Literature in the News: Tolstoy in Crimea

Crimea, that peninsular on the Black Sea where Russia and Ukraine were recently playing tug of war, has been in the news, and was also in the news when Leo Tolstoy served as an officer for Russia in the Crimean War in the 1850s.  I came across this article (titled, “How the Horrors of Crimea Shaped Tolstoy”) in the New Republic  by a Charles King on how serving in the Crimean War shaped Tolstoy’s view of war, which was later infused into his novels.  Mr. King’s bio line says he’s a professor of International Affairs, so I’m not quite sure what his expertise is in Tolstoy, but the article seems credible enough and worthy to share. 

Leo Tolstoy was 26 years old when he first saw the ramparts of Sevastopol. The weather in Crimea in the early winter of 1854—subtropical, cool but not cold—was a paradise compared with the harsh snow and ice farther north. The city itself, though, was in chaos. The heights above the port were ringed with earthworks of woven saplings and packed dirt and stone. Below, the narrow entrance to the harbor was blocked by the hulls of wooden ships deliberately sunk by the Russian navy, placed there to block the invaders. “There are thousands of different objects,” Tolstoy wrote, “thrown in heaps here and there; soldiers of different regiments, some provided with guns and with bags, others with neither guns nor bags, crowd together; they smoke, they quarrel.” 

A junior officer in an artillery brigade, Tolstoy already knew something of the exhilaration and horror of battle. For nearly three years, he had been in the Caucasus, the Russian empire’s mountainous southern frontier, in the middle of a grinding counterinsurgency campaign against upland Muslims. He had seen native villages destroyed and besieged, with the great forests of Chechnya whittled down to nothing—a strategy of the Russian army to deny shelter to Chechen raiding parties. Muslim gunmen would wait in the underbrush and aim their long guns at the Russian sappers sent to hack away a clearing on either side of a road. Not that Tolstoy had placed himself in the line of fire. By his own admission, he spent much of his time there in a Cossack stanitsa, or fortified village, hunting, drinking, “running after Cossack women,” and “writing a little,” as he noted in his diary.

 

Readers of my blog might recall Tolstoy’s Chechnya experience led to his novel, The Cossacks, which I read and examined last year.  You can read about that here.   

 

While Chechnya was more of a raid, incursion, and reconnaissance between small tribal factions, Crimea was Tolstoy’s first experience of major set armies in modern warfare.  From King’s article: 

When he arrived in Crimea, Tolstoy found himself in the middle of a war that did not yet have a name. For years, tensions had been rising between the two great powers in the Near East, the Russian and Ottoman empires. Czar Nicholas I claimed a right to protect the lives and property of Orthodox Christians inside Ottoman lands, including those who controlled access to the holy sites in Jerusalem. The Ottoman sultan, Abdülmecid I, countered that Orthodox Christians—who formed more than a third of all his subjects—were under no particular threat. The czar’s claims, he said, were merely a pretext for interfering in his domestic affairs. 

and  

Britain, France, and Sardinia came to the Ottomans’ aid. By the time Tolstoy arrived in Crimea, most of the great battles of the war were already past. Russian infantry had been put to flight by an Anglo-French force at the River Alma, the Light Brigade had made its doomed cavalry charge at Balaklava, and brutal hand-to-hand combat at Inkerman had broken Russia’s fighting will and ensured that the rest of the conflict would be focused on the desperate defense of Sevastopol. The war became a siege, with the Russians defending the heights against cannonades and bayonet charges. 

Tolstoy was there to witness the results: British and French ships sitting within cannon shot of the Crimean coast; creaking wooden carts being pulled up the steep hills, loaded with corpses; the constant roar of the Russian batteries; and the repeated thrusts of Allied troops, tripping over their greatcoats and slipping downhill in the mud.

 

Tolstoy’s writing career actually was initiated while serving. 

Tolstoy had spent much of the siege writing dispatches from the city, realistic accounts that, in an era of intense press censorship, provided Russia’s reading public with some of its first true-life accounts of battle. They appeared in The Contemporary, an influential St. Petersburg literary journal, and as hard-nosed pieces of reportage—with as much gore as could pass the state censor—they made him almost instantly famous. 

“On the earth, torn up by a recent explosion, were lying, here and there, broken beams, crushed bodies of Russians and French,” he wrote in his final installment from the scene of battle, later collected as Sevastopol Sketches, “heavy cast-iron cannon overturned into the ditch by a terrible force, half buried in the ground and forever dumb, bomb-shells, balls, splinters of beams, ditches, bomb-proofs, and more corpses, in blue or in gray overcoats, which seemed to have been shaken by supreme convulsions . . .” Tolstoy had arrived in Crimea as a casual patriot; he was now a committed skeptic.

 

King then ends his article with this interesting observation from the point of view of another writer who happened to be in Crimea a decade later. 

A decade after the war, in 1867, Mark Twain visited Sevastopol and walked over the old battlefields with a group of American tourists, kicking up bits of shrapnel and shards of bone. U.S. newspapers had carried news of the fighting, and photographers had captured images from the front lines. The telegraph and glass-plate photography had made their debut as tools of war reporting. “Sevastopol is probably the worst battered town in Russia or anywhere else,” Twain wrote in The Innocents Abroad. “But we ought to be pleased with it, nevertheless, for we have been in no country yet where we have been so kindly received.” 

