Sevastopol Tales E-Book

Leo Tolstoy

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press Classics
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 254

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026

Beschreibung

Crimea, 1854: Sevastopol's inhabitants taunt the besieging forces that keep them trapped behind defensive walls. So begins Leo Tolstoy's depiction of nine months of battle and bravery, based on his own experiences in the Crimean War.This new translation by acclaimed translator Nicolas Pasternak Slater introduces us to long-suffering citizens, vain hussars and the courageous Kozeltsov brothers - one jaded and pragmatic soldier, one naïve and hungry for glory. Enduringly vivid, profoundly ironic, Tolstoy's portrayal of the stumble from triumph to disaster captures the absurdity at the heart of conflict.

Leseprobe

1What Tolstoy achieves—and what any fiction writer hopes to achieve—is, in fact, magic’

CLAIRE MESSUD

‘All of Tolstoy’s writing, fictional and non-fictional, is concerned with truth’

J.M. COETZEE

‘If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy’

ISAAC BABEL 2

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SEVASTOPOL TALES

LEO TOLSTOY

TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY NICOLAS PASTERNAK SLATER

PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS4

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SEVASTOPOL TALES

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Contents

Title PageHistoricalNoteSevastopol in DecemberSevastopol in May12345678910111213141516Sevastopol in August 1855123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627Available and Coming Soon from Pushkin Press ClassicsAbout the AuthorsCopyright8

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HistoricalNote

In 1854–5, as a young officer, Tolstoy took part in the defence of Sevastopol during the siege of the city by mainly French and British forces. This was one of the turning points of the Crimean War. The Sevastopol Tales are fictionalized accounts inspired by his lived experience.

It may be useful to the reader to have an idea of the background to these Tales. Sevastopol lies on the southern shore of its harbour, an inlet of the Black Sea on the west coast of the Crimean peninsula. Across Sevastopol harbour is the North Side, relatively untroubled by the invaders; a pontoon bridge connects the North Side to the city on the south shore.

The harbour is sealed off from the Black Sea by two lines of Russian ships which have been scuttled to prevent enemy access. Tolstoy describes the masts of these sunken ships projecting above the surface of the bay. The guns were transferred to dry land and used in the defence of Sevastopol; they were fired by sailors, which explains the number of sailors fighting on land in Tolstoy’s account.

The city is surrounded by a line of Russian fortifications, with a numbered series of strong points along them (the bastions). The fourth and fifth bastions lie to the south-west of the city; the Kornilov bastion (not numbered) is an important fortification on the south-east side, on an elevation called Malakhov Hill (or the Malakhov mound). All these bastions are facing French troops. 10It is on Malakhov Hill that the last decisive action takes place. (After the French victory, a district of Paris was named Malakoff after this hill.)

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Sevastopol in December

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Dawn is only just beginning to tinge the horizon above Mount Sapun; the deep-blue surface of the sea has already shed the darkness of night and awaits the first ray of sunlight to bring it out in a cheerful sparkle; a chilly mist blows in from the bay; the ground is bare of snow, all is black, but the biting frost of morning pinches your face and crackles underfoot; and only the distant, unceasing boom of the sea, interrupted now and then by echoing gunshots from Sevastopol, disturbs the morning quiet. The muffled sound of eight bells rings out on the nearby ships.

On the North Side, the daytime bustle slowly dispels the calm of night. Here a relief detachment of sentries marches by with a clatter of muskets; there a doctor is already hurrying to the hospital; further on, a soldier scrambles out of his dugout to splash his sunburnt face with icy water, turns towards the reddening east, hurriedly crosses himself and says a prayer; over there a tall, cumbersome camel-drawn madzhara* creaks its way to the cemetery where its load of bloody corpses, piled almost to the top, will be buried… You walk on to the quay, where you are assailed by that peculiar smell of coal, manure, damp and beef; thousands of random objects—firewood, meat, gabions, flour, iron, and the like—lie in heaps by the quayside; soldiers from different regiments 14mill around, with and without their kitbags and guns, smoking, swearing at one another, and manhandling heavy loads onto the steamer which is moored by the quayside with its steam up; small boats for hire, loaded with all sorts of passengers—soldiers, sailors, merchants, women—moor and cast off from the quayside.

