Leo Tolstoy – The Cossacks

The Cossacks is an early work by Leo Tolstoy, finished in 1863 to pay off his gambling debts. This, I suppose, makes him a real Russian writer of that period. (Dostoevsky’s The Gambler came out three years later). It’s Tolstoy’s last novel before he wrote War and Peace, so one reason to read it is to consider what kind of leaps he made between this work’s relative mediocrity and that work’s titanic majesty.

The Cossacks tells the tale of one Olenin, a rich young man without parents who joins the army, partly to pay his debts, and partly to find himself. These details are largely true to Tolstoy’s own life. We begin with Olenin in Moscow, having a farewell party with his friends. He then goes to the Caucasus, meets the Cossack people who live there, falls in love with a girl, Maryana, and has to deal with a rival claimant for her love, the Cossack Lukashka.

In this novel, in embryo, is much of what we think of as Tolstoy as a writer and his concerns. On the first page, just as we learn that the noblemen are having their party, we see that the working people and the religious are heading to work and church – a contrast between idle and serious lives that he was only to feel more strongly about as he grew older. There is also the contrast between town and country which we will recall from Anna Karenina, where Levin’s most authentic experiences are all on his estate.

Tolstoy is most visible in Olenin’s obsession with living well, however. Olenin prefigures characters (or authorial stand-ins, depending on how generous we are feeling) like Levin and Pierre who are given large chunks of their novels to ask more or less the same questions and receive only slightly different answers. “I’ve made a mess, made a mess of my life. But now it’s all over, you’re right. And I feel that a new life is beginning.” This is what Olenin says as he leaves his friends. Already, we can see a kind of religious sensibility that it might surprise us to learn was always with Tolstoy – later revelations in the book emphasise cleanliness (Olenin complains of “filth”), falsehood, and other such charged terms.

What makes Olenin more interesting, or at least surprising, compared to the characters from later works, is that he manages to try more ideas than they do, and it is less clear which ones the author considers right. As he goes to the Caucasus to find himself, Olenin does not indulge in binging or cards, instead spending most of his time with an old Cossack hunter, or else hunting alone. Exactly halfway through the book, Olenin has a revelation while in the forest – he feels “causeless happiness and love for everything”, coming to see his purpose as total selflessness. (Even before reading Schopenhauer, we can see how receptive Tolstoy would be to his ideas). After his revelation, Olenin tries to do some good deeds, but finds that nobody wants him to do anything (which seems to me an extremely rare example of a situation where Tolstoy manages to laugh at himself).

In any case, Olenin’s new philosophy does not really last. “Happiness is the only thing that matters: he who is happy is right” he declares upon deciding that he will attempt to pursue the Cossack girl, Maryana. Rather than do as little damage as possible, he soon manages to do quite a lot.

But I should not exaggerate. The Cossacks is a book that is surprisingly light on violence and action. In fact, the author whose work it most reminded me of was Turgenev, with whom Tolstoy had an on-off friendship and who, as the older writer, may still have been a significant influence at this stage of Tolstoy’s career. As is the case with most of Turgenev’s works, The Cossacks is basically just a gooey love story where nothing happens. There are also a lot of nature descriptions of the sort that remind me of Turgenev’s famous Sportsman’s Sketches / Hunter’s Album (Zapiski Okhotnika).

This is one of the things that is most disagreeable with the novel, actually. It’s striking how little violence there is. The raids and expeditions Olenin undertakes are mentioned rather than described (as they are in Tolstoy’s short story, “The Raid”, for example). Here we might find a difference between the current and later Tolstoy which reveals the former’s weakness. What was happening in the Caucasus in the early 19th century and before was a brutal, at times genocidal (ask the Circassians, whose clothing, worn by everyone in the novel, seems the only sign they still exist), campaign of imperial conquest. Tolstoy could be critical of war in general, as in The Sevastopol Sketches, but at this stage, he seems to have struggled to see into the eyes of the victims in the way that he did in Hadji Murat.

