His experiences and reflections in these new surroundings, we know from his _Cossacks_. But it was there also that in the face of the beautiful nature which had so powerfully inspired Púshkin and Lérmontoff he found his true vocation. He sent to the _Contemporary_ his first literary experiment, _Childhood_, and this first story, as he soon learned from a letter of the poet Nekrásoff, editor of the review, and from the critical notes of Grigórieff, Annenkoff, Druzhínin, and Tchernyshévskiy (they belonged to four different æsthetical schools), proved to be a _chef d’œuvre_. DURING AND AFTER THE CRIMEAN WAR However, the great Crimean war began towards the end of the next year (1853), and L. N. Tolstóy did not want to remain inactive in the Caucasus army. He obtained his transfer to the Danube army, took part in the siege of Silistria, and later on in the battle of Balakláva, and from November, 1854, till August, 1855, remained besieged in Sebastopol--partly in the terrible “Fourth bastion,” where he lived through all the dreadful experiences of the heroic defenders of that fortress. He has therefore the right to speak of War: he knows it from within. He knows what it is, even under its very best aspects, in such a significant and inspired phase as was the defence of these forts and bastions which had grown up under the enemy’s shells. He obstinately refused during the siege to become an officer of the Staff, and remained with his battery in the most dangerous spots. I perfectly well remember, although I was only twelve or thirteen, the profound impression which his sketch, _Sebastopol in December, 1854_, followed, after the fall of the fortress, by two more Sebastopol sketches--produced in Russia. The very character of these sketches was original. They were not leaves from a diary, and yet they were as true to reality as such leaves could be; in fact, even more true, because they were not representing one corner only of real life--the corner which accidentally fell under the writer’s observations--but the whole life, the prevailing modes of thought and the habits of life in the besieged fortress. They represented--and this is characteristic of all subsequent works of Tolstóy--an interweaving of _Dichtung_ and _Wahrheit_, of poetry and truth, truth and poetry, containing much more truth than is usually found in a novel, and more poetry, more poetical creation, than occurs in most works of pure fiction.