By this stage, Tolstoy was on the other side of his journey of disillusionment, one that had begun in the forests of Chechnya and ended on the Black Sea coast. He was nursing the ideas that would define his work as a mature writer: that battles were a form of deliberate folly, that the only enduring nation was humanity, that ordinary Russians were always better than the rulers whom history seemed to give them. While Twain was looking over the ruins of Sevastopol, Tolstoy was far to the north, back home on the old family estate at Yasnaya Polyana. He was in the final stretch of a manuscript he had decided to call War and Peace.

 

As it turns out, Russia did take Crimea from the Ottoman Empire, and apparently has retaken it from Ukraine.  History does sometimes repeat itself, though this second iteration was without any battle.  War is a terrible thing, and Tolstoy learned firsthand.  Read Charles King’s entire article.

Book Excerpt: The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy, Part 3

You can read Part 1 of Book Excerpt: The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy here and Part 2 here. Excerpts taken from etext from Wikisource Library through Classic Literature By Great Authors ; translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude.

 

In the first blog on The Cossacks I delineated the central character Olenin, an overly sophisticated, disillusioned, even cynical young man who decides to leave his Moscow life for a military stint in the wilds of the Caucasus.  On the second blog I delineated his contracting character, Lukashka, a young Cossack man who is heroic and at one with the nature of his upbringing.  Both these characters fall in love with the beautiful Cossack girl, Maryanka, and so the novel forms a triangle.  Lukashka and Maryanka are betrothed by their parents in a traditional arrangement, but besides the arrangement there is a true, youthful attraction, and they are presented as a natural and likely couple.   Olenin is the outsider, the rich man from Moscow, from the big and sophisticated city.  He has denied that love is possible or even real, but once in contact with the natural elements and natural people, his outlook is challenged and he starts to change.  He becomes drawn to Maryanka, at whose parent’s home he is a lodger.  Here is a passage when Olenin first meets Maryanka.

Olenin ran up the steps of the porch and pushed open the door of the hut. Maryanka, wearing nothing but a pink smock, as all Cossack women do in the house, jumped away from the door, frightened, and pressing herself against the wall covered the lower part other face with the broad sleeve of her Tartar smock. Having opened the door wider, Olenin in the semi-darkness of the passage saw the whole tall, shapely figure of the young Cossack girl. With the quick and eager curiosity of youth he involuntarily noticed the firm maidenly form revealed by the fine print smock, and the beautiful black eyes fixed on him with childlike terror and wild curiosity. 'This is SHE,' thought Olenin. 'But there will be many others like her' came at once into his head, and he opened the inner door.  [chpt 10]

 

Love at first sight, love from contact through the eyes is a motif in several of Tolstoy’s works.  (It happens with Lukashka and Maryanka later on as well.)  There is a magic when Tolstoy brings two people’s eyes in contact as they fall in love.  Such a moment happens here to Olenin: “'This is SHE,' thought Olenin.”  But notice how in the very next thought that moment of love becomes warped: “'But there will be many others like her' came at once into his head.”  He has choked off the feeling of love with the thought of sexual objectification.  It isn’t the “she” he embraces, but the sexual object.  Let’s compare Lukashka’s interaction with Maryanka.  A group of girls including Maryanka are talking about the lodger at Maryank’s house when Lukashka walks over and listens.  Finally Lukashka feels a pang of jealousy.

Lukashka rose and raised his cap.

'I expect I had better go home too, that will be best,' he said, trying to appear unconcerned but hardly able to repress a smile, and he disappeared behind the corner of the house.

Meanwhile night had entirely enveloped the village. Bright stars were scattered over the dark sky. The streets became dark and empty. Nazarka remained with the women on the earth-bank and their laughter was still heard, but Lukashka, having slowly moved away from the girls, crouched down like a cat and then suddenly started running lightly, holding his dagger to steady it: not homeward, however, but towards the cornet's house. Having passed two streets he turned into a lane and lifting the skirt of his coat sat down on the ground in the shadow of a fence. 'A regular cornet's daughter!' he thought about Maryanka. 'Won't even have a lark--the devil! But just wait a bit.'

The approaching footsteps of a woman attracted his attention. He began listening, and laughed all by himself. Maryanka with bowed head, striking the pales of the fences with a switch, was walking with rapid regular strides straight towards him. Lukashka rose. Maryanka started and stopped.

'What an accursed devil! You frightened me! So you have not gone home?' she said, and laughed aloud.

Lukashka put one arm round her and with the other hand raised her face. 'What I wanted to tell you, by Heaven!' his voice trembled and broke.

'What are you talking of, at night time!' answered Maryanka. 'Mother is waiting for me, and you'd better go to your sweetheart.'

And freeing herself from his arms she ran away a few steps. When she had reached the wattle fence of her home she stopped and turned to the Cossack who was running beside her and still trying to persuade her to stay a while with him.

'Well, what do you want to say, midnight-gadabout?' and she again began laughing.

'Don't laugh at me, Maryanka! By the Heaven! Well, what if I have a sweetheart? May the devil take her! Only say the word and now I'll love you--I'll do anything you wish. Here they are!' and he jingled the money in his pocket. 'Now we can live splendidly. Others have pleasures, and I? I get no pleasure from you, Maryanka dear!'

The girl did not answer. She stood before him breaking her switch into little bits with a rapid movement other fingers.

Lukashka suddenly clenched his teeth and fists.

'And why keep waiting and waiting? Don't I love you, darling? You can do what you like with me,' said he suddenly, frowning angrily and seizing both her hands.

The calm expression of Maryanka's face and voice did not change.

