Writing at war

Leo Tolstoy makes his first serious attempt to write fiction in early 1851. The story, The History of Yesterday, is executed in Moscow after a night of cards and drinking at the home of his cousin Alexander Alexandrovich Volkonsky and his wife Louisa, with whom Tolstoy is infatuated. It is a description of just such a night and the ride home, and a meditation on indolence and aimlessness. It is similar to what might be found in his diaries of the time but it has a fictional character at its heart. It is never finished.

While serving in the Caucasus War and the Crimean War his work flourishes. He starts to think of himself as a writer and be recognised as such. From the outset his work is underpinned by the aim of faithfully depicting reality: painting characters with all their outward contradictions and internal complexity intact.

The Raid, the first piece of fiction he finishes, draws heavily on what is going on all around him. Simultaneously he works on the fourth draft of the novel Childhood, the first work to be published. It is based on his own and a neighbouring family and part of its intensity comes from Tolstoy’s realistic descriptions of people, occurrences and feelings he has known.

Sevastopol in December, the first of this three Sevastopol sketches of war is his most patriotic. The next, Sevastopol in May, depicts the absurdity of war and the awful suffering of the wounded. It is heavily censored. Of it he writes the following in his diary: “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” (p127, Tolstoy, Troyat). His style is social realism and he believes the elegance and poetry of prose is worth nothing compared to truth.

Tolstoy and his comrades write a satirical ditty, Song of Sevastopol, in response to the poor leadership of the top Russian brass.
The toppest brass
Sat down to meet
And pondered long;
Typographers
Lined paper black;
But all forgot
The deep ravine
They had to cross!
(p130, Tolstoy, Troyat)

War and Peace
Anna Karenina
The body of work
Literary influences