‘To the Grafskaya, your Honour? Come aboard.’ Two or three retired sailors stand up in their boats to offer their services.

You pick the nearest boat, stepping over the half-decomposed carcass of a brown horse lying in the mud beside it, go aboard and make your way to the tiller. Now you have cast off. All around you, the sea is already gleaming in the morning sunlight; in front of you, an old sailor in a camel-hair overcoat and a tow-headed young lad are silently and doggedly working the oars. You look out at the enormous striped hulls of the ships scattered near and far over the bay, and the little black dots of boats moving across the sparkling azure water, and the beautiful bright buildings of the town across the bay, tinged pink in the rays of the morning sun; and the foamy white line of the boom, and the scuttled ships, with here and there a black masthead projecting forlornly out of the water, and far in the distance the enemy fleet, just visible on the crystal-clear skyline; and the frothing eddies and leaping salty bubbles raised by the oars; you listen to the regular beating of the oars, and hear the voices wafted to you across the water, and the majestic sounds of cannon fire in Sevastopol, which seems to you to be growing more intense.

The thought that you too are in Sevastopol cannot fail to fill your soul with a sense of manliness and pride, making your blood course faster through your veins…

‘Your Honour! You’re making straight for the Constantine!’ says the old seaman, looking round to see the course you are steering. ‘Bear a bit to starboard.’ 15

‘She’s still got all her guns aboard,’ remarks the tow-headed lad, casting an eye over the ship as you pass it.

‘’Course she has; she’s new—Kornilov lived on board of her,’ says the old man, also looking at the ship.

‘My, just look at that one going off!’ exclaims the boy after a long silence, gazing up at a spreading white cloud of smoke that has suddenly appeared high over the South Bay, accompanied by the sharp crack of an exploding mortar bomb.

‘That’s him, firing from his new battery today,’ says the old man, spitting imperturbably into his hand. ‘Well, press on, Mishka, let’s get ahead of that longboat.’ And our boat speeds ahead over the broad swell of the bay, and does indeed overhaul the heavy longboat loaded with sacks, awkwardly rowed by inexperienced soldiers; and we finally pull in alongside the Grafskaya quay, surrounded by a varied collection of other moored boats.

The quayside is crowded with a noisy, bustling throng of soldiers in grey, sailors in black and women in all sorts of colours. The women are selling bread rolls, Russian peasants carrying samovars are crying ‘Hot sbiten!’,† and the first steps are littered with rusty cannonballs, bombs, grapeshot and cast-iron cannon of various calibres. A little further on is a wide open space with huge wooden beams, gun carriages and sleeping soldiers lying about; there are horses, waggons, green field guns, ammunition chests and stacks of small arms; soldiers, sailors, officers, women, children and merchants are moving this way and that; carts loaded with hay, sacks or barrels pass by; here and there you will see a mounted Cossack or officer, or a general in his droshky. The street on the right is closed off by a barricade, with small cannon mounted in the embrasures and a sailor sitting beside them, puffing at his pipe. 16To the left is a handsome house with Roman numerals carved into its pediment, beneath which some soldiers are standing beside bloodstained stretchers. Everywhere you see the unattractive features of a military encampment. Your first impression is bound to be most unpleasant: this odd mixture of camp life and town life, the beautiful city with a dirty bivouac, is more than unsightly—it looks a repulsive mess. You may even feel that everyone is in a panic, rushing hither and thither and not knowing what to do. But take a closer look at the faces of the people moving around you and you will realize that this is nothing of the sort. Just look at this convoy soldier leading his team of three bay horses to be watered—he’s muttering so placidly to himself, he’s clearly in no danger of losing his way in this motley crowd, which doesn’t even exist for him. He just gets on with his job, whatever it may be—from watering horses to dragging a field gun—as coolly, calmly and confidently as if all this was happening somewhere in Tula or Saransk. And you’ll see the same expression on the faces of the officer walking past in his immaculate white gloves, and the sailor sitting smoking on the barricade, and those soldiers in the working party waiting with their stretchers on the steps of what used to be the Assembly Hall, and that young lady skipping from stone to stone across the street, careful not to wet her pink dress.

