The Cossacks Read Free Page A

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