Tag: Russian Literature

Ideas of Emancipation in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Fenitschka

Lou Andreas-Salomé is someone I had long imagined I would only encounter through the words and biographies of others. Perhaps the most important woman Nietzsche knew, and certainly the only one to whom he ever proposed – as many as three times, without success – and a lover and confidante to Rilke who taught him Russian and introduced him to Tolstoy, before finally becoming a significant figure in psychoanalysis, where she worked alongside Sigmund Freud, Andreas-Salomé found herself at the centres of German-language culture practically from the moment she was born in 1861 to her death in 1937.

A Russian, born in St Petersburg of mixed Huguenot and German ancestry, Andreas-Salomé had everything she needed to succeed as a woman in her age. Her father maintained an intellectual atmosphere at home, including letting his daughter attend her brothers’ classes. Then, when he died young, he left his daughter enough money for a certain amount of choice in how to live. The most important thing for her, however, came from within – the will to choose her own destiny, everything else be damned. She eventually married for affection rather than desire, spending her entire life in what today we might call an open relationship, passing from one rapturous affair to the next, never settling for too long or surrendering her independence to the men she adored. Deeply intellectual, deeply passionate, and finally heroic in her own choice of life, she seems a person it would be great to get to know.

What a relief it is, then, to learn she wrote some books. They aren’t easy to come by, either in the original German (Andreas-Salomé spent most of her adult life in Germany) or in any other language (though, in one of the quirks of translation, Goodreads seems to suggest she has become quite popular in Turkish). Still, I wanted to hear her words. I bought a slim and tiny Reclam edition of Fenitschka, one of her best-known novellas. I thought it would be as good a place as any to start with.

As a work of literature, Fenitschka excels in the subversion of our expectations. This stretches from the novella’s title, to its genre and characters. It appears at first glance to be a traditional bildungsroman, a story of education. We follow Max Werner, an Austrian flaneur on the streets of Paris who encounters the mysterious Russian woman, Fenia or Fenitschka, while at a bar. His destiny, from the moment he lays eyes on her, seems to be to unite himself in marriage with her. Marriage, after all, is the key moment in traditional works of the genre, as it provides a synthesis of all the education that has gone on before. And Max, who thinks of himself as something of a psychologist, appears to have undertaken all the other “education” needed – all that remains is the marriage.

Yet just as the novella places Max as the hero, ready for marriage, it undermines Max’s education. Max’s “psychology”, is really just an excuse for him to stare at women. When on an evening walk with Fenitschka, who has taken herself through a degree in Zurich, she talks about the importance of education for female emancipation, Max shows very little enthusiasm or understanding for what she’s talking about. By this point he has decided to seduce her. He abuses his right as a man to ensure a lady is taken home safely to her hotel by taking her back to his hotel, then actually locks her in his room to make sure he gets what he wants. It appears he knows the theory of seduction, but as for the reality…

Fenia tells him to get lost and leaves. Not only that, but she calls him “the first indecent man” she has ever met. Rather than happily enjoying the fruits of his manliness, Max is not just denied what he thinks is his by right, but he also finds his own sense of self and knowledge challenged by this stranger. It’s a remarkable scene insofar as the supposed hero is acting the villain, while the readers watch in increasing discomfort. The education Max has received is not proved through marriage, but undermined by showing that he is an asshole.

We wait a year for the action to continue. Max is in Russia for his sister’s marriage when he encounters Fenia again. She refers to their “love affair” (Liebesroman) with a certain mockery, born of her increased confidence from being a little older (she has finished her studies) and from being in her own country. For that is what the first section of Fenitschka is – a love story that has the wrong ending. The remaining sections of the novella are only more different to what we expect.

Max follows Fenia to St Petersburg to meet her family, as a friend, that is. (He reveals to her at the wedding that he is himself engaged, but readers smile knowing an engagement can always be broken off). We might expect that having failed at the “affair” part, Max might have a go at the “love” part of his “love affair”. For a reader, Max is still the person we follow, and we always have in mind the novella’s title – Fenitschka is the central figure, and we expect such figures to get married. Regular references to love, such as through quotes from the Russian poet Lermontov’s long poem The Demon, and a sense that Max is finding Fenitschka ever more physically attractive, make us think that he and she will soon end up together. But this is not what happens. Instead, Max discovers that Fenitschka is herself conducting a secret affair, and assumes the (traditionally female) role of confidant.

While Max has his moments when it seems he realises his worldview is limited, he is still very much that voice of tradition which lurks behind apparent liberal outlooks. When Fenitschka’s lover insists they get married, he encourages her to go ahead with it. But this is precisely what she does not want, as it would constrain her. The novella ends with her rejecting the lover, but with gratitude for their time together – a very modern moment.

We think that this is Max’s story. He is referred to always as “Max Werner”, as if to highlight his solidity and manly importance in contrast with the fragile female Fenitschka. The novella’s title, Fenitschka, is itself a diminutive, turning the independent woman into a cutesy figure. Her real name is Fenia, and the narrative shifts between the two to emphasise that she has two identities – one imposed from outside, and the other that she is crafting for herself. We see a similar situation in Nadezhda Kvoshchinskaya’s The Boarding School Girl, where “Lelenka” becomes “Elena” once she has achieved independence.

The comparison with Kvoshchinskaya’s work is worth exploring. One key similarity is in their narrative structures. In both works we have stories that are seemingly about men – the exiled revolutionary Veretitsyn and the flaneur Max Werner – who we expect to marry the titular female figures, but who are soon revealed to be far less impressive than their female counterparts, who instead move beyond them. Veretitsyn is supposedly a progressively-minded revolutionary, but is shocked when Lelenka becomes an artist and lives independently in St Petersburg. Werner claims to be up to date in psychology and has long discussions with Fenia about women’s rights, only to try to persuade her to marry her lover after all. Like Lelenka, Fenia instead prefers to be alone – in her case as a professor.

Where these works differ is in their treatment of the obstacles facing women in the 19th century. The Boarding School Girl paints a miserable picture of Lelenka’s home life, where she is essentially sold into a marriage she does not want. The enemies are mainly her family – father and mother – and the way out is self-education. Fenitschka instead focuses on the shortcomings of male figures who are not even aware of what they do. While certainly the novella makes the typical stabs at the empty “faultless mechanism of coming and speaking and moving on” of society evenings, and Fenia has an uncle who is something of a toady, freedom through education is still available to Fenia to ignore all of that. Instead, the real enemy is Max, precisely because he has no idea that he is one, believing himself liberal and sensible. Whether trying to seduce her or marry her, he continues to “demonise or idealise” her, rather than viewing her as a human being, and force her into traditional roles.

Of course, we smile at the thought that the so-called psychologist is unable to view his subject properly. But in Fenitschka we see the more subtle pressures placed upon women, compared to parents telling them what to do. Calling the incident in Paris a “love affair” gives it a recognisable narrative shape, and thus pressures both of their existences to follow this same shape. When they encounter the Lermontov (“All on this earth I give to you. / Just love me, you have to love me!”), Fenia notes that the quotes are hanging in near-enough every house in the city, ready for impressionable girls and boys to learn their roles: the one to love, the other to submit to its force. In this way, the novella shows that our traditional understandings of narrative, shaped by culture, are also a subtle barrier to emancipation.