There are two deaths in The Cossacks. The first, is an “Abrek”, or Chechen. He is killed early on by the Cossack Lukashka. His things are stolen, and then his body is ransomed. One of the best scenes concerns the meeting of Lukashka and the dead man’s brother, who comes to collect him. Here, for a brief moment, we see the kind of hatred that senseless war provokes. But then it disappears. And in any case, it is the Cossack who is guilty of the murder, not a Russian.

The portrayal of the Cossacks here is something we might compare to two other works – Gogol’s Taras Bulba and Babel’s Red Army Cavalry or the diary it grew from. Tolstoy’s Cossacks are primarily interesting to him for providing another way of living. Whether this is the hunter Uncle Yeroshka and his connection with nature, or the carefree Lukashka and naively coquettish Maryanka, these people are living a life that appeals to that permanent longing within Tolstoy’s breast to live more closely to the world, and more innocently. (A key intellectual influence on him, early on, was Rousseau – and Cossacks here are by and large functioning as noble savages). As a result of this focus, we see the Cossacks in environments other than those of the other two books – on the fields, farming, or at home.

In Red Army Cavalry, the Cossacks are essentially epic heroes. They lack interiority and are all action. Even though there is little violence here, Lukashka still demonstrates a similarly simple morality. When Olenin tries to make him think about the consequences of killing the Chechen’s brother, Lukashka’s response is suitably uncaring. “So what? It happens! Our brothers get killed, too, don’t they?” It turns out that limited education is not necessarily a route to moral enlightenment – the Cossacks here are notably not playing the role of peasants in Tolstoy’s later works. They are just happier for their ignorance. As a result of all this, it is perhaps inevitable that the story ends the way it does, with a kind of reminder that such an ‘ignorance is bliss’ morality is widespread in the Caucasus and Olenin is the stranger with strange ideas.

Gogol’s Cossacks in Taras Bulba are also depicted as a kind of powerful, elemental, violent force. (Tolstoy’s own are compared to animals regularly). But Gogol’s aim, at least partly, seems to have been the justification of the annexation of Cossack-controlled territory into the Russian Empire, and the assimilation of the Cossacks to the Russians through a shared religion.

Tolstoy does little of this myth-making – the difference between the Russians and the Cossacks is a key point, made quite powerfully at the end when they essentially all close ranks against him. In fact, Tolstoy’s novel challenges a narrative of easy integration by making the Cossacks seem closer to the other peoples of the Caucasus than to the Russians. This is primarily done through language. There are Cossack words that Tolstoy needs to explain in the footnotes, alongside other Caucasus-specific language like “aul” (village), which is generally left untranslated in English versions and would seem just as strange to a Russian reader sitting in one of the two capitals. Then there is the way that many of the Cossacks are fluent in Tatar and other languages of the region, while Olenin is left looking confused on the sidelines. In other words, the novel presents a spectrum of identities, ranging from Russian to Chechen, with the Cossacks sitting uneasily in the middle, without making any real argument either for or against their assimilation into Russia. In fact, we could even say they seem a pure people who would be spoiled by Russia – in this limited regard, we might even suggest that the novel is anti-colonial.

Overall, however, the novel just isn’t that great. The characters are not really “alive” in the same way that they are in other Tolstoy works. We might say the Cossacks are vivid – but I would say, instead, that they are caricatures every bit as silly as Tolstoy’s peasants. And whereas the peasants are only part of, say, Anna Karenina or War and Peace, here the Cossacks are essentially the only characters. In other words, we are surrounded by silly stereotypes.

Another problem is one of balance. In the later novels, we have a huge cast of characters to enable an equally complex range of comparisons. Levin and Vronsky, Pierre and Bolkonsky, and so on and so forth. Here we only really have Olenin, with Lukashka a largely simple figure for a foil. This makes the story too simple. Coupled with the equally simple characters, it’s just not that exciting to read, as if it’s an episode from a longer novel, not a novel in itself.

