Nekrasov was crying for Youth (sequel to Childhood and Boyhood) and the promised accounts of the siege of Sevastopol. Tolstoy worked on both of these very dissimilar works at once. First he was the rich man's son, the spoiled student, happy and naive, facing the anguish of his first examinations, first loves and first metaphysical doubts, and then the anonymous soldier in the inferno of Sevastopol. He received all the encouragement he could wish from behind the lines. His sister wrote that Ivan Turgenev was full of admiration for him, Nekrasov filled every letter with high praise, and the Memoirs of a Billiard- Marker, which The Contemporary had finally brought out after a year of hesitation, was warmly received by all the critics.
"What gave me most pleasure," Tolstoy wrote on March 27, "was to read the critics' notices: they speak of the Memoirs of a Billiard-Marker in very flattering terms. 'iTiis sensation is both pleasant and useful, for by feeding my pride it drives me to action. . . . Alas; for the last five days I have not written a single word of Youth, although I did begin Sevastopol by Day and by Night." The more deeply he became involved in his work, the harder it was for him to bear the hardships of camp life. Obviously, he would be more comfortable writing in an office. Prince Gorchakov had replaced Admiral Prince Menshikov as commandcr of the army of the Danube, so he applied for a transfer back to the staff. Aunt Pelagya Yushkov was pressed into service, to speak to the general—who was a relative of hers—in support of his request. On March 30, refusaclass="underline" "I did not get the transfer because, I am told, I am only a second lieutenant. Pity!"
His annoyance increased when, instead of appointing him aide-de- camp and settling him in some more comfortable quarters, his superiors ordered him and his battery to the 4th (or Flagstaff) Bastion, south of Sevastopol, in the most dangerous sector of all. An artist needs distance; it is impossible to write about war in the thick of the battle! He who had been complaining of "inactivity" a few weeks before suddenly balked at the thought of being exposed to fire like some common little officer up from the ranks. He had caught a cold in the casemate, his nose was running, he was coughing, he had a fever, and it was all the fault of the command, who did not know how to use its resources. In a rage, he wrote on April 11, 1855, "Fourth Bastion ... It makes me furious, especially now that I am ill, to think that nobody has imagined I might be good for something other than cannon fodder of the mast useless kind."
When his cold abated his spirits rose, and in fact he displayed great courage. The 4th Bastion was closest to the French lines—a hundred yards or less. "Not a day went by," wrote Captain Reimers, who commanded the bastion, "without heavy bombardment—on holidays the French sent in the Turks to relieve them. There were periods during which we received an average of two thousand shells from a hundred cannon within a twenty-four-hour period." Tolstoy was on quartermaster duty four days out of eight. Off duty, he rested in Sevastopol in a humble but clean dwelling overlooking the boulevard where the military band was playing. When he was 011 duty he slept in an armored casemate. A fir post in the center held up the ceiling. Tarpaulins were hung halfway up to catch falling nibble. It was furnished with a bed, a table littered with papers, a clock and an icon with its vigil light. Inside this clammy den, the thunder of the cannonade was incessant. A flickering glare came through the narrow window. The ground shook, the walls cracked, the bitter, peppery smell of powder hung in the air.
At first he was terrified, then he mastered his quaking limbs and, from extreme fright, passed to extreme bravery; he did not know that the sccret of his genius lay in just this rare capacity to shift from cowardice to heroism, or that it was his very flaws and inconsistencies that would later enable him to embrace the attitudes of each of his characters in turn with equal sincerity, or that his diversity as a man would be the foundation for his universality as a writer.
Twenty-four hours after grumbling at being treated as "cannon fodder," he wrote in his diary, "My little soldiers are very nice, I feel quite gay with them." (April 12.) And then: "The continual allure of danger, and the interest with which I observe the soldiers around me, and the sailors, and the war itself, are so rewarding that I would be sorry to leave this place, especially as I should be glad to see the attack, if there is one." (April 13.) The firing grew more intense; a mine exploded, hurling chunks of stone and human debris into the air; deafened and tormented by the cries of the wounded, Tolstoy prayed to God: "Lord, I thank you for your unwavering protection. How worthless I should be if you abandoned me. . . . Help me, not to gratify my own futile ambition, but to attain the great eternal aim of life, which I do not know but am aware of."
In this atmosphere of fever, upheaval and death, writing was a tall order. But Tolstoy had never felt so inspired. He wrote down his impressions on the wing and drafted his accounts for The Contemporary inside the lxastion. He must have been the first real "war correspondent." He did not disown Stendhal's influence: "I am in his debt more than any other's," he told Paul Bovcr in 1901. "I owe my knowledge of war to him. Reread his account of the battle of Waterloo in The Charterhouse of Parma. Who, until then, had described war in such terms, that is, the way it really is?" But in The Charterhouse of Parma the battle of Waterloo is seen through the eyes of Fabrizio alone, whereas in the Sevastopol Sketches Tolstoy enlarged upon the method and entered into the minds of all his protagonists in turn, giving their dissimilar versions of the same engagement. There was no artistic premeditation in this concept of "coverage," moreover; as always, the author was obeying his instinct, saying what he had seen and not caring whether he pleased or offended. He showed the reeking operating-room, the wounded soldiers slavering with pain, the surgeon's assistant tossing an amputated leg into the corncr, the death of a mud- covered sailor with clenched jaws ("Farewell, brothers!"), the military bands playing in town for the ladies who were languishing for a flirtation and the officers back from the front, the bastion under enemy fire, the shell—approaching like a fiery pinpoint, growing larger, whistling over their heads—the mountains of corpscs, the smoke, ruins, wasted blood, the grandeur and misery of the anonymous soldier. "Hundreds of bodies who, two hours before, were bursting with hopes and desires, great and small, now lay with fresh bloodstains on their rigid limbs in the dew-eovercd flowering valley dividing the bastion from the trenches and on the smooth slabs of the mortuary chapel at Sevastopol. Hundreds more, with curses and prayers on their cracking lips, crawled, writhed and groaned among the corpses in the flowering fields, or on stretchers, camp cots and the blood-soaked boards of the ambulance station; but, as on the previous days, the heat-lightning flickered about
Mount Zapun; the trembling stars dimmed; a whitish mist rose on the dark, tossing sea; the pink dawn lit up the east; long purple clouds wafted away to the horizon, which turned a luminous blue again; and, as on the previous days, the powerful, glowing star emerged, promising joy, love and happiness to all the awakening world."
One man has a sinister foreboding: "I shall surely be killed today, especially since it wasn't my turn to go and I volunteered"; another heaves a cowardly groan of relief when his replacement arrives; a third thinks greedily, as lie sees a comrade in danger of death and remembers his ten-ruble debt to him, that it may cancel itself in a moment. Tolstoy himself, who had more than one creditor in the batter)-, might have experienced the same sensation in similar circumstances. At the pitch of nervous tension a man is brought to by the continual threat of annihilation, his mind is no longer the master of the images that visit it. At the end of Sevastopol in May, Tolstoy could proudly declare, "The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the strength of my soul, the hero I have tried to reproduce in all his beauty, who always has been, is and always will be admirable, is the truth."