The Crimean War: A Hisory

by Orlando Figes

This was the context in which Tolstoy wrote his own ‘national epic’, War and Peace. Tolstoy’s conception of the war against Napoleon as Russia’s national awakening – the rediscovery of ‘Russian principles’ by the Europeanized nobility and the recognition of the patriotic spirit of the serf soldiers as the basis of a democratic nationhood – was a reflection of his reaction to the heroic deeds of the Russian people during the Crimean War. Written between 1862 and 1865, in the years immediately after the emancipation of the serfs, when Russian liberal society was inspired by ideals of national reform and reconciliation between the landed classes and the peasantry, War and Peace was originally conceived as a Decembrist novel set in the aftermath of the Crimean War. In the novel’s early form (‘The Decembrist’), the hero returns after thirty years of exile in Siberia to the intellectual ferment of the late 1850s. A second Alexandrine reign has just begun, with the accession of Alexander II to the throne, and once again, as in 1825, high hopes for reform are in the air. But the more Tolstoy researched the Decembrists, the more he realized that their intellectual roots lay in the war of 1812, and so set his novel then. The memory of 1812 was bitterly contested after the Crimean War, which had opened up a new perspective on the national character. Democrats like Tolstoy, inspired by the recent sacrifices of the Russian peasant soldiers, saw 1812 as a people’s war, a victory attaine...