'Don't bluster, Lukashka, but listen to me,' she answered, not pulling away her hands but holding the Cossack at arm's length. 'It's true I am a girl, but you listen to me! It does not depend on me, but if you love me I'll tell you this. Let go my hands, I'll tell you without.--I'll marry you, but you'll never get any nonsense from me,' said Maryanka without turning her face.

'What, you'll marry me? Marriage does not depend on us. Love me yourself, Maryanka dear,' said Lukashka, from sullen and furious becoming again gentle, submissive, and tender, and smiling as he looked closely into her eyes.

Maryanka clung to him and kissed him firmly on the lips.

'Brother dear!' she whispered, pressing him convulsively to her. Then, suddenly tearing herself away, she ran into the gate of her house without looking round.    [Chpt 13]

 

Their courting is youthful, natural, even impulsive.  Lukashka’s jealousy sets up the love triangle, the conflict, and the narrative tension.  Olenin, on the other hand, courts Maryanka at Beletski’s party.  Prince Beletski is an acquaintance of Olenin’s from Moscow society who is a rising officer in the army and has arrived during the summer to participate with Olenin’s troop.  While in the Caucuses he arranges evening parties, a sort of meat market gathering where Beletski lures women and then brags about his conquests.  He has brought the Moscow sophistication to the country, and when he hears about Olenin’s attraction to Maryanka, he brings them together at his party.  Here Olenin notices Maryanka at the party. 

Olenin noticed Maryanka among the group of girls, who without exception were all handsome, and he felt vexed and hurt that he met her in such vulgar and awkward circumstances. He felt stupid and awkward, and made up his mind to do what Beletski did. Beletski stepped to the table somewhat solemnly yet with confidence and ease, drank a glass of wine to Ustenka's health, and invited the others to do the same. Ustenka announced that girls don't drink. 'We might with a little honey,' exclaimed a voice from among the group of girls. The orderly, who had just returned with the honey and spice-cakes, was called in. He looked askance (whether with envy or with contempt) at the gentlemen, who in his opinion were on the spree; and carefully and conscientiously handed over to them a piece of honeycomb and the cakes wrapped up in a piece of greyish paper, and began explaining circumstantially all about the price and the change, but Beletski sent him away. Having mixed honey with wine in the glasses, and having lavishly scattered the three pounds of spice-cakes on the table, Beletski dragged the girls from their comers by force, made them sit down at the table, and began distributing the cakes among them. Olenin involuntarily noticed how Maryanka's sunburnt but small hand closed on two round peppermint nuts and one brown one, and that she did not know what to do with them. The conversation was halting and constrained, in spite of Ustenka's and Beletski's free and easy manner and their wish to enliven the company. Olenin faltered, and tried to think of something to say, feeling that he was exciting curiosity and perhaps provoking ridicule and infecting the others with his shyness. He blushed, and it seemed to him that Maryanka in particular was feeling uncomfortable. 'Most likely they are expecting us to give them some money,' thought he. 'How are we to do it? And how can we manage quickest to give it and get away?'    [Chpt 24] 

It ‘s in that setting that Maryanka, now become mesmerized with the social scene, and begins to feel tempted to Olenin’s entreats.  It comes to a head one day when Olenin is drunk. 

Olenin drank with Eroshka, with the other Cossack, and again with Eroshka, and the more he drank the heavier was his heart. But the two old men grew merry. The girls climbed onto the oven, where they sat whispering and looking at the men, who drank till it was late. Olenin did not talk, but drank more than the others. The Cossacks were shouting. The old woman would not let them have any more chikhir, and at last turned them out. The girls laughed at Daddy Eroshka, and it was past ten when they all went out into the porch. The old men invited themselves to finish their merry-making at Olenin's. Ustenka ran off home and Eroshka led the old Cossack to Vanyusha. The old woman went out to tidy up the shed. Maryanka remained alone in the hut. Olenin felt fresh and joyous, as if he had only just woke up. He noticed everything, and having let the old men pass ahead he turned back to the hut where Maryanka was preparing for bed. He went up to her and wished to say something, but his voice broke. She moved away from him, sat down cross-legged on her bed in the corner, and looked at him silently with wild and frightened eyes. She was evidently afraid of him. Olenin felt this. He felt sorry and ashamed of himself, and at the same time proud and pleased that he aroused even that feeling in her.

'Maryanka!' he said. 'Will you never take pity on me? I can't tell you how I love you.'

She moved still farther away.

'Just hear how the wine is speaking! ... You'll get nothing from me!'

'No, it is not the wine. Don't marry Lukashka. I will marry you.' ('What am I saying,' he thought as he uttered these words. 'Shall I be able to say the same to-morrow?' 'Yes, I shall, I am sure I shall, and I will repeat them now,' replied an inner voice.)

'Will you marry me?'

She looked at him seriously and her fear seemed to have passed.

'Maryanka, I shall go out of my mind! I am not myself. I will do whatever you command,' and madly tender words came from his lips of their own accord.

'Now then, what are you drivelling about?' she interrupted, suddenly seizing the arm he was stretching towards her. She did not push his arm away but pressed it firmly with her strong hard fingers. 'Do gentlemen marry Cossack girls? Go away!'

'But will you? Everything...'

'And what shall we do with Lukashka?' said she, laughing.

He snatched away the arm she was holding and firmly embraced her young body, but she sprang away like a fawn and ran barefoot into the porch: Olenin came to his senses and was terrified at himself. He again felt himself inexpressibly vile compared to her, yet not repenting for an instant of what he had said he went home, and without even glancing at the old men who were drinking in his room he lay down and fell asleep more soundly than he had done for a long time.  [Chpt 34]

And so what Tolstoy has set up through the triangle is a decision point for Maryanka, and then the culmination of the struggle between Olenin and Lukashka.  You would expect the resolution of that struggle, perhaps a life and death fight between the antagonists, to be the climax of the novel.  However, it isn’t, and it never takes place.  Maryanka, in effect, does make a decision, though not a considered choice.  Tolstoy projects a culminating conflict but it never happens.  An event, which I won’t spoil for the reader here, occurs that changes the trajectory of the narrative. 

