TOLSTOY AND THE : 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

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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 . Aside from the texts themselves of , Prisoner of the Caucasus, and , 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 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).

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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).

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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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alienated Russian officer and a Chechen girl (which Tolstoy in part parodies in The Cossacks). But by far the deepest literary cultural influence stemmed from Alexander Pushkin, whose Prisoner of the Caucasus was a deep tem plate and a deeply active memory not only for Tolstoy's story of the same ti tle but for the lyricism and character portraiture of The Cossacks. Tolstoy's creative move in the face of these last two formidable precedents was to take advantage of their formulations and insights but to refigure them, in part through irony and parody, in part through a closer fit with actual life as he had experienced it in a Chechenized Cossack village, through intensive li brary research on Hadji Murat, and through his many friendships and hostile encounters with Chechens.

II. Ethnography and biography A. The Tolstoy/Chechen Interface Without more introductory ado, let us turn directly to the highly charged facts of Tolstoy facing off against but also communicating and bonding with "his" Chechens. In doing so we are splicing together details of his life with details of Chechen and Cossack culture and history, and so integrating psy chological anthropology, specifically the still vital and viable "life history approach" and, for that matter, the life portrait approach, and several kinds of ethnography and ethnology. During 1851, in particular, he was stationed or at least sojourning in Chechnia, usually with Cossacks north of the Chechens. He studied Chechen seriously (vserioz) if intermittently and recorded songs, first transliterating them using an adapted Russian alphabet with diacritics, then translating into Russian; two of these texts, women's epithalamia, have survived and are among the earliest recordings of Chechen oral literature. Again, we cannot know for sure Tolstoy's degree of competence, but some specialists argue that he knew it well, based in part on his treatment of the form of key words and the semantics of ethnic slur words such as lamard (used by lowland of highland Chechens).5 Given Tolstoy's exceptional knack for languages this competence was probably significant. Highly significant in any case is his well documented positive attitude toward and culture.6

5. A. M. Mal'sagova, "Vostochnaia leksika v povesti L. N. Tolstogo 'Khadzhi Murat',"Eastern lexicon in L. N. Tolstoy's Hadji Mural,," in L. N. Tolstoi i Checheno , ed. by T. F. Mal'chevskaia (Grozny: Checheno-Ingushskoe Knizhnoe Izdatel'stvo, 1989), 138-51. 6. I have read with sympathy Chechen ethnographers, philologists, and literary scholars. Their enthusiasm for Tolstoy and his positive attitudes toward their own and other Caucasus cul tures is understandable, and, indeed, today, poignant. After sifting out the grains of salt with which they must be taken, one finds in their words an overall consistency and considerable agreement with Russian sources, and Tolstoy himself and his contemporaries.

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Authorities also agree that Tolstoy was studying the poetries of the Cos sacks, the Chechens, and other North Caucasus peoples. This is substantiated by an 1875 letter to his close friend, the major poet Afanasy Fet: "At that time I was reading books which nobody understands but on which I used to get drunk/revel in (upivalsia). It was a collection of reports about the Cauca sus highlanders published in Tiflis. There are legends and a poetry of the mountains and extraordinary poetic treasures."7 He sent Fet two Chechen and one Dagestan songs, including one called "The earth will dry upon my grave." Tolstoy's linguistic and folkloristic Orientalism went hand in hand with cultural and historical knowledge and raw, multifaceted experience. He stud ied archives, records and collections assiduously. He habitually read Russia's then leading journal, The Contemporary, with its occasional articles on Cau casus ethnography and military campaigns. He visited and sojourned in many Chechen villages and towns, including Kharav-Yurt, Mamakai-Yurt, Aki Yurti, Dadan-Yurt and Stary Yurt (the latter was to be the scene of furious fighting in 2000). He also keenly noted many aspects of Chechen culture, first of all clothing and personal habits: his descriptions of Luka and Eroshka are implicitly descriptions, as noted, of the ideal Chechen brave (dzhigit) of those times and of earlier times. Beneath such surfaces our author also captures or at least characterizes some of the deep values of Chechen (male) culture, notably hospitality obli gation, ritual brotherhood (Khloshal) and kunak friendship. All were to be powerfully distilled in the behavior and thoughts of his later protagonist, the Chechen Sado, when the outsider leader and rebel, Hadji Murat, rides into the village and asks for a night's lodging. Sado is grateful for this chance to

One has to take the pluses with the minuses. The Chechens surely exaggerate when they aver that he knew Chechen "well," but their consensus (and that of other scholars) is just as surely correct he knew the Kumyk-based northern Turko-Tatar; they also exaggerate his in volvement with Chechen folklore (he was more interested in Cossack oral literature, some of it Chechenized), but they are right, as noted above, that he did study it and that he transcribed and perhaps translated some of its songs. Simmons typifies critics by belittling this sort of thing as "Tolstoy going off after jotting down a Chechen song" (E. J. Simmons, Tolstoy [New York: Vin tage, 1946]:- 82). Yet it is Simmons who accords more attention to the Chechen factor than any other major critic that 1 have encountered. His final summation bears quoting: "the natives held hvm in high esteem. They admired his simplicity, honesty, and generosity, his expert horseman ship and unquestioned bravery, which won for him their highest commendation, the title of dzhigit" (see also fn. 1 above). Such are the overall contexts for Tolstoy's oft-quoted lines to his brother Sergei: "With all my strength I will assist with the aid of a cannon in destroying the predatory and turbulent Asiatics," which seem like a bit of youthful bombast and braggadocio. More important are the valuable insights into Tolstoy as an anthropologist and into the specifics of Chechen values, notably kunak friendship. 7. K. B. Gaitukaev, "Lev Tolstoi I gortsy Kavkaza," in Mal'chevskaia, L. N. Tolstoi'i Che cheno-Ingushetiia,, 76.

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prove his friendship and hospitality. Tolstoy well understood and accurately represented what Gaitukaev has eloquently called the "international" charac ter of the kunak system: it typically crosses the lines of class, ethnicity and locality8: Luka with Chechen Girei-Khan, Eroshka with many Chechens and Russian officers, and Chechen Sado with the Avar Hadji Murat. (That the values of kunak friendship outrate those of war is illustrated by the Sado inci dent below.) To conclude, "nobody before Tolstoy had given such an accu rate and full description of the inner life of the mountain village and of the individual family of the highlander."9 Tolstoy's extraordinary, anthropologi cal gift of getting inside the mind of a Caucasian mountaineer and of looking out from within that mind, which makes him unique and superior to all other Russian writers (or to Americans on Native Americans?) is clearly analogous to the way this stereotypically masculine man was able to get inside the mind of women, or better, to represent what it is like to look out at the world from those minds - 's, obviously, but also Natasha's, Dolly's, and others.10 Tolstoy's intuitions for Chechen culture stemmed in large part from his own kunak friendships with many Chechens, of whom three stand out. One, Balta Isaiev, told him the story of Hadji Murat on March 31, 1851, with later elaborations. His main kunak friendship with Sado Miserliev eventually en tailed a deep mutual bond, as shown by a well-known incident: after riding ahead of their column in a group of five, they were sighted by over a score of mounted Chechens, seven of whom pursued and nearly caught our author and his kunak before they made it to Grozny. Tolstoy, who had temporarily ex changed his fine but heavy Kabardian horse for Sado's faster mount, hung back with his kunak, risking falling hostage or, like two of his fellow officers who had headed back to the convoy, being severely wounded or, of course, killed. There are two accounts of what happened while Leo and Sado were flee ing death, imprisonment or torture. By one, Sado kept firing back at the Che chens or at least aiming at them and simulating the intention to fire. By the other account, which includes Tolstoy's, Sado talked back and forth with their pursuers in Chechen. Gaitukaev argues cogently that Sado was shouting that Tolstoy was his kunak, which Tolstoy unwittingly confirmed by hanging back": one Chechen ideal sometimes realized, is to rank kunachestvo and other values in their code of honor, above the temptations of combat (as was

8. Ibid., 72-73. 9. Ibid., 76. 10. Paul Friedrich, "The tragedy of shame: Anna Karenina" in The Peirce Society Papers, ed. by Michael Shapiro (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), 3: 29-59 11. Gaitukaev, "Lev Tolstoi I gortsy Kavkaza," 74.