In both Khvoshchinskaya’s novella and Andreas-Salomé’s, the women choose independence, but in both works there remains a certain ambiguity – the loneliness that comes with the rejection of ties. Max hears Fenia reject her lover, but never sees her again, just as Veretitsyn ends his story descending from Lelenka’s apartment, not sure what to do with himself. Yet in the almost fifty years between the novellas, (The Boarding School Girl is from 1861, while Fenitschka was published in 1898) there is a sense that the victories of the women are quite different. Lelenka has fought off the suitor her parents provided and is now an independent artist, but it has come at a cost – she is now rational and cold, as if she has had to adopt qualities from the men who aimed to control her in order to control her own freedom. Fenia, however, retains both her emotional side and her intellectual side when she achieves her freedom: “I thank you! I thank you!” These are emotional words, but they are also the words of someone choosing to be a professor – an eminently rational pursuit. To put it another way, Fenia appears to be achieving a more complete existence as a free person compared to Lelenka.

When we see this synthesis, we realise that Fenitschka was indeed a kind of bildungsroman after all. It was not Max who needed to grow, develop, and get married. He only learned, and probably not well enough, of his own mistakes and limitations. But Fenia grew, finally demonstrated her independence, and achieved a kind of synthesis in her own life – one that required no marriage at all. Here we have a model for growth without shortcuts. There may be challenges ahead for the Russian, but she is now well-set to face them. Of all the many heroes and heroines we know who end their books married instead, of how many can we really say their marriage will last?

As literature, Fenitschka has certain issues – it’s a little weak in terms of language, and I find the idea that a young woman would forgive so readily the man who locked her in his room to try to seduce her a little unbelievable – but it’s quite an exciting look at the challenges and opportunities for self-discovery available to women (or anyone) in the late 19th century. And with its emphasis on the idea that marriage and conformity are less important than being true to yourself and your ideals, it’s a work with a message that is as fresh now as it was then. It’s especially worth seeking out if you want to experience for yourself the voice of the “free spirit” Nietzsche once truly loved, and see how she imagined emancipation for herself.

What Truth can we write under Stalin? Grossman’s Stalingrad

“It’s not enough to say, “I wrote the truth.” The author should ask himself two questions: “First, which truth? And second, why?” We know that there are two truths and that, in our world, it is the vile and dirty truth of the past that quantitatively preponderates. But this truth is being replaced by another truth that has been born and continues to grow” – Maxim Gorky, to Vasily Grossman.

This quote, which I find more harrowing than almost anything else I have read recently – and I have just finished Snyder’s Bloodlands – comes from the introduction to the new translation of the Jewish (ethnicity) – Ukrainian (birthplace & upbringing) – Russian (language & literary tradition) – Soviet (time) writer Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. The novel was first published as For a Just Cause (За Правое Дело), which I think is also a great (if ironic) title, but Grossman preferred Stalingrad, which is why the Chandlers chose this one.

Whether in the complexities of the author’s identity, or in Gorky’s twists and turns, or in the novel’s title and the many changes between editions to account for a shifting censorship environment, we can see one of the central problems of the work – truth itself. The great Russian critic, Vissarion Belinsky, once wrote that literature was the finest place for discussing the problems of the day because at that time it was less rigorously policed than philosophy or the papers. Belinsky, however, never met Stalin.

Stalingrad is an attempt to write a great novel under Stalin and it is about as good as is possible, given that constraint. The Chandlers’ translation pulls together scraps from the various drafts and editions of the novel to approximate what Grossman might have wanted for his work and reveal its real brilliance. Their notes at the novel’s end are in depth and fascinating, highlighting just how major and minor the censorship could be. Characters and whole chapters disappear or are added, bodies that touched in the manuscript remain chastely apart. The closer we get to publication, the fuzzier we get – we go from saying someone was in a camp, to a euphemism for the same, then at times to merely a blank space.

The story of Stalingrad concerns the lives of the Shaposhnikov family. There’s a matriarch, three sisters and a brother, and various grandchildren, husbands and ex-husbands. Through them, we have a kind of cross-section of Soviet society, ranging from kolkhoz volunteers to power plant operators, researchers and soldiers, doctors and teachers. The Soviets wanted a Soviet War and Peace. While in many ways this novel is worse than Tolstoy’s, one area where Grossman vastly outstripped Tolstoy was in actually showcasing an entire society. During the war, he worked as a war correspondent, so he really did see everyone and everything. (He was among the first to write about Treblinka).

As stories go, Stalingrad is fine – the problem lies in the characters. There are too many of them, and not enough plot, which makes it all hard to follow. The characters we have are also fairly flat. Both nuance and doubt are impossible here. A general can burst into tears while looking at an enflamed Stalingrad, but never can he feel scared or want to turn back. We read that Krymov, one of the sister’s ex-husbands, has had to execute several “traitors”, but Grossman can do nothing to suggest that there might be something wrong with this. (In Life and Fate, early on we have a meeting of powerful people where one of them makes a slip up about Stalin, and the sheer force of the menace that immediately arises is enough to send shivers down your spine – but here Grossman could not even get close to writing this).

The central topic of the book is the Battle of Stalingrad. It comes to consume everything, and everyone, whether they are fighting or fleeing. This sense of onrushing history keeps us reading by papering over the less interesting bits and the occasional limp characterisation. But war is, in some ways, a bad topic for literature. Such a war as the one against the Nazis refuses much by way of nuance.  

Here’s Sofya Osipovna, a Jewish friend of the Shaposhnikov’s: “You’re wrong. I can tell you as a surgeon that there is one truth, not two. When I cut someone’s leg off, I don’t know two truths. If we start pretending there are two truths, we’re in trouble. And in war too – above all, when things are as bad as they are today – there is only one truth.” This dialogue is on the same topic as Gorky earlier. Now, from a literary perspective, allowing for two truths at least presupposes a conflict, a need to clarify. But this novel is mainly about one truth instead – that the Germans are evil, and the Soviets – good. Nothing that makes the Soviets, or at least the Russians (the official line), look bad can be written. Looting and collaboration are carefully removed by the time of publication.

What kind of nuance is left to the author? Obviously, Grossman thought the idea of Gorky’s truth was hogwash. So how could he hint at something else?

The first way is by the act of hinting itself, by forcing the reader to connect the dots. One of the great lacunae of Stalingrad concerns the fate of the Jews. For Grossman, this was personal – his mother was murdered in his hometown of Berdichev (Berdychiv). Viktor Shturm, one of the key Jewish characters of the novel, receives a letter from his own mother, written before she was executed. But we never read it. Only in Life and Fate, a novel that could not be published in the Soviet Union, could Grossman say what the letter said. Yet we know the letter exists, and the reader would have to fill in this gap for themselves.

At another point, a German character flies over the terrain east of Warsaw:

“Forster had glimpsed a thread-like single-track railway, running between two walls of pine trees to a construction site where hundreds of men were swarming about amid boards, bricks and lime. Something of strategic importance was evidently being built here.”

Those last words are so heavy with irony they might bring the plane down. They bring us to the second way that Grossman criticises truth – using Germans. The Soviets had one truth, the Nazis another. While he could not criticise the Soviet truth, he could break down the Nazi truth in a way suspiciously easy to adapt to the Soviet one. The camp has no strategic utility – it just annihilates people, probably Jews. Forster deludes himself, but we sense the truth. Could characters on the other side, justifying their own camps, not be similarly deluded?

Another character, Schmidt, while under fire in Stalingrad, wonders how he might build bridges to his colleagues. He’s an old communist, and suspects he is not alone in not wanting to fight. But he cannot connect to his colleagues – to voice doubt in public or private would be to court immediate execution. It’s a similar scenario to the one the Soviets experienced in the Great Terror, of people unable to unite, even though they might manage to make change if they could, all because of the state’s power and surveillance. At another point, some soldiers declare their propaganda was always a lie: “To be honest with you – now that the war’s almost over – all this talk about the unity of the German nation is bullshit.” Here, too, could we not say something similar about the Soviets?