Somehow between this novel being published in 1863 and the beginning of War and Peace’s serialisation in 1865, Tolstoy leapt forward as a writer in a few key ways. The first is that he learned how to write real-seeming characters better, and in great numbers. There is the odd detail in The Cossacks that really made me see the people, but they are rare rather than general. (“A third, in a new-looking sheepskin jacket, is pacing about the room, stopping now and then to crack an almond in fingers that are rather thick and strong, but with clean nails, and keeps smiling at something; his eyes and face are burning” – for a first view of Olenin, this really does tell us a lot). The second thing is that he chose a far more interesting story than just a man falling in love with a Cossack girl. In fact, in War and Peace, he pretty much chose every story under the sun.

With a few exceptions like Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy’s work gains its awesome power from accumulation. The Cossacks accumulates nothing because its characters don’t seem too real, and it is too focused. By contrast, in Hadji Murat, Tolstoy learned how to use the vignette to tell a huge story, or give a hint of it, in a much smaller space. This, it seems to me, is what made Babel’s Red Army Cavalry possible. But in 1863 Tolstoy had a long way to go before he learned how to write like that.

Historical note: What exactly Cossacks are is complicated and just as uncertain as their placement on the spectrum of identities within Tolstoy’s book. This warrior people, partly Turkic and Slavic in origin, have now largely been assimilated into the dominant ethnic groups of the areas where they historically operated – what is today’s southern Russia and Ukraine. Both Ukraine and Russia today claim Cossack inheritance as their own exclusive right, but as is typical with such historical claims, the truth is that both nations probably have to share the harvest. Good luck trying to make that happen…

Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative – Jane Alison

In our stories, we usually have “the dramatic arc”, where “a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides.” Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative asks how far a certain fixation with that idea might be holding us back by proposing, in an accessible way, some other forms that our fiction might take. In this, she serves us all by reminding us that the novel takes its name from the same root as novelty, and that if novels ever seem tired and staid, there always remain ways of recovering that same sense of newness / excitement.

Alison begins by noting that when we talk about narrative, it’s typically in visual terms. Northrop Frye is quoted as saying that “we hear or listen to a narrative, but when we grasp a writer’s total pattern we “see” what he means”. Narratives are generally experienced as images -or perhaps that’s how we explain them. Either way, Alison continues by suggesting that if readers experience narratives in this way, a writer could consciously choose to “design” a narrative with a particular shape in mind other than the typical arc. So far, so reasonable.

But why would the writer bother? Alison’s argument, built up through a liberal use of examples from longer and shorter fictions, is that we need different forms for different stories or ideas, or at least for different focuses. In a narrative about grief, must we always tell the story of overcoming, with its arching trajectory of shock and mourning to recovery? Or may we not, instead, focus on how grief works by showing how it ripples through the lives of those affected like a shockwave? In such a narrative there may be overcoming, but the focus is instead on variety and the writer as a kind of clinician, identifying human frailties and strengths.

From a basic toolkit of sentence and paragraph length and structure, the use of colour and any differences between story time and textual time, and other texturing such as repeated images, phrases, and scenes, Alison describes a wide variety of narrative patterns. There are “waves”, which are when the narrative is governed by the principle of symmetry, with scenes at the end mirroring those at the beginning. There are “wavelets”, which take this kind of mirroring and repeat it on a paragraph level. “Meanders” make use of digressions to force us to look around and refocus our attention on the scenery, while “spirals” advance chronologically while always looking back.

“Radials or explosions” are of the type I described above concerning grief – situations where everything looks into the centre, or where everything in the story is trying to pull away from some central point but cannot.  With “Networks and Cells”, “Instead of following a line of story, your brain draws the lines, makes connections.” This is Sebald, where you do the work of identifying meaning. Finally, there are “fractals”, where the meaning is the narrator’s searching for meaning rather than the plot itself, and “tsunamis”, where Alison could only find one example, which in any case seems something of a hybrid approach.

The examples are all contemporary, with writers I knew – such as Sebald and Carver – joined by others I was less familiar with, such Lin Tao and Susan Minot. Arguably, many of the storytelling structures are older than this – we have been disobeying Aristotle pretty much since he first put stylus to wax (or whatever he used). But to criticise the book on this point is to miss the idea that these forms are practically essential for telling certain stories that are increasingly important to us modern readers. Sebald writes differently, sure, but we also needed the horrors of the 20th century to really get to a point where we needed Sebald and his style – and felt the need to write about memory at all as a kind of moral duty.

