Tolstoy’s Ghost

By Robert Zaretsky. In 1854 the young Russian officer Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was stationed in the Crimean port of Sevastopol. For several weeks French and British forces had laid siege to the city. An aspiring writer and inspired Russian patriot, Tolstoy transformed his observations into the Sevastopol Sketches, three long dispatches that won him the regard not just of critics but also of Czar Alexander II, who was desperately seeking a way out of the war that his just-deceased father, Nicholas I, had recklessly begun. More...