by A. N. Wilson
C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
In 1862, Tolstoy completed his first masterpiece, The Cossacks. It was what he called his ‘Caucasian’ novel1 and it had been lying around in various versions ever since he had himself lived in the Caucasus. But a melancholy spell in Moscow at the beginning of the year brought more gambling debts, and at the beginning of February, Tolstoy was approached by Mikhayl Nikiforovich Katkov, editor of the periodical Russkii Vestnik (The Russian Herald) with the offer of a thousand pounds if Katkov, rather than Nekrasov on The Contemporary, could have the novel.
It was to be a momentous partnership. Katkov would publish War and Peace and the greater part of Anna Karenina. He was an interesting man, and not the mindless reactionary which some literary historians have made him out to be. In fact, his career is emblematic of much that was happening in those confusing decades of Russian history. He was ten years older than Tolstoy, and his background was Moscow intellectual. He taught philosophy at Moscow University from 1845 onwards, when it was still very much the University where Herzen had learnt and propagated his radical ideas. Katkov was a believer in constitutional government of the English pattern, but his liberalism was to be destroyed in 1863 by the Polish Uprising. Thereafter, we find him associated with extremely conservative, patriotic views – more like those of Dostoyevsky than those of Tolstoy.
Politically and intellectually, Tolstoy was as difficult to place at this period of his life as at any other. Katkov did not buy The Cossacks because it was the work of a fellow radical. He bought it because it was a work of genius. It is one of the most supreme examples in the Tolstoy œuvre of his ability to ‘make strange’, to use the formalist term, very familiar, old stuff. The young man riding off to the Caucasus is a cliché of early Russian Romanticism. But Olenin’s relationship with Yeroshka and Maryanka is so subtly drawn that never for an instant do we feel that Tolstoy is trespassing in Lermontov or Pushkin country. These two characters, Yeroshka and Maryanka, are two of the great originals in literature. Yet, in different ways, they both illustrate the extreme separateness of their world from Olenin’s. Olenin’s is partly the typical isolation of the Romantic man, which Rousseau and Wordsworth might feel simply because they are so special, so much themselves, but which comes home with special force abroad where, as another poet was to feel, ‘elsewhere’ underwrote his existence. Tolstoy does not feel the merely Lermontovian or Byronic (or, come to that, T. E. Lawrence-ish) desire to be a member of a different race or culture. With extreme realism, he recognises that he can’t be: not merely that he cannot transcend the barrier of race and class even in his love for Yeroshka and for Maryanka; but, more importantly, that he cannot make himself an innocent. In his final conversation with the old man Yeroshka condemns Russian doctors as fal’csh — phoney.
Olenin did not begin to reply. He was in all too much agreement that everything was phoney in the world in which he lived and to which he was returning.2
It was the world, incidentally, in which Tolstoy was living while writing the story: an extremely important fact, which will emerge later in this chapter. Olenin’s return, like that of Scott’s Waverley in highly comparable circumstances, is a crucial part of the story. To that degree, at least, it would not be necessary to dismiss those mid-twentieth-century Soviet critics who have seen the narod, the people, as the collective heroes of this story. ‘The idea of the superiority of the people, their consciousness, their labour-based morality over the moral worthlessness and degeneracy of the nobility is the main idea of the story.’ Western critics have derided this point of view, but it is not a completely preposterous one. It is only rubbish to say that this is all with which the story concerns itself.
But it is an element in the story. However much Olenin tries to befriend the Cossacks, he is still just as alien from the villagers as his fellow officers; in fact, because of his squeamish sense of morals, rather more alien than a man like Beletsky. Both the Russian officers, as far as Yeroshka is concerned, come from a pampered, risible world where men depend upon dud doctors, can’t hold their liquor, and are not much good either as huntsmen or in bed. To the wise Yeroshka, these are self-evident truths and he milks the friendship with Olenin for all it is worth.
