Doll Hospital
In 1827, in the nursery of an English country house, two sisters place a dozen dolls in neat hospital rows. The girls administer kitchen medicines, apply poultices, wrap their patients’ bisque necks with strips of flannel. As the sisters grow beyond the confines of the nursery, the younger will be the one to care for the sick villagers on her father’s estate, the one most eager to nurse servants and family members who fall ill, keeping a careful ledger of their ailments. Near the end of a life of near-superhuman achievement, Florence Nightingale will say there was no part of her life she could look back on without pain, nor a time since earliest childhood, when she had not longed to be a nurse.
Green Stick
In the spring of 1833, on their father’s estate one hundred and fifty miles south of Moscow, Nikolai Tolstoy, eldest of five siblings, solemnly initiates his younger brothers and sister into the “Ant Brotherhood.” The Brotherhood’s scepter, he tells them, is a green stick he has buried near the edge of a ravine. Carved into its wood are magic words to vanquish evil, teach love and in a coming golden age, bring everlasting peace.
The Meeting That Never Was
On November 4, 1854, thirty-four-year-old Florence Nightingale arrives in the Crimea.
Superintendent of thirty-eight nurses, her mission is to care for wounded British soldiers at Scutari’s Barrack Hospital in Istanbul.
That same month, Count Leo Tolstoy, a twenty-six-year-old junior officer of the Imperial Russian Army’s artillery brigade, arrives at Sevastopol’s Russian naval base. He will serve throughout an eleven-month siege as British, French, Ottoman and Italian armies seek to put an end to Russia’s expansionist ambitions.
The lives of these two undisputed giants of the nineteenth century offer fascinating parallels and common sympathies.
Tolstoy and Nightingale, with three hundred miles of Black Sea and the enmity of nations between them, are still largely unknown to the world. By the time they return home, Tolstoy to his inherited estate, Yasnaya Polyana, in 1855, and Nightingale to her father’s summer estate, Lea Hurst, in 1856, each will be on the threshold of incredible fame. Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches will be a literary success in Russia, and England will crown Nightingale “The Angel of the Crimea.” Though they will never meet one another, the lives of these two undisputed giants of the nineteenth century offer fascinating parallels and common sympathies.
Rebellion
Rebellion came early to Florence Nightingale. Named after the Italian city where she was born on May 12, 1820, Florence, with her sister, Parthenope, grew up on their father’s estates, Lea Hurst in Derbyshire, and Embley in Hampshire. At eighteen, Florence made her formal debut into society, a ritualized announcement of upper-class marriageability. But she resisted marriage, calling it “a prison,” and “a cage,” describing the family home as a “murderer of young women.” Precocious and especially gifted in mathematics, Florence received a rigorous education from her father, the equivalent of what he had learned at Cambridge. Her mother schooled her differently, to be an aristocrat’s future wife. But on February 7, 1836, sixteen-year-old Florence heard a call from God. She was to do His work in the world, the nature of that service unclear.
Carefully noted in her commonplace book, the divine summons grew into a desire to become a nurse. In Victorian England, nursing was a disreputable occupation, sordid and particularly degrading for a young woman of Florence’s elite status. Aside from three months’ hard-won training at a religious hospital in Germany, she was thwarted for years by her parents’ objections, until William, relenting, granted his daughter, aged thirty and unmarried, a modest allowance. Financial freedom allowed Florence to accept a position in London as superintendent of the “Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen.” And in late October 1854, with the endorsement and support of her friend, Sidney Herbert, Minister at War, she, and a party of hastily selected female nurses, sailed to the Crimean warfront.
The Crimean War (1853-1856) catapulted Nightingale into reluctant celebrity, while igniting a lifelong determination to reform health systems. Confronted by personal wars within Scutari’s Barrack Hospital—hostility from a misogynistic military hierarchy, scarcity of food and medical supplies, unscalable mountains of administrative paperwork, unseemly behaviors on the part of a few of her nurses—Florence’s mission, to prove that Englishwomen could be effective nurses in wartime, was constantly threatened, while in England, a sentimental hagiography, fed by reports from wartime journalists, formed a national halo around her. She became a “Ministering Angel,” “Mother of Soldiers,” and most famously, “the Lady with the Lamp.”
In March 1856, Russia was defeated, and the Treaty of Paris signed. Five months later, ill from a near-fatal case of brucellosis and calling herself “Miss Smith,” Nightingale, on foot and unannounced, arrived at Lea Hurst, having successfully evaded throngs of admirers in London.
Early on, Nightingale understood the price of marriage as a lateral move from one gilded cage to another. For the rest of her life, she would slip free of the equally stifling impositions of fame. Debilitated by the lingering effects of her illness, invalidism offered the seclusion she needed to publish a prolific stream of books, pamphlets, articles, reports, statistical charts, and diagrams. From her bedroom in a modest flat near Parliament, Nightingale worked to reform every conceivable aspect of public healthcare, from the design and administration of hospitals and improvements in city sanitation, to providing trained nurses and midwives to the poor in England’s notorious workhouses.
In 1860, she opened The Nightingale Training School for Nurses, the first professional nursing school for women. In Parliament, her male allies, particularly Sidney Herbert, delivered hundreds of health reform speeches on her behalf. Unable to participate in the male-dominated affairs of government except from behind the scenes, Nightingale used her celebrity and government connections strategically.
A Slow Awakening
Leo Tolstoy’s rebellion was a prolonged, messy, public spectacle. Born into a family of Russian nobility on September 9, 1828, at his father’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy was two years old when his mother passed away, nine when his father died. The five Tolstoy children lived first with one aunt, then another. Leo, an unremarkable student, left Kazan University without completing his studies. Inheriting his portion of the family’s wealth, including Yasnaya Polyana, he descended into a degenerate, aimless life of gambling, drinking and sex, while keeping meticulous, guilty lists of how to improve his character (“limit visits to brothels to twice a month.”) In 1851, burdened by gambling debts, he followed his oldest brother, Nikolai, into the army, and in November 1854, was dispatched to the Crimea as a junior artillery officer.
His first literary effort, a pseudo-autobiographical novel, Childhood, had been published in 1852; during the siege of Sevastopol, he would write Sevastopol Sketches. Published in 1855, it exposed the incompetence, vanities, courage, and chaos of war. Horrific hospital scenes in Sevastopol Sketches read much like Nightingale’s descriptions of Barrack Hospital in her letters and journal entries, stomach-churning accounts of amputations, foul stench, agonizing wounds, and fatal diseases. Wading into the blood and muck of the Crimean War, Tolstoy secured his literary reputation, while Nightingale plunged into the work God called her to—health and hospital reform.
In 1855, Tolstoy left the Crimea, quit the Imperial Army, and relapsed into his former dissolute habits. In 1862, now thirty-four, he married eighteen-year-old Sophia Behrs. The Tolstoys would go on to have one of literary history’s most miserable, obsessively documented, and turbulent marriages, but in the early years, with Sophia serving as his amanuensis and editor, Tolstoy finished War and Peace. Published in 1869, the book was a triumphant success.
Nine years later, Anna Karenina ensured his reputation as one of Russia’s greatest writers. But wealth and fame could not avert a growing moral and religious midlife crisis. He visited monasteries to ask priests the meaning of life and came away dissatisfied. Questioning the purpose of existence, disenchanted, and preoccupied with death, dismissing his novels as “frivolous,” “counterfeit pieces of art,” he feared his own temptation to suicide.
Like binary stars orbiting an era, Tolstoy and Nightingale drew close in the Crimea before spinning away into separate destinies.
