1855
It was Sevastopol that first brought European fame to Tolstoy. When, as already mentioned, Sevastopol in December appeared in the June Contemporary, the Emperor ordered it to be translated into French. That same month Tolstoy completed and despatched The Wood-Felling; in July he sent off Sevastopol in May. Here once again the Censor exercised his malignant power, and Panáef wrote to Tolstoy from Petersburg:
In my letter delivered to you by Stolýpin, I wrote that your article has been passed by the Censor with unimportant alterations, and begged you not to be angry with me that I was obliged to add a few words at the end to soften.... 3000 copies of the article had already been printed off, when the Censor suddenly demanded it back, stopped the appearance of the number (so that our August number only appeared in Petersburg on 18 August) and submitted it to Poúshkin, President of the Committee of Censors. If you know Poúshkin, you will be able partly to guess what followed. He flew into a rage, was very angry with the Censor, and with me for submitting such an article to the Censor, and altered it with his own hand.... On seeing these alterations I was horror-struck, and wished not to print the article at all, but Poúshkin explained to me that I must print it in its present shape. There was no help for it, and your mutilated article will appear in the September number, but without your initials—which I could not bear to see attached to it after that....
Now a word as to the impression your story produces on all to whom I have read it in its original form. Every one thinks it stronger than the first part, in its deep and delicate analysis of the emotions and feelings of people constantly face to face with death, and in the fidelity with which the types of the line-officers are caught, their encounters with the aristocrats, and the mutual relations of the two sets. In short, all is excellent, all is drawn in masterly fashion; but it is all so overspread with bitterness, is so keen, so venomous, so unsparing and so cheerless, that at the present moment when the scene of the story is almost sacred ground, it pains those who are at a distance from it; and the story may even produce a very unpleasant impression.
The Wood-Felling, with its dedication to Tourgénef, will also appear in September (Tourgénef begs me to thank you very, very much for thinking of him and paying him this attention).... In this story also (which passed three Censors: the Caucasian, the Military, and our Civil Censor) the types of officers have been tampered with, and unfortunately a little has been struck out.
Tolstoy's dedication of The Wood-Felling to Tourgénef proceeded from his admiration for that writer's A Sportsman's Sketches, which to the present time he continues to value very highly, considering Tourgénef's descriptions of Nature in that book not merely excellent, but inimitable by any one else.
Nekrásof wrote to Tolstoy in September, about Sevastopol in August, saying:
The revolting mutilation of your article quite upset me. Even now I cannot think of it without regret and rage. Your work will, of course, not be lost ... it will always remain as proof of a strength able to utter such profound and sober truth under circumstances amid which few men would have retained it. It is just what Russian society now needs: the truth—the truth, of which, since Gógol's death, so little has remained in Russian literature. You are right to value that side of your gifts most of all. Truth—in such form as you have introduced it into our literature—is something completely new among us. I do not know another writer of to-day who so compels the reader to love him and sympathise heartily with him, as he to whom I now write; and I only fear lest time, the nastiness of life, and the deafness and dumbness that surround us, should do to you what it has done to most of us, and kill the energy without which there can be no writer—none, at least, such as Russia needs. You are young: changes are taking place which, let us hope, may end well, and perhaps a wide field lies before you. You are beginning in a way that compels the most cautious to let their expectations travel far....
The Wood-Felling has passed the Censor pretty fairly, though from it also some valuable touches have disappeared. ...In that sketch there are many astonishingly acute remarks, and it is all new, interesting, and to the point. Do not neglect such sketches. Of the common soldier our literature has as yet not spoken, except frivolously.
Tourgénef, writing from his estate at Spássky to Panáef, said: