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Existential Quest and Artistic Possibility in Tolstoi's "The Cossacks"

2005; Maney Publishing; Volume: 83; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/see.2005.0149

2222-4327

Andrew Kaufman,

Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies

SEER,Vol. 83, No.2, April2005 Existential Quest and Artistic Possibility in Tolstoi's The Cossacks ANDREW D. KAUFMAN 'I am convinced that artrepresentsthe highesttaskand trulymetaphysicalactivity of thislife.' Nietzsche' WHEN Tolstoi published The Cossacks in I852, both the Caucasus as a geographical region and the Cossacks as a cultural community had already become significantly marked themes in nineteenth-century Russian literature. The Caucasus was a favourite venue for Romantic writers to celebrate their love of exotic cultures and places, and to revel in their fascination with the fresh, expansive nature of the south, which was often contrasted with the constriction of civilized culture of the northern Russian cities. Among the earliest and most famous of the works of Russian literature dealing with this theme were Pushkin's narrative poem, 'The Gypsies', published in I824, and Lermontov's narrative poem, 'Izmail-Bey', completed in I832.2 Both of these works, as well as Tolstoi's personal experiences as a soldier in the Caucasus, Andrew D. Kaufman is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia. The author wishes to thank Professors Lazar Fleishman, Gregory Freidin, Joseph Frank, Monika Greenleaf, and Dr Stephen Moeller-Sally, as well as the anonymous readers from SEER, for their valuable comments on previous drafts of this article. ' Friedrich Nietzsche, 'Preface to Richard Wagner', quoted in Walter Kaufmann (ed.), Basic Writings ofNietzsche,New York, 1992, p. 3 '. 2 Many excellent works of Slavic scholarship have been devoted to the issue of Russian Orientalism. See, for instance, Harsha Ram, 'Russian Poetry and the Imperial Sublime', in Monika Greenleaf and Stephen Moeller-Sally (eds), RussianSubjects.Empire,Nation, and the Culture of theGolden Age,Evanston, IL, I998, pp. 2I-49; Susan Layton, RussianLiterature and Empire:Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkinto Tolstoy,Cambridge, I994 (hereafter, Russian Literature andEmpire);Katya Hokanson, 'Empire of the Imagination: Orientalism and the Construction of Russian National Identity in Pushkin, Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, Lermontov, and Tolstoy', doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 1994 (hereafter, 'Empire of the Imagination'); and Monika Greenleaf, 'The Foreign Fountain: Self as Other in the Oriental Poem', in eadem, PushkinandRomanticFashion.Fragment, Elegy,Orient,Irony, Stanford, CA, 1994, pp. I08-55. ANDREW D. KAUFMAN 209 were influentialin the writer'screation of 7he Cossacks.3 Similarly,the myth of the vital, free Cossackswas firmly establishedin the Russian cultural imagination in the writings of Pushkin and Gogol' before Tolstoi entered literature in the i850s. Judith Kornblatt has shown how the Cossack myth was a way for Russian writers to express their ideason subjectsaswide-rangingassocialequality,politicaland artistic freedom, and Russiannational identity.4 In spite of its subtitle, Kavkazskaia povest'(A Caucasian Tale'), Tolstoi's Kazakiis a differentsort of Caucasian tale from the one with which Tolstoi'sreaderswould have been familiar.It representsin many ways a debunking of the Romantic treatment of the Caucasus in Russian literature, as scholars have often noted. Susan Layton, for instance, reads the novel as an illustration of the problems of crosscultural communication and as Tolstoi's response to his Romantic predecessors.5Katya Hokanson reads the novel as a Bildungsroman, in which Olenin comes 'faceto face not with the Caucasusorthe Cossacks or the Chechen abreks, but with himself -with himself as other, with the other as himself'.6 Hokanson's insights have contributed to my thinking about the psychological aspects of Olenin's experience of the Caucasus. The argumentsof Layton and Hokanson have their partial roots in a critical paradigm first offered by Boris Eikhenbaum, who argued that Tolstoi's intention in TheCossacks, as well as in his other early Caucasian tales, was to debunkthe traditionof literaryRomanticism in Russian belles lettres.7 While Layton and Hokanson concentrate on the literaryCaucasus as a culturalconstruct, Eikhenbaumis more interested in the question of poetics. He writes: 'Tolstoi follows in the footsteps of the Romantics with the conscious intention of thoroughly destroying their poetics. He happens to be in the Caucasus for the 3 Tolstoi's initial work on the novel took place at a time when he was fascinated by the romantic image of the Caucasus as a land of freedom and poetic inspiration. In I 854 Tolstoi reflected on his personal experience in the Caucasus in light...