Worth is the key word. In their sad moment of parting there is a truly Falstaffian touch when Yeroshka cadges, successfully, Olenin’s rifle. Tolstoy manipulates language as a device to remind us of Yeroshka’s extreme alienness. When we first meet him, he ‘had on a ragged, tucked-in, homespun coat, on his legs tied round with string were puttees of deer’s porshny and a dishevelled white cap. On his back he carried over one shoulder a kobilka and a sack with a hen and a small falcon for luring hawks. . . .’3
This description requires two authorial footnotes to tell us the meaning of the Cossack words porshny and kobilka. This is a device, incidentally, much favoured by Scott. With very similar effect he scatters his Scottish Highland scenes with Gaelic words which require the elucidation of a footnote. But Olenin (whose name reminds us of the word olen’, a deer) is not reading a text with footnotes, he is meeting the huntsman, the predator, for real, and he tries to identify with him by using the strange Tartar greeting. He says koshkildy in reply. But Yeroshka gleefully corrects him. Using the second person singular with which one would address children or inferiors, he says ‘Eee lad, thou dissn’t know form! Daft thing! If someone says “koshkildy” to thee tha sayst “Allah razi bo sun” — God save thee.’4
The unbridgeable gap between Olenin and the Cossack, felt powerfully enough in his dealings with Yeroshka, and with Maryanka, is even more strongly emphasised in his pathetic desire to be chums with Lukashka, to whom, rather condescendingly, he gives a horse. The differences are emphasised in almost every conversation between the two young men. We have already been told, for example, in the documentary chapter, that the Old Believers forbade smoking on the Scriptural grounds that it is not what goes into a man’s mouth, but what comes out of it, which corrupts him. Olenin is often to be seen puffing a nervous cigarette, which gives added pathos and comedy to Lukashka’s
‘What do you smoke for?. . . . Is it really as good as all that?’
He evidently said this solely because he noticed that Olenin was awkward and that he was lonely among the Cossacks.
‘That’s how it is,’ Olenin replied. ‘I’ve got used to it. Why?’
‘Hm. If one of our blokes started to smoke, there’d be trouble. . . .’5
Lukashka feels sorry for Olenin, and condescends to him by ‘making’ this somewhat baffled conversation. Olenin reveres the Cossack warrior but he is very far from taking the view that he is a noble savage. In fact, he takes a very modern, Europeanised view of him, as he remembers hearing Lukashka and Maryanka kissing outside the hut that very morning, and as he dwells upon the Cossacks’ proud attitude to the number of enemy snipers they have been able to kill.
What a fine young man, thought Olenin, looking at the Cossack’s cheerful face. He remembered about Maryanka and about the kiss which he had overheard beyond the gate and he felt so sorry for Lukashka, sorry for his lack of education. What sort of nonsense and muddle is this? he thought. The man has killed another man and he is happy and contented as if he had done the most splendid deed. Can it be that nothing tells him there is no cause for great joy in this? That happiness does not consist in killing but in sacrificing oneself? . . .6
We, with hindsight, can hear in Olenin’s musings the texts from which the pacifist sage of Yasnaya Polyana was to preach his sermons to the world in the latter half of his career. True, they provide evidence that his concern with these matters was lifelong, and not merely something which occurred after Tolstoy’s mid-life crisis. But, in the context of the story itself, Lukashka and Olenin are balanced. The difference between the classes is something which Tolstoy can see. He can see – here the Marxist critics are right – that the narod, the people, the sheer brute force of the uneducated, is a much stronger thing than the effete musings of the hero. Tolstoy see
s this even though the musings of Olenin are his own. These are the early days. We see here what Lenin so admired in Tolstoy – his ability to cast off the assumptions and attitudes of his own class and reflect the outlook of the narod. As Lenin recognised, this was nothing to do with Tolstoy’s political attitudes at any given time but to his artistic power: the power to tell the truth which specially artists have, because only in art is such detachment possible.