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illustrated often enough during the recent Chechen wars). In any case, Tol stoy, a compulsive gambler, later ran up a huge debt in the winter of 1861-62 and Sado (whom he had taught how to avoid being cheated by the Russian officers) won back the IOU and gave it to Tolstoy's brother (who wrote to Leo, "That man is really bound to you").12 These and many other priceless anecdotes evidence Tolstoy's deep, on-the-ground grasp of and insight into the Chechens and their culture - won through a "participant observation" far exceeding that of most professional anthropologists today. In the Russian sense of love, Tolstoy loved the Chechens and his Chechen kunaks. His Cau casus diaries often mention "my kunaks" who drop in to talk or to make merry and at times weary him.13 In the Tolstoy museum in Grozny until it was bombed flat by the Russians in 1999, there used to hang the damask (bu latny) steel sword given him by Sado, and in the petite anthology appended to the Chechen-Ingushetia volume in the bibliography below, there is a moving poem about this sword by Chechen poet Hüdrin Muzaev.

"You're dear to us, oh damask blade, You're simple, and your steel is sharp...

Then, after 18 lines:

"Such friendship is not bought for gold And it is true as damask steel Amid the fight was always true...

It was this love that deeply moved his lyrical but also toughly realistic de piction of the Chechenized Cossacks Luka, Maryana and Eroshka in The Cossacks. The multifarious positive sides of the Tolstoy-Chechen connection are ironized when not really problematized by their dialectic with the ostensible raison d'être of his sojourn in the Caucasus. To begin, the Chechens whom he knew as kunak friends were either renegades or members of clans that were siding with the Russians against the majority of their people. Tolstoy, moreover, served actively, first as a volunteer {Junker), then as a "peyrverker" and cadet (roughly, type of lieutenant), that is, as a junior offi cèr in the Russian artillery. He took part in at least twelve engagements, cam paigns or "wood-felling" expeditions (wholesale destruction of virgin forest

12. B. S. Vinogradov and V. B. Vinogradov, "Letopis' zhizni I tvorchestvo L. N. Tolstogo na Severnom Kavkaza," in Mal'chevskaia , L. N. Tolstoi i Checheno-lngushetiia, 9. 13. Aylmer Maude, ed., The Private Diary of Leo Tolstoy. 1853-1857, trans, by Louise and Aylmer Maude (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1927), 7.

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to provoke Chechen defensive action - analogous to the wholesale bombing in 1999-2000). He was in the 1853 campaign against the general uprising un der Shamil that ran through the mid-nineteenth century (1840-59). His par ticipations brought him many times under small arms and artillery fire and three times led to recommendations for Russia's highest award for heroism under fire, the Cross of St. George - all denied on procedural grounds (e.g., once he was under house arrest for failing to show up for guard duty).14 Combat experience (hardly "a little fighting,"15 as Layton puts condescend ingly), actually seeing the destruction of villages and crops and seeing or at least hearing of the slaughter of civilians, was the source of a tremendously motivating guilt as well as providing raw materials for the unforgettable real ism of many scenes in The Cossacks, The Raid, Hadji Murat, and Prisoner of the Caucasus. Let us refrain from reducing a Tolstoyan dialectic of experi ence and conflict of values to a fashionable characterization of him as an "unwitting agent of Russian imperialism." Tolstoy's Orientalism, that is, his Caucasianism (but note the role of Chi nese and Indian thought in his later years), is one of the deepest components of his creative profile. It was among the snowclad mountains, the Chechens and the Cossacks, that he first found and asserted himself as a writer (not only through his Caucasus literature but his autobiographical sequence that begins with Childhood). "The Caucasus was the beginning of the beginning for Tolstoy the man and the artist."16 In this Orientalism the Chechens be come associated with the natural, in a positive, Rousseauian sense and also with oppressed peoples everywhere. Diffuse factors such as these are tough ened by the linguistic and the personal engagement and experience which, as noted, differentiates him fundamentally from Pushkin, Lermontov and all Russian authors. To sum up, Tolstoy was unique in his anthropological attempt to take a Caucasus Native (mainly Chechen and Avar) point of view and to depict their predicament realistically. The uniqueness stemmed from many places - from his sensitivity to Caucasus culture and his rapport with its natives, from his attention to archival and belleletristic sources, from his three-year "partici pant observation in the field," and from his own philosophical sophistication. His unique Orientalism pervades his Caucasus works, albeit sometimes devi ously or well-masked, and generates some of their most poignant ironies and infectiousness. Let us also refrain from confusing, as some have done, Toi

14. Vinogradov and Vinogradov, "Letopis' zhizni i tvorchestvo L. N. Tolstogo na Severnom Kavkaza," 9-20. 15. Suzanne Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 237. 16. A. V. Ochman, "Kavkazskie dnevniki L. N. Tolstogo 'Ot gorizonta odnogo k gorizontu vsekh'," in Mal'chevskaia , L. N. Tolstoi i Checheno-Ingushetiia, 31.

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stoy's own knowledge of and insight into the Chechens, Cossacks, and oth ers, with the lack of it portrayed in some of his protagonists.

B. Tolstoy as (linguistic) orientalist There is always an element, sometimes large, of the psychologically un knowable when it comes to whatever connects a person to another linguacul ture, be it the irrational aesthetic initial take that leads from the first minutes in a freshman class on French to a lifelong dedication to the language, or the peculiarly early engagement of Leo Tolstoy with Oriental languages. To be gin, nobody, including specialists, has speculated on why this young man, af ter growing up on the family estate, a crème de la crème aristocrat, and being educated in three modern Western languages and much Latin, chose to enter the Department of Oriental Languages at the University of Kazan' where the great Volga empties into the Black Sea. Biographers simply state the fact, if they mention it at all, without going into motivation. Let us speculate. Was it the many allusions to the Orient in his beloved Rousseau, and other eighteenth and early nineteenth century writers and trav elers? Was it with a career in diplomacy in mind following the model of fa vorite authors Griboedov and Tiutchev? Or was it the excitement, or, better, rapture (vostorg) to which he admits about reading the Caucasus works of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Bestuzhev-Marlinsky? Or was it an urge to under cut and to surpass them? Be the reasons what they may, in 1842, the then fourteen-year-old Tolstoy crossed the Rubicon, studied hard for the entrance exams,17 and scored "5" (or A) in both Arabic and Turko-Tatar (along with 5's in some other subjects and a 5+ in French, but due to the instructor, a poor performance in Latin in which he was adept to the point of reading Cicero without a dictionary.18 We do not know the content of these Oriental ist exams, nor how much time the young man subsequently spent in class, given the distractions and seductions of the gymnasium, society, and the flesh. Yet the bare facts on his Orientalist course of action at this time are at least suggestive. Tolstoy's early curiosity about Oriental languages fit in motivationally with his subsequent decision, in 1850, to go as a volunteer officer to the Cau casus to join his beloved brother Nicholas. During the three-year sojourn he hpd frequent contact with what he calls "Tatar": the label, depending on the context, can refer to any group of the North Caucasus, or the Turko-Tatar of his Kazan' University days, or a northern variant of the lingua franca that was used throughout the North Caucasus (and still is). This variant was based

17. Henri Troyat, Tolstoy, trans, by N. Amphoux (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 44. 18. V. G. Chertkova, ed., L. N. Tolstoi. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Gos. lz., 1930), 2: 310.

