The Cossacks

The Cossacks (1863)

Author: Leo Tolstoy · 1863 Казаки

Plot

Dmitri Olenin is a young Moscow aristocrat — in debt, bored, sick of society, sick of himself. He leaves for the Caucasus as a military cadet, not because he has any patriotic plan but because he wants, in the old way of young men with trust funds, to start over somewhere else. He has read enough to believe that a new geography will produce a new soul. Tolstoy, who made this same trip as a young man for the same reasons, knows exactly what is wrong with this theory.

On the road south Olenin sees the snow-capped peaks for the first time and something in him stops. “‘Now it has begun,’ a solemn voice seemed to say to him.” He arrives at a remote Grebensk Cossack village on the Terek and is billeted with a family. The Cossacks — frontier people, descended from Russian Old Believer schismatics who fled south centuries ago and fused with the local hill peoples — are not Russians as Olenin understands Russians. They farm, fight, drink, and raid. They consider Russian peasants “foreign, savage, despicable.” Their men go out in pairs at night to ambush Chechen scouts crossing the river. Their women are unapproachable.

Olenin falls in with two people. Daddy Eroshka is a giant, drunk, retired hunter — pagan, pantheistic, a relic of a freer Cossack past, willing to tell Olenin anything over wine. “God has made everything for the joy of man. There is no sin in any of it.” Maryanka is the landlord’s daughter — beautiful, strong, betrothed to a young Cossack named Lukashka. She will not meet Olenin’s eye. Lukashka — nicknamed “the Snatcher” — is the book’s image of the uncorrupted natural man: instinct, bravery, no hesitation. He earns the respect of the village by shooting an abrek, a hostile Chechen, swimming across the Terek at night. “I’ve killed an abrek, that’s what I fired at.”

Olenin, lying alone in a stag’s day-lair deep in the forest, has a mystical experience. The mosquitoes, the beast’s bed, the whole tangle of life — he suddenly sees that every mosquito is a separate being just as he is, and he has an epiphany: “Happiness is this! Happiness lies in living for others.” On the strength of this revelation he gives Lukashka an extremely expensive horse. He tells himself he is helping the young couple. He is, in fact, doing what confused civilized men do: buying his way into a world he cannot enter, and calling it altruism.

The altruism collapses as soon as passion enters. Olenin wants Maryanka. He works next to her in the vineyard, he lives in the same courtyard, and the philosophical self-abnegation he had just congratulated himself for invents a new argument: “Self-renunciation is all nonsense and absurdity!” He writes Maryanka a letter — which he never sends — offering to buy a house, become a Cossack, marry her. He tells her, at last, in person. She seems, for a moment, to consider it. Tolstoy’s narrative is very careful about this moment: she may be vaguely curious, she may be mocking him, she may be weighing it with no possibility of yes.

Then the Chechens cross the river for revenge. In a brutal little firefight across open ground Lukashka is shot in the belly and mortally wounded. When Olenin, running back to the village, tries to reach Maryanka — tries, in the moment of her world’s wound, to be the man who consoles her — she turns on him with complete contempt. “Cossacks have been killed, that’s what for.” “Get away. I’m sick of you!” She is not his woman. She was never going to be. Her loyalty is to her own dying people.

Olenin packs, climbs into his carriage, and leaves. Daddy Eroshka walks alongside, drunk and weeping, the one villager who has any love for him. “You are so forlorn, always alone, always alone.” The novel ends where it began: with Olenin departing alone, the Caucasus already receding behind him, his soul no more native than the day he arrived.

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What the Book Is About

The Cossacks is the young Tolstoy working out a question he would keep worrying for the next fifty years: can civilized consciousness be shed? Can the over-refined, over-read, over-spoken ego — the ego of the Moscow drawing room — be traded for the simpler, larger life of people who live close to the ground? He wants the answer to be yes. The novel, with great love for its hero and no mercy, tells him no.