Yes, and no. A defensive war is generally one which unites people. To speak of Soviet unity is probably less of a lie than German unity. The Soviets, at least, knew why they were in the trenches. Grossman also does show some hints of Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis, but the collaborators were only ever a small part of the Ukrainian people, a people who mostly wanted to protect their homes and families like everyone else. Those who did collaborate often soon realised that the Soviets were bad, but the Nazis were much worse. (It’s also worth noting that many of the heroes of Stalingrad are Ukrainians, and Ukrainian itself is spoken at a few points, so this is far from an anti-Ukrainian book. And by the time he could write freely in Life and Fate, Grossman was willing to dispel Russian unity as well – see Lyudmila’s visit to Saratov in that work, where a simple bus journey is enough to show us how selfish the Russian people really were.)

The final way that Grossman begins to challenge a kind of fixed, stultifying, “Gorkian” truth, is through his treatment of death in the novel. This was another weakness, for me, of War and Peace. While in theory Tolstoy could kill any character, in reality he keeps Andrey alive long after Borodino so he gets a proper goodbye. Only Petya gets the kind of death that suggests war is stupid, unglamorous, and cruel.

Grossman is an anti-Tolstoy – he wields his scythe with relish. “All deaths are stupid,” says one of the characters, deep into the fighting. “There’s no clever way to get killed.” Instead of stupid, we might say unromantic. As soon as the Germans arrive, Stalingrad becomes something of a slasher movie: people die all the time, without warning, without any kind of authorial protection seeming to act upon them.

“There was a whistle of iron over the Volga. A thick bubbly column of greenish water leapt up just in front of the dinghy’s bow, then crashed down on top of it. A moment later, in the middle of the river, amid foaming white water, the dinghy’s tarred black bottom was shining gently in the sun, clearly visible to everyone on the launch.”

This paragraph, as sudden as the bomb itself, ends the life of a major character. They get no goodbye, not even a revelation. But that’s life, or rather death. That’s war. Here’s the grand revelation we get for the first death of the book:

As he continued up the slope, he could hear the engine struggling.

Then he heard the howl of a falling bomb. He pressed his head to the steering wheel, sensed with all his body the end of life, thought with awful anguish, “Fuck that” – and ceased to exist.

So much for the author coming in to tell us about God and meaning. “Fuck that” – probably that’s far closer to the truth of war than any adoring contemplation of trees.  

If death is not romantic, and the Germans express doubts about their purpose which are just as applicable to the Soviets as they are to the Nazis, and the topic of the Jews is constantly there in the background, as a blank space, to suggest that perhaps the Soviet narrative of the war (primarily Russian suffering) might have its own limits – then, it’s fair to say, Grossman has done a lot to give readers something to think about. After all, Stalingrad came out under Stalin! Frankly, it’s impressive how good this work is, given that.

It’s far from great, however. The limitations that censorship placed upon Grossman’s characters are too powerful. It’s like they are aware we might be eavesdropping, and thus prefer to keep silent about those things that are most likely to make them human – their doubts, their unsanctioned passions. In Life and Fate, Grossman’s modestly titled sequel, all of these shackles come off. It’s extraordinary how much better that book is, from the very first page, than Stalingrad. At about a hundred and fifty pages in I can see already that this is brushing up against War and Peace. (After finishing it, I can say it’s just as good, and far more timely reading now).

Now, an interesting thought is how the two books might fit together when considering this truth problem. Stalingrad begins to dismantle certain Soviet truths, albeit carefully, subtly. Life and Fate, with its openness to discuss the importance of autonomous kindness against totalitarian control, seems to be proposing a truth of its own. Just as they share characters (and I think Stalingrad is worth reading just to help give depth to the people and destinies of Life and Fate), they also work together on the same themes. It’s a hard ask to say we should read nine hundred pages that are merely pretty good, just to enhance another nine hundred that are definitely really good. But hopefully not an impossible one. I certainly don’t regret it.

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…