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on Kumyk, a Turkic language spoken by a relatively large group that occu pies the northeast corner of the area (it is actually mentioned once in chapter 40 as a synonym of Tatar). While in the Caucasus study of Turko-Tatar was sometimes part of the daily routine of this man given to schedules of self improvement.19 It is a fact, that is, the scholarly consensus, that Tolstoy had learned (Russian izuchal) Kumyk or Turko-Tatar well. Tolstoy's last great work, Hadji Murat, includes over one hundred words from oriental languages - Arabic, Turkic, Persian, Chechen,20 many of them used for the first time in Russian literature and some of them since entering into it. A typical Russian edition that includes his Caucasus work will append a glossary of two or more pages, most of it Orientalist. Which brings us back to the question of motivation. It is not fashionable today to think in terms of cause but let us do so, if but heuristically, within the Aristotelian paradigm2' for why things happen: the efficient cause was Tolstoy's desire to join his beloved brother, the material cause was the need to avoid creditors and the ruinous expenses of the high life in the capitals, the formal causes were the structures and possibilities that the tsarist military and social hierarchy meant to a young aristocrat such as himself; the final cause was his potential and his ambitions to become a great writer: what better to pos to realize this telosl Tolstoy's (linguistic) Orientalism continued to grow through the rest of his life. In 1862, aged thirty-four and with The Cossacks nearly in print, he im proved his health by taking the "kumys cure" among the Turkic Bashkirs, rid ing with them on the south Russian steppe and sleeping in a yurt tent, gorging on mutton and drinking six bottles of kumys a day, discussing Christ and Mo hamed with the elders and running and wrestling with the young men (beat ing all but one at the latter).22 Eleven years later he took some of his family to these Bashkirs, bought 6,700 acres, and returned every summer thereafter for seven years.23 During all this he presumably used the Turko-Tatar which he had begun studying in Kazan at fifteen. These specifics of language and be havior, incidentally, are highly relevant here because they indicate a personal and grounded quality to Tolstoy's Orientalism. The Bashkirs, like the Che chens, felt that he viewed all ethnic groups as equals.

19. According to Ochman, "Kavkazskie dnevniki L. N. Tolstogo: 'Ot gorizonta odnogo k go rizontu vsekh'," 38, Tolstoy called his schedule Franklinesque. 20. Mal'sagova, "Vostochnaia leksika v povesti L. N. Tolstogo 'Khadzhi-Murat'." 21. Aristotle, The Physics, ed. by Francis M. Cornford (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1957), 1: 129-30. 22. Troyat, Tolstoy, 222-23. 23. Ibid., 329-30.

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III. A. Who were (are) the Chechens?

Integral to the anthropology-and-literature approach is a substantial ac count of the ethnographic side of the ledger such as is, without exception, omitted by literary critics in this case,24 even those who are practicing "cul tural criticism."25 Chechens, Circassians, and other peoples of the Caucasus remain for these critics as undifferentiated variables which absence, also without exception, deprives their analyses of a humanistic depth. Let us turn, then, to a sketch of the Chechens with particular attention to those aspects of their physical, linguistic, historical and cultural anthropology that figure in Tolstoy's representations, be it bits of local color or profound antitheses of value, or simply enlightening background. According to both archeological and linguistic evidence, the Chechens and other speakers of northeast Caucasian have lived in the northeastern Cauca sus since about 6000 B.C. The Chechens, in particular, have long lived in the lowlands on either side of the Terek and lesser rivers and in the foothills, ra vines, and mountains, the highest of them snowcapped, of Chechnia. They are Caucasoid racially with an incidence of red (Russian ryzhyi) hair that may be unique in the world and which Tolstoy often uses as an ethnic marker to gether with head and facial hair dyed red (Russian krasrtyi); in some writings I suspect a confusion of the physical and the cultural color. A vivid physical description, that resonates with Tolstoy's epiphany of a dead Chechen (see below), comes from a hundred years ago: "In person the Chechens were tall, lithe, well (though slenderly) built, and often handsome."26 Tolstoy alludes so frequently to Chechen red hair that it becomes an ethnographic, or better, a physical anthropological trope. The Chechen language is close linguistically to the neighboring Ingush (hence "Chechen-Ingush") and, like it, rich in back consonants which Tol stoy, exploiting them as an ethnic marker, called "gutteral" - and small won der since the total number includes six ejectives, a glottal stop and a pharyn geal phoneme, and 16 of its 37 consonants can be pharyngealized.27 The third member of the group, Batsbi, is spoken in Georgia, whence its speakers fled the Russians in the last century. All three languages form Waivakh or North Central Caucasian,28 which is unconnected with Turkic or Indo-European

24. E.g., ibid.; Edward Wasiolek, "The Cossacks," in Tolstoy's Major Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), ch. 4; Donna Tussig Orwin, Tolstoy's Art and Thought (Prince ton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993). 25. Layton, Russian Literature and Empire. 26. John F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus (London: Longmans, Green , 1908), xxxvii. 27. Joanna Nichols, "Chechen," in The Indigenous Languages of the Caucasus, ed. by Rieks Smeets (Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1994), 4, pt. 2: 1-77. 28. Bernard Comrie, The Languages of the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), 197.

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(e.g., Russian), although interesting hypotheses are being elaborated on the second of these possibilities. Religion has always played a major role. Original animism was partly re placed by or syncretized with Georgian Orthodox Christianity. Overlapping with this process was the spread of Islam in the latter part of the first millen nium and culminating in the 1700s and 1800s with a syncretism of Islam and native animism - a sort of folk Islam similar to the folk Catholicism of Mex ico. This Chechen Islam was stimulated and made more rigorous by the ever ramifying growth of secret societies and several radically fundamentalist movements, both of the Suffi branch of Islam, that is, devoted to a strict form of Orthodoxy, outstandingly the general Muslim law or sharia and the khazavat (or ghazavat) of holy war. The abreks mentioned so many times in The Cossacks were often religiously driven warriors of this sort.29 These brotherhoods, particularly the Naqshbandiya brotherhoods under Shamil "achieved a deep and long-lasting result" when they "transformed the half-pagan mountaineers into strict Orthodox Muslims and introduced Islam into the animist areas of upper ."30 It is in his late Hadji Murat, that Tolstoy defines Avar and Chechen religiosity and morality most vividly, no tably the practice of prayer (one of the five pillars of Islam) and the quintes sential value of hospitality, which, as in Sado's case, includes protecting one's guest with one's life. However, his sensitivity to ritual was matched by a relative blindness to Chechen and Avar concepts. Chechen religiosity was significantly connected with economy, as it al ways is everywhere: from the early 1700s on, the fierceness of Chechen resis tance (like that of the contemporaneous Scotch Highlanders) stemmed from both religious-ideological and materialistic, economic causes, above all, the