Yes, you’re bound to be disappointed if this is the first time you’ve entered Sevastopol. On all the faces you see, you’ll search in vain for any sign of fuss or bother, or even of enthusiasm, determination or readiness to die—there’s none of that. You see everyday people calmly going about their everyday business—you may even end up reproaching yourself for your own excessive fervour, and come to doubt some of that talk of the heroism of Sevastopol’s defenders which has reached you through tales and descriptions of the sights and sounds on the North Side. But 17before giving way to such doubts, go down to the bastions, watch the defenders of Sevastopol on the defences themselves, or better still, walk across this very street and step into that building that used to be the Sevastopol Assembly, where the soldiers with their stretchers are standing on the steps—and you’ll see the defenders of Sevastopol, and witness terrible and tragic sights, and noble and amusing ones—sights which will astonish you and fill your soul with exaltation.

You step inside and find yourself in the great Assembly Hall. As soon as you open the door, you are suddenly assailed by the sight and smell of some forty or fifty amputees and critically wounded men, some on camp beds but most lying on the floor. Ignore the feeling that makes you hesitate in the doorway—it’s not a good feeling—but go on in, don’t be ashamed that you appear to have come just to look at these sufferers, don’t be ashamed to go up and chat to them. People who are in misery like seeing a sympathetic human face, they like talking about their sufferings and hearing words of love and compassion. You walk down between the beds, looking for a face less stern and less full of suffering, and make up your mind to approach and have a conversation.

‘Where’s your wound?’ you ask shyly and tentatively, addressing a gaunt old soldier sitting on his camp bed, whose eyes are following you with a good-natured look as if inviting you to approach. I said you ask ‘shyly’, because as well as arousing your profound compassion, his suffering somehow also inspires you with a fear of causing offence, and with the deepest respect for the sufferer.

‘My leg,’ replies the soldier; and at that very moment you notice, from the folds in the blanket, that he has lost his leg above the knee. ‘Thank God,’ he adds, ‘I’ll get my discharge now.’

‘Is it long since you were wounded?’

‘Coming up six weeks, your Honour.’ 18

‘And does it still hurt now?’

‘No, it doesn’t hurt now, it’s all right, only there’s a sort of dragging ache in my calf when the weather’s bad, that’s all.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘On the fifth bastion, sir, in the first bombardment—I’d just trained a cannon and was walking away from it, like that, to another embrasure, when he got me in the leg—just as though I’d stepped into a hole. I looked, and my leg wasn’t there.’

‘Surely it must have hurt in that first moment?’

‘Not too bad; only it felt as if they’d shoved something hot into my leg.’

‘Well, but afterwards?’

‘Afterwards it wasn’t too bad either, except when they started stretching the skin over it, there was a scorching feeling. First thing is, your Honour, not to think too much. So long as you don’t think about it, nothing matters. The worst is thinking about things.’

At this point a woman in a grey striped dress and a black kerchief comes up to you, joins in your conversation with the sailor and starts telling you all about him, and what he’s suffered, and what a dreadful situation he was in for a whole four weeks, and how after he was wounded, he made the stretcher bearers stop to watch our battery firing a salvo, and how the grand dukes talked to him and gave him twenty-five roubles, and he told them that he wanted to get back to the bastion to instruct the young men if he wasn’t fit to fight any more himself. Getting all this out in one breath, the woman glances at you and then at the sailor, who has turned away and seems not to be listening to her, but is picking at some lint on his pillow, and her eyes gleam with special intensity.

‘That’s my missis, your Honour,’ the sailor remarks, with an expression that seems to say ‘Don’t mind her—you know what women are, talking a lot of nonsense.’ 19

You’re beginning to understand the defenders of Sevastopol; for some reason you’re beginning to feel guilty in this man’s presence. There’s too much that you’d like to say to him, to express your sympathy and admiration; but you can’t find the words, or you’re dissatisfied with the ones that come into your head—so you say nothing, just bow your head before this man’s mute, unconscious majesty and firmness of spirit, this modesty in the face of his own courage.

‘Well, God grant you a quick recovery,’ you say, and stop beside another invalid who is lying on the floor and appears to be in unbearable agony as he waits for death.