To be forthright, I can’t claim I understand why Tolstoy ended the novel in this fashion.   I can’t say if it holds together.  Intuitively it seems off.  But I’ve only read this once and I would need at least another reading—especially now that I know how it ends—to see if Tolstoy has found a sparkling and fitting, though original, ending or one that is forced and flawed.  Perhaps in the future I will read this novel again.  It’s worth a second read.  This is definitely an enjoyable novel, especially if you like Tolstoy.  In the meantime, anyone that has read the novel, I would appreciate your thoughts, especially on the ending. 

Book Excerpt: The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy, Part 2

You can read Part 1 of Book Excerpt: The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy here. Excerpts taken from etext from Wikisource Library through Classic Literature By Great Authors ; translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude.

 

Olenin, the novel's central character, is contrasted with a young Cossack who couldn’t be more different, a youth named Lukashka with the nickname, “the snatcher” because of his hunting skills.  While Olenin is introduced in the city setting, Lukashka is quite distinctly introduced with the wilderness as background. 

The male population of the village spend their time on military expeditions and in the cordon--or 'at their posts', as the Cossacks say. Towards evening, that same Lukashka the Snatcher, about whom the old women had been talking, was standing on a watch-tower of the Nizhni-Prototsk post situated on the very banks of the Terek. Leaning on the railing of the tower and screwing up his eyes, he looked now far into the distance beyond the Terek, now down at his fellow Cossacks, and occasionally he addressed the latter. The sun was already approaching the snowy range that gleamed white above the fleecy clouds. The clouds undulating at the base of the mountains grew darker and darker. The clearness of evening was noticeable in the air. A sense of freshness came from the woods, though round the post it was still hot. The voices of the talking Cossacks vibrated more sonorously than before. The moving mass of the Terek's rapid brown waters contrasted more vividly with its motionless banks. The waters were beginning to subside and here and there the wet sands gleamed drab on the banks and in the shallows. The other side of the river, just opposite the cordon, was deserted; only an immense waste of low-growing reeds stretched far away to the very foot of the mountains. On the low bank, a little to one side, could be seen the flat-roofed clay houses and the funnel-shaped chimneys of a Chechen village. The sharp eyes of the Cossack who stood on the watch-tower followed, through the evening smoke of the pro-Russian village, the tiny moving figures of the Chechen women visible in the distance in their red and blue garments.  [Chpt 6]

Yes, that’s the same Chechen people who have been in the news here in the United States lately.  The Cossacks and the Chechens are neighboring people with the Terek River dividing them, but they are at war with each other, a sort of feud of cultures.  They are on guard against each other, and it seems like the goal of the men of both is to prove their manhood through soldierly exploits.  Lukashka is now old enough to participate, and he’s a natural at it. 

Lukashka, who stood on the watch-tower, was a tall handsome lad about twenty years old and very like his mother. His face and whole build, in spite of the angularity of youth, indicated great strength, both physical and moral. Though he had only lately joined the Cossacks at the front, it was evident from the expression of his face and the calm assurance of his attitude that he had already acquired the somewhat proud and warlike bearing peculiar to Cossacks and to men generally who continually carry arms, and that he felt he was a Cossack and fully knew his own value. His ample Circassian coat was torn in some places, his cap was on the back of his head Chechen fashion, and his leggings had slipped below his knees. His clothing was not rich, but he wore it with that peculiar Cossack foppishness which consists in imitating the Chechen brave. Everything on a real brave is ample, ragged, and neglected, only his weapons are costly. But these ragged clothes and these weapons are belted and worn with a certain air and matched in a certain manner, neither of which can be acquired by everybody and which at once strike the eye of a Cossack or a hillsman. Lukashka had this resemblance to a brave. With his hands folded under his sword, and his eyes nearly closed, he kept looking at the distant Tartar village. Taken separately his features were not beautiful, but anyone who saw his stately carriage and his dark-browed intelligent face would involuntarily say, 'What a fine fellow!'  [Chpt 6]

In almost complete contrast to the Olenin scene with his friends, we get a scene with Lukashka and his friends, but instead of the Moscow scene where the dialogue is over a lame philosophic conversation on whether love exists, Lukashka’s scene is very much different.  Here it is at length; it’s worth reading the whole thing. 

Nazarka, with a live pheasant under his arm, forced his way through the brambles and emerged on the footpath.

'Oh!' said Lukashka, breaking off in his song, 'where did you get that cock pheasant? I suppose it was in my trap?'

Nazarka was of the same age as Lukashka and had also only been at the front since the previous spring.

He was plain, thin and puny, with a shrill voice that rang in one's ears. They were neighbours and comrades. Lukashka was sitting on the grass crosslegged like a Tartar, adjusting his nets.

'I don't know whose it was--yours, I expect.'

'Was it beyond the pit by the plane tree? Then it is mine! I set the nets last night.'

Lukashka rose and examined the captured pheasant. After stroking the dark burnished head of the bird, which rolled its eyes and stretched out its neck in terror, Lukashka took the pheasant in his hands.

'We'll have it in a pilau tonight. You go and kill and pluck it.'