Then there is David Foster Wallace’s digressive style and his ambition in his unfinished The Pale King to write a novel about boredom and working in tax that somehow was uplifting rather than miserable. Within Meander, Spiral, Explode we also have Susan Minot’s Lust, which uses a fragmentary style and shifting narrative voice to draw readers into the breakdown of self as a young woman’s sexual encounters get the better of her. Yes, Schnitzler’s Fraulein Else has a similar plot, but Minot’s work has a different focus and a different form to make that focus possible.

As an argument about the importance of finding the right form, and as a guide to some of the forms available, Meander, Spiral, Explode is fun and helpful. It would be hard for a writer to read it and not feel at least a little inspiration on how to write next. But there is one point where the book is arguably a little weaker. (I will discount the cataloguing aspect – for example, why “tsunami” has only one example, why “waves” seem fairly unrecognisable to someone who has spent much time at the sea, and so on – all this is unimportant).

The main criticism is one we might detect ourselves from the examples used. With one or two exceptions, we are primarily looking at shorter fiction – short stories, novellas, and short novels. The problem with all the patterns Alison proposes is that they struggle with being sustained into a longer work. There is only so far that we can sit with Sebald before we get tired, given that his shorter fictions in Campo Santo are just as effective as those in The Rings of Saturn, with only a slight adjustment for the power that accumulation brings in the latter. We might circle around the killing at the centre of Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold for a hundred or so pages, but not for much longer without any forward movement. To look at other examples not given in the text, the guilt narratives of Grass’s Cat and Mouse and Bernhard’s The Loser are all short too, barely scraping two hundred pages in some editions.

It’s no surprise then, that the narratives that are longest in Meander, Spiral, Explode are also the ones where the arc is still central. We can talk about the mirroring of scenes at the beginning and end of Roth’s Goodbye Columbus, for example, but this is only a feature of a narrative that otherwise is a typical story of a relationship, from its beginning to its collapse. Cloud Atlas, the novel at the centre of the “tsunami” chapter, is huge – but it’s also six narratives in one.

This is not to suggest that patterns are bad, but rather that many struggle with an extension into longer works. We get bored, run out of energy, or even – most dangerously – have our moment of illumination too soon and put the book down, having understood what the author had in mind and lacking any comparably powerful plot to carry us on. Even if the pattern is delivering a moral message – and Alison is to be commended for showing through her examples that experimentation does not have to come at the expense of a sense of right and wrong – a pattern whose shape is determined too soon can lead to reader’s attention sagging. At least with a plot, the author is in charge, letting us know when we are in the beginning, middle, or end. If we want the whole thing, we have to follow them all the way.

I have been considering some of the problems in Meander, Spiral, Explode from a completely different angle this year, within the context of my re-reading of War and Peace. One of the great mysteries of that work is how it manages to keep the reader reading when it is so long. I am now reading, on and off, Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad, and will then read his Life and Fate, which together are probably at least as long as War and Peace and in the case of the latter, apparently nearly as good. With Stalingrad, however, I am struggling and was trying to understand why.

One reason is that Tolstoy does something that Grossman, at present, does not – he structures his book as a series of novellas with linked characters. We might describe one part of War and Peace as Natasha and Andrey’s romance, and another as Pierre’s experience of wartime Moscow. Other things happen in the parts, but each has a distinctive identity. Stalingrad is, after four hundred pages, just an accumulation – of people, primarily, and a little bit of plot. That makes it both harder to follow and less engaging. People might have a backstory, but they do not have much of a story in the present that drives the text forward. Instead, the only thing that does that is the historical context.

Because each section of Tolstoy’s epic is a kind of novella in itself, with an arc-like structure, the work remains engaging, providing a little bit of that same satisfaction that a shorter, complete novel would. We can say that War and Peace reaches the limit of the arc and has to adjust by breaking it into little arcs, just as some of the narratives in Meander, Spiral, Explode reach the length limit of their own patterns. The really interesting question for authors is how you can expand the patterns of Alison’s book to incorporate them into longer works, for I am sure that the selection here is only just the beginning of what kind of structures and forms we can write into our stories.