Tolstoy was never less concerned to push a point of view than in The Cossacks, and there are strong biographical reasons for this. For more than one contemporary critic, who were not in a position to compare The Cossacks with what was to come in Tolstoy’s later œuvre, The Cossacks was ruined by the ‘philosophising’. It was said that Count Tolstoy had abandoned characterisation in favour of stuffing his hero’s head with a lot of thoughts about life which a person of his intelligence and background would not be able to sustain. Two things strike us about this point of view. Yes, Olenin is just a cipher, not a character in the way that the Cossacks are characters. Yes, he is the vehicle for ideas. But the dislocation occurs because he is being made a vehicle for ideas which Tolstoy was having ten years after the events described. We find a parallel between Olenin and the Tolstoy of 1862. Like a whole succession of Tolstoyan protagonists, Olenin decides that his happiness will derive from living for others. He prays to God that he will not die before doing something kind; he is baffled that anyone could enjoy killing; he longs for sexual purity and (importantly) he remains chaste. Very unlike Tolstoy himself in the Caucasus. Where Olenin differs from the later heroes – such as Pierre, Levin or the Nekhlyudov of Resurrection – is in his abandonment of the quest. After all, he is not elevated by his sojourn among the Cossacks. He merely knows himself a little better and trusts himself a little less. ‘He no longer promised himself a new life. He loved Maryanka more than before and now knew that she could never love him.’7
But Olenin is not the only character in the story. In some ways, he is the least important figure in it. Yeroshka’s full-bodied and illogical materialism is given as much weight as Olenin’s vaguely ‘spiritual’ yearnings. In fact, there is much in the exuberant life-acceptance of Yeroshka which is actually closer to the later Tolstoy than Olenin’s Schopenhauerian melancholy.
Soviet readings of The Cossacks, with their laborious emphasis on ‘the people’, are only half right. If the story has a point, it is not to show the superiority of the common people over the moral degeneracy of the nobility, so much as to assert the overriding, and really amoral, power of Great Creating Nature. Olenin, walking in the woods near the spot where he and Yeroshka had startled a deer, feels at first that being in the country is just impossible: the day is already hot, and he and his dog are covered in mosquitoes. But then, with almost Hindu detachment, he resigns himself to being eaten alive by insects ‘and strangely enough by midday this sensation even became pleasant to him’. He goes on to have the highly ‘ecological’ idea that
these myriads of insects went so well with the wild, with the monstrosity of rich vegetation, with this dark verdure, with this odorous hot air, with these little rivulets of turbid water, everywhere oozing from the Terek and gurgling beneath the overhanging leaves that what had before seemed to him terrible, unbearable, now became positively pleasant.8
Like the Ancient Mariner, ravished even at the sight of the ‘thousand thousand crawling things’, Olenin gives a blessing. It is his vision of nature, the whole pulsating world of it, which makes him think that it is absurd to live purely for himself. In a very few pages, which could only have been penned by Tolstoy, he has moved from irritation at mosquito-bites to self-dedication in pursuit of the good. As well as being one of the most beautiful chapters in The Cossacks, it is also central to a proper understanding of Tolstoy himself, as a man, as an artist, as a thinker. It will always be tempting when he starts to condemn the things of this world to set up a contrast between the moralist and that ‘crude biological assertion of life which is not beyond but simply outside any moral categories’. But it is a dichotomy which we draw to make sense of what cannot, properly, be made sense of: that is, Tolstoy’s capacity to tap, or to appear to tap, the very forces of nature itself. And this he does both in the later doctrinal writings, as well as in the earlier stories. It is not so much a contrast between Tolstoy’s ideas and his life-acceptance, as it is a sense of hierarchy. Olenin being bitten by mosquitoes suddenly feels himself to be part of the living organism of nature: not a Russian nobleman or the relation of this or that grandee, but just a creature, like the deer and the mosquito. In the Tolstoyan scale of values, this is a life-enhancing thought. ‘It’s all one what I might be – an animal such as any other over whom the grass will grow and nothing more, or a frame in which has been set a part of the one deity – all the same, it is necessary to live in the best way.’ We would spoil Tolstoy if we tried to suggest that his life and work were not riven with inconsistencies, but this humility before life itself, this sense of existence having a divine significance, is one of the recurrent possessions of his genius. ‘Suddenly, it was as if the sun had shone into his soul.’
It is in this light that we read the love interest in The Cossacks. It is fascinating, from a biographical point of view. Olenin, it is hinted, has a ‘past’, but it is one which he leaves behind in Moscow with his drinking pals and his gambling debts. By the time he reaches the Caucasus, his chastity has become an object of remark to his fellow officers. While Lukashka climbs in and out of windows and evidently enjoys Maryanka’s favours, and while Yeroshka is happily confident that there is nothing sinful in wenching, Olenin is coy and restrained. Occasionally, he makes a pass at Maryanka but so much as holding her hand produces in him feelings of bashful self-reproach. He knows that he cannot appreciate her beauty in the same pure way that he loves the mountains and the misty mornings and the forests. He is ferociously jealous of Lukashka. He loves Maryanka not just with his mind but with his whole being. But in the end he drives away and she does not even look up at him as he passes in the cart.