'And shall we eat it ourselves or give it to the corporal?'

'He has plenty!'

'I don't like killing them,' said Nazarka.

'Give it here!'

Lukashka drew a little knife from under his dagger and gave it a swift jerk. The bird fluttered, but before it could spread its wings the bleeding head bent and quivered.

'That's how one should do it!' said Lukashka, throwing down the pheasant. 'It will make a fat pilau.'

Nazarka shuddered as he looked at the bird.

'I say, Lukashka, that fiend will be sending us to the ambush again tonight,' he said, taking up the bird. (He was alluding to the corporal.) 'He has sent Fomushkin to get wine, and it ought to be his turn. He always puts it on us.'

Lukashka went whistling along the cordon.

'Take the string with you,' he shouted.

Nazirka obeyed.

'I'll give him a bit of my mind today, I really will,' continued Nazarka. 'Let's say we won't go; we're tired out and there's an end of it! No, really, you tell him, he'll listen to you. It's too bad!'

'Get along with you! What a thing to make a fuss about!' said Lukashka, evidently thinking of something else. 'What bosh! If he made us turn out of the village at night now, that would be annoying: there one can have some fun, but here what is there? It's all one whether we're in the cordon or in ambush. What a fellow you are!'

'And are you going to the village?'

'I'll go for the holidays.'

'Gurka says your Dunayka is carrying on with Fomushkin,' said Nazarka suddenly.

'Well, let her go to the devil,' said Lukashka, showing his regular white teeth, though he did not laugh. 'As if I couldn't find another!'

'Gurka says he went to her house. Her husband was out and there was Fomushkin sitting and eating pie. Gurka stopped awhile and then went away, and passing by the window he heard her say, "He's gone, the fiend.... Why don't you eat your pie, my own? You needn't go home for the night," she says. And Gurka under the window says to himself, "That's fine!"'

'You're making it up.'

'No, quite true, by Heaven!'

'Well, if she's found another let her go to the devil,' said Lukashka, after a pause. 'There's no lack of girls and I was sick of her anyway.'

'Well, see what a devil you are!' said Nazarka. 'You should make up to the cornet's girl, Maryanka. Why doesn't she walk out with any one?'

Lukashka frowned. 'What of Maryanka? They're all alike,' said he.

'Well, you just try... '

'What do you think? Are girls so scarce in the village?'

And Lukashka recommenced whistling, and went along the cordon pulling leaves and branches from the bushes as he went. Suddenly, catching sight of a smooth sapling, he drew the knife from the handle of his dagger and cut it down. 'What a ramrod it will make,' he said, swinging the sapling till it whistled through the air.

The Cossacks were sitting round a low Tartar table on the earthen floor of the clay-plastered outer room of the hut, when the question of whose turn it was to lie in ambush was raised. 'Who is to go tonight?' shouted one of the Cossacks through the open door to the corporal in the next room.

'Who is to go?' the corporal shouted back. 'Uncle Burlak has been and Fomushkin too,' said he, not quite confidently. 'You two had better go, you and Nazarka,' he went on, addressing Lukashka. 'And Ergushov must go too; surely he has slept it off?'

'You don't sleep it off yourself so why should he?' said Nazarka in a subdued voice.

The Cossacks laughed.

Ergushov was the Cossack who had been lying drunk and asleep near the hut. He had only that moment staggered into the room rubbing his eyes.

Lukashka had already risen and was getting his gun ready.

'Be quick and go! Finish your supper and go!' said the corporal; and without waiting for an expression of consent he shut the door, evidently not expecting the Cossack to obey. 'Of course,' thought he, 'if I hadn't been ordered to I wouldn't send anyone, but an officer might turn up at any moment. As it is, they say eight abreks have crossed over.'

'Well, I suppose I must go,' remarked Ergushov, 'it's the regulation. Can't be helped! The times are such. I say, we must go.'

Meanwhile Lukashka, holding a big piece of pheasant to his mouth with both hands and glancing now at Nazarka, now at Ergushov, seemed quite indifferent to what passed and only laughed at them both. Before the Cossacks were ready to go into ambush. Uncle Eroshka, who had been vainly waiting under the plane tree till night fell, entered the dark outer room.

'Well, lads,' his loud bass resounded through the low-roofed room drowning all the other voices, 'I'm going with you. You'll watch for Chechens and I for boars!'  [Chpt 7]

That scene just oozes with masculinity: the hunting and killing of the pheasant, Lukashka not concerned if his girlfriend leaves him (he’ll find another), cutting a tree down with his knife, male rivalry and banter, getting drunk, going on ambush, guns, and so on.  A couple of notes that may clarify.  Abreks are a type of Chechen and Maryanka is a girl Lukashka has had his eye on and who his family has been trying to arrange a marriage for him.  The ultimate accomplishment of the Cossack warrior is to kill an invading Chechen, and Lukashka does just that while ambush that night. 

The greater part of the night was past. The black cloud that had moved westward revealed the clear starry sky from under its torn edge, and the golden upturned crescent of the moon shone above the mountains with a reddish light. The cold began to be penetrating. Nazarka awoke, spoke a little, and fell asleep again. Lukashka feeling bored got up, drew the knife from his dagger-handle and began to fashion his stick into a ramrod. His head was full of the Chechens who lived over there in the mountains, and of how their brave lads came across and were not afraid of the Cossacks, and might even now be crossing the river at some other spot. He thrust himself out of his hiding-place and looked along the river but could see nothing. And as he continued looking out at intervals upon the river and at the opposite bank, now dimly distinguishable from the water in the faint moonlight, he no longer thought about the Chechens but only of when it would be time to wake his comrades, and of going home to the village. In the village he imagined Dunayka, his 'little soul', as the Cossacks call a man's mistress, and thought of her with vexation. Silvery mists, a sign of coming morning, glittered white above the water, and not far from him young eagles were whistling and flapping their wings. At last the crowing of a cock reached him from the distant village, followed by the long-sustained note of another, which was again answered by yet other voices.