So, overall, I found Alison’s book an exciting and pleasant read, even with the length caveat. It certainly made me want to go away and think about my and others’ structuring decisions with a more architectural eye. And it also gave me a raft of new authors I might want to read. Really, in a book like this, that’s what success is all about.

Enduring Enduring Love

Enduring Love has a justly famous opening, bringing together a group of strangers as they attempt in vain to avert a hot air balloon catastrophe in the English countryside. It then shifts focus to become a strange book about the obsessive relationship between a young religious gay man, Jed Parry, and our narrator, Joe Rose, middle-aged and married (to a woman, Clarissa). I had read McEwan’s Atonement before, so I was on the lookout for narrative games, and was convinced I had spotted a twist only to discover that there was no twist after all.

The problem with the book is that it seems rather disorganised. With a title mentioning love you have a razor-sharp thematic focus right from the beginning, and love is complex enough that it can sustain the lengthiest of works. (Including a different Clarissa, in fact.) Enduring Love, however, is not a long work. Yet it seems burdened by its title, forced into discussing love, and forced by the thought of love’s range into talking about all too much. It’s wide in scope, rather than deep. Love is one word, but it can take many forms, each of which is rich enough for a story.

Instead, speaking broadly, we have: the romantic love of Joe for Clarissa and vice versa, the obsessive love of Jed for Joe, Jed’s love of God, Joe’s love of science, Clarissa’s love for Keats, the love of the widow of one of the men who tried to stop the balloon for her husband, who nevertheless she suspects had cheated on him, the love of a trio of drug addicts for one another, reflections on the love of parents for children, and so on.

In other words, there is too much here. The main focus, Jed’s obsession for Joe (and its contrast to Joe’s relationship with Clarissa), is not given enough development despite being the dominant part of the book. The tonics, questions of moral responsibility associated with the hot air balloon catastrophe (is Joe to blame for the victim’s death?), and the contrast of reason (science) and emotions (God, faith), are too faintly drawn.

Then there is the matter of the plot. Enduring Love is a book where things actually happen. But it is also a painfully real novel. It is the most upper-middle-class English story I have ever read. It’s just about people who have nice picnics with things from Waitrose or occasionally Fortnum and Mason, who have nice houses and nice friends. The upper middle class. My people, (by birth and education, if not always by inclination). So, when we have attempted assassinations by hired killers in busy restaurants, or calling up old friends to help us buy handguns from drug dealers, there’s something that seems more laughable than congruent. The opening scene is unlikely yet believable, the rest is just silly. (And as the action is being driven by characters, we can hardly say this fits into the whole ordered universe vs randomness theme, either).

There’s a fundamental tension in modern middle-class life, it seems to me, which causes problems for novelists. In the good old days, love plots were typically structured as being against society, and brought readers on side by the truth of the love against society’s fakeness. Now, with scant exception, we can love who we want, and though we may occasionally face some disapproval, in western Europe for the dominant social groupings we cannot create nearly enough drama to make a story. Instead, the novelist of average talent or below who wants to write about passionate love and make a story of it, is practically obliged to write about something like obsession.

Obsession, however, places the lover outside of society. It’s inherently less interesting because it reflects little back on our world. Its lessons stop as soon as we think about what makes obsession happen, patting ourselves on the back at the obvious conclusion that, for the example, we must be an atomised society to cause such madness in its members. In Enduring Love, Jed is not integrated in society. He is a loner, living at home, with no family and no job. Through his obsessiveness, he gradually disintegrates Joe’s position in society, spoiling his marriage and work as he draws him into his “love”. Indeed, Jed even does a good job of disintegrating Joe’s mind.

Now there are thoughts here that are interesting, like the way that Joe’s conviction that Jed is stalking him and dangerous is shared by nobody, so that we see as he falls away from social groups just how fragile our position in society can be. But again, there’s rather too much going on. We don’t need attempted murder to make these points. While I wouldn’t want to stress the point too much, there is a sense for me that in a serious book using shocking action like this is almost like the novelist is saying that they don’t trust themselves to hold my attention otherwise. (Which is probably true of this book).

