Authors: Leo Tolstoy
So thinks Olenin, the young aristocrat whose sensibility is the motivating fulcrum of
The Cossacks
, the novel Tolstoy began in 1852, shortly after his arrival in the Caucasus. Like Tolstoy himself, Olenin at eighteen
had been free as only the rich, parentless young of Russia’s eighteen forties could be. He had neither moral nor physical fetters. He could do anything he wanted. … He gave himself up to all his passions, but only to the extent that they did not bind him…. Now that he was leaving Moscow he was in that happy, youthful state of mind in which a young man, thinking of the mistakes he has committed, suddenly sees things in a different light—sees that these past mistakes were incidental and unimportant, that back then he had not wanted to live a good life but that now, as he was leaving Moscow, a new life was beginning in which there would be no such mistakes and no need for remorse. A life in which there would be nothing but happiness.
But the fictional Olenin is Tolstoy’s alter ego only in part. After months of dissipation, each comes to the Caucasus as a volunteer soldier attached to a Russian brigade; each is in search of clarity of heart. Olenin, though, is a wistful outsider who is gradually drawn into the local mores and longs to adopt its ways, while his creator is a sophisticated and
psychologically omniscient sympathizer with the eye of an evolving anthropologist.
After starting work on
The Cossacks
, Tolstoy soon set it aside and did not return to finish it until an entire decade had elapsed. In the interval, he continued to serve in the military for another three years; he published stories and novels; he traveled in Europe; he married. Still, there is little evidence of a hiatus; the narrative of
The Cossacks
is nearly seamless. It pauses only once, of necessity, in Chapter Four—which, strikingly distanced from character and story, and aiming to explain Cossack culture to the uninitiated, reads much like an entry in a popular encyclopedia. Terrain and villages are minutely noted; also dress, weapons, songs, shops, vineyards, hunting and fishing customs, the status and behavior of girls and women. “At the core of [Cossack] character,” Tolstoy writes, “lies love of freedom, idleness, plunder, and war…. A Cossack bears less hatred for a Chechen warrior who has killed his brother than for a Russian soldier billeted with him…. A dashing young Cossack will flaunt his knowledge of Tatar, and will even speak it with his brother Cossacks when he drinks and carouses with them. And yet this small group of Christians, cast off on a distant corner of the earth, surrounded by Russian soldiers and half-savage Mohammedan tribes, regard themselves as superior, and acknowledge only other Cossacks as their equals.” On and on, passage after descriptive passage, these living sketches of Cossack society accumulate—so much so that a contemporary critic observed, “A score of ethnological articles could not give a more complete, exact, and colorful picture of this part of our land.”
3
The name “Cossack” appears to derive from a Turkic root meaning freebooter, or, in a milder interpretation, adventurer. As a distinct population group, the Cossacks grew out of a movement of peasants escaping serfdom, who in the fifteenth century fled to the rivers and barren plains of Ukraine and southeastern Russia, seeking political autonomy. Having established self-governing units in areas close to Muslim-dominated communities, whose dress and outlook they often assimilated, the Cossacks were eventually integrated into the Russian military; their villages became army outposts defending Russia against the furies of neighboring Chechen fighters. It is into this
history—that of an admirable, courageous, independent people, in gaudy Circassian costume, the women as splendidly self-reliant as the men—that Tolstoy sets Olenin, his citified patrician. And it is vital for Tolstoy to halt his story before it has barely begun—momentarily to obliterate it from view—in order to supply his readers in Moscow and St. Petersburg with a geographical and sociological portrait of the land Olenin is about to encounter. For such readers, as for Olenin, the Cossacks are meant to carry the romantic magnetism of the noble primitive.
But there is a different, and far more sinister, strain of Cossack history, which Tolstoy omits, and which later readers—we who have passed through the bloody portals of the twentieth century—cannot evade. Tolstoy saw, and survived, war. We too have seen war; but we have also seen, and multitudes have not survived, genocide. The most savage of wars boasts a cause, or at least a pretext; genocide pretends nothing other than the lust for causeless slaughter. And it is genocide, it must be admitted, that is the ineluctable resonance of the term “Cossacks.” Writing one hundred and fifty years ago, Tolstoy registers no consciousness of this genocidal association—the long trail of Cossack pogroms and butcheries; hence the Cossacks of his tale are merely conventional warriors. Lukashka, a young fighter, coldly fells a Chechen enemy; his companions vie for possession of the dead man’s coat and weapons. Afterward they celebrate with pails of vodka. A flicker of humane recognition touches the killer, but is quickly snuffed: “‘He too was a man!’ Lukashka said, evidently admiring the dead Chechen.” To which a fellow Cossack replies, “Yes, but if it had been up to him, he wouldn’t have shown
you
any mercy.” It is the language of war, of warriors, heinous enough, and regrettable—still, nothing beyond the commonplace.
