Tag: Cossacks

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…

Violence and Russian Nationalism in Gogol’s Taras Bulba

Of course, Gogol was a rather odd bird. He had to be, to write such curious little tales as his Nose or Overcoat, which are full of bodies and accessories doing what they aren’t supposed to do, in a city – Saint Petersburg – that seems to have a mind of its own too. But that madness, which most depressingly led him to throw the second part of Dead Souls into the fire, and then try to retrieve it from the flames, and then die, also had its darker side. For Gogol, the most famous writer of Ukrainian heritage, was also a rabid Russian nationalist lunatic who makes even Dostoevsky seem sensible by comparison. In fact, it was for reading the famous response of Nikolai Belinsky, a noted Russian liberal thinker, to Gogol’s miserably moralising hypocritical imperialist codswallop Selected Passages from Correspondence to Friends, that Dostoevsky was sentenced to exile. That, and for being in a terrorist cell. But we digress, however much Gogol would have approved.

I wanted to read Taras Bulba because it seemed the most overtly Ukrainian of Gogol’s works. Unlike the earliest works, it is not designed to sanitise and place in a display cabinet the customs of the Little Russians (as Gogol occasionally refers to them). Rather, by focusing on the Cossacks of the Zaporozhian Sech, I had expected to find in it a work that would fit just as easily into the hands of Ukrainian nationalists. I was mistaken, badly so. This is a book for our times, but not for either side of the present war. If we read it, we will find it hard not to see it as an accidental statement of the hollowness of (Russian) nationalism, and the wastefulness of war and of martial societies. But unlike Tolstoy’s brilliant anti-war Hadji Murat, it seems Gogol stumbled into this all by accident and was only half aware of what he wrote.

Plot

Taras Bulba tells the story of veteran Cossack Taras Bulba and his two children, Andrii and Ostap. It is an earlier century and the boys have returned home from study in Kiev, to their father and mother. One education has been completed, but now it is time for the real one, the one that will turn them into Cossacks, men who are comfortable only when out on the open plains or by the side of the great Dnieper, free and killing indiscriminately. For that is the one-word answer to what the book is about: violence. Taras takes his sons away from their mother after only one night at home and off they head to Zaporozhe, here a kind of travelling circus of macho manliness and bacchanalian delights.

Immediately Taras is bored. He wants violence. He is disappointed to hear that the Cossacks have agreed to stop attacking the native Tatars and tries to work out whom they can fight instead. Luckily, a rumour spreads that the Polish (the Zaporozhian Sech is nominally part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) in conjunction with the hated Jews are destroying the noble Orthodox faith of the people. Great news. The Cossacks mount up and begin a campaign of destruction and slaughter. All is going well until they begin sieging Dubno. Andrii Bulba, who in Kiev had not just learned his Latin and Greek but had also had a fling with a Polish noble’s wife, and is spotted by her again – she is trapped behind the castle’s walls – and brought into the city through a secret tunnel.

The Cossacks are bored by sitting around, waiting for the people to starve to death. Eventually, fighting breaks out, and Taras uses some of the Cossacks to draw Andrii – now a turncoat – into a forest, where he murders him for betraying his fatherland. Unfortunately, by leaving the battlefield, Taras has abandoned his men, and the battle is lost. He himself is captured but miraculously escapes. He then learns that Ostap is alive but has been taken with the other Cossacks to Warsaw, where he will be executed. With the help of a mistreated Jew, Yankel, Taras gets to Warsaw and witnesses Ostap’s execution,  to then disappear before he being caught again.

Of the Cossacks that remain at the Sech none are left of his former comrades. The new leader wants to sign a peace agreement with the Poles, but Taras has none of it. Taking a band of Cossacks for himself, he goes around the Commonwealth pillaging, before being trapped in a castle on the Dniester river, where he is burned to death by the Poles. So much for the story. The fun, as ever, begins when we get the knife out to begin the dissection.

Violence and Militarism

Some of the most spectacular passages of Taras Bulba concern “the infinite, the free, the sublime steppe” of South Ukraine where the Cossacks are free to roam on horseback and hunt and fish to their hearts’ content. But these are rarities. As a whole, the story is about war and the people who wage it. Andrii and Ostap may have been studying diligently the classics in Kiev, but as soon as they go home it’s time for a better sort of education – “the school of war.” Now, militarised societies have existed for a long time – the archetypal one, of course, is Sparta in Ancient Greece. But the Sech is different for two reasons – first, the emphasis on freedom, and secondly the tension present there.