The book’s first argument is that the natural life is real. Tolstoy is not constructing a noble-savage fantasy out of library books. He lived among these Cossacks. He hunted with them. He is writing about a people whose bravery, beauty, and integrity he saw with his own eyes. The Caucasus in this novel is genuinely superior — not cleaner or more innocent, but more whole. The Cossacks kill and are killed, they marry early, they get drunk, they steal horses, and they do all of it without the civilized man’s self-commentary. Eroshka’s line — “when you die the grass will grow on your grave and that’s all!” — is not offered as a horror. It is offered as adult fact. Nature does not punish, reward, or remember. It continues.

The book’s second argument is that the civilized man cannot cross over. Olenin’s three philosophical phases — “love is an illusion” in Moscow, “happiness is self-sacrifice” in the stag’s lair, “self-renunciation is nonsense, I want her” in the vineyard — are each sincere, each total, and each lasts about a week. The problem is not that Olenin has the wrong philosophy. The problem is that he has philosophy at all. The Cossacks don’t. They act. A man trained to narrate his inner life cannot un-train himself by moving to a new village. He can only narrate his inner life against a different backdrop.

The third argument is about nature’s indifference. Maryanka’s rejection is not a defeat of one man by another man; it is a defeat of civilized sentiment by the fact that the natural world keeps its own house. When her people are dying, she does not look up at the outsider. The mountains looked beautiful and sublime to Olenin; they look like weather to the Cossacks. The final verdict of the book is that nature wins not by attacking the intellectual but by remaining proudly uninterested in him. The lishniy chelovek — the “superfluous man” of Russian fiction — is superfluous exactly because no one out here needs him.

The fourth argument is autobiographical. Tolstoy in his Caucasus years kept a diary of his own resolutions — I will be good, I will be simple, I will live for others — and broke each of them within weeks. The Cossacks is his first masterpiece because it is the first book in which he understands that the problem is not his particular weakness but the structural gap between self-conscious life and unself-conscious life. Every later Tolstoy hero, all the way through Levin and Ivan Ilyich, is still dealing with the terms this novel sets.

The Cast

Dmitri Olenin. The civilized intellectual who believes a change of address can produce a change of soul. He is earnest, generous, philosophical, and wrong. His three conversions in the novel are all sincere and all dissolve. He ends where he began, alone.

Lukashka. The natural man as martial instrument. Brave, limited, vain, effective. He kills his first abrek and becomes a minor hero. The novel respects him without romanticizing him; the bravery is real, the arrogance is real, the eventual wound is real.

Maryanka. Nature with a human face. The novel deliberately keeps her opaque. Her beauty is described, her gestures are described, her interior is not. This is the point — she is not constructed as an interior for Olenin to read. When he tries to merge, she speaks six words and ends the whole fantasy: “Get away. I’m sick of you!”

Daddy Eroshka. The old hunter, the book’s pagan chorus, a Cossack Silenus. He has done it all, killed Chechens for sport, slept with everyone’s wife, and now drinks and tells the truth. His farewell — “We are not loved, you and I. We are forlorn” — is the one sentimental gesture in a book that otherwise refuses sentiment, and the one moment of kinship Olenin is allowed. Even then it is a kinship of outsiders.

Symbols

Symbol	What it signals	Where it lives
The mountains	Indifferent sublime; nature that does not register the viewer	Olenin’s first sight of the peaks from the road
The stag’s lair	Interconnectedness of all life; Olenin’s pantheist epiphany, which does not last	Chapter XX — Olenin in the forest, mosquitoes, the realization that each creature is “a separate Dmitri Olenin”
The Terek	The line between worlds; civilized Russia on one side, Chechen wilderness on the other, Cossacks on the thin bank between	Night ambushes, the abrek floating past on a log
The vineyard	Daily work as the membrane Olenin cannot pass through; bodies close together, souls miles apart	Olenin laboring beside Maryanka

Key Debate

Is happiness altruism, or instinct? Olenin argues first for self-sacrifice: the civilized Christian line. Eroshka argues for pantheist appetite: eat, drink, couple, die, grow grass. The novel doesn’t pick. It shows Olenin’s altruism as an intellectual pose that dissolves the instant a beautiful woman works beside him. It shows Eroshka’s instinct as a life you are either born into or not. Nature wins by being indifferent to the contest, and the civilized man loses both arguments — his altruism was a lie, his instinct has no door in.

