We must have things to hope for, and ways of making that hope come to pass.

And perhaps I should be fairer to myself too. All told, I have received my salary twice, and given the job has required me to move abroad, my getting-started expenses have been quite high. Perhaps it’s too early to say whether I will fail to do Singer proud. Time will tell, and one day this blog will shiftily or proudly display the answer.

As for you, readers, how do you sleep at night? Do you give, do you volunteer? If not, what can you say to undermine Singer’s argument?

Leo Tolstoy – The Sevastopol Sketches

Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches are an early work of the great Russian, taking us behind the Russian lines at the Siege of Sevastopol (October 1854 – September 1855) in the Crimean War. It is interesting because although that war has been much mythologised in my own country – one need only speak the name “Florence Nightingale” and a floating lamp will appear, while Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is one of the few poems whose lines probably remain burned into the British poetic public consciousness – in Russia one often has the sensation that there was no Crimean War at all. A defeat when the ruling elites were still convinced their country was undefeatable led to a series of reforms culminating in the emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1861.

The picture of Russia that it presents to the world and its people these days has no space for sore defeats such as this one. The only thing we need to know about Crimea is that it is Russian and always has been. Well and good.

Still, this losing war produced a piece of remarkable Russian fiction, one that has much in common with Isaac Babel’s Red Army Cavalry, written as the Soviet Union suffered a disastrous defeat against a newly independent Poland in the early 20th century. Both works attempt to engage with war – a theme so great that it bursts the hinges of anything that aims to contain it (War and Peace, of course, was really too short) – through fragmentation and novel narrative techniques. These techniques – chronological, ironic – Tolstoy would later develop further in works like Hadji Murat – but they found their beginning here. And for this, the work is interesting now, above and beyond its perspective on a war we may think we know.

Overview

“The real hero of my story, who I love with all the powers of my soul, who I have tried to bring out in all his beauty and who has always been, and will always be, sublime – is truth itself.”

In the Sevastopol Sketches Tolstoy, who was writing only a few months after serving in Crimea as an officer – in fact, the first two stories were written while the siege was ongoing – was already formulating many of the basic ideas about war which would later mark his monumental book on the topic. What are these ideas? To begin with, we learn that war is hell. We have always known this, but Tolstoy’s particular goal is to deglamourize heroism – that one thing that has nevertheless made war glorious and somehow justified for the individual soldiers without whom there could be no war. Everything in the Sevastopol Sketches serves towards the argument that war is not a place of heroism and glory, but of sadness, disappointment, and pointless violence.

Leo Tolstoy at the time of the Siege of Sevastopol

The Sketches are three in number, and each is set at a different moment in the siege. As with Babel’s treatment of the Polish war in Red Army Cavalry, this allows us to see the war effort as it goes well, stagnates, and finally is lost – but without having to fill in the gaps in between and thereby enlarge the book without necessarily making it any more compelling. Although the city of Sevastopol remains central throughout, each story gives us different characters. The first and shortest tale, “Sevastopol in December”, uses an unusual second-perspective narration. Tolstoy here plays the part of a gallant tour guide. The sounds of war are in the background, but somehow sufficiently distant. We see a city that seems carefree, relaxed:

“There you will see the defenders of Sevastopol alongside terrible and sad, great and entertaining, but always amazing, soul-raising sights.”

“Sights” is perhaps the key word here – we are a visitor, staring at exhibits in the zoo. Even after a visit to the hospital and conversations with the wounded, still, we are prey to the feelings of awe in the face of “danger, that game of life and death”. Without allowing us to follow a character or linger over a particular wounded, Tolstoy temporarily allows us to see the war in a depersonalised manner and focuses on the great patriotism of the Russians at its commencement. But in the other two stories, not only do we follow individuals, but we also see what the tour downplays or hides – death, ignorance, and hypocrisy.

Communication Failures

In the second story, “Sevastopol in May”, we begin to experience fighting first-hand. We follow an officer, Mikhailov, as he goes about his duties, before finally heading to the fortifications themselves. But these duties are not what we might have expected. An awful lot of his time is given over to considering the complete and utter vanity of the officers:

“A thousand human self-images managed to be offended, a thousand managed to be awfully pleased, to puff themselves up, and a thousand – to find their rest within the arms of death.”