29. The meaning of abrek, or, more correctly, abreg, as a warrior of the Caucasus motivated by religion or anti-Russian sentiment is given by Tolstoy and others; the Oxford Russian-English dictionary gives us "a member of Caucasian mountain bands who fought the Russians in the nineteenth centaury"; the generally authoritative and reliable Ushakov gives "a mountaineer partisan during tjie conquest of the Caucasus by the Russians" as a historical meaning, the con temporary meaning as "a mountaineer brigand/robber." One problem with the two dictionary definitions is that they remain implicit about the reasons for opposing the Russians which were, of course, significantly religious in the Chechen case. Caucasus specialist John Colarusso, on the other hand, puts abrek in another light: "abregs are not religiously committed warriors. Murid would be a better term. An abreg is one who renounced clan ties in order to avenge a wrong that the clan is unwilling to avenge because of weregeld, politics, and so on. An abreg is estimable therefore because he is a morally uncompromising man who has been forced into the status of being a renegade by the expedient compromises of society. He need not be religious at all." Clearly, the exact meaning of this term is important for understanding "Tolstoy and the Che chens" (the term itself is of Ossetian origin, by the way). 30. Alexandre Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush, "The Chechen-Ingush.," in Muslims of the Soviet Empire (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1986), 189.

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land question. By 1864, the Cossacks of the area controlled more than twice as much land per capita as the Chechens and were in the process of increas ing the imbalance31 - as they are today. This land question is missed by Tol stoy in the otherwise realistic ethnography of his Chechen-related works. The occupation of Chechen lands by Terek Cossacks in very recent years is a little discussed aspect of Putin's economic cum genocidal policies. Russian colonial conquest of the North Caucasus began with Cossack in cursions in the 1500s during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, and mounted dur ing the 1700s, notably under the direction of Peter the Great and then, later, the generalship of Suvorov. It intensified during the early nineteenth century with tactics of suppression and indeed genocide that reached a sort of climax in the 1850s during the last years of Nicholas I, when Tolstoy was there. The Caucasus War officially ended in 1867 (although 1859 is usually given for Shamil, and 1864 for the Circassians). The standard Russian tactics from the 1830s to the 1860s combined the building of a line of forts, the settling of bellicose Cossacks in border areas, and frequent "raids," for which the contemporary idiom "search and destroy" seems à propos: burning of villages and standing crops, execution of men and abduction of women, and the felling of trees, particularly the giant beech for ests into which the Chechens fled and from which they attacked, as they do today. The tsarist tactics are the same as those pursued by the Russian gov ernment in the recent Chechen Wars, except that they were less efficient (see the final quote from Hadji Murat below). Russian colonial policies m the North Caucasus aroused the fiercest oppo sition among the Chechens and their neighbors to the east, the Avars and the Ubykh to the southwest; the Avars eventually resorted to intensive Muslim learning as symbolic resistance; pilgrims came from all over the Near East to speak with their interpreters of the Koran.32 The Chechens, while party to this religiosity, including the study and use of Arabic, have mainly resisted through intermittent guerilla warfare up to the present day (the Ubykh mi grated to Turkey). Tolstoy, like literary and most political scholars, says little about the ideas in Chechen Islam, even in his full representations of religious rituals in Hadji Murat, which for a time he was thinking of calling Khazamat, The Holy WarP By the 1850s the Chechens were pursuing a diversified economy that in cluded agriculture and horse raising (and rustling). Their extended families

31. John B. Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of Separatist Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 33. 32. Bennigsen and Wimbush, "The Chechen-Ingush." 33. Michel Cadot, "Hadji Mourat ou les ambiguités tolstoïennes vis-à-vis de la guerre russe en Tchétchénie," in Michel Aucouturier, Autor de Tolstoï (Paris: Institut d'études slaves, 1995), 56.

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lived in villages, mostly in the mountains, with defensive walls and towers; sometimes each extended household was walled. These villages, though typi cally small, "could number as many as hundreds of houses, all of them sin gle-storied, flat-roofed structures built of sun-baked mud" with its own gar den or orchard and, in a forest clearing nearby, there were cultivated fields sown with maize, oats, barley, rye, and millet."34 Such small villages typify Chechnia today, and their communal nature certainly appealed to Tolstoy. Unique for the Caucasus, they and the linguistically close Ingush were and still are organized into coordinate, patrilineal clans,35 that, with villages and extended families were entangled in political alliances, partly ritualized theft, and vendetta obligations; kidnapping for ransom or to increase the labor force was already an ingrained custom. Extreme value attached to rituals of hospi tality, kinship vengeance and kinship loyalty, and kunak friendship. All these native institutions were reticulated in some shape with Islam and Islamic law, both local and transnational, often with complex conflicts, as when the for mer accommodated to blood vengeance and the latter opposed it. As of the late 1990s they still had a highly developed aesthetic culture of music (song), dance, and verbal, notably, epic art.36 Beyond the norms even for the Caucasus, the Chechens lived and live in terms of a warrior ethic that often seems Iliadic; the same code of honor and shame that has been conspicuous in the recent Chechen Wars.37 Their conser vative Islam, their custom of kidnapping for ransom, and propensity to vio lence (as in vendettas between clans), and their hatred and contempt for Rus sians have created a space where anthropologists and other social scientists, past and present, have not, for whatever the reason, chosen to tread. They are among the least known groups of the Caucasus. In this perspective, Tolstoy's personal familiarity, both as opposing warrior and intimate friend, give his insights a singular anthropological value. Insights but little analysis. The métonymie and imagistic scroll of his liter ary ethnography weaves in hundreds of details, including old favorites of an thropology such as kinship terminology, and also the contexts of song, and basic facts of kunak friendship and the vendetta, but he rarely sees beyond this to the deeper factors of agrarian conflict, clan structure and village fac tionalism, or religious ideology. He was a novelist and we must guard against the cliché that novelists in their ethnography are in all ways superior to eth nographers.

34. Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya, 19. 35. John Colarusso, "Yeltsin's war in Chechnia," Current History 94, no. 594 (1995): 329 35. 36. Nichols, "Chechen." 37. Colarusso, "Yeltsin's War in Chechnia."

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B. The Chechen stratum in The Cossacks As the analysis below purports to demonstrate, the Chechens figure in The Cossacks both overtly and insidiously. To begin, they are referred to more than seventy times over the 147-odd pages, mainly by name but also by allu sions that are unambiguous; for example, the abreks, or religiously commit ted warriors, named dozens of times by Tolstoy, are all Chechens. The ex pressions for punitive war, be it raid, campaign, or expedition, mostly allude to the Chechens as do the references to Cossacks rustling horses from the nomadic Nogay to the north to sell them "across the (Terek) river" to the (Chechen) south, or of getting a balalaika or a dagger or a fine horse from "across the river," or to the (Chechen) kunak friends whom Luka and Eroshka name and brag about so often, or, finally, the dozens of allusions to and invo cations of the dzhigit status, approximately glossed as "brave" by the Maudes and others, the model for which was the Chechen (and other Caucasus) brave; even the Terek River, named so many times, rings in the Chechen highland ers of The Great Chechnia. The Chechens are likewise entangled in many idioms, sayings and other locutions, be it frightening (or possibly killing or maiming) distant Chechen women with a potshot, or Eroshka's offer, "I'll show you Chechens," or passages where Chechens are likened to boars, carp, and "animals". The Chechen distant or indirect presence informs many bor rowed patterns of behavior, not only occasional bride-theft and gender rela tions, but the coin necklaces, the reds and blues of the women's beshmets and pantaloons, their red slippers, the kerchiefs covering their faces, and the cherkeshka and corresponding details of male attire that come from the Che chens with whom they interacted and sometimes intermarried or simply mixed sexually (notably through rape or bride-capture). At a mythic or arche typal level, the figure of Cossack Luka is not only modeled almost point for point on the contemporary Chechen or Circassian brave {dzhigit), but on the warrior hero in traditional Vainakh (e.g., Chechen) and, in part, early Russian epic and song.38 Old Cossack Eroshka, another variant of the synthesis, was modeled on Tolstoy's comrade in hunting, drinking and talking into the night, the real-life Épishka Sekhin (who dyed his beard red); he is named many times in Tolstoy's diaries of the Caucasus years. The Greben or Mountain Ridge Cossacks (not to be confused with the Terek Cossacks who lived elsewhere along the river), were Old Believers (a dissident sect that broke off from Russian Orthodoxy in the seventeenth cen tury); Tolstoy notes many traces of this sect such as drinking from a personal