He is a fair-haired man, with a pale, swollen face, lying face upwards with his left arm flung out, in a posture that speaks of cruel suffering. His parched, open mouth is taking laboured, stertorous breaths; his blue, leaden eyes are rolled upwards, and his thrown-back blanket reveals the remains of his right arm, wrapped in bandages. You are assailed even more strongly by the oppressive smell of a dead body, and you yourself seem to be penetrated by the consuming inner fire that rages in every one of the victim’s limbs.

‘So is he unconscious?’ you ask the woman, as she follows you around and gazes lovingly at you as if you were family.

‘No, he can still hear, but he’s very bad,’ she whispers. ‘I gave him some tea today—you can’t help feeling sorry for him, even if he’s one of theirs—but he hardly touched it.’

‘How are you feeling?’ you ask him.

He moves his eyes in response to your voice, but he neither sees nor understands you.

‘Heart’s on fire.’

A little further on you come to an old soldier changing his linen. His face and body are a sort of brownish colour, and thin as a skeleton’s. One arm is completely missing, cut off at the 20shoulder. He’s sitting straight up, wide awake; he has recovered from the operation. But his dull, deathly expression, his dreadful gaunt frame and heavily lined face tell you that this is a man at the close of a life full of suffering.

Lying on a bed on the other side of the room you see the pale, tortured and gentle face of a woman, with a hot, feverish flush covering her cheek.

‘That’s one of our sailors’ wives, she was hit in the leg by a bomb on the 5th,’ says your guide. ‘She was carrying her husband’s dinner to him on the bastion.’

‘And so—did they amputate it?’

‘Cut it off above the knee.’

Now, if you have strong nerves, go through the door on the left, to the room where they’re doing dressings and carrying out operations. You’ll see doctors there with pale faces and grim expressions, their arms covered in blood up to the elbows, working by a bed on which a chloroformed patient is lying open-eyed, deliriously mouthing meaningless words, or sometimes just simple and touching ones. The doctors are engaged in the repugnant but merciful work of amputation. You will see the sharp curved knife entering the healthy white flesh; you will see the wounded man suddenly regain consciousness, with a ghastly, harrowing scream and curses; you will see the assistant fling the severed arm into the corner; you will see another wounded man lying on a stretcher in the same room, watching his fellow soldier’s operation, and writhing and groaning not so much from physical pain as from the psychological stress of waiting—you will see horrifying, blood-curdling sights, you will see war not in its fine, orderly and glorious aspect, with bands and drum rolls, fluttering banners and generals prancing along on horseback, but in its true essence, in its blood and suffering and death. 21

As you leave this house of pain, you cannot help feeling a sense of relief—you will take a deeper breath of fresh air, feel pleasure in the knowledge of your own good health, but at the same time, contemplating the suffering you have seen, you will find a sense of your own insignificance. And you will make your way, calmly and unhesitatingly, to the bastions.

‘What can the death and suffering of a paltry worm like myself mean in the face of so many deaths and so much suffering?’ you will ask yourself. But the sight of the clear sky, the brilliant sun, the handsome city, the open church and the soldiers moving this way and that, will soon restore your spirits to their normal condition of insouciance, trivial concerns and exclusive preoccupation with the present.

Perhaps you may encounter some officer’s funeral procession emerging from the church, with a rose-coloured coffin, a band and flying banners; perhaps you will hear the sounds of firing coming from the bastions; but all this will not take you back to your previous thoughts. The funeral will strike you as a very fine military spectacle, and those sounds as very fine military sounds; you will not associate either the spectacle or the sounds with your own very clear personal thoughts about suffering and death, as you did at the dressing station.

Passing the church and the barricade, you enter the liveliest quarter of the city. Shop and inn signs line both sides of the street. The merchants, the women in their bonnets or headscarves, the smartly turned-out officers, all bear witness to the firm resolution, the self-confidence and security of the city’s inhabitants.

If you want to hear the sailors and officers conversing, step into the inn on the right; they’re sure to be talking about last night’s doings, and the girl called Fenka, and the action on the 24th, and 22how bad and expensive the meatballs are in this place, and how this comrade and that one has been killed.

‘It’s just godawful where we are!’ comes the deep voice of a yellow-haired, clean-shaven little sea officer in a knitted green scarf.

