Sebastopol: On the Fall of a City

Trudi Tate

doi:10.16995/ntn.720

Abstract

The siege of Sebastopol lasted for eleven months, causing immense hardship on all sides. After the heaviest bombardment in the history of the world, Sebastopol fell in September 1855 when the Russians evacuated overnight, leaving the city heavily mined. When the allies were eventually able to occupy Sebastopol, many were shocked and saddened by its state of ruin. Visitors were moved to make representations of the fallen city, in letters, newspaper articles, sketches, and photographs. This article explores some aspects of how representation helps to shape cultural perceptions of warfare, and the particular forms these took at the Crimea. It looks at a range of representations, including memoirs and letters of soldiers, army medics, and civilians, alongside some of the visual representations, most notably the haunting photographs of James Robertson and Felice Beato. The article meditates upon the meanings of representations of warfare, especially at the Crimea, regarded as the first modern war in this respect. I consider this question within a framework of historical rethinking suggested by historian Andrew Lambert, who argues that all the courage and suffering at the Crimea did not have much impact on the outcome of the war.

Highlights

In the early hours of 9 September 1855, huge explosions shook the ground around Sebastopol
‘The city was enveloped in fire and smoke, and torn asunder by the tremendous shocks of these volcanoes’, wrote William Howard Russell in The Times.[1]
What did the fall of Sebastopol mean to the British who were present, and how were those meanings expressed, both visually and in writing? The Crimean War was the first conflict to be reported first-hand in the newspapers, the first to make use of the telegraph, the first to be represented in the illustrated press, and the first to be photographed

Summary

Trudi Tate

In the early hours of 9 September 1855, huge explosions shook the ground around Sebastopol. The Crimean War was the first conflict to be reported first-hand in the newspapers, the first to make use of the telegraph, the first to be represented in the illustrated press, and the first to be photographed In certain respects, it is regarded as the first modern war, in the sense that it employed modern methods of representation, and those representations began to play some part in the machinery and politics of warfare. The Crimean War raised conceptual as well as political questions which remain pertinent today Recent theoretical commentators, such as Susan Sontag, Judith Butler, Mary Favret, and Paul Virilio, are very interested in the problems of how war is represented, and what place those representations have, or ought to have, in our political understandings of war.[6] These are complex questions whose roots lie very deep in our history. I look at just one aspect of this conflict, and meditate upon its meanings, both at the time, and for later thinking about war and representation

Into Sebastopol

Inside the city

Visualizing Sebastopol

Look what we have done