Tolstoy gives us pages on the narcissism of small differences among the officers – who is ranked slightly higher, who has the nicer carriage, who is consumed by this or that petty anxiety. All dialogue is constructed by its participants to give a particular impression – it is a lie, hypocrisy. And this is particularly ridiculous given the context of a war. If we cannot communicate truthfully, how can we possibly hope to fight well, to plan and strategize effectively? At the start of the story, we laugh at the ignorance of a woman from central Russia who has written Mikhailov a letter describing how the press reports the war – battles with hundreds of foreign casualties and only a single Russian one, for example – but then we learn that the soldiers themselves are no less badly informed. One even declares the Americans will save them.

Miscommunication continues once Mikhailov’s part in the war itself begins. In War and Peace, one of the major themes is the incompetence of the commanders in contrast with the intrinsic elan of the soldiers – during a battle, the officers do not matter, and certainly not the generals. Only the individual soul facing its opponent does. And the encounter is inevitably messy. Mikhailov only knows that he has killed a Frenchman because he makes a noise – “ah Dieu” – upon being stabbed. Earlier, we read that “Mikhailov, supposing that they were asking after the company commander, came out of his pit, and thinking that Praskukhin was the leader, holding his hat in his hand, went up to him”. The emphasis is mine – it indicates that assumptions and guesswork lie behind the interactions. It indicates, above all, instincts, which can be either good or bad but which in war are perhaps all we have.

“Sevastopol in May” concludes with Mikhailov getting a light head wound. As if to tie his themes together, Tolstoy shows that Mikhailov’s main concern is whether he will look silly with it, not whether he will die. Even war cannot change vanity, it seems.

Ways of Dying

In fiction, dying often reveals the truth of the life that death ends. A good life generally has a good end, while a bad one, such as Ivan Ilyich’s, tends to end slowly and painfully. There are three significant deaths in The Sevastopol Sketches. The first is in “Sevastopol in May”, while the other two are in “Sevastopol in August 1855”. Each of these deaths has a different purpose and is approached in a different way.

In “Sevastopol in May” the death is Praskukhin’s, an officer’s. He dies fighting alongside Mikhailov. I’ve heard his death mentioned in the secondary literature as one of the earliest examples of a kind of stream of consciousness, for what strikes one about Praskukhin’s death is how his consciousness expands to envelop the whole story, and then like a black hole suddenly collapses inwards. Praskukhin’s death is first of all sad – “he was scared, listening to himself”. He seems little aware that he is dying until it is far too late. War cannot change vanity, but we find that death can. Suddenly Praskukhin is very small, weighed down by what feels like blocks of stone. Just a moment earlier he had seen Mikhailov get injured, and his first thought had been that this was a relief because Mikhailov owed him money. The stream of consciousness narration allows us to see the transformation of Praskukhin’s world from its petty concerns about money into its tragic concern about onrushing death. By connecting the two, Tolstoy seems to suggest that what we think about in war is really far from what we should think about. And this connects ultimately with the idea that if only we understood what war really was – death and destruction – nobody would ever fight again.

Or as he puts it in my favourite quote of the book:

“A disagreement that has not been solved by diplomacy will still less be solved by powder and blood”.

“Sevastopol in August 1855” takes us to the end of the siege, and to the end of the two Kozeltsov brothers. Much of the story is taken up with the younger brother’s arrival in Sevastopol, which is a completely different city to the one it was in the prior stories. Where before it appeared to function normally, with civilians and women and shops, now it is nearly deserted. The younger Kozeltsov is less occupied by vanity than the other officers – instead, he is guilty of an exaggerated love of heroism. He dreams of heroic death, even though “so little of what he saw was anything like his brilliant, joyous, great-souled dreams.”

 When he eventually meets his fellow officers, they do not tell him what to do, even though he knows next to nothing about running an artillery unit. Instead, they want to play cards and gossip. An opportunity to go to the battlements arises and Kozeltsov puts himself forward, only to be rejected by the others. Instead, they draw lots, and Kozeltsov is again chosen – a significant moment, given what comes later. It seems to suggest again that war is less about planning and more about sheer random chance. Kozeltsov gets to the battlements, and the fighting begins, but here the narrative takes us away from him suddenly.