38. A. Kh. Tankiev, "Elementy narodnogo obshchestvennogo soznaniia vainakhov v kavkazskikh proizvedeniiakh L. N. Tolstogo," in Mal'chevskaia, L. N. Tolstoi i Checheno Inguishiia, 81.

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cup, or forbidding the balalaika. The Greben Cossacks became so close to the Chechens, for a while, that they actually sided with them in a revolt and fought with them against the Russians in 1707. Tolstoy sums up the situation aptly:

Long ago their Old Believer ancestors fled from Russia and settled beyond the Térek among the Chéchens on the Grében, the first range of wooded mountains of Chéchnya. Living among the Chéchens the Cos sacks intermarried with them and adopted the manners and customs of the hill tribes, though they still retained the in all its purity, as well as their Old Faith. A tradition, still fresh among them, de clares that Tsar Ivan the Terrible came to the Térek, sent for their Elders, and gave them the land on this side of the river, exhorting them to re main friendly to Russia and promising not to enforce his rule upon them nor oblige them to change their faith. Even now the Cossack families claim relationship with the Chéchens, and the love of freedom, of leisure, of plunder and of war, still form their chief characteristics.39

Tolstoy accurately represents the Terek Cossacks as having adjusted to the Chechens so much that their life style stood somewhere between "Russian" in some generic sense and the mountain tribals of the Caucasus; hence much of what he says about Cossacks actually alludes to the Chechens. Curiously, both Chechen and Chechenized Cossack man emulate Circassians in their dress styles. But only up to critical boundaries: Cossack alcoholism, the eat ing of pork, and pre-marital sexual freedom, all of which are highlighted, at times to the point of seeming caricature, are fundamentally foreign and in deed heinous to the devoutly Muslim Chechens of the strict, "puritanical" Hannafi rite (a subset of Sunni). Sociolinguistics figures significantly in The Cossacks. Greben Cossack men prided themselves on being bilingual in Russian and "Tatar," by which Tolstoy, in his many references to this, often seems to mean the Kumyk derived Turko-Tatar lingua franca of the linguistically diverse Caucasus. "A dashing young Cossack likes to show off his knowledge of Tatar, and when carousing talks Tatar even to a fellow Cossack."40 Chechen men also are de scribed as speaking "Tatar," by which Tolstoy sometimes means Turko Tatar, sometimes Chechen; Chechen country is described as "Tatar" and the "gutteral" Tatar that Chechens speak to each other is presumably Chechen. Later, in Prisoner of the Caucasus, Tolstoy uses "Tatar" throughout for what

39. Leo Tolstoy, The Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy, ed. and with intro. by John Bayley (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 98. 40. Ibid., 99.

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appear to be Chechens (for example, they are often red-headed, and kidnap ping for ransom is an established custom). Oldster Eroshka's impressive cre dentials within this multilingual context, incidentally, include high fluency in "Tatar" and some alleged competence in Georgian, Chechen, Armenian, and "Tavlinian" (presumably Balkar, Karachay or another Turkic language; the form itself is Russian, based on the Ossetian for "mountaineer"). As just noted "Tatar" may mean Chechen in some passages. In the context of language, way of life, and religion, it must still be re peated that from earliest times, and particularly under Catherine the Great (1729-96) and to the present, a basic factor determining Russian-Chechen re lations has been land (as today it is also oil). The "wild" Chechen highlanders have kept moving down out of the mountains even while the (equally wild) Cossacks have kept taking up land in the lowlands. Such economic and demographic forces were largely responsible for the great uprisings during the nineteenth century under a succession of Chechen and Avar imams, cul minating in Shamil (1840-59), followed by mass deportations to Siberia (three of them), emigration to an inhospitable Turkey, or summary execution of many men by hanging; unlike the Cossacks, Chechens were judged in military courts.41 Tolstoy's awareness of this savage legalism motivates his defense and sympathetic representation of the Chechens.

IV. Tolstoy's Caucasus literature Having etched the biographical and ethnographic sides of the problem and many of the interconnections, let us turn to the actual - not "output" - but creations. The theoretical issues here are numerous and profound for anthro pology today: how can a full measure of knowledge from archives and per sonal interaction be converted into texts that represent and even participate in a way of life and a worldview, and the individuals who live in those terms? This means solutions in terms of extensive depiction, as in Tolstoy's sketches of the woman's work, or a distillation of basic values such as the axioms of Islam as practiced on the ground, or psychic portraiture. Tolstoy's works, for all their brill'iance, also raise questions of reductionism and superficiality.

A. Three plots Adapting from Aristotle's Poetics,*2 a one-sentence gist of the Odyssey, The Cossacks can be summarized in one paragraph. An aristocratic rake, Olenin, leaving the dissipation of Moscow and a courtship gone awry, heads as a volunteer junior officer for the Caucasus brimming with romantic illu

41. Duniop, Russia Confronts Chechnya, 16, 22. 42. Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and trans, by W. Hamilton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. Loeb Classical Library, 1927), 8.1451 a 24.

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sions of heroic combat, egalitarian natives, the beauties of nature, and of na tive women. On reaching the village on the Terek River he makes friends with an oldster and former brave, Eroshka, who teaches him much about hunting, local customs, and human nature; with a young brave, Luka, who in carnates Cossack and Chechen values of fighting and horsemanship; and with a strong and beautiful virgin, Maryana, with whose family he lives and with whom he becomes infatuated. Memorable episodes include the idealized brave shooting a Chechen guerilla as he tries to cross the river; a hunting se quence centered on a great stag and its lair; then a party given by Russian of ficers for Cossack young women; and finally, a skirmish in which the ideal brave gets what looks like a mortal gut wound while a detachment of Cos sacks is wiping out nine Chechen infiltrators. The young Russian protagonist leaves the village and Chechnya behind somewhat wiser but still alienated, this time from nature, and from the Cossacks who will soon forget him. In his Prisoner of the Caucasus, Tolstoy responded to challenges posed by earlier authors, notably Pushkin, in literary works with the same or similar ti tles or themes, notably romantic love or liaisons between a Russian aristocrat and a young woman of the Caucasus. Tolstoy in his turn depicts a young offi cer, but of poor aristocratic background, who is also a master of many practi cal trades. With his friend he is captured by Chechens. During a grueling con finement in a pit he makes friends with a pre-nubile girl who visits him. He eventually becomes a general handyman for the natives in the area. With the girl's help he escapes and, after great hardship, gets back to his fellow Rus sians. In his last major work, Hadji Murat (1904), Tolstoy drew on a historical figure, on memories of war in Chechnya, and on his own perennial battle with authority, to depict an Avar leader who, because of personal conflicts with the insurgent warlord Shamil, defected to the Russians. After being held for some time as an honored captive, he escaped and with a handful of fol lowers, died under heavy fire. Through dozens of detailed interactions involving leaders and ordinary folk of the Caucasus, and Russian officers, soldiers and high society ladies, Tolstoy created a complex portrait of the culture of the Caucasus, and of fundamental Islamic values, such as the obligation to protect one's guest.

Y B. Chechen-related texts in The Cossacks With these three plots in mind, let us turn to cultural aspects of our prob lem, specifically, to some of the many pages in The Cossacks where the Che chens figure. We do this in terms of the consistent parallelism between dyads of chapters that has been demonstrated elsewhere.43 The parallelism is chias

43. Paul Friedrich, "Chiasmus in Tolstoy's The Cossacks," ms., 2002.

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mic because the content and order of chapter 1 corresponds to a significant degree to that of the last, 42, chapter 2 corresponds to 41, and so forth. There is also some chiasmic parallelism within chapters, but the purpose of the fol lowing pages is not to explain the orchestration of the book (which, indeed, was inspired by Homer's Iliad), but to show how the Chechen-specific details work within the fine-grained realism of the text.44

Chapters 6 and 37 In 6 and 37 Chechen symbols are part of the overall weave. In 6, to begin, Luka, the young Cossack, is staring across empty plains and bullrushes that run to a distant Chechen village and then the mountains, whereas in the com panion chapter, 37, he describes how he and his Chechen friend got lost in the Nogay steppe. Both chapters further pinpoint the Chechens and the Che chen-Cossack relation. In 6, on the one hand, Luka studies the brightly clad Chechen women in the village and then jokes about taking a potshot at them (a serious and ugly possibility); yet his ideal Cossack brave status is defined

44. The many problems of realism in poetic prose that are raised by The Cossacks include the fact near the end that a hay wagon on its long axis (not broadside) would hardly suffice to shield even a small contingent of Cossacks and that such a small contingent would hardly have been able with ease to wipe out nine Chechens (who man for man have proven themselves to be more than a match); the Chechens could and would have shot at and hit the Cossacks' legs as they ad vanced across the field. The final firefight, which seems relatively less carefully crafted, involves issues of parody and mock heroic, as does the pervasive inversion whereby Luka, who bush whacks an abrek is extravagantly lauded as a conquering hero, whereas the actual hero was his Chechen victim who was courageously trying to swim across the Terek River by night. Tolstoy's realism in its brilliant practice in The Cossacks is of course exemplified not only in descriptions of the externally visible such as the Chechen body or Daddy Eroshka's physique, but of the ex ternally audible, as of Cossack idioms and the rhythms of Cossack conversation. The realist tradition, or better, the realist-romantic tradition in Russian literature has been widely ignored or misjudged in the West, partly due to its association with the eventual socialist realism of Soviet days. The neglect applies equally to important realist novelists such as N. Zla tovratsky and M. Sholokhov, and to ethnographic poets such as I. Nikitin and the master realist poet (and Tolstoy's first publisher), N. Nekrasov (Paul Friedrich, Music in Russian Poetry [New York: Peter Lang, 1998], 120-22); it even applies to Tolstoy's notably ethnographic stories such as "Polikushka." Yet realism in poetry and prose was a profound issue in Russian literature and to accept it uncritically is hardly more naïve than to ignore or disparage its serious aspects; Ja kobson illustrates the latter error by reducing it to the generic, and then an absurdity (all art seeks reality), whereas Eikhenbaum reduces it to an absurd oversimplification (e.g., Tolstoy's adoption of Stendhal's tropes; Roman Jacobson, Language in Literature, ed. by Krystnya Pomorska and Stephen Rudy [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of the Harvard Univ. Press, 1987]; B. M. Eik henbaum, Molodoi Tolstoi [München: Wilhelm Fink, 1922], 188). 1 would say that all art is real istic and all art is symbolic, but there is a significant difference between a Nikolai Nekrasov or a Robert Frost representing a mortal injury (in poems that are, incidentally, phonically masterful), and, on the contrary, a Konstantin Balmont or a Stephane Mallarmé weaving word fabrics that purport to be sufficient unto the music of their phonic selves.

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as a successful imitation of a Chechen dzhigit, or warrior-horseman. In 37, on the other hand, much is made of his fluency in the "Tatar" lingua franca as exemplary of Cossack linguistic acculturation to their Chechen neighbors. Moreover, his friend, Girei Khan, who is only mentioned boastfully in 6 ("we'll drink buza at the next fiesta"), is, in 37, a friend of trust and confi dence (kunak) who is referred to by suffixing the familiar -ka to his name and with whom he goes horse-rustling.45 Parallels also occur within chapters, here between Luka and the old Cos sack Eroshka: in 6, to begin, it is the physique and attire of the two men that occur in successive paragraphs (Chechen-style, both wear torn but functional clothing), whereas in 37, Eroshka, himself a lone wolf (biriuk, once again, a Chechen symbol), claims to be able to guide himself by the stars - just as Luka lets his horse's sense of direction guide him and his friend home from Nogai territory. Another detail: in 6, Eroshka has a small falcon (a Chechen symbol), which he uses as a decoy for catching hawks or vultures, whereas in 37 he and his friend smell booze and, "like birds of prey," join the drinkers (an example of the near parody that enlivens Tolstoy's realism). Finally, Luka's horse-rustling in 37 parallels the older Eroshka's boar hunting in 6, just as, within 6, Eroshka's hunt for wild boars, with advice to Luka as to their whereabouts, parallels Luka's anticipated hunt for wild Chechen abreks.

Chapters 8 and 35 The major parallelism counterpoints complexly between two different kinds of experience and knowledge. In 8 the Chechens are twice linked with boars, that is, wild, strong and dangerous things in nature: the exact spot for ambushing a boar is shown to Eroshka by Luka at the start of 8 whereas at the end of 8 it is Luka who is lying in ambush behind his gun-prop. This neat intra-chapter chiasmus is the basis for the main work of inter-chapter chias mus between 8 and 35. In the former of these, two pages are devoted to the natural wealth of the night in which Luka lies waiting: sky and clouds, moun tains and flowing river, reeds and driftwood, the noises of animals moving,

45. Some scholars have identified Luka's kunak, Girei-Khan (chapter 6) as a Kumyk, but the Kumyks are many miles away from the Greben Cossacks to the east and separated from them by the Andi and the Avar. I think he was meant to be seen as a Chechen (his name forms a paradigm With the slain Chechen Akhnied Khan). The fact that Eroshka is called a biryuk, "lone wolf," later in chapter 6, may be connected symbolically with the critical role of that animal in Chechen culture (it was the state totem until 2000), making Eroshka significantly Chechen (just as his model, Epishka Sekhin dyed his beard red). It may also hark back to the wolf-warrior association in early Indo-European culture (Kim R. McCone, "Hund, Wolf und Krieger bei den Indogerma nen," in Studien zur Indogermanischer Wortschaft, ed. by W. Meid [Innsbruck: Innsbrucker Bei träge zu Sprachwissenschaft, 1987). Dzhigit and Girei-Khan occur many times in The Cossacks, but biriuk is a hapax legomenon (see E. N. Shipova, Slovar ' tiurkizmov v russkom iazyke [Alma Ata: Nauka, 1976], 47 for Turkic connections).

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and then the beautiful final detail of the flight of the owl, its wings shifting their frequency so as to touch each other in flight as it nears its perch. In 35, on the other hand, we have a comparable wealth about the village: the square, chewed squash seeds, strolling youths, dignified elders, merchants, freshly washed porches, all-night revels and round dances. The exchange between Olenin and Beletsky has no obvious counterpart, but the night in 8 is one of three great evocations of nature in The Cossacks, just as the village in 35 is one of the three main literary-ethnographic evocations of culture: the two evocations are intercalated in Tolstoy's calculated distych.

Chapters 9 and 34 9 and 34, like so many other pairs, at first, seem unconnected, but in fact fairly teem with curiously echoing parallelisms. To begin, the overall theme of 9 is distilled in one sentence by Maryana's mother when she reports that Luka is running wild after killing a Chechen. The other sentences about his standing his friends to vodka and then heading for a spree with his current mistress, the sexually generous Yamka, correlate with the several sentences in 34 again by Maryana's mother, about his carousing, womanizing and gen eral braggadocio. At another physical, indeed corporeal level, 9 zooms in on the black and blue pants of the dead Chechen abrek and on Luka's white and red arms as he swims, and on the bodies of both men and the clothes they are divested of, such as the abrek1 s coat. The initial focus of 34, on the other hand, is on Maryana's uncovered head and knee and her "shapely leg" hang ing down from the stove; in other words, the Chechen in pants only and Luka stripping to his pants only commute to Maryana's exposed legs. In 9, to con tinue, Luka sees himself as hunting Chechens, the ethnic group to the south (he calls his victim an "animal") whereas in 34 he is referred to twice as stealing horses from the Nogai, the ethnic group to the north of the Chechens, as noted earlier. But the deeper meaning of 9 is that the Chechens are as hu man as we are; though he has slain them in the past, Eroshka recognizes this: "'You killed the brave (dzhigit),' he said, as if with regret," and then, "'He is far away noto.'" Finally, even Luka adds to this, "'He too was a human be ing'" (chelovek). With these and other strokes Tolstoy contextualizes his full paragraph on the dead Chechen stretched out on the sandy shore: lean torso, a "good-natured smile" on his dead lips (for the translation in its entirety of this lyric epiphany, see "Chechen Images" below). In 34, as a subtle complement to 16, Olenin, the high society Russian aris tocrat, is trying to seduce and hence psychologically destroy Maryana, the noble native women, by an unrealistic and infatuated proposal of marriage. The falseness of his whole case is recognized by her and she springs away "like the doe of a fallow deer" (spotted like a fawn; thus lan ' is obviously linked as a symbol to the name of Olenin and its Russian source in olen',

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"deer" here a stag). Olenin feels "vile" (gadko) here, just as earlier the Cos sacks joking and jesting obscenely around the dead Chechen are implicitly vile: one Cossack says that you could use the Chechen's trousers to make kerchiefs for the girls. The desecration of the noble warrior in 9 parallels the attempted violation of a "majestic" Cossack woman in 34. Luka and his mates are to the Chechen as Olenin is to the Chechenized Maryana. Equally interesting is the exploration in chapter 16 of perfidiousness and exploitativeness in friendship as defined in terms of Russian-Chechen rela tions. The chapter begins with old Eroshka meditating on the "simplicity" of his new Russian friend; it is likable but leaves him vulnerable to requests for a drink or a musket. The same chapter ends with his advice to his younger counterpart, Luka, not to trust a Chechen, even if he is your kunah: "It's strange/complicated (mudreno) (this of a) shavenhead (gololobyy)," that is, a Chechen. Then comes: "Once a Chechen was going to kill me: I'd asked ten rubles for a horse. To trust, yes, but don't lie down to sleep unarmed." The chapter ends with Eroshka derrogating both Russians and Cossacks.

Chapters 15 and 28 ' A deep thematic stratum is the partly Cossack, partly universal view that Eroshka articulates, mainly in terms of boars, boar hunting, and the boar hunter's skills: in 15 he praises a sow who led her litter to safety, then sympa thizes with moths dying in a candle. In 15, again, he tells how to kill a boar, whereas in 28, having recently done just that, he is sharing out cuts of pork in exchange for other goods. His feelings about hunting, animals, and transiency in love and life match his respect for the seriousness of death, be it of boars or Chechens or anything else: it is mudreno (here "complicated, problem atic," although elsewhere "strange, wonderful, impractical"46). Several key statements elsewhere by this Cossack sage define the seriousness of death. By a simply worded ethical relativism he equates "the laws of boars and man." The conjoined ideas of death and inter-ethnic hatred are illustrated in the very next chapter by one of the most compelling images of inter-ethnic homi cide. Luka is leaving his home for the outpost. He turns toward his mute sis ter, who signaled, "shaven head, a Chechen . . . then gestures as if to aim from a gun, sh(r)ieked, and started to sing, shaking her head. She was saying that Lukashka should kill another Chechen." Even this pathetic and perhaps half-witted mute, then, has internalized Russian ethnic hatred, where to kill a Chechen becomes a virtue.

46. Boris O. Unbegaun, The Oxford Russian-English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 355.

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Chapters 21 and 22 The deepest shared issue in both chapters was also half of the deepest ethical and religious problem for the author: thou shalt not kill. In 21 this is sue is raised early on by the dead Chechen and his brother and then elabo rated by Luka's exultant joy at having been the slayer, and by Olenin's objec tion to the kill and the lack of any regret or remorse on the part of his friend. The local resignation to war, blood vengeance and the vendetta as a way of life, as part of the flow, is distilled by the almost verbatim agreement betwe».y the two heroic natives: the Chechen older brother says, "Yours kill ours and ours kill yours," and, near the end, when answering Olenin, Luka echoes this with "Don't they kill our brother too?" In the adjoining chapter, 22, in a simi lar answer to a similar question ("Don't you feel any horror (strashno) at hav ing killed a man?"), Luka, translating Olenin's horror of guilt and remorse into fear of external danger, answers, "What is there to fear? I want to go on a campaign!" This standoff on taking life is part of a larger and detailed con trast, as noted above, between the two youthful protagonists that, in terms of categories, includes a much wider scope of exchange, gift-giving, theft (espe cially of horses), the extended family and ritual kinship and friendship, mar riage, and love, both romantic-sentimental and peasant-practical. These two chapters, structurally dead center, focus synergistically on two of the central protagonists, Olenin and Luka, as on the book's central prob lem, the commandments: "Love thy neighbor (or brother)" and, "Thou shalt not kill," that became so salient and articulate in Tolstoy's later years. In a vendetta culture, be it Cossack or Chechen, the tragic obverse of brotherly (love) is homicidal hatred for your brother's killer. This is condensed by the image of the red-bearded Chechen full of contempt beyond hatred.

