The Cossacks (3 page)

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 the
merrymaking 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 ones have been hanged, deported, or imprisoned at home.”
⁸
His polemical engines charged instead into a campaign on behalf of the Dukhobors, an ascetic communal sect that refused to bear arms and, like Tolstoy himself, preached nonresistance to evil. A brutal initiative urged by the Czar had exiled the group to the Caucasus, where at the government’s behest bands of Cossack horsemen surrounded the sectarians, whipped and maimed them, and pillaged their houses. Tolstoy was outraged, and in a letter to the Czar protested that such religious persecutions were “the shame of Russia.” That among the agents of persecution were the selfsame Cossack daredevils about whom he had written so enchantingly forty years before will perhaps not escape notice.

And again: never mind! The young Tolstoy is here possessed less by social commitment than by the sensory. His visionary lyricism exults in Maryanka’s strong legs, and in the mountains, woods, and sparkling rivers of the Caucasus. The Caucasus is his motive and his message. Natural beauty is his lure. Tolstoy’s supremacy in capturing heat, weather, dust, the thick odors of the vineyard, culminates in a voluptuous passage:

The scene is Edenic, bursting with fecundity, almost biblical in its overflowingness. Scents and juices spill out of every phrase: it is Tolstoy’s sensuous genius at its ripest. Olenin will return to Moscow, yes; but his eyes have been dyed by the grape harvest, and he will never again see as he once saw, before the Caucasus, before Maryanka, before the mountains. The novel’s hero is the primordial earth itself, civilization’s dream of the pastoral. The old Tolstoy—that crabbed puritanical sermonizing septuagenarian who wrote
What Is Art?
, a tract condemning the pleasures of the senses—might wish to excoriate the twenty-something author of
The Cossacks
. The old Tolstoy is the apostle of renunciation. But the young Tolstoy, who opens Olenin to the intoxications of the natural world, and to the longings of love, means to become, at least for a time, an apostle of desire.

CYNTHIA OZICK
’
S
acclaimed works of fiction include
The Shawl, The Puttermesser Papers
, and
Heir to the Glimmering World
. Her most recent essay collection,
Quarrel & Quandary
, won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

NOTES

1.
Tolstoy
, by Henri Troyat. A biography translated from the French by Nancy Amphoux. Doubleday, 1967, p. 116.

2.
Ibid., p. 123.

3.
Ibid., p. 284 (the critic was one Annenkov, writing in the
St. Petersburg Review
).

4.
Isaac Babel; 1920 Diary
. Edited by Carol J. Avins, translated from the Russian by H. T. Willetts. Yale University Press, 1995, p. 14.

5.
Ibid., p. 61.

6.
Troyat, p. 284.

7.
Ibid., p. 285.

8.
Ibid., p. 564.

Moscow lies silent. From time to time screeching wheels echo in the wintry streets. Lights no longer burn in the windows, and the street-lamps have gone out. The ringing of church bells rolls over the sleeping city, warning of the approach of dawn. The streets are empty. The narrow runners of a nighttime sleigh mix sand and snow as the driver pulls over to a corner and dozes off, waiting for a fare. An old woman walks past on her way to church, where candles, sparse and red, are already burning asymmetrically, throwing their light onto the golden icon stands. The workers of the city are waking after the long winter night and preparing to go to work.

But fashionable young gentlemen are still out on the town.

Light flickers illegally from behind the closed shutters in one of Chevalier’s windows. A carriage, sleighs, and cabs are huddling in a line by the entrance. A troika is waiting to leave. A porter, bundled in a heavy coat, stands crouching behind the corner of the house as if hiding from someone.

“Why do they keep blathering, on and on?” a footman sitting in the hall at Chevalier’s wonders, his face drawn. “And always when it’s my shift!”