Then is it conceivable that we know more, or wish to know more, than the majestic Tolstoy? Along with Shakespeare and Dante, he stands at the crest of world literature: who can own a deeper sensibility than that of Tolstoy, who can know more than he? But we do know more: through the grimness of time and the merciless retina of film, we have been witness to indelible scenes of genocide. And it is because of this ineradicable contemporary knowledge of systematic
carnage that Cossack history must now, willy-nilly, trigger tremor and alarm. Fast-forward from Tolstoy’s eighteen fifties to the year 1920: Isaac Babel, a Soviet reporter, is riding with the Red Cossacks (a brigade that has made common cause with the Bolsheviks); they are hoping forcibly to bring Poland to Communism. Babel, like Olenin, is a newcomer to the ways of the Cossacks, and he too is entranced by nature’s stalwarts. In his private diary he marvels at these skilled and fearless horsemen astride their thundering mounts: “inexplicable beauty,” he writes, “an awesome force advancing … red flags, a powerful, well-knit body of men, confident commanders, calm and experienced eyes.”
4
And again, describing a nocturnal tableau: “They eat together, sleep together, a splendid silent companionship…. They sing songs that sound like church music in lusty voices, their devotion to horses, beside each man a little heap—saddle, bridle, ornamental saber, greatcoat.”
5
But there is a lethal underside to this muscular idyll. Daily the Cossacks storm into the little Jewish towns of Polish Galicia, looting, burning, torturing, raping, branding, desecrating, murdering: they are out to slaughter every living Jew. Babel, a Jew who will become one of Russia’s most renowned writers (and whom the Soviet secret police will finally execute), conceals his identity: no Jew can survive when Cossacks are near. (My own mother, who emigrated from Czarist Russia in 1906 at the age of nine, once confided, in a horrified whisper, how a great-uncle, seized in a Cossack raid, was tied by his feet to the tail of a horse; the Cossack galloped off, and the man’s head went pounding on cobblestones until the skull was shattered.)
Tolstoy did not live to see the atrocities of 1920; he died in 1910, and by then he had long been a Christian pacifist; but surely he was aware of other such crimes. The Cossack depredations of the nineteenth century are infamous; yet these, and the mass killings Babel recorded, hardly weigh at all in comparison with the Chmielnicki massacres that are the bloodiest blot on Cossack history. In a single year, between 1648 and 1649, under the leadership of Bogdan Chmielnicki, Cossacks murdered three hundred thousand Jews, a number not exceeded until the rise of the genocidal Nazi regime.
None of this, it goes without saying, forms the background of Tolstoy’s novel;
The Cossacks
, after all, is a kind of love story: its theme is longing. The seventeenth century is buried beyond our reach, and already the events of the middle of the twentieth have begun to recede into forgetfulness. All the same, the syllables of “Cossacks” even now retain their fearful death toll, and a reader of our generation who is not historically naïve, or willfully amnesiac, will not be deaf to their sound.
Tolstoy’s stories are above all always humane, and his depiction of his Cossacks is exuberantly individuated and in many ways unexpectedly familiar. They are neither glorified nor demeaned, and they are scarcely the monsters of their collective annals; if they are idiosyncratic, it is only in the sense of the ordinary human article.
The Cossacks
was immediately acclaimed. Turgenev, older than Tolstoy by ten years, wrote rapturously, “I was carried away.”
6
Turgenev’s colleague, the poet Afanasy Fet, exclaimed, “The ineffable superiority of genius!”
7
and declared
The Cossacks
to be a masterpiece; and so it remains, validated by permanence. Then what are we to do with what we know? How are we to regard Tolstoy, who, though steeped in principles of compassion, turned away from what
he
knew?
