The Crimean War

Volume II

I will not try to sell you on the notion that the Crimean War is an interesting subject, nor will I deliver a short synopsis. I see no point in that.

The Russian original of this volume was something of a mess. It was my first effort at translating a big project, and I’m afraid I did a rather poor job with the edition that appeared in 2014. One thing that hindered me was the quite reasonable notion that a translator should not change an author’s work a great deal. So, I didn’t edit as much as I should have. There is no harm in eliminating redundancy and you, the reader, will never know how redundant Yevgeny Tarle was. It really is quite remarkable. I see nothing wrong with moving sections about so that something like chronological order is maintained. So, this edition is cleaner.

I then got the idea of introducing excerpts from Pëtr Menkov’s A Soldier’s Story of the Crimean War. I addressed that in the tout for Volume I. Menkov was a participant in the Crimean War and had access to the highest levels of military command. He wrote about it in a quite entertaining and informative way. Was he always objective? No, you couldn’t say that. I translated his memoirs and didn’t feel the work as a whole deserved publication. So, I added parts of it to this.

You will find an account of the Crimean War unlike anything you will read by British or French historians. Tarle included a cornucopia of contemporary observations, and those, I think, are worth the price of admission. He was guilty of “cherry-picking” those quotations, but what writer is not? In many cases, Menkov serves as an antidote to Tarle. In the end, I am fairly happy with the result.