In Russia, the person who put Sevastopol on the literary map was Leo Tolstoy, a veteran of the siege. His fictionalized memoir The Sebastopol Sketches made him a national celebrity. Already with the first installment of the work published, Tsar Alexander II saw the propaganda value of the piece and ordered it translated into French for dissemination abroad. That made the young author very happy. Compared with Tolstoy’s later novels, The Sebastopol Sketches hasn’t aged well, possibly because this is not a heartfelt book. As the twenty-six-year-old Tolstoy’s Sevastopol diaries reveal, not heartache but ambition drove him at the time. Making a name as an author was just an alternative to two other grand plans–founding a new religion and creating a mathematical model for winning in cards (his losses during the siege were massive even for a rich person). . Constantine Pleshakov
Some Similar Quotes
  1. I've always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be. - Leo Tolstoy
  2. Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the... - P.g. Wodehouse
  3. The same Sermon on the Mount that influenced Tolstoy to write “The Kingdom of God is Within You”, inspired me to a great extent in my work “Principia Humanitas”. - Abhijit Naskar
  4. Only a handful of individuals in human history can be truly hailed as Christians, such as Tolstoy, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Rumi, Martin Luther King Jr. and a few others. - Abhijit Naskar
  5. ..And there really are men who believe in this, who spend their time in promoting Leagues of Peace, in delivering addresses, and in writing books; and of course the governments sympathize with it all, pretending that they approve of it; just as they pretend to... - Leo Tolstoy
More Quotes By Constantine Pleshakov
  1. In Russia, the person who put Sevastopol on the literary map was Leo Tolstoy, a veteran of the siege. His fictionalized memoir The Sebastopol Sketches made him a national celebrity. Already with the first installment of the work published, Tsar Alexander II saw the propaganda...
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