Sevastopol Tales

‘His fiction changed the way human beings think about themselves’ George Saunders

‘If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy’ Isaac Babel

Crimea, 1854: Sevastopol’s inhabitants taunt the besieging forces that keep them trapped behind defensive walls. So begins Leo Tolstoy’s depiction of nine months of battle and bravery, based on his own experiences in the Crimean War.

This new translation by acclaimed translator Nicolas Pasternak Slater introduces us to long-suffering citizens, vain hussars and the courageous Kozeltsov brothers – one jaded and pragmatic soldier, one naïve and hungry for glory. Enduringly vivid, profoundly ironic, Tolstoy’s portrayal of the stumble from triumph to disaster captures the absurdity at the heart of conflict.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was born into the Russian aristocracy, spent his youth in aimless dissolution, and joined the army in a bid to escape his gambling debts. Sevastopol Tales, based on his experience serving as an artillery officer in the Crimean War, helped to establish his fame as a writer in the 1850s. The war helped transform him into a passionate pacifist and social agitator. He started a series of schools for the recently emancipated serfs of Russia, as well as publishing a number of literary masterpieces, most famously the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He gradually became a near-messianic figure, both lauded and persecuted by the Russian authorities. He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prizes in Literature and Peace, but never won.

Nicolas Pasternak Slater is the nephew of novelist Boris Pasternak. After retiring from his career as a doctor he turned to translation, and has published several highly praised versions of great Russian authors, including Pushkin, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov.