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TOLSTOY and the CHECHENS: PROBLEMS in LITERARY ANTHROPOLOGY Author(S): PAUL FRIEDRICH Source: Russian History, Vol TOLSTOY AND THE CHECHENS: PROBLEMS IN LITERARY ANTHROPOLOGY Author(s): PAUL FRIEDRICH Source: Russian History, Vol. 30, No. 1/2 (SPRING-SUMMER 2003 / PRINTEMPS-ÉTÉ 2003), pp. 113-143 Published by: Brill Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24660865 Accessed: 30-08-2019 13:05 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Brill is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Russian History This content downloaded from 80.7.164.141 on Fri, 30 Aug 2019 13:05:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Russian History/Histoire Russe, 30, Nos. 1 -2 (Spring-Summer 2003), 113-43. PAUL FRIEDRICH (Chicago, USA) TOLSTOY AND THE CHECHENS: PROBLEMS IN LITERARY ANTHROPOLOGY Introduction1 Tolstoy's Caucasus works are an outraged critique of Russian high society and tsarist imperialism, colonialism and atrocity-ridden war against the Che chens and other peoples of the Caucasus. The policies were to a large degree managed by Tolstoy's bête noire: the diagnostically brutal and mechanical Nicholas I (1796-1855), who he unmasked and denounced as he later did Na poleon in War and Peace. Aside from the texts themselves of The Cossacks, Prisoner of the Caucasus, and Hadji Murat, we have the considerable evi dence of personal correspondence, and the external evidence of Tolstoy's de fense of victimized minority groups of all kinds - Gypsies, Bashkirs, Jews; in 1899, for example, he wrote Resurrection to raise money to help an extreme sect, the Dukhobors ("Spirit-Wrestlers"), to emigrate to Canada. For his Cau casus works, he dealt with the most conservative Muslims in the Caucasus, the Hannafi Avars and Chechens, both of them distinguished throughout his tory for their courageous and, in the Chechen case, intransigent resistance to Russian imperialism and state terror. At a theoretical level the bond between Leo Tolstoy and the Chechens and Chechenized Cossacks raises and answers or at least illuminates three interre lated and essentially anthropological problems. One is the always in part mysterious connection between the mind of the ethnographer or ethnographic poet-novelist and the structure and cultural symbolism with which it is en gaged; in Tolstoy's case, as we will see below, four causes brought him to the Chechens and connected him to them. The second problem is: just how and to what extent are the "materials of culture" integral or contributory to the text, be it literary ethnography or ethnographic literature? In the case of Tol stoy we find a brilliant blend of circumspect, panoramic description reminis 1. Thanks to the following for their critical comments: Tom Bartscherer, John Colarusso, Sascha Goluboff, Alaina Lemon, Paul Liffman, Katia Mitova, Dale Pesmen, and Kevin Tuite. 1 am grateful to Anne Ch'ien of the University of Chicago's Anthropology Department and Katie Gruber of the Linguistics Department for their meticulous, informed typing of the manuscript and to Maureen Mahowald for her assiduous library research. Thanks also to those who ques tioned and commented after presentations at the University of Chicago (2000) and the University of Michigan (2002). This content downloaded from 80.7.164.141 on Fri, 30 Aug 2019 13:05:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 114 Russian History/Histoire Russe cent of the still useful model of the cultural sketch. We also find focused and distillate insights into cultural values, and the variations, inconsistencies and feedback between those values. Third and last, how can the texts and other information that derive from fieldwork, participation, verbal condensation, analysis, and other artistic and scientific work be connected- with the conflicts and possibilities of peaceful resolution in the world of politics, colonialism, tyranny and state terror? In Tolstoy's case we find a heroic model of a writer who succeeded in being truthful by his own exacting standards while dodg ing, tricking, and, in general, coping with censorship, thought and media con trol, what we today call political correctness, and the state-level evils just named. More particularly, we find a fascinating and instructive dialectic be tween, on the one hand, representing the genesis, practice and perpetuation of ethnic hatred and, on the other, suggesting or enjoining the values of broth erly love and peace between peoples. I conclude with three crucial postscripts on current relevance, "Homer versus Jesus," and Tolstoy's ekphrastic imag ing of the sources of inter-ethnic hatred. I. Anthropological aspects: Culture Tolstoy's relation to the Chechens and the Chechenized Cossacks is inex tricably anthropological, in the first place, cultural, and that in four ways: ethnographic: ethnography and the poetic novel; social and political criticism, here of both Russian and Cossack society; culturally specific stereotypy - the Chechen brave or dzhigit2 - and universal archetypy: the old warrior with his memories of war and women; last, the high cultural, literary input from pre existing novels, stories, lyrics and long poems involving the Caucasus, on which Tolstoy drew and which inspired him. Let us look at these four in turn. Most striking in all his Caucasus works is the degree to which they are ethnographic. In Hadji Murat we enter a Chechen village in the evening in a manner reminiscent of many modern ethnographies. The Cossacks includes a cultural sketch in the fourth chapter but throughout gives us hard facts and delicate nuances on material and social culture that would enable a competent scholar to'infer a fairly complete cultural sketch of the Chechenized Terek Cossacks (as has actually been done for the Don Cossacks using The Quiet 2. The term dzhigit, derived from Turkic, possibly Nogai, is defined simply as a Caucasian horseman in the Oxford Russian-English dictionary, and as a skilled horseman in Ushakov. It is actually a complex symbol with the following components: 1) equestrian skill (the derived noun and verb involve difficult and complex riding skills and moves); 2) courage, dash, pluck, and other warrior virtues - hence the Maudes' gloss as "brave"; 3) a whole complex of masculine, virile traits connected with Caucasus culture, including clothing and how to wear it. Tolstoy was recognized as a dzhigit by the Chechens (E. N. Shipova, Slovar' tiurkizmov v russkom iazyke [Alma-Ata: Nauka, 1976], 122). This content downloaded from 80.7.164.141 on Fri, 30 Aug 2019 13:05:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Tolstoy and the Chechens: Problems in Literary Anthropology 115 Don3). Indeed, Tolstoy's main Caucasus works raise in acute form the issue of just where the boundary line between ethnography and literature lies. In teracting with the ethnographic factor is the second one of Tolstoy's social, political and cultural criticism: local hunting skills, work-hardened Cossack women and Chechen religiosity and courage are contrasted invidiously with Russian high society décolletage and general debauchery, greed and vain glory, and the corruption and power-mania of Russian politics, bureaucracy, and military practice. Yet the somewhat idealized Terek Cossacks are them selves undercut by the pervasive presence of the likewise idealized Chechens and other "Tatars" - a critical palimpsest and triangulation that has been missed by all critics. Related to social criticism is the third factor of ethnic identity, conflict, and hatred: the Russian, both soldier and aristocrat, the Cossacks, both man and woman, and the Chechen dzhigit are depicted in terms of their similarities and differences and, often, their reciprocal homi cidal intent. The subjective sense of ethnicity, of what it means to the indi vidual to be a Russian or a Caucasus mountaineer, is repeatedly imaged and articulated - with notable brilliance in the counterpoint between the Avar leader Hadji Murat and the Russian aristocratic officers and ladies with whom he interacts during his captivity. Ethnic opposition, in turn, is partly conveyed through stereotypes and archetypes that, as noted, may be culture specific or universal, Chechen, Cossack, or global: the alienated truth-seeker, the strong and passionate virgin, the dangerous mountain tribal, the heroic in digenous leader, the dissolute officer, the lazy lackey, the sturdy, simple ri fleman, the romantic adolescent.4 Beyond such cultural painting, Tolstoy proves to be a masterful anthropologist at representing from within - because he had lived within - be it through the rhythms of the Cossack dialect, or the psychologically complex and culturally situated character study of Hadji Mu rat. No comparable novels or other literary art, such as Cooper's Deerslayer or Melville's Moby-Dick, give us such sensitive and thoroughly wrought treatments of cultural processes and the unique individuals who synthesize them. Tolstoy's types and individuals draw in their turn on the rich galleries of earlier writers, among whom three stand out. As a young man he was often carried away by A. A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky's romantic tales of derring-do and high passion in the Caucasus. There was an intensely competitive en gagement with Michael Lermontov, particularly his A Hero of Our Time, a fundamental classic of Russian literature that features an affair between an ■ 3. Michael Khodarkovsky and John Stewart, "Don Cossacks," in Encyclopedia of World Cul tures. VI. Russia and Eurasia/China, ed. by Paul Friedrich and Norma Diamond (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1994), 103-07. 4. Robert L. Jackson, "The archetypal journey: Aesthetic and ethical imperatives in the art of Tolstoy: The Cossacks," Russian Literature 11 (1982): 389-410.
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