Sevastopol Sketches are three historical fiction

Historical fiction

Historical fiction tells a story that is set in the past. That setting is usually real and drawn from history, and often contains actual historical persons, but the principal characters tend to be fictional...

 short stories written by Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...

 and published in 1855 to record his experiences during the Siege of Sevastopol (1854–1855). The name originates from Sevastopol

Sevastopol

Sevastopol is a city on rights of administrative division of Ukraine, located on the Black Sea coast of the Crimea peninsula. It has a population of 342,451 . Sevastopol is the second largest port in Ukraine, after the Port of Odessa....

, a city in Crimea

Crimea

Crimea , or the Autonomous Republic of Crimea , is a sub-national unit, an autonomous republic, of Ukraine. It is located on the northern coast of the Black Sea, occupying a peninsula of the same name...

. The book has also been released under the anglicized title The Sebastopol Sketches and is sometimes titled Sevastopol Stories. These brief "sketches" formed the basis of many of the episodes in Tolstoy's magnum opus

Magnum opus

Magnum opus , from the Latin meaning "great work", refers to the largest, and perhaps the best, greatest, most popular, or most renowned achievement of a writer, artist, or composer.-Related terms:Sometimes the term magnum opus is used to refer to simply "a great work" rather than "the...

, War and Peace

War and Peace

War and Peace is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, first published in 1869. The work is epic in scale and is regarded as one of the most important works of world literature...

.

Sevastopol in December

In Sevastopol in December, Tolstoy uses second person narrative (with the pronoun 'you') in an introductory tour of life in Sevastopol. The detailed tour is arguably similar to one Tolstoy may have been given upon arrival in Sevastopol in November, 1854. As part of the tour, the narrator takes you though the dressing station, which is a makeshift hospital in the Assembly Hall. Here you find wounded soldiers, amputees, "some of them on camp beds, but most of them lying on the floor". Tolstoy also uses Sevastopol in December to introduce the reader to the settings, mannerisms, and background he uses in Sevastopol in May and Sevastopol in August. For example, when referring to the enemy, either the British or the French, but only the French are featured in the Sketches; they are referred to as "'him', as both soldiers and sailors say" (Tolstoy 198).

Sevastopol in May

In Sevastopol in May, Tolstoy examines the senselessness and vanity of war. The story examines the psychology of war and the misleading presence of humanism in truces (misleading because countries continuously go to war with one another, despite past truces). Tolstoy concludes by declaring that the only hero of his story is truth.

External links

• The full text of Sebastopol Sketches on Google Books