thank you for reading! Tolstoy's narratives in his Sebastopol Sketches gives us one of the more conflicted perspectives of war and battle I have seen of the crimean war. It definitely feels like a lot of his experience went into his later works. For example, his writings in the following echo Prince Andrei Bolkonsky's ruminations as he looks to the sky after he is wounded in the Battle of Austerlitz in War and Peace and one of my favorite passages about the crimean soldier experience : “On emerging from this house of pain,” he would write, “you will infallibly experience a sensation of pleasure, you will inhale the fresh air more fully, you will feel satisfaction in the consciousness of your health, but, at the same time, you will draw from the sight of these sufferings a consciousness of your nothingness, and you will go calmly and without any indecision to the bastion.”
Fantastic quote Joanna. It’s weird because I hadn’t even found your Substack and kind of was thinking about different perspectives on war. In this case Thackeray vs Tolstoy Vanity Fair vs War and Peace. Forgive me this was first post on SS.
This is some scholarly stuff. Joanna how in the world did you get into history on these topics. Impressive. Love the perspective from Tolstoy
thank you for reading! Tolstoy's narratives in his Sebastopol Sketches gives us one of the more conflicted perspectives of war and battle I have seen of the crimean war. It definitely feels like a lot of his experience went into his later works. For example, his writings in the following echo Prince Andrei Bolkonsky's ruminations as he looks to the sky after he is wounded in the Battle of Austerlitz in War and Peace and one of my favorite passages about the crimean soldier experience : “On emerging from this house of pain,” he would write, “you will infallibly experience a sensation of pleasure, you will inhale the fresh air more fully, you will feel satisfaction in the consciousness of your health, but, at the same time, you will draw from the sight of these sufferings a consciousness of your nothingness, and you will go calmly and without any indecision to the bastion.”
Fantastic quote Joanna. It’s weird because I hadn’t even found your Substack and kind of was thinking about different perspectives on war. In this case Thackeray vs Tolstoy Vanity Fair vs War and Peace. Forgive me this was first post on SS.
https://verumserum.substack.com/p/freedom-is-to-live-without-end?r=8dev4&utm_medium=ios