'Time to wake them,' thought Lukashka, who had finished his ramrod and felt his eyes growing heavy. Turning to his comrades he managed to make out which pair of legs belonged to whom, when it suddenly seemed to him that he heard something splash on the other side of the Terek. He turned again towards the horizon beyond the hills, where day was breaking under the upturned crescent, glanced at the outline of the opposite bank, at the Terek, and at the now distinctly visible driftwood upon it. For one instant it seemed to him that he was moving and that the Terek with the drifting wood remained stationary. Again he peered out. One large black log with a branch particularly attracted his attention. The tree was floating in a strange way right down the middle of the stream, neither rocking nor whirling. It even appeared not to be floating altogether with the current, but to be crossing it in the direction of the shallows. Lukashka stretching out his neck watched it intently. The tree floated to the shallows, stopped, and shifted in a peculiar manner. Lukashka thought he saw an arm stretched out from beneath the tree. 'Supposing I killed an abrek all by myself!' he thought, and seized his gun with a swift, unhurried movement, putting up his gun-rest, placing the gun upon it, and holding it noiselessly in position. Cocking the trigger, with bated breath he took aim, still peering out intently. 'I won't wake them,' he thought. But his heart began beating so fast that he remained motionless, listening. Suddenly the trunk gave a plunge and again began to float across the stream towards our bank. 'Only not to miss ...' thought he, and now by the faint light of the moon he caught a glimpse of a Tartar's head in front of the floating wood. He aimed straight at the head which appeared to be quite near--just at the end of his rifle's barrel. He glanced cross. 'Right enough it is an abrek! he thought joyfully, and suddenly rising to his knees he again took aim. Having found the sight, barely visible at the end of the long gun, he said: 'In the name of the Father and of the Son,' in the Cossack way learnt in his childhood, and pulled the trigger. A flash of lightning lit up for an instant the reeds and the water, and the sharp, abrupt report of the shot was carried across the river, changing into a prolonged roll somewhere in the far distance. The piece of driftwood now floated not across, but with the current, rocking and whirling.  [Chpt 8]

The shot hits its mark and the kill is confirmed in the subsequent chapter as the young soldiers find the body.  Lukashka becomes a young hero to his village.  The Cossack/Chechen feud, which culminates in a major battle at the end of the story, has the feel of a Cowboys and Indians dime novel, or at least a Russian version of it.  The young Tolstoy was fond of reading the novels of the backwoods frontier of the 19th century American novelist James Fenimore Cooper. 

 

I leave you with three images of first the Terek River and second two of the Caucasus Mountains and wilderness, so you can get a feel of the terrain. 

 

 

Book Excerpt: The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy

This is not one of the famous novels that Leo Tolstoy produced, but it’s a fine novel nonetheless.  The novel centers around the character Dmitri Olenin, a young Russian from Moscow, as he enters the exotic world of the rough and rugged people from the Caucuses part of Russia called Cossacks.  Supposedly the novel has an element of the biographical, though it’s hard to say what exactly is autobiographical.   Apparently Tolstoy spent some time in the Caucuses, but Olenin is not exactly the type of hero that would reflect well on the author.  The novel was published in 1863, when Tolstoy was thirty-five years old, but Tolstoy had started writing the novel in 1852.  The novel underwent several revisions, including a substantial one.  Perhaps Olenin’s naiveté and lack of courage was Tolstoy looking back at himself as a younger man, or perhaps the novel started from a more direct biographical stance but under revision Tolstoy felt the central character required a more stark contrast to the Cossack men.  Whatever the autobiography might be, the Olenin character as a sort of green, spoiled, insecure, and immature youth contrasted to the confident, assertive, and natural Cossack men and woman is a stroke of genius. 

 

 

Let’s spend some time understanding Olenin’s character since it’s at the crux of the story.  The novel starts in Moscow with Olenin having made the dramatic decision to enter the military and go off to the Caucuses.  That is like a New Yorker from the early 19^th century deciding to enter the cavalry and live among the Apache Indians.  It’s not only of another culture, another world, but it’s going from a life of comfort and sophistication to one of living elementary.  Here Olenin, referred to here as “the traveler” is traveling with a few of his companions to a departure point.

'Now I can speak out fully,' said the traveller. 'I don't want to defend myself, but I should like you at least to understand me as I understand myself, and not look at the matter superficially. You say I have treated her badly,' he continued, addressing the man with the kindly eyes who was watching him.

'Yes, you are to blame,' said the latter, and his look seemed to express still more kindliness and weariness.

'I know why you say that,' rejoined the one who was leaving. 'To be loved is in your opinion as great a happiness as to love, and if a man obtains it, it is enough for his whole life.'

'Yes, quite enough, my dear fellow, more than enough!' confirmed the plain little man, opening and shutting his eyes.

