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Tolstoy L. Tales of military life (Military stories).
Sankt-Petersbourg, a printing house of General Staff, 1856. [4], 382,
[1] p. p. the Censor V. Beketov. Contemporary half calf (slightly
stained and worn, rubbed). Internally a clean and fresh copy. A.P.
Petsmans Bindery in Moscow. Format: 1913 cm. First separately
published book of great Russian writer! Extremely rare! Only five
stories
 As we know, a large loss in card play in spring 1851 forced Leo
Tolstoi to follow his elder brother Nikolai to the Caucasus. Soon he
decided to join the army. In autumn of 1851, having passed an exam in
Tiflis, Tolstoi as a cadet joined the fourth battery of the twentieth
artillery brigade. This unit stayed for a long time at a remote
Cossack settlement of Starogladovo on the Terek bank near Kizlyar.
Shaking off the dust and soot of civilisation, Leo got the best part
of himself: he started writing. Most probably that the History of My
Childhood is the first work of Tolstoi; there is at least no
information evidencing that he had earlier attempted to write anything
in the literary form. In 1852, Tolstoi send to the editorial board of
Contemporary the first part of his autobiographical trilogy. When he
received the manuscript of Childhood, Nekrasov recognised at once its
literary value and write a kind letter to the author, where he blessed
the author to further deeds in the field of literature. Being
published by Nekrasov and signed by modest initials L. N., Childhood
won an extraordinary success and the author was once referred to as a
great figure of the young literary school. Being soon certified as an
officer, Tolstoi stayed in the Caucasus for two years and took part in
numerous battles, where he was subjected to all the dangers and
troubles. When the war in Crimea arose in the end of 1853, Leo Tolstoi
was transferred to the Danube army, where he took part in the battle
at Oltenz and in the siege of Silistria and from November 1854 to the
end of August 1855 he stayed in Sevastopol in the hottest battles at
the fourth bastion, Chernaya, Malakhov Hill. Here he wrote five
stories, one of them (Sevastopol in December 1854) was published by
Contemporary and read thirstily by whole Russia; it made a shocking
impression with a picture of horrors experienced by defenders of
Sevastopol. This story was noted by Emperor Nicholas I, who ordered to
save a talented officer. There are only five of these stories, but
they were very actual for that time by form and contents: the great
nation felt sorry for the disgraceful loss in the Crimean war against
the French, English and Turkish armies. On the other hand, they fall
in the flow of quasi-stories, quasi-essays and papers, in the terms of
Nekrasov, which replaced poems and novels in 1840s and 1850s. It is
not by chance that Tolstoi dedicated his Wood-felling to Turgenev,
who was then the famous author of Hunter's Notes, a typical collection
of stories and essays for that time. The pathos of Military Stories is
truth, severe truth of war. This is what Tolstoi wrote: I paint the
war not as a ordered, fine and shining march with music and drums,
waving banners and riding generals but ... in its real expression, in
blood, suffers, death... The quiet talks among people in the war
situation, in front of the mortal danger, in the last moments of
decaying consciousness must be deeply sincere. But this is not enough
for the author! He interferes the self-observation of his character
and eliminates the last illusions and shows everything as it is in
fact. The instinct of life, vanity and self-interest, theft and
treason, causal and predetermined death, animal fear and realised feat
- everything is interesting for Tolstoi. It is interesting for me to
know how and under what feeling one soldier kills another.Tolstoi's
tales of military life reflect his experiences in the Caucasus and the
Crimea. The Raid (Nabeg, 1853) and The Wood-felling (Rubka lesa,
1855) belong superficially to the familiar Russian genre of the
Caucasian military tale. They contain an indirect polemic with the
romantic cliches of fearless heroism, the glory of battle, and
exaggerated patriotism characteristic of such earlier practitioners of
the genre as Aleksandr BESTUZHEV (Marlinsky). Tolstoi reduced the
conventional exciting plots of such stories to the level of mere
incidents which he used as a framework to display his true interest, a
neatly categorized series of psychological portraits of the Russian
soldiers and officers and their opponents, the mountain tribesmen. The
stories blend the traditional Caucasian military tale of the 1820s
with the strategies and devices characteristic of the NATURAL SCHOOL
of the 1840s. Tolstoi's interest in the latter, be spoken by his high
opinion of Grigorovich (a leading practitioner of the PHYSIOLOGICAL
SKETCH), is also reflected in Notes of a Billiard Marker (Zapiski
markera, 1855) with its use of skaz (i.e., the interposition of a
narrative persona, usually one with a local color value and
characterized by dialectal or subliterary speech, between author and
reader), and The Snowstorm (Metel', 1856), a physiological sketch of
the Russian coachman.
The three Sevastopol Stories (Sevastopol' v dekabre mesyatse, 1855;
Sevastopol' v mae, 1855; Sevastopol' v avguste 1855 goda, 1856)
are difficult to classify. They represent a blend of fiction and
reportage with a startling admixture (in Sevastopol in December) of
the stylistic conventions of a tourist guidebook. They also
(especially Sevastopol in May) make extended use of the narrative
device of stream of consciousness (the dialectic of the soul as it
was called by the critic N. G. CHERNYSHEVSKY) with which Tolstoi had
first experimented in The History of Yesterday. The stories,
especially the first of them, display the characteristically Tolstoian
device of estrangement 'whereby familiar sights and events are made to
seem new and striking by distorting or ignoring the conventions which
usually govern our perception of them. This descriptive technique was
to become a hallmark of Tolstoi's style. The loci classici are the
account of Natasha at the opera in War and Peace, the description of
the service in the prison church in Resurrection, and the ridiculing
of the rehearsal of a Wagnerian opera in What Is Art? Finally, it was
in Sevastopol in May that Tolstoi proclaimed that the hero of his
fiction was not any of the characters who appeared in it but rather
that which I love with all the power of my soul and which has been,
is, and will be beautiful, namely, The Truth ! That is why the fame
of Tolstoi in literature started from his Military Stories. It is not
by chance that N. N. Smirnov-Sokolskiy used to emphasise: Collection
of all the Tolstoi publications during his life was not included in my
modest goals, but I was looking long for this first book published in
his life and when I got it I put it on my shelf with a great
satisfaction as one of the best decorations of my collection. One
would not say better!
Reference literature:
1. Smirnov-Sokolskii, Biblioteka, vol. I, 1190.
2. Kilgour (to be absent).
3. Bitowt Uyrii A Count Leo Tolstoy in literature and art, Moscow,
1903, 399.
4. A. Mezier Russian literature , St. Petersbourg, 1902, 18146.
5. M.S. Lesman, 2245. |