Discipline is how wars are won. The endless drill of the Prussians and their legendary goosestep was partly what made that marshy state a great power over the course of the 18th century. The Cossacks of Taras Bulba are greedy, raucous, and have no time for order. As things go wrong during the battle at Dubno, many of the little death-vignettes that Gogol gives us show Cossacks becoming vulnerable because they get distracted by little things – here it is an adversary’s armour, ripe for the looting; there it is a desire to desecrate his body. These are not disciplined people.

Secondly, there is this tension, by which I mean a real desire for violence. These people are bloodthirsty. They want a fight. When news comes that the Poles may be converting their people, there is no desire among the Cossacks to actually check this is the case. They want to kill and are glad of the excuse provided. Immediately, they set upon the Jews who help service the Sech, slaughtering them indiscriminately. When besieging the castle at Dubno they get bored because they are not doing enough fighting and seem half-willing to just leave the starving residents alone.

In all of this, there is something elemental about them. At times it is almost funny, as when one Cossack – after starving and besieging Dubno for some time already – declares “first we hit them nicely, now we’ll hit them so much that they won’t carry as much as five of them home again.” But this shouldn’t distract us. When the Cossacks go through the Commonwealth what is the result? “Beaten children, women with breasts cut off, the skinning of all those who were allowed to keep their lives – in a word, it was a heavy price the Cossacks extracted for the Poles’ debt.”

What we see in Taras Bulba is a society that is so set on war, on violence, that it creates the conditions for it, at the cost of all deference to the truth. It is telling that against the marauders are ranged all those who are not part of the Cossack host – the women, the Jews, the Poles. Nothing unites a people like violence done against it. And what is the result, the glory that the Cossacks earn? Death. Repeatedly, for character after character. Taras dies, Ostap dies, Andrii dies, all manner of minor Cossacks die. They spout idiotic drivel about God and the fatherland which all might seem heroic to someone braindead, but we end the book to find a whole lot of dead, and nothing earned for all that suffering.

Religion and Hypocrisy

I have no interest in saying that violence is never justified, but Taras Bulba undermines the validity of its own violence with awesome consistency, and this is nowhere more obvious than in its treatment of religion. The Cossacks follow the Eastern Orthodox faith. Taras himself considers himself “a lawful defender of Orthodoxy”. But in the Sech, what holiness do we find? The whole host is ready to defend their faith “to the last drop of blood, although they did not wish to hear anything about fasting or restraint.” Characters declare that “for faith we’re ready to lay down our lives”. And yet they go about defending their faith against people who, a few doctrinal differences aside, share it, using the most unchristian means.

This irony is possibly deliberate. In chapter 6, when Andrii is smuggled into the city during the siege, he enters through a church, coming face to face with a monk – the exact type of person he had been ravaging the countryside in search of. But he is surprised, all the more so when he hears the prayers: “He prayed for the sending down of a miracle: for the saving of the city and the fortification of a wavering soul, for patience and the removal of temptation”. In short, he is praying for rather familiar things. Then he hears the organ music, and by that point, his defences really are beginning to crumble. He has stepped out of this narrow, macho, male, Cossack society and come into one that seems much fuller, with music, women, and peace instead. And what does he lose? “Moved by compassion,” we can say he loses the active voice. The Cossack loses his freedom and gains a heart.

All of this humanising stands in stark contrast to the description of the Cossacks in the next chapter and morning, who declare they are fighting an “enemy of Christ.” There is more than a little ridiculousness in this. Taras is referred to as “father” by his men, but he commits filicide on Andrii. Though the text has described Andrii as Judas, his death being like the death of “an ear of wheat” also suggests there is something deeply wrong about it. In short, we can say that the faith of the Cossacks, even as Taras himself dies by being burnt at the stake, is not quite a sham, but just an excuse for their violence. These people do not seem heroic as they throw babies into fires, or fight for their faith, because it is obvious that there is no real concern for the faith at all. As with their violence, the Cossacks’ hypocrisy leaves an unpleasant impression upon the modern reader.

National Myths

Still, if we are reading Taras Bulba today, we are interested in the national myth-building it engages in. What does it tell us about Russian nationalism in particular and the place of Ukraine within that? It’s important to remember that in the 1830s and 1840s when Gogol was writing, the annexation of much of what we now think as Ukraine had taken place relatively recently, especially of the south and west where the story takes place. These places needed to be integrated into Russia, and literary culture had some part to play in that.

