CHIEF AUTHORITIES FOR CHAPTER III

Birukof.

Behrs.

U. Bitovt, Graf L. Tolstoy v literatoure i iskousstve: Petersburg, 1903. (Hereafter called 'Bitovt.') Though ill-arranged, this book is valuable to any one engaged on the difficult task of compiling a Bibliography of Tolstoy's works.

Nekrasof's letters to Tolstoy published in the Literary Supplement to the Niva, February 1898.

Much light is also thrown on this period of Tolstoy's life by the following works, which must not be considered autobiographical:

The Raid.
The Wood-Felling.
Meeting a Moscow Acquaintance.
The Cossacks, and
The Snow Storm,

as well as by stories included in Tolstoy's Readers:

Boulka.
Boulka and the Wild Boar.
Milton and Boulka.
Boulka and the Wolf.
What Happened to Boulka in Pyatigorsk.
Boulka's and Milton's End.
A Prisoner in the Caucasus.

CHAPTER IV
THE CRIMEAN WAR

Joins army of the Danube. Siege of Silistria. Sevastopol. Projected Newspaper. Sevastopol in December. Battle of the Tchérnaya. Capture of the Maláhof. Courier to Petersburg. Song. Relations with superiors and fellow-officers. Self-depreciation. The Wood-Felling. Sevastopol in May. The Censor. On War.

At twenty-five years of age it fell to Tolstoy's lot to take part in a great European war and thereby to extend the range of his experience in a way that considerably affected his subsequent life and writings.

Tolstoy tells us that he got his first understanding of war from Stendhal, the author of Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme. In conversation with Paul Boyer, Tolstoy once spoke of those novels as inimitable works of art, adding, 'I am greatly indebted to Stendhal. He taught me to understand war. Re-read the description of the battle of Waterloo in La Chartreuse de Parme. Who ever before so described war? Described it, that is, as it is in reality? Do you remember Fabrice riding over the field of battle and understanding "nothing"?'

Tolstoy's brother Nicholas, though fond of war, also disbelieved in the popular romantic view of it, and used to say: 'All that is embellishment, and in real war there is no embellishment.'—'A little later, in the Crimea,' added Tolstoy in his talk with Boyer, 'I had a grand chance to see with my own eyes that this is so.'

Of the causes that led to the war it need only be said that the rule of the Turks over Christian populations had long kept a dangerous sore open in Europe, and the consequent diplomatic difficulties were complicated by the indefiniteness of two lines in the Treaty of Kainardji, which Catherine the Great had imposed upon Turkey in 1774. There was also friction between the Eastern and Western Churches, with reference to the custody of the Places in Palestine rendered holy by their traditional connection with the Prince of Peace. Nicholas I, who had wellnigh drilled all intelligence out of those near him in his Government and in his army, was not accustomed to be thwarted. Dimly conscious of the first faint symptoms of that growth of Liberalism which a few years later, in the early 'sixties, led to sweeping reforms in Russia, he felt inclined to demonstrate the beneficence of his rule not by allowing changes to be made at home, but by arbitrarily inflicting reforms on Turkey. Failing to get his way by diplomatic pressure, he rashly proceeded to occupy the Danubian Principalities as a 'material guarantee' of Turkey's compliance with his demands.

He was opposed by Austria and Prussia as strongly as by England and France, and the pressure exerted by the four powers sufficed to compel him to withdraw his army from Turkish soil. Thereupon the war, which had as yet been waged only between Russia and Turkey, might well have ended, had not England and France undertaken a quite needless invasion of the Crimea: an enterprise in which Austria and Prussia refused to join. The end did not justify the proceedings, for in spite of success in this war, Napoleon the Third's dynasty crumbled to dust within twenty years, while within a like period after Palmerston's death Lord Salisbury frankly admitted that we had 'put our money on the wrong horse.' As to Nicholas I, his pride was destined to be bitterly mortified by the results of an enterprise which not only failed of its immediate object, but by its failure actually hastened the coming of those reforms in Russia against which he had set his face. Even Turkey did not really benefit by being allowed to oppress her subject races for a couple of generations longer.

It was the influence of Napoleon III, as Kinglake has pointed out, that led England to take part in the war. Having by treachery and murder made himself Emperor of the French, that monarch found himself for a time dangerously isolated from the support of people of good repute. In consultation with Palmerston, he decided to subordinate the traditional Eastern policy of his country to that of England if thereby he could succeed in being publicly paraded as the friend and ally of Queen Victoria. As soon as he had secured an alliance with England, with Palmerston's aid, and helped by the extraordinary war fever which seized the English nation, he quickly forced the peacefully disposed Lord Aberdeen along an inclined plane which ultimately plunged both nations into a war for which no sufficient motive justification or excuse existed.