‘Where’s that?’ someone else asks him.

‘Fourth bastion,’ says the young officer, and as soon as you hear the words ‘fourth bastion’, you can’t help taking more notice of this fair-haired young officer and even viewing him with some respect. His exaggeratedly cool manner, the way he waves his arms about, his loud voice and laugh that you had found offensive, will now strike you as that special kind of devil-may-care bravado that some very young men affect after passing through danger. Now you’re expecting to hear him telling you how terrible it is on the fourth bastion, from all the mortar bombs and bullets—but not a bit of it! It’s the mud that’s so terrible. ‘You can’t get across to the battery,’ he says, pointing to his boots, which are caked knee-deep in mud.

‘Well, they killed my best gunner today,’ says someone else; ‘got him right in the forehead.’ — ‘Who was that? Mityukhin?’ — ‘No… Hey, am I ever getting my veal? Lazy slobs!’ he adds in the waiter’s direction. ‘No, not Mityukhin, it was Abrosimov. A great fellow, he was—he’d been in six sorties.’

Sitting at the other end of the table, over plates of meatballs with green peas and a bottle of that sour Crimean wine they call ‘Bordeaux’, are two infantry officers. One of them, a young man with a red collar and two stars on his greatcoat, is telling the other, an older man with a black collar and no stars, all about the battle of the Alma. The younger man has already drunk a fair amount, and his hesitancy as he tells his story, his uncertain air that betrays his doubts about whether he will be believed, and above all the improbably important part he seems to have played in the action, 23and how horrible it all was—all this makes it clear that he is taking great liberties with the actual truth. But you have no time for tales of this sort, which you will go on hearing in every corner of Russia for a long time to come. You want to hurry off to the bastions, and particularly the fourth, about which you have been hearing so many very different accounts. Whenever anyone announces that he was on the fourth bastion, he takes special pride and satisfaction in saying so; if anyone says ‘I’m going to the fourth bastion’, you will always detect a shadow of anxiety or too great a show of indifference; if a man wants to make fun of someone, he’ll say ‘They ought to send you to the fourth bastion’; and when people meet a stretcher and ask ‘Where from?’, the answer is usually ‘The fourth bastion.’ Generally speaking, there are two very different views going round about this terrible bastion. There are those who have never been there, and are convinced that the fourth bastion is a sure grave for anyone who ventures there; and those who live on it, like the little yellow-haired midshipman, who, if they mention the fourth bastion, will talk about whether it’s dry or muddy, whether their dugout is warm or cold, and the like.

During the half-hour you’ve spent in the inn, the weather has changed—the sea mist that covered the water has gathered into gloomy, damp, grey clouds obscuring the sun, and a dreary drizzle is coming down, wetting the roofs, pavements and the soldiers’ greatcoats…

Passing through another barricade, you emerge from a doorway on the right and walk up the main street. Beyond this barricade the houses on either side of the street are deserted, there are no shop signs, the doorways are boarded up, the windows knocked out; here the corner of a wall has been broken away, there a roof has been smashed in. The buildings look like old veterans who have lived through all kinds of woes and privations, and seem to 24be eyeing you with pride and a certain contempt. On your way you stumble over cannonballs scattered here and there, and trip over potholes full of water, carved out by shells falling on the stony ground. Along the street you meet or overtake groups of soldiers, Cossack scouts or officers; occasionally you encounter a woman or a child, but by now the woman won’t be in a bonnet—she’ll be a sailor’s wife in an old fur cloak and army boots. Carrying on along the street and down a little slope, you find you are not among houses any more, but odd-looking piles of rubble, stones, boards, clay and beams; ahead of you, up a steep hill, you can see a black, muddy expanse criss-crossed by ditches, and what you’re seeing out there is the actual fourth bastion… Here you meet even fewer people, there are no women to be seen, and the soldiers are hurrying along; you come across drops of blood on the road, and you are bound to meet four soldiers carrying a stretcher, and upon the stretcher a pale, yellowish face under a bloodstained greatcoat. If you ask ‘Where’s he wounded?’ the stretcher bearers will answer you angrily, without turning towards you, to say it’s in the leg or arm, if the wound is a slight one; or else keep a stony silence, if the head can’t be seen on the stretcher and he’s already dead or gravely wounded.

