The Tsar turned down the proposal for a forces newspaper in late November, on the grounds that it was not in the government’s interests.76 He suggested instead that Tolstoy and his comrades publish articles in Russian Veteran, the official newspaper patronised by the Ministry of War, which of course they already were entitled to do. The news angered Tolstoy when it reached him, but after collecting more raw impressions from a sortie to Sebastopol in early December with his platoon, he began sketching out an article with which he hoped to respond. This was the first draft of ‘Sebastopol in December’, his first piece of war reportage, which would bring him national celebrity. On 11 January Tolstoy wrote to Nekrasov with the proposal that he send him articles on the war which he promised would be of a quality not inferior to anything else published in The Contemporary. Nekrasov wrote back by return of post giving Tolstoy carte blanche. It was now that Tolstoy learned that his story ‘Notes of a Billiard Marker’ had been published in the January issue for 1855, and that Boyhood had appeared in the journal back in October. The censor had once again objected to several passages, such as the one where the narrator regrets that some people are poor while his family are rich, and all references to the Church and its rituals, which were at that time prohibited in secular publications (they include the passage about the boy’s father making the sign of the cross over the window of the carriage his family is to travel in, and the horse’s nickname of ‘Deacon’).77
Tolstoy was stationed in the quiet Tatar village of Eski-Orda for one and a half months, so he had plenty of time again at his disposal, and enjoyed hunting wild goats, playing duets and dancing with young ladies.78 But in the middle of January 1855 he was transferred to the 3rd Battery of the 11th Artillery Brigade, which was stationed on the Balbek river, six miles outside Sebastopol. On the way, he stopped in the city and picked up money sent him by his brother-in-law from the sale of his house at Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy earned a reputation amongst his new battalion for his physical strength – one day he impressed his comrades by lying on the floor and lifting a twelve-stone man with his bare hands. The officers in his battalion did not impress him, however; he felt very alienated in this new posting. He was miserable during that cold winter. He had no books, and no one to talk to. It was not a situation conducive to writing either, and the torpor made him vulnerable to his vices. On 3 February he steeled himself to write a difficult letter to his brother Nikolay. He had succumbed once again to his gambling addiction, and over the course of two days and two nights had lost the 1,500 roubles he had just received as seed money for the forces newspaper. Confessing this lapse to Nikolay was Tolstoy’s way of doing penance.79
When news of Russia’s latest defeat at Evpatoria reached the Tsar on 12 February 1855, he had wept like a child, and no longer wanted to hear any more despatches from the front. On 18 February Nicholas I died. He had ruled Russia with an iron fist for thirty years and his death at the age of fifty-eight was completely unexpected. As far as most of the educated population of Russia was concerned, however, the news was more a reason for celebration than for mourning. The relaxation in censorship which followed soon after Alexander’s accession would make an immediate impact, and Russians would begin to speak about a ‘thaw’, just as they would a century later after Stalin’s death. Down in the Crimea, Tolstoy clearly now felt emboldened to extend his reforming plans for the military, for in early March he began sketching out a plan for modernising the entire army, not just the artillery’s weapons. He did not mince his words. ‘We don’t have an army,’ wrote Tolstoy, ‘but a mob of oppressed disciplined slaves who have submitted to robbers and mercenaries.’ The Russian soldier, he went on, was someone legally constricted from satisfying even his most basic needs, and he was certainly not given enough to prevent him from suffering from hunger and cold. Tolstoy divided Russian soldiers into the oppressed, the oppressors and the desperate. It was hardly surprising that an oppressed soldier spent the niggardly seventy kopecks he received every quarter (a ‘bitter mockery of his poverty’) on drink, and that morale was low. Tolstoy had nothing good to say about those in charge: a lot of the officers were crooks devoid of any sense of duty or honour, while the generals were more often appointed for their acceptability to the Tsar rather than for their abilities.80 Tolstoy abandoned this ambitious project after a few days, no doubt because he realised it would not go anywhere even in the new climate, but it is important to realise that there was a precedent for speaking out when he began railing in public against social and political injustices thirty years later.
At the same time that Tolstoy was preoccupied with military matters, he was also thinking deeply about religious questions. On 4 March 1855 he took communion and made a remarkable declaration in his diary about the founding of a new religion. It is often quoted in view of its prophetic nature:
Yesterday a conversation about divinity and faith led me to a great and stupendous idea, the realisation of which I feel capable of devoting my whole life to. This idea is the foundation of a new religion corresponding to the development of mankind – the religion of Christ, but purged of dogma and mystery, a practical religion, not promising future bliss but providing bliss on earth. I realise that to bring this idea to fruition will take generations of people working consciously towards this goal. One generation will bequeath this idea to the next, and one day fanaticism or reason will implement it. Working consciously to unite people with religion is the foundation of the idea which I hope will occupy me.81
In a sense, all of Tolstoy’s future career is here, as he was always a religious writer, concerned with seeking the truth. In his early works this concern was implicit, but it became increasingly explicit as he evolved as an artist. Tolstoy’s literary works, in the compelling argument of Richard Gustafson, can even be seen as ‘verbal icons’ of his religious view. until the nineteenth century the icon had fulfilled the role of theology in the Russian Orthodox Church. There simply was no written theological tradition in Russia as there was in the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches, and when the art of icon painting fell into decline in the nineteenth century, after the Orthodox Church was made into a department of state, it was literature which took its place. As Gustafson has commented, people in Russia began instinctively to understand the role of literature as theology: ‘the images created by artists were taken seriously as words which reveal the Truth’. Tolstoy’s writing is hailed for its realism, but it is a very emblematic, religious kind of realism.82
At the end of March 1855 Tolstoy began writing properly again. He started Youth, which would end up being the third and last instalment of his projected four-part work. He also began reworking the draft of his article about events at Sebastopol. He did not get very far, however, as he was called into action. After the long winter months, during which time the allies built a railway to speed up the delivery of supply of guns and ammunition, French and British troops were ready to resume their bombardment of Russian defences in Sebastopol. Tolstoy’s battery was despatched to the fourth bastion in the south of the city, which was the most dangerous owing to its close proximity to the French position. The new allied bombardment ceased on 7 April, except in the case of the fourth bastion, which continued to be pummelled for another five days. Tolstoy was first on duty between 5 and 6 April, and then in stints of four days, followed by eight days’ rest, during which time he retreated to a flat in town and played the piano.83 On 19 April the allies seized the trenches between the fourth and fifth bastions, and the Russian forces began to doubt that they would prevail.