I felt like Iris Murdoch struggled with a similar problem in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, which shares with Enduring Love its focus on people who I went to school with or who my mother occasionally has round for tea. Murdoch’s novel seems at first to be the story of a demonic figure who manipulates a group of friends to ruin their relationships, as if by magic. Using words like “haunted,” “demons”, “materialises”, Murdoch creates an atmosphere or uneasy horror in spite of an essentially extremely bougie London setting. Yet when the time comes to have consequential action, those moments that would prove that the demon were truly a hellish visitant, Murdoch refuses to allow anything like that before finally dismissing the mystery at the story’s close. Meanwhile, McEwan rushes to jump the proverbial shark. Neither approach is entirely satisfactory. The one brings in the unreal and surrenders to the real. The other seems real, but refuses to abide by reality’s rules.

In general, I suppose I just find my people boring. I try to be a well-behaved writer and pay attention, but so far as I am aware there has been not one interesting story taking place around me in that circle in all the years of my life. (My time in Russia is another story). No cheating, no problems which are not immediately thrown under the rug, pure bourgeois stability, punctuated occasionally by death or mental decline, complaining over inheritance, but nothing more than that. That’s not to say I cannot write stories from the material I’m given. But the stuff of old novels, society scandal and the like, is essentially absent. The problem, one of them anyway, is that in Enduring Love McEwan doesn’t seem to trust either himself or his readers. The novel could work just as well as a slow burn, a gradual breakdown in sanity, a growing sense of menace. Instead, McEwan feels the need here to have every chapter be dramatic like a cheap thriller, to show love from so many angles, so that it’s far too busy a work to be an interesting one.

That’s not to say that there are not things I admired in the work. One part I liked is the novel’s ending, not what it says so much as how it says it. As with Lolita, where if we want to know Lo’s true fate we must read the parts where Humbert Humbert’s narration stops rather carefully, here too we have an appendix that gives more closure to everyone’s story than the section of Joe’s narrative does, while concealing its actual significance under the appearance of an article in a medical journal.

There is also the hard-to-dismiss fact that the book does work hard to establish tension, and as novelists are supposed to make their works entertaining, this is a good place to learn it. The first chapter is not that dull conversation business that animates the start of War and Peace, for example. (/s) Here, it’s pure energy, suggesting that we needn’t care about characters if the story is exciting enough. And as for that beginning, it’s also a good example of a way to draw out a morally complex theme from a conceivable real-world situation. It’s just that McEwan, for mysterious reasons, chooses to leave this theme in the background rather than the foreground.

Overall, your blogger shrugs his shoulders. I felt this was a busy book, with uninteresting characters and a silly plot. It was a contemporary story – I could tell at once how much the work was written under the sensible eyes (and scalpel) of a sensible editor, or even the ghost of one, tutting at the thought of an opening that did not grip, of anything that might lose the reader’s attention and do something so irrelevant as add depth to themes. Yet unlike the contemporary fiction of people like Sally Rooney or Patricia Lockwood, where even if I have my complaints I still am excited by the opportunities for reflecting our changed relation with the world under the effects of an ever more pervasive technology, I did not feel McEwan wrote a book that was contemporary in the deeper sense of telling me something about my world which I did not already know. (A classic, of course, can be a thousand years old and still manage this). Enduring Love, instead, feels already dated. Or, to be blunt, it’s a book which apart its opening, will probably not endure.

Blog note: the recent paucity of blog posts is due to two factors. First, my bag, containing my laptop and other quite useful items like the heavily annotated books I was aiming to write about (apologies to the reader who recommended Cusk – both Transit and Kudos are gone but there might still be a post on Outline), was stolen on the train. Second, I was struck by inspiration and wrote the first draft of a novel in the past two months, some 110000 words. This necessarily has to take precedence over other forms of writing, and indeed living.

Anyway, should be back to slightly more regularly updates from now ish.