The answer, I believe, lies in another principle, sometimes hard to come by. Not the solipsist credo that isolates literature from the world outside of itself, but the idea of the sovereign integrity of
story
. Authenticity in fiction depends largely on point of view—so it is not Tolstoy’s understanding of the shock of history that must be looked for; it is Olenin’s. And it is certain that Olenin’s mind is altogether bare of anything that will not stir the attention of a dissolute, rich, and copiously indulged young man who lives, like most young men of his kind, wholly in the present, prone to the prejudices of his class and time. Tolstoy means to wake him up—not to history, not to pity or oppression, but to the sublimeness of the natural world.
So come, reader, and never mind!—set aside the somber claims of history, at least for the duration of this airy novel.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
pays no heed to the Spanish Armada;
Pride and Prejudice
happily ignores the Napoleonic Wars;
The Cossacks
is unstained by old terrors.
A bucolic fable is under way, and Olenin will soon succumb to the mountains, the forest, the village, the spirited young men, the bold young women. His first view of the horizon—“massive mountains, clean and white in their gentle contours, the intricate, distinct line of the peaks and the sky”—captivates him beyond his stale expectations, and far more genuinely than the recent enthusiasms of Moscow: “Bach’s music or love, neither of which he believed in.”
All his Moscow memories, the shame and repentance, all his foolish and trivial dreams about the Caucasus, disappeared forever. It was as if a solemn voice told him: “Now it has begun!” … Two Cossacks ride by, their rifles in slings bouncing lightly on their backs, and the brown and gray legs of their horses blur—again the mountains…. Across the Terek [River] smoke rises from a village—again the mountains…. The sun rises and sparkles on the Terek shimmering through the weeds—the mountains…. A bullock cart rolls out of a Cossack village, the women are walking, beautiful young women—the mountains….
And almost in an instant Olenin is transformed, at least outwardly. He sheds his formal city clothes for a Circassian coat to which a dagger is strapped, grows a Cossack mustache and beard, and carries a Cossack rifle. Even his complexion alters, from an urban pallor to the ruddiness of clear mountain air. After three months of hard bivouac living, the Russian soldiers come flooding into the village, stinking of tobacco, their presence and possessions forced on unwilling Cossack hosts. Olenin is no ordinary soldier—his servant has accompanied him from Moscow, and he is plainly a gentleman who can pay well for his lodging, so he is quartered in one of the better accommodations, a gabled house with a porch, which belongs to the cornet, a man of self-conscious status: he is a teacher attached to the regiment. To make room for him, the cornet and his family must move into an adjacent thatch-roofed house: Olenin, like every Russian billeted in the village, is an unwelcome encroachment. “You think I need such a plague? A bullet into your bowels!” cries Old Ulitka, the cornet’s wife. Maryanka, the daughter, gives him silent teasing hostile glances, and Olenin yearns to speak to her: “Her strong, youthful step, the untamed look in
the flashing eyes peering over the edge of the white kerchief, and her strong, shapely body struck Olenin…. ‘She is the one!’ he thought.” And again:
He watched with delight how freely and gracefully she leaned forward, her pink smock clinging to her breasts and shapely legs, and how she straightened up, her rising breasts outlined clearly beneath the tight cloth. He watched her slender feet lightly touching the ground in their worn red slippers, and her strong arms with rolled-up sleeves thrusting the spade into the dung as if in anger, her deep, black eyes glancing at him. Though her delicate eyebrows frowned at times, her eyes expressed pleasure and awareness of their beauty.
But he cannot approach her. He is solitary, watchful, bemused by everything around him. He sits on his porch, reading, dreaming; alone and lost in the woods, he is overpowered by a spurt of mystical idealism. More and more the abandoned enticements and impressions of Moscow ebb, and more and more he immerses himself in Cossack habits. He befriends a garrulous, grizzled old hunter, Eroshka, a drunkard and a sponger, who teaches him the secrets of the forest and introduces him to Chikhir, the local spirits. In and out of his cups, Eroshka is a rough-cut philosopher, ready to be blood brother to all—Tatars, Armenians, Russians. He mocks the priests, and believes that “when you croak … grass will grow over your grave, and that will be that.” “There’s no sin in anything,” he tells Olenin. “It’s all a lie!”