It is easy, from this distance, to see the split between the first half of Tolstoy’s life ending with Anna Karenina, and the second half, marked by a radical, spiritual awakening. Where Nightingale’s calling began quietly at age sixteen, with a mystical experience, Tolstoy’s was a result of anguished years seeking a reason to live. Embarking on a life of asceticism, a self-proclaimed Christian anarchist and pacifist, he wore peasant clothing, cobbled his own shoes, ate no meat, worked alongside the muzhik he over-idealized, refused violence of any kind and insisted on a literal interpretation of Jesus’ teachings.
His new writings openly attacked the abuses and inherent flaws of organized religion and government and put him on a collision course with Imperial Russia and the Orthodox Church. Worse for Sophia, he began attracting what appeared to her a motley, unsavory band of “foreign” thinkers and followers, “Tolstoyans,” who descended on Yasnaya Polyana to emulate her husband’s way of life, rejecting the authority of government and church, eschewing ownership of property and embracing vegetarianism, non-violence and a communal, ascetic way of life based on Christian love.
Tolstoy’s spiritual rebellion was becoming a movement.
Public and Private Endings
Like Tolstoy, Nightingale criticized the theology of her church and was influenced by readings in Buddhism and Hinduism. Other influences included Plato, Mohammedism, Catholicism, Gnosticism, and ancient Egyptian beliefs. Tolstoy was drawn to the teachings of the Duokobors, a persecuted, non-violent Russian sect, and the Shakers, a pacifist, celibate, artisanal sect in America. What is the meaning of life? How do I best serve God? What, then, is Truth? Both Nightingale and Tolstoy based their life’s work on answers derived from unconventional sets of spiritual beliefs.
Under the scrutiny of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Tsar’s secret police, Tolstoy’s heretical religious writings led to his excommunication in 1901, elevating him to the national status of a “devil” to some, a staretz, or holy man, to others. Nightingale’s prolific writings on Christian mystics and saints, her broadminded, theological disagreements with the Anglican church, were privately published and discreetly shared among a handful of trusted friends.
If Leo Tolstoy had a weakness for large, seemingly “happy families,” the happiness of his own family was increasingly marred. As the tenets of his anarchistic faith grew to include poverty, nonviolence, and non-ownership of property, what appeared as saintly to his many admirers and disciples, looked increasingly like fanatical madness to his wife. Forced to take control of the practical details of Tolstoy’s estate and business affairs, Sophia saw her husband as “playing the peasant,” posing as a self-appointed staretz and prophet, while neglecting his own family.
The Tolstoys’ animosity became constant, with bitter, hysterical quarrels followed by guilt-stricken lovemaking. Each kept an open diary filled with vengeful accusations against the other. In a final, terrible irony, when Tolstoy could no longer endure the paranoid behaviors and divisions within his family and feeling death imminent, he tried to find peace by running off to a monastery. On November 20, 1910, he died in Astapovo train station, in the station master’s bed, hordes of onlookers surrounding the station, news cameramen filming his final hours. His last intelligible words were “the muzhiks, you know how to die.”
Just three months before Tolstoy’s highly publicized death, Florence Nightingale died quietly in London, in the same bed from which she had worked for years to improve the health of the nation and the world. Her last words: “I enter in.”
Only at Yasnaya Polyana would Tolstoy be given what he had asked for, that his body be buried in an unmarked grave near the “Ant Brotherhood’s” green stick, with its promise of an unending age of peace, charity, and Utopian love.
Nightingale, too, would have the burial she wanted, in the small cemetery at her family’s church in East Wellow, Hampshire. A white, steepled monument bears the names and dates of her parents and sister on three of its sides. On the fourth, only a simple cross, the initials F.N., and Born 12 May, 1820, Died 13 August, 1910, mark an extraordinary existence.
Like binary stars orbiting an era, Tolstoy and Nightingale drew close in the Crimea before spinning away into separate destinies. What bound them was a common desire to live by spiritually perceived Truth, and to move toward an eternity for which, ultimately, there was no name.
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Flight of the Wild Swan by Melissa Pritchard is available from Bellevue Literary Press.