The whistle of a cannonball or mortar bomb close by, as you start climbing the hill, will give you an unpleasant shock. You will suddenly understand, in quite a different way from before, the real significance of those sounds of gunfire which you heard in the city. Some tranquil, happy memory will suddenly rise up in your imagination; you’ll begin to take much more of an interest in your own person than in what you’re seeing; you’ll be less concerned with what is around you, and will succumb to a sudden feeling of hesitancy. But you ignore the cowardly voice that has suddenly begun to speak inside you at the sight of danger, and force it to be 25silent—particularly when you see a soldier running past you at a trot, laughing and waving his arms about as he slithers downhill through the wet mud. Instinctively you straighten out your chest, hold your head high and scramble on up the slippery clay slope. As soon as you’ve got a little higher, carbine bullets start whizzing past you from right and left, and you will perhaps wonder whether you had not better go on along the trench that runs parallel with the road; but the trench is filled higher than knee-deep with such stinking, liquid, yellow mud that you’re bound to choose the road, particularly when you see everyone else doing the same. Some two hundred paces further on, you come to a ploughed-up expanse of mud surrounded by gabions, trenches and embankments, platforms and dugouts, with great cast-iron guns standing on them and neat piles of cannonballs beside them. All this seems to you to have been heaped up here without any sense, coherence or order. Here, sitting on the battery, is a group of sailors; there, in the middle of the open ground, half sunk into the mud, lies a broken cannon; there goes an infantryman carrying his musket across the battery, barely managing to pull his feet out of the clinging mud. But everywhere, on all sides, wherever you look, you see bomb splinters, unexploded bombs, cannonballs, the remnants of an encampment—and all of it sunk in the liquid, viscous mud. You seem to hear the thud of a cannonball falling nearby; on all sides you think you can hear every kind of bullet noises—buzzing like bees, whistling sharply past, or humming like a plucked string. You hear the dreadful boom of a cannon firing, which shakes you to the core and fills you with utter dread.

‘So this is it, the fourth bastion; here it is, this awful, truly terrible place!’ you think to yourself, with a little bit of pride and a very great deal of repressed terror. But you’re in for a disappointment—this isn’t the fourth bastion yet, it’s only the Yazon 26redoubt, relatively pretty safe and not at all terrible. To get to the fourth bastion, you must turn to the right, along this narrow trench, where the infantryman went, keeping his head down. Here you may meet another stretcher, or a sailor, or soldiers with shovels; you may see mine cables, or dugouts in the mud with barely room for two men bent double. You’ll see the Cossack scouts of the Black Sea battalions, changing their boots, eating, smoking their pipes, carrying on with their lives; and everywhere you’ll see that same stinking mud, traces of encampments, and abandoned lumps of cast iron of every conceivable shape. Walk on another three hundred steps and you’ll come to another battery, on an area of open ground crossed by trenches and covered by gabions covered in earth, cannon on platforms and earth embankments. Here you may see a group of four or five sailors playing cards in the shelter of the breastworks, and a naval officer who, observing that you’re a new arrival and curious to know more, will take pleasure in showing off his domain and everything you might find interesting. This officer rolls his yellow paper cigarette so calmly, sitting on a cannon, and strolls so calmly from one embrasure to another, and chats so calmly to you, without the slightest affectation, that despite all the bullets whizzing past you, thicker than ever, you yourself come to feel cool-headed, question him attentively and listen to what he tells you. This officer will tell you—but only if you question him—about the bombardment on the 5th; he’ll tell you how in his battery only one gun could be fired, and out of all his gunners there were only eight left, and how in spite of that, next day on the 6th he was firing from all his guns; he’ll tell you about the bomb that landed on a sailors’ dugout on the 5th and wiped out eleven men; he’ll take you to an embrasure to show you the enemy batteries and trenches, no further than seventy or eighty yards away. But I’m afraid that you, encouraged by the whizzing 27bullets, may stick your head out of the embrasure to have a look at the enemy, and not see anything; or if you do see anything, you’ll be very surprised to find that this white stone rampart, so close to you, with puffs of white smoke popping up from it—this same white rampart is the enemy, it’s him, as the soldiers and sailors say.