In chapter 24, a brilliant short chapter, we see Sevastopol through the eyes of two spotters far off. They see the beginnings of a hostile assault upon the city, and then later –

“Oh God, a flag! Look, look!” Said the other, getting his breath and moving from the telescope. “A French flag is on Malakhov Redoubt!”

In Hadji Murat the hero’s death is announced before we experience it first hand when his head is brought to the Russians. In “Sevastopol in August 1855” too, death is announced before we experience it directly. The effect of this is to devalue it – we know what will ultimately happen, so any heroism or defiance is suddenly rendered pointless. It would have been better not to die at all.

Both Kozeltsov brothers die in the French attack. The elder is injured first and later succumbs from his wounds. In the confusion of the fighting, he believes he has successfully repelled his enemy. He feels “an inexpressible delight in the knowledge that he had managed a heroic act”. Yet what is this heroism really, if not a lie? He is indeed deceived by the priest in the hospital, who tells him that the enemy are in retreat. Kozeltsov elder may be able to die gladly, but the reader cannot share in his delight. There is something utterly sickening in seeing falsity so close to the grave. Perhaps I am wrong to care so much about truth, but Tolstoy does name truth the hero of his story, so I think I am right here. War cannot be even remotely good if it engenders the need for such deceit, even comforting deceit.

Heroism allows Kozeltsov elder to die gladly, assuring himself that he has protected his fatherland successfully. But Tolstoy devalues that heroism by showing it is based on a lie. Volodya, Kozeltsov younger, who is even more prone to idealise heroism than his older brother, is given an even more brutal send-off. We do not even see his death. Instead, through one of his soldiers’ eyes, we see how “something in an overcoat lay face down in the place where Volodya had just been” as the French begin their attack. There is no last stand, there is no coming to terms with the war. There is simply death. Whereas even the elder’s battle allows us to find redemption in his valour and heroic qualities, Tolstoy does not even allow Volodya a page to make his departure from the world meaningful. Depriving him of description, he deprives him of meaning.

Try as we might, we cannot find any way of saying that his death was worthwhile.

Conclusion

I visited Sevastopol in 2020. In recent years the city has once again attracted international attention. Crossing over from the North to the South parts of the city by ferry – a route taken by many of the characters of The Sevastopol Sketches – I was left awestruck by the great grey mass of Russian Black Sea Fleet, moored inside the bay past the old city harbour walls. I was not particularly interested in the Crimean War and did not seek out any of the museums related to it. Sevastopol is probably more interesting to a tourist these days on account of its pleasant waterfront promenade and its Greek heritage – the ancient city of Khersones is quite well-preserved. All told, however, the promenade at Yalta is more lovely, and the beaches along Crimea’s southern coast, such as Alupka, are better for people who would like to swim and forget their troubles.  

The Crimean War has been forgotten, at least in Russia. For the British, it remains an important part of our national identity. The last time I visited my grandmother’s she produced a diary of one of her forebear’s from the Crimean War for me to flick through. It did not make for particularly entertaining reading – for the most part, it was a list of men lost and troop movements. But to hold history in one’s hand like that is nevertheless a wonderful feeling.

The diary. Note the “Russian attack” at the bottom of the page.

To read Tolstoy’s little book is also to encounter history, and it is to encounter it from a different perspective to the one we are used to. In fact, this perspective-shift buttresses the argument of The Sevastopol Sketches. Reading our “enemy” already leaves us biased against them, so that Tolstoy’s suggestion that war is pointless and desperately sad is easier to accept. The petty vanities of the officers, dislodged from the cultural frame of reference that might let us love them, appear just as petty as they really are.

Ultimately, Tolstoy’s fullest and best critique of war is found, unsurprisingly enough, in War and Peace (or possibly Hadji Murat). But The Sevastopol Sketches are still a fun book. For one, they have in embryo many of the techniques that Tolstoy will expand upon later in his great works. More importantly, however, while few of us will ever fight in a war, Tolstoy’s work acts as an antidote to an idealised notion of it which I think may still be relatively common. And wherever war is idealised, inevitably it will burst into reality.