How It’s Written

Tolstoy’s method here is already recognizable: an omniscient narrator who knows exactly how self-deceived his protagonist is, a gentle ironic distance that never turns cruel, and immensely patient physical description. You learn how a Cossack vineyard works, how a night ambush works, how an old hunter fillets a pheasant. The physicality is the argument — against Olenin’s swirl of theories, the novel plants the stubborn concreteness of the work, the weather, the river.

The interior scenes — the stag’s lair, the unsent letter — use a kind of free indirect style that will become Tolstoy’s trademark: Olenin’s self-justifications are rendered in full, so you can hear the exact timbre of their sincerity and the exact point at which they turn into rationalization.

The opening is Moscow, night, drunk, artificial — Olenin taking leave of shallow friends. The closing is the Caucasus, daylight, a drunk Eroshka saying goodbye, genuinely moved. The contrast is not innocence-to-experience. It is the same man leaving two different rooms, equally alone.

Connections

• Leo Tolstoy — the autobiographical Caucasus, the young Count running from Moscow debts and boredom into the life he would spend fifty years trying to understand.
• Anna Karenina — later Tolstoy on self-deception; Olenin is a first draft of Levin, the man who keeps arranging his soul in new positions and each one fails.
• Arthur Schopenhauer — the pessimism that will feed into late Tolstoy; The Cossacks is pre-Schopenhauer Tolstoy, still optimistic that an escape route exists.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky — the other pole of 19th-century Russian self-examination; where Dostoevsky puts his characters under interrogation, Tolstoy puts them in a vineyard and lets them expose themselves through work.
• Homer — the warrior code of Lukashka and the Cossacks is Iliadic: shame-culture heroism, the named weapon, the public death, the community that mourns its men on its own terms.
• The Iliad — the river-crossing, the night ambush, the dying young warrior; Lukashka is a Grebensk Cossack Patroclus.
• Don Quixote — Olenin is a quixotic figure; his dream of “becoming a Cossack” is a charge at the windmill of authenticity. The novel shares Cervantes’s knowledge that the dream ennobles the dreamer and also ruins him.
• The Little Prince — thin thread, but real: the civilized outsider who briefly touches a truer world and cannot keep it. The fox who must be tamed and then left.
• Alienation — the structural condition of Olenin, the first “superfluous man” in Tolstoy: trained for a drawing room that he despises, unfit for a wilderness that does not want him.
• Free Will and the Moral Law — the book’s philosophical backdrop; can a man choose, by will, to become a different kind of person? The novel’s answer is: you can choose your address, not your soul.

Lineage

Predecessors

• Pushkin’s A Prisoner of the Caucasus (1821) and Eugene Onegin (1833) — the Russian romantic Caucasus and the prototype of the lishniy chelovek
• Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (1840) — the direct precursor; Pechorin is Olenin’s older, more cynical brother
• Rousseau — the natural-man theory Olenin has read and tries to live

Successors

• Anna Karenina (1877) — Levin working out the same problem with a hayfield instead of a Cossack village
• Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat (1912, posthumous) — the late return to the Caucasus, this time without any illusion that the outsider can cross over
• Heart of Darkness (1899) — the civilized European going into a “wild” place and discovering the failure is in himself
• Hemingway’s bullfight books — The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms — the 20th-century inheritor of the outsider-seeking-authenticity-among-harder-people plot