From the brightly lit room next to the hall come the voices of three young men. One is small, neat, thin, and ugly, and gazes with kind, weary eyes at his friend, who is about to leave on a journey. The second, a tall man, is twiddling his watch fob as he lies on a sofa next to a table covered with the remains of a banquet and empty wine bottles. The man about to leave on a journey is wearing a new fur jacket and is pacing up and down the room. From time to time he stops to crack an almond with his thick, strong fingers, whose nails are meticulously clean. For some reason he is continually smiling. A fire burns in his eyes. He speaks passionately, waving his arms. But it is clear that he is searching for words, and that the words which come to him seem
inadequate to express what has moved him. He is constantly smiling. “Now I can tell you everything!” he says. “It’s not that I am trying to justify myself, but I want you, of all people, to understand me as well as I understand myself—I don’t want you to see things the way a vulgar person would. You say that I have done her wrong!” He turns to the small man, who is gazing at him with kindly eyes.

“Yes, you have done her wrong,” the small, ugly man answers, and it seems that even more kindness and weariness are reflected in his eyes.

“I know your point of view,” the man about to leave continues. “You feel that there is as much happiness in being the object of love as there is in loving—and that if you attain it once, it’s enough for a lifetime!”

“Oh yes, quite enough, my dear fellow! More than enough!” the small, ugly man says with conviction, opening his eyes wide and then closing them.

“But why not experience love oneself?” the man setting out on a journey says. He becomes pensive for a moment and then looks at his friend as if pitying him. “Why not love? I don’t mean ‘Why not be loved?’ No, being loved is a misfortune! It’s a misfortune because you feel guilty that you cannot return the same feelings, that you cannot reciprocate. Lord!” He waves his hand disparagingly. “If only this could all happen reasonably. But it seems to have a will of its own. It’s as if I had made her fall in love with me. I know that’s what you think—I know you do. Don’t deny it! But will you believe me if I tell you that of all the bad and foolish things I have done in my life, this is the only one I do not and cannot repent of! I did not lie to her, not at the beginning and not later! I really thought I had finally fallen in love, but then I realized that the whole thing was an unintentional lie, that one cannot love that way. So I simply could not continue. And yet she did. Is it my fault I couldn’t? What was I to do?”

“Well, it’s all over now!” his friend said, lighting a cigar to chase away his drowsiness. “But one thing is clear: you have not yet loved, and you don’t know what love is!”

The young man about to set out on a journey clasped his head in his hands, again wanting to express something, but unable to find words. “You are right! I have never loved! But I have a desire within me
to love, a burning desire! Yet the question remains: Does such a love exist? Somehow everything is so incomplete. But what’s the point of even talking about it! I have made a mess of my life, a complete mess! But you’re right, it’s all over now. I feel that I am about to embark on a new life!”

“A new life that you’ll also make a mess of,” the man on the sofa cut in.

But his friend did not hear him. “I am sad to be leaving but also happy,” he continued. “Though I have no idea why I am sad.” He began to speak about himself, not noticing that the others did not find the topic as interesting as he did. A person is never so much an egoist as in moments of rapture. He feels that at such times there is nothing more splendid or interesting than himself.

A young house serf wrapped in a scarf and wearing a heavy coat came into the room. “Dmitri Andreyevich, the driver says he cannot wait any longer—the horses have been harnessed since midnight, and it’s already four in the morning!”

Dmitri Andreyevich looked at his serf Vanyusha. In the serf’s coarse scarf, his felt boots, and his drowsy face, he heard the voice of another life calling to him—a life full of hardship, deprivation, and work.

“Yes, we must leave! Farewell!” he said, patting the front of his jacket to see if any of the hooks were unclasped. The others urged him to tip the driver to wait a little longer, but he put on his hat and stood for a moment in the middle of the room. The friends kissed good-bye—once, twice, then stopped and kissed a third time. He walked up to the table, emptied a glass, took the small, ugly man by the hand, and blushing said, “I must speak my mind before I go…. I must be straightforward with you, because I love you dearly, my friend…. You are the one who loves her, aren’t you? I sensed it from the beginning … no?”

“Yes, I love her,” his friend replied, smiling even more gently. “And perhaps …”

“Excuse me, but I have been ordered to put out the candles,” one of the sleepy waiters said, hearing the last words of the conversation and wondering why gentlemen always kept saying the same things. “Who
should I make the bill out to? To you, sir?” he asked, turning to the tall man, knowing very well that he was the one who was to pay.

“Yes, to me,” the tall man said. “How much do I owe?”

“Twenty-six rubles.”

The tall man thought for an instant but said nothing and slipped the bill into his pocket.