How did Leo Tolstoy portray ordinary soldiers in the Sevastopol sketches?

In his Sevastopol sketches, Leo Tolstoy portrayed ordinary soldiers by focusing on their courage and the reality of their experiences during the Siege of Sevastopol.1

Tolstoy’s depiction of these soldiers was marked by several notable literary techniques:

• Focus on Courage: The first sketch, written in the second person as if it were a tour guide, specifically highlights the courage of simple soldiers, a portrayal that earned praise from the tsar.1
• Psychological Depth: In the second sketch, Tolstoy utilized an early form of stream of consciousness to capture a soldier's internal experience in the final moments before his death.1
• Rejection of Traditional Heroism: Tolstoy explicitly commented that none of his characters were truly heroic in the conventional sense. Instead, he asserted that the only true hero of his work was the truth itself.1

Through these sketches, Tolstoy demonstrated a lifelong concern with the morality of observing the suffering of others, moving away from idealized portrayals to emphasize the raw, aesthetic effectiveness of absolute truth in fiction.1