How does Gogol do it? Well, for one thing, the Cossacks all have “Russian” souls, and live on “Russian land” – this description of the land in particular as Russian is repeated and particularly jarring to the reader of today. “Ukraine” is mentioned, but its people are the Cossacks, and the Cossacks are, after all, Russian. (N.B. The word “Ukrainian”, unlike “Ukraine”, had no real place in either the Russian or Ukrainian language until later. It is absent even from Shevchenko’s works. Until the later 19th century, it was primarily used by the Poles). The reason for this, of course, is because they are Orthodox and in Gogol’s version all speak Russian with only occasional Ukrainianisms for local colour. The Poles, the only other people who could claim control over the Cossacks, are a bunch of church-desecrating heretics who capture, torture and kill a great many proud Cossacks at the end of the story – showing that they cannot be the people to whom the Cossacks should swear their allegiance.

After noting that the Cossacks are practically Russians and that they do not belong to Poland, devalues any notion of independence through the decimation of the Sech. The Cossacks of the story are brave and honourable – for does not Taras go so far as to kill his own son for the sake of his honour? But everyone dies, and the decisions made in the story are poor. Gogol does not say it, but he certainly seems to imply that what the Cossacks lack is an organising force, an empire that could allow them to use their energies productively. Taras’ men die because he focuses on punishing Andrii – his false child – instead of protecting his real children, the people. If only he had a bit of guidance. Certainly, this man can kill, can fight. But wouldn’t things be better for the Cossacks, Gogol seems to ask, if they were engaged in something productive, like the genocide of the Circassians and the conquest of the Caucasus?

The character of Andrii, the traitor, is a complicating factor. Whereas the other Cossacks are motivated only by their desire for violence built upon rickety religious foundations, Andrii has a slightly more complex character. When he meets his old flame in the besieged city, he falls so madly in love that he forswears his own homeland: “Who said that my homeland is Ukraine? Who gave her to me? A homeland is what the soul seeks, what is sweeter than everything else in the world. My homeland is you.” Now, readers, I don’t think this is an unreasonable thought, but that’s just me. Within the story, we must ask what the Sech has done for Andrii. It has shocked him with its justice system, where murderers are buried alive, and thieves are tied to beams to be beaten by passersby. It has gone through the countryside burning, destroying, and killing, for no good reason. When he enters Dubno he sees, for the first time individualised, the consequences of the Cossacks’ actions – all these starving, miserable, mostly innocent people. When the choice is between love and music on the one hand and war on the other, his decision doesn’t seem unreasonable. What differentiates Andrii from the other Cossacks is that he realises there is a choice here.

But Andrii is a traitor, whatever else he is and whatever sense he speaks. (And given he is described as a “schoolboy” caught misbehaving at school when Taras confronts him and does not speak to defend himself, we can say that the scene has been constructed to delegitimise him.) That is what we should understand, at least if we are a Russian or Ukrainian nationalist. He deserved his death. Speaking of Ukrainian nationalists, Taras Bulba is not a good book for them either. Of course, you have the heroic Cossacks, fighting bravely and living enviable lives of freedom. But really, that’s the only positive thing you can take from this book. The women are excluded, and perpetual war and horrible crimes are a delight. And not just the women, by the way. In its description of a mini pogrom at the Sech and its repulsively anti-Semitic characterisation of Yankel (who would do anything for money, and is the one who tells Taras about Andrii’s betrayal) and all the other Jews, and in its demonisation and dehumanisation of the Tatars (like “chased dogs”) and Poles, Taras Bulba depicts the worst hateful and exclusionary tendencies of both Ukrainian and Russian nationalisms.

Conclusion:

Poor Ukraine, to have as its most famous writer a man who would have despised its independent existence. Lucky us, to have a writer like Gogol, who could write the works he did. Gogol, reactionary, religious, nationalistic, insane, was of course an odd one. But he took the ambiguities of his life and heritage and created good and often great literature, as did Kafka and so many others. Ambiguities and conflicts within the writer are what make for works that are worth reading. Taras Bulba is such a book. It is both pro-violence and pro-Russia, while also being undercut by a sense almost of disgust at itself and its hypocrisy, occasionally hinted at by the narrator. It is a more complex book than it seems at first glance, but perhaps not as complex as we would wish.

Unfortunately, to the modern reader, it still makes for uncomfortable reading. Although there are some similarities with Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat, especially in the scenes after the siege of Dubno has failed and Taras has lost his sense of balance in the world and feels desperately isolated (as Hadji does in Tbilisi), the tone is completely different here, much less tolerant, much less repulsed by the violence it is forced to describe.

Perhaps the best argument for reading this book is that it and its author are so ambiguous about their identities. In that, you end up getting a far more accurate picture of Ukraine and its people than you might otherwise get. But this is a poor reason, all told. Gogol’s other works are much more thought-provoking. The only ones you get reading this one ar e the thoughts you don’t want to have.  


Update: for those here trying to write essays, there’s a good comment from Vladimir Golstein of Brown which provides some context on the work which I missed.