'But why shouldn't the man love too?' said the traveller thoughtfully, looking at his friend with something like pity. 'Why shouldn't one love? Because love doesn't come ... No, to be beloved is a misfortune. It is a misfortune to feel guilty because you do not give something you cannot give. O my God!' he added, with a gesture of his arm. 'If it all happened reasonably, and not all topsy-turvy--not in our way but in a way of its own! Why, it's as if I had stolen that love! You think so too, don't deny it. You must think so. But will you believe it, of all the horrid and stupid things I have found time to do in my life--and there are many--this is one I do not and cannot repent of. Neither at the beginning nor afterwards did I lie to myself or to her. It seemed to me that I had at last fallen in love, but then I saw that it was an involuntary falsehood, and that that was not the way to love, and I could not go on, but she did. Am I to blame that I couldn't? What was I to do?'

'Well, it's ended now!' said his friend, lighting a cigar to master his sleepiness. 'The fact is that you have not yet loved and do not know what love is.'

The man in the fur-lined coat was going to speak again, and put his hands to his head, but could not express what he wanted to say. [Chpt 1]

Excerpts taken from etext from Wikisource Library through Classic Literature By Great Authors ; translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude.

We see he has broken up with a woman, an affair that seems to have ended badly.  He thought he was in love, but came to the awareness that he wasn’t.  Well, that’s sort of adolescent.  That he concludes love isn’t even important reveals a sort of an overly intellectual childishness.  His friend points out that Olenin doesn’t even know what love is.  What is also striking on how Tolstoy ends that exchange is that Olinen, hands somewhat flailing up, “could not express what he wanted to say.”  On the surface that’s again suggestive of his adolescence, but it’s also symbolic.  What we’ll see in the novel is that Olenin fails to complete goals, fails to consummate actions, and remains a vicarious standby as the rugged men live life.

Olenin was a youth who had never completed his university course, never served anywhere (having only a nominal post in some government office or other), who had squandered half his fortune and had reached the age of twenty-four without having done anything or even chosen a career. He was what in Moscow society is termed un jeune homme.

At the age of eighteen he was free--as only rich young Russians in the 'forties who had lost their parents at an early age could be. Neither physical nor moral fetters of any kind existed for him; he could do as he liked, lacking nothing and bound by nothing. Neither relatives, nor fatherland, nor religion, nor wants, existed for him. He believed in nothing and admitted nothing. But although he believed in nothing he was not a morose or blase young man, nor self-opinionated, but on the contrary continually let himself be carried away. He had come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as love, yet his heart always overflowed in the presence of any young and attractive woman. He had long been aware that honours and position were nonsense, yet involuntarily he felt pleased when at a ball Prince Sergius came up and spoke to him affably. But he yielded to his impulses only in so far as they did not limit his freedom. As soon as he had yielded to any influence and became conscious of its leading on to labour and struggle, he instinctively hastened to free himself from the feeling or activity into which he was being drawn and to regain his freedom. In this way he experimented with society-life, the civil service, farming, music--to which at one time he intended to devote his life--and even with the love of women in which he did not believe. He meditated on the use to which he should devote that power of youth which is granted to man only once in a lifetime: that force which gives a man the power of making himself, or even--as it seemed to him--of making the universe, into anything he wishes: should it be to art, to science, to love of woman, or to practical activities? It is true that some people are devoid of this impulse, and on entering life at once place their necks under the first yoke that offers itself and honestly labour under it for the rest of their lives. But Olenin was too strongly conscious of the presence of that all-powerful God of Youth--of that capacity to be entirely transformed into an aspiration or idea--the capacity to wish and to do--to throw oneself headlong into a bottomless abyss without knowing why or wherefore. He bore this consciousness within himself, was proud of it and, without knowing it, was happy in that consciousness. Up to that time he had loved only himself, and could not help loving himself, for he expected nothing but good of himself and had not yet had time to be disillusioned. On leaving Moscow he was in that happy state of mind in which a young man, conscious of past mistakes, suddenly says to himself, 'That was not the real thing.' All that had gone before was accidental and unimportant. Till then he had not really tried to live, but now with his departure from Moscow a new life was beginning--a life in which there would be no mistakes, no remorse, and certainly nothing but happiness.  [Chpt 2]

What is clear in that expository passage is that Olenin has lots of wishes, attempts many things, but never finishes anything, never accomplishes anything.  Every activity will be a new beginning, every new endeavor will bring certain happiness.  My goodness, he expects a life of no mistakes or remorse. 

Olenin’s journey to the Caucuses is important.  An author makes many choices as he tells the story, especially the framing of the story.  Tolstoy could have started the story with Olenin already immersed in the Cossack culture.  But Tolstoy shows Olenin departing, breaking away from his friends, and physically being transferred into a different world.  This is a tale imbued with values of the Romantic movement, the idealization of the primitive over the civilized.  Little by little Olenin notices the increasing wildness of the places he passes by, so that he is moving toward the heart of the elemental. 

The farther Olenin travelled from Central Russia the farther he left his memories behind, and the nearer he drew to the Caucasus the lighter his heart became. "I'll stay away for good and never return to show myself in society," was a thought that sometimes occurred to him. "These people whom I see here are NOT people. None of them know me and none of them can ever enter the Moscow society I was in or find out about my past. And no one in that society will ever know what I am doing, living among these people." And quite a new feeling of freedom from his whole past came over him among the rough beings he met on the road whom he did not consider to be PEOPLE in the sense that his Moscow acquaintances were. The rougher the people and the fewer the signs of civilization the freer he felt. Stavropol, through which he had to pass, irked him. The signboards, some of them even in French, ladies in carriages, cabs in the marketplace, and a gentleman wearing a fur cloak and tall hat who was walking along the boulevard and staring at the passersby, quite upset him. "Perhaps these people know some of my acquaintances," he thought; and the club, his tailor, cards, society ... came back to his mind. But after Stavropol everything was satisfactory--wild and also beautiful and warlike, and Olenin felt happier and happier. All the Cossacks, post-boys, and post-station masters seemed to him simple folk with whom he could jest and converse simply, without having to consider to what class they belonged. They all belonged to the human race which, without his thinking about it, all appeared dear to Olenin, and they all treated him in a friendly way.  [Chpt 3]

And finally Olenin reaches his destination, the very heart of Cossackdom, where life is composed of farming, fishing, hunting, and war. 

