The Cossacks Read Free Page B

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 inthe 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!”
    And meanwhile Maryanka continues elusive. She is being courted by Lukashka, whom Olenin both admires and envies. Lukashka is all that Olenin is not—brash, reckless, wild, a fornicator and carouser, fit for action, at one with the life of a fighter. He is a Cossack, and it is a Cossack—not Olenin—that is Maryanka’s desire. Even when Olenin is finally and familiarly accepted by Old Ulitka, Maryanka resists. At bottom,
The Cossacks
is an old-fashioned love triangle, as venerable as literature itself; yet it cannot be consummated, on either man’s behalf. Maryanka may not have Lukashka—violence destroys him. And she must repudiate Olenin: he is a stranger, and will always remain so. Despite the Circassian coat, despite Eroshka’s embraces, despite themerrymaking Chikhir, he is, unalterably, a Russian gentleman. He will never be a Cossack. In the end Moscow will reclaim him.
    But Tolstoy’s art has another purpose, apart from the regretful realism of the tale’s denouement and its understated psychological wisdom. It is, in this novel, a young man’s art, instinct with ardor—an ardor lacking any tendril of the judgmental. By contrast, the old Tolstoy, at seventy, pledged to religio-political issues of conscience, nevertheless declined to lend his moral weight to a manifesto seeking a reprieve for Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jewish officer falsely accused of treason. Though this was the cause célèbre of the age, Tolstoy was scornful: Dreyfus was hardly a man of the people; he was not a
muzhik;
he was not a pacifist believer. “It would be a strange thing,” he insisted, “that we Russians should take up the defense of Dreyfus, an utterly undistinguished man, when so many exceptional