LEO TOLSTOÏ.
SEBASTOPOL.
SEBASTOPOL IN DECEMBER, 1854.
SEBASTOPOL IN MAY, 1855.
SEBASTOPOL IN AUGUST, 1855.
![[Image: Portrait of Tolstoï unavailable.]](https://oldbook.b-cdn.net/kitaplar/7/pg61388-h/images/frontispiece_lg.jpg)
SEBASTOPOL
BY
COUNT LEO TOLSTOÏ
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCHBY
FRANK D. MILLET
WITH INTRODUCTION BY W. D. HOWELLS
WITH PORTRAIT
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE
1887
Copyright, 1887, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserved.
LEO TOLSTOÏ.
When I read in the excellent essay of M. Ernest Dupuy that “Count Leo N.Tolstoï was born on the 28th of August, 1828, at Yasnaya Polyana, avillage near Inla, in the government of Inla,” I have a sense of lunarremoteness in him. It is as if these geographical expressions weredescriptive of localities in the ungazetteered regions of the moon; andyet this far-fetched Russian nobleman is precisely the human being withwhom at this moment I find myself in the greatest intimacy; not becauseI know him, but because I know myself through him; because he haswritten more faithfully of the life common to all men, the universallife which is the most personal life, than any other author whom I haveread. This merit the Russian novelists{6} have each in some degree;Tolstoï has it in pre-eminent degree, and that is why the reading of“Peace and War,” “Anna Karenina,” “My Religion,” “Childhood, Boyhood,and Youth,” “Scenes at the Siege of Sebastopol,” “The Cossacks,” “TheDeath of Ivan Illitch,” “Katia,” and “Polikouchka,” forms an epoch forthoughtful people. In these books you seem to come face to face withhuman nature for the first time in fiction. All other fiction at timesseems fiction; these alone seem the very truth always.
The facts of Tolstoï’s life, as one gathers them from the essays of M.Dupuy and of M. Melchoir de Voguë, are briefly that he studied Orientallanguages and the law at the University of Kazan; then entered the army,served in the Crimean war, resigned at its close; gave himself up tosociety and literature in St. Petersburg; and finally left the capitalfor his estates, where he has since lived the life of lowly usefulnesswhich he believes to be the true Christian life. The man whose careerwas in camps, in{7} courts, and in salons, now makes shoes for peasants,and humbly seeks to instruct them and guide them by the little tales hewrites for them in the intervals of his great work of newly translatingthe gospels. He married the daughter of a German physician of Moscow,and his wife and children share his toils and ideals. Not much more isknown of the retirement of this very great man; bu