Novomlinsk village was considered the very heart of Grebensk Cossackdom. In it more than elsewhere the customs of the old Grebensk population have been preserved, and its women have from time immemorial been renowned all over the Caucasus for their beauty. A Cossack's livelihood is derived from vineyards, fruit- gardens, water melon and pumpkin plantations, from fishing, hunting, maize and millet growing, and from war plunder. Novomlinsk village lies about two and a half miles away from the Terek, from which it is separated by a dense forest. On one side of the road which runs through the village is the river; on the other, green vineyards and orchards, beyond which are seen the driftsands of the Nogay Steppe. The village is surrounded by earth-banks and prickly bramble hedges, and is entered by tall gates hung between posts and covered with little reed-thatched roofs. Beside them on a wooden gun-carriage stands an unwieldy cannon captured by the Cossacks at some time or other, and which has not been fired for a hundred years. A uniformed Cossack sentinel with dagger and gun sometimes stands, and sometimes does not stand, on guard beside the gates, and sometimes presents arms to a passing officer and sometimes does not. Below the roof of the gateway is written in black letters on a white board: 'Houses 266: male inhabitants 897: female 1012.' The Cossacks' houses are all raised on pillars two and a half feet from the ground. They are carefully thatched with reeds and have large carved gables. If not new they are at least all straight and clean, with high porches of different shapes; and they are not built close together but have ample space around them, and are all picturesquely placed along broad streets and lanes. In front of the large bright windows of many of the houses, beyond the kitchen gardens, dark green poplars and acacias with their delicate pale verdure and scented white blossoms overtop the houses, and beside them grow flaunting yellow sunflowers, creepers, and grape vines. In the broad open square are three shops where drapery, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, locust beans and gingerbreads are sold; and surrounded by a tall fence, loftier and larger than the other houses, stands the Regimental Commander's dwelling with its casement windows, behind a row of tall poplars. Few people are to be seen in the streets of the village on weekdays, especially in summer. The young men are on duty in the cordons or on military expeditions; the old ones are fishing or helping the women in the orchards and gardens. Only the very old, the sick, and the children, remain at home.  [Chpt 4]

The perspective in that passage, which is Olenin’s perspective, is that of an anthropologist meeting the aborigines.  Finally I want to present this wonderful passage of one of Olenin’s first evenings situated in the Cossack village.

It was one of those wonderful evenings that occur only in the Caucasus. The sun had sunk behind the mountains but it was still light. The evening glow had spread over a third of the sky, and against its brilliancy the dull white immensity of the mountains was sharply defined. The air was rarefied, motionless, and full of sound. The shadow of the mountains reached for several miles over the steppe. The steppe, the opposite side of the river, and the roads, were all deserted. If very occasionally mounted men appeared, the Cossacks in the cordon and the Chechens in their aouls (villages) watched them with surprised curiosity and tried to guess who those questionable men could be. At nightfall people from fear of one another flock to their dwellings, and only birds and beasts fearless of man prowl in those deserted spaces. Talking merrily, the women who have been tying up the vines hurry away from the gardens before sunset. The vineyards, like all the surrounding district, are deserted, but the villages become very animated at that time of the evening. From all sides, walking, riding, or driving in their creaking carts, people move towards the village. Girls with their smocks tucked up and twigs in their hands run chatting merrily to the village gates to meet the cattle that are crowding together in a cloud of dust and mosquitoes which they bring with them from the steppe. The well-fed cows and buffaloes disperse at a run all over the streets and Cossack women in coloured beshmets go to and fro among them. You can hear their merry laughter and shrieks mingling with the lowing of the cattle. There an armed and mounted Cossack, on leave from the cordon, rides up to a hut and, leaning towards the window, knocks. In answer to the knock the handsome head of a young woman appears at the window and you can hear caressing, laughing voices. There a tattered Nogay labourer, with prominent cheekbones, brings a load of reeds from the steppes, turns his creaking cart into the Cossack captain's broad and clean courtyard, and lifts the yoke off the oxen that stand tossing their heads while he and his master shout to one another in Tartar. Past a puddle that reaches nearly across the street, a barefooted Cossack woman with a bundle of firewood on her back makes her laborious way by clinging to the fences, holding her smock high and exposing her white legs. A Cossack returning from shooting calls out in jest: 'Lift it higher, shameless thing!' and points his gun at her. The woman lets down her smock and drops the wood. An old Cossack, returning home from fishing with his trousers tucked up and his hairy grey chest uncovered, has a net across his shoulder containing silvery fish that are still struggling; and to take a short cut climbs over his neighbour's broken fence and gives a tug to his coat which has caught on the fence. There a woman is dragging a dry branch along and from round the corner comes the sound of an axe. Cossack children, spinning their tops wherever there is a smooth place in the street, are shrieking; women are climbing over fences to avoid going round. From every chimney rises the odorous kisyak smoke. From every homestead comes the sound of increased bustle, precursor to the stillness of night.  [Chpt 5]

That is Tolstoy’s prose at his best, simple, filled with rich, meaningful detail, and with a sense of movement.