In an earlier version of the story, Lukashka took to the hills leaving Maryanka free to marry Olenin, which she did. In the passages of Tolstoy’s diary on which the novel is based, the contrasts are even starker. Yeroshka is plainly Tolstoy’s old friend Yepishka, who gave him the idea for the book. And in his rapture at the beauties of nature, his desire to be good, his detestation of superficial city life, his Romantic fondness for Cossack customs, costumes and language, there is an obvious overlap between the two cadets, Lev Nikolayevich and Olenin, the Lion and the Fawn. But in real life, the Lion bedded almost as many Caucasian women as he shot wild boar and he spent the latter part of his year as a cadet being treated for suspected syphilis.
In other words, The Cossacks in its final version was an exercise in laundering the past. By the time he had finished it, he must have begun to wonder what, if any, was the true version of events. The novel is so much more vivid than the diary. When the trick worked, art provided Tolstoy with a highly satisfying method of dealing with his darker memories. But the diary, with its reminders of how he had actually behaved, and what he might actually be like, could not be discarded or destroyed. He wanted it there. His obsessive reperusal of it was perhaps less like picking an old wound than an act of wondering. What was this thing conscience which was so powerfully at work in him from time to time? In part, it was a symptom that he was not at ease with the physical world, not in harmony with things as Yepishka had been. Before the grass grew over his head, Tolstoy longed to resolve the difficulty. In his art, he could manage the various sides to his nature by parcelling it out to different characters. But in life, he wistfully yearned for innocence. When the time came to marry, he wanted to present a washed, an innocent self, to his beloved. But at the same time, he feared marriage, precisely because he knew that he was not an innocent and that what he took into the marriage chamber would be a body considerably less innocent than that of Olenin.
Three years b
efore, on January 1, 1859, Tolstoy had inscribed in his diary, ‘I must get married this year – or not at all.’ The twelvemonth passed, and Tolstoy had remained a bachelor. Considering his sister’s unhappy experience of the married state with their cousin Valeryan, and his brother Sergey’s sensible decision to opt out of the marriage game and live as a gipsy, it is a wonder that Tolstoy felt this pressing need for matrimony. It was not as though he lived in society. His visits to Moscow or St. Petersburg were either to family or old friends, or to writers and intellectuals whose attitude to marriage was by bourgeois standards loose and irregular. Nor was it as though he lacked either for emotional adventures, nor for the opportunity to have women. He had considered proposing marriage to the daughter of the poet Tyutchev, to either of the daughters of his friend Lvov, and to a number of others. Tyutchev’s daughter, Yekaterina, would, he believed, have accepted him, but he detected in her acquiescence rather than ardour. ‘She would have accepted me with studious coldness.’
One might ask – and some of his cynical St. Petersburg friends would have asked – ‘What’s wrong with that?’ But Tolstoy was looking for something more in a wife. He appears to have been looking for love, what is more, an absolving love which would restore him once again to the condition of his childhood innocence. At the same time, to judge from his censure of Tyutcheva, he wanted someone who would share his highly charged erotic proclivities.
He found one near at home in the person of Aksinya Bazykina, a twenty-three-year-old married peasant with whom he had enjoyed a passionate and long-standing liaison since 1858. ‘I’m in love as never before in my life,’ he recorded that first summer. ‘She’s very pretty. . . . Today in the big wood. I’m a fool. A beast. Her neck is red from the sun.’9 It was very usual for Russian landlords to have sexual relations with their peasants. Tolstoy’s father had at least one illegitimate peasant-child, serving as a coachman at Yasnaya Polyana. It would seem as though Tolstoy himself had feelings for Aksinya which went beyond those of lust. With others, over the years, lust flared up. But Aksinya was different. ‘Continue to see Aksinya exclusively,’ he writes a year later, in a self-contradictory paragraph which weighs up the desirability of the Lvov daughters. Before going abroad, in 1860, he had risen at five in the morning and gone in search of her in the village. ‘I looked for her. It’s no longer the feelings of a stag but of a husband for a wife.’10
