Sevastopol Tales

by Leo Tolstoy, Nicolas Pasternak Slater (Translator)

A stunning new translation of Tolstoy’s immersive, inventive and masterfully ironic account of the Crimean War, and of the profound light that violence shines on human nature.

“[Tolstoy’s] fiction changed the way human beings think about themselves.” —  George Saunders

Crimea, 1854: residents in the besieged city of Sevastopol look out over a harbor punctured by the masts of scuttled ships, and taunt the French forces that keep them trapped behind defensive walls. So begins Leo Tolstoy’s account of nine months of shelling, destruction, courage, vanity, glory and death.

Based on his own experiences as an artillery officer in the Crimean War, Tolstoy uses a kaleidoscopic range of narrative techniques to build up a picture of the conflict, wheeling from officer to soldier, cannon to barracks. The first tale, ‘Sevastopol in December’, takes us on a tour of the besieged city, where spirits are high, but defenses are crumbling. In ‘Sevastopol in May’ we enter the fray with a group of officers, some honorable and brave, some foolish, vain and shallowly preoccupied with status – and some all of these at once. ‘Sevastopol in August’ brings the story to a close, following the fates of two brothers in the final battle for the city.

Communicated in prose marked by vivid sensation and profound irony, Tolstoy’s questions – about the nature of truth and heroism, and about why we choose to pay the high human price of conflict – are as relevant as ever.

206 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 28, 2026

About the author

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) 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 fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer.

His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

See also:
French → Léon Tolstoï
Spanish → León Tolstói

Reviews

[Melanie]

Talking books one day with one of the young people I work with at the bookstore. He asked if I had ever read “the Russians.” I replied I’m 67; I’ve read a little of everything. I’ve read Dostoevsky, Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn and a modern Russian writer Boris Akunin.” His reply “oh, so you’ve read the dissidents. I was floored that they’ve been reduced to the “dissidents “. So. We agreed that I would read Tolstoy and he would read a dissident. Well worth the trade. I’m working my way up to Anna Karenina. Tolstoy is Tolstoy for a reason. Highly recommend.

[Laurens]

We’re so back. Schitterend boekje in 3 delen dat verschillende kanten van een stad onder bezetting belicht en zich meer focust op gedrag en ego van mensen in de situatie dan het vechten zelf, wat het boek een ironische glans geeft. Toch zul je ook wel door de beschrijvingen van opgestapelde lijken, vieze en benauwde loopgraven en geïmproviseerde ziekenhuizen moeten, maar het wordt nooit met spektakel als doel gepresenteerd. Heerlijk om na ongeveer 3 jaar terug te komen bij Tolstoy. Meester.