B. Chechen images and metonymy Tolstoy's campaign against Russian state tyranny and terrorism is articu lated and buttressed by indelible images of Chechens that speak with great if partly masked emotion. Russian state terrorism, then as now, included occa sional infanticide, frequent rape, and the wholesale execution and torture of male captives. Yet, to the more obvious metaphors of terror and the forms of chiasmus and the Homeric epithet, we must add and emphasize another fig ure: the metonym: taking the part for the whole or the whole for the part. Some instances synthesize both these processes: the empty cradle floating down the Terek River - implicitly the baby who used to sleep in it - stand for or reduces to all Chechen victims, but also expands to include all the Russian military victimizers.47 Or take the example of scapegoating: the Chechens,

47. Paul Friedrich, "Language, ideology, and political economy," American Anthropologist 9 (1989): 305-06.

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that is all "black people" of the Caucasus, are to blame for a criminal act. Or the expansionist metonymy of "collective guilt": entire villages where Che chens are said to hide, are wiped out. Metonymy in whatever sense may work synergistically with the images of a powerful poetic prose and the pervasive mood of outrage. The combination gives the select passages below their epiphanic power and, more generally, informs the political rhetoric in Tol stoy's novels. Literary theory and practice can only be strengthened by such structural and tropological analysis. Chechen images and metonyms, particularly synecdoche, or the part-for whole figure, are distributed widely in The Cossacks. Let us look, first, at two images of what is now called "ethnic cleansing," and then a final ekphrasis. In chapter 15, Eroshka, the old Cossack, daydreaming while in wait for game, spies an empty cradle floating down the Terek: "Your soldier devils came to the village, collected the women, some devil killed the child, took its legs and (smashed its head) against a corner. And don't they do that, ah, there's no soul in people!. ... I think they threw away the cradle, drove away the women, burnt the houses, but a brave took his rifle and came over to our side to steal." This inclusion of an (implicitly innocent) baby Chechen as vic tim of brutality deepens the author's case immeasurably. The second closely kindred image comes nine chapters later in 24. Eroshka again the spokesman for fraternity and humanity, sings a "sad Tav linian song." "All its charms consisted in the refrain: 'Ai, dai, dalai.' Eroshka translated the words of the song: 'A fine young man (molodets) drove sheep from (his) village into the mountains. The Russians came, burnt the village, killed all the men, took all the women into captivity. The fine young man came (back) from the mountains: Where the village had been, there was an empty place, no mother, no brothers, no house: only one tree remained. The fine young man sat under the tree and began to weep: alone (one) like you, I remained alone and I'll sing, 'Ai, dai, dalai.' And this howling, soul-gripping refrain the old man repeated several times. The refrain probably echoes Wainakh funerary keening. The third major image of this sort comes early on, in 9. After the details of shooting a Chechen abrek from ambush and boasting of it and being praised for it, we are confronted with the body of the man, circled by silent or ob scenely jesting Cossacks:

The brown body in nothing but darkened wet blue pants, held by a thin belt over the sunken stomach, was well-proportioned and beautiful. The muscular arms lay straight along the ribs. The bluish, freshly shaven round head with its blood-clotted wound on one side, was thrown back. The smooth tanned forehead contrasted sharply with the shaven area. The glassy, opened eyes, with their pupils fixed downwards, stared up, it

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seemed, past everything. On the thin lips, drawn out at the corners and protruding from the red, closely cropped moustache, there seemed to be a smile of subtle, good-natured mockery. The fingers on the small hands, overgrown with chestnut red hair were turned -inwards, and the nails were dyed red.

Ecce homo. This moving and evocative ekphrasis, even epiphany, is bracketed in a memorable way by its two references to "The Angel of Si lence," a type of religious punctuation that is unique in Tolstoy although it does occur elsewhere. It marks this scene as perhaps the central hub of The Cossacks or one of them.48 But to return to metonymy, or the figure of part-whole. "Of all the tropes, synecdoche and related forms of metonymy are the most powerful and insidi ous when it comes to conflict between racial, class, and other social and po litical groups."49 Metonymy, hypertypically a ruse of racist gangs or racist states like Russia today, is being exploited here by one of the ultimate pro tagonists in the history of Man against the State, in this case one of its colo nial and often genocidal variants. The three images translated and analyzed above, powerfully represent Tolstoy's commitment to denounce the politics of Russian expansion into the Caucasus - as do many images in his much later Hadji Murat. To the frequency of reference to the Chechens in The Cossacks and the fact that that frequency goes unnoticed, must be added the way they are seer as distant. The point of view may be Tolstoy's own. It may be that of the Cossacks as a group, or of a group of Cossacks, or of one Cossack individual: Luka seeing them as animals, or the objects of a longshot potshot, or his mute sister's glee at his killing one of them, or Eroshka on the Chechens as fellow human beings, even superior human beings, or his memory of distant enemies and distant kunak friends. It may be Olenin seeing them gallop in the dis tance, or imagining Chechen footprints or Chechens behind every bush, or hearing about them from Cossacks. It may even be a Chechen source, a Che chen song. The overall distance or indirection is part of what makes so vivid and even epiphanic the handsome body of the slain Chechen and the con tempt beyond hatred of his red-bearded brother.

48. It may be no less pivotal, albeit for different reasons, in Layton's Alan Bloom inspired reductionist reading: "Still engaged in his battle with the poetry of Caucasian warfare and the dzhigit, Tolstoy virtually reduced romanticism's hot-blooded tribesman to a cadaver on a dissect ing table" (Layton, Russian Literature and Empire, 247). 1 would say that Akhmed Khan's dead body represents both a rejection of trite romanticism and an affirmation of a more profound phi losophy that comprises some romantic elements. 49. Friedrich, "Language, Ideology and Political Economy," 306.

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Symbolization of the Chechens as distant in space combines dialectically in Tolstoy's art with an intense if often indirect representation of them and their culture. The reader is repeatedly reminded of them even while being held away from them by the narrative flow and other devices. This engage ment by means of indirection is analogous to the technique of "indirect infec tiousness" in Tolstoy's later works: we become involved in Anna Karenina falling in love (again?) with Vronsky at the ball, by virtue of seeing her through the jealous eyes of adolescent Kitty.50 To conclude with a more general aspect of the Russian-Chechen connec tion: throughout Russian literature and "real life" there extends a generic and maximized ambivalence. On the one hand, the Chechens are evil (zlye), dis honest and crafty, dangerous, foreign and alien, analogous to wild fauna, es pecially boars and wolves. The same standard adjective, zloi, is used of the Chechens in Pushkin's Prisoner of the Caucasus, and Lermontov's "Cossack Lullaby." On the other hand, they are also conventionally seen as colorful, artistic (music, poetry), tough and indomitable, and essentially human. Both sides of the ambivalence recur in The Cossacks.

V. The Chechens and the Tsarist censor There is decisive evidence of threats and drastic rewriting by the Tsarist censorship in the 50s and 60s, and of Tolstoy's cunning moves to circumvent and survive. Several pages of The Raid were suppressed that depicted "the distress of the Chechen highlanders whose houses were being pillaged and burnt by soldiers and the crops destroyed - all with the collusion of their su periors.51 His diary for 1853 eloquently attests to his anger at the way this text had been transmogrified: "The Raid was killed by the censor. Everything that was good in it was thrown out or mutilated."52 Many, many images drawn from life experienced in the early 1850s were tucked away in the au thor's memory, safe from any censor, only to appear almost half a century later in Hadji Mur at. Yet even in the intense political suppression of the 1890s "the description of a raid (razzia) was one of the reasons for Tolstoy's fear that the censor would not allow publication of Hadji Murat in its en tirety."53 Conceptually and aesthetically as well as in terms of their publica tion problems, The Cossacks and Hadji Murat should be seen as companion pieces, in tandem, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, the extensive but pervasive

50. Friedrich, "The Tragedy of Shame"; Brock Eide, "Indirect infectiousness in Anna Karen inarms., 1998. 51. Cadot, "Hadji Mourat," 53. 52. Eikhenbaum, Molodoi Tolstoi, 69. 53. Vladimir Gudakoff, "Les oeuvres Caucasiennes de Léon Tolstoï comme Document eth nologique," in Cahiers Léon Tolstoy II: Autour de Tolstoï: Le Caucase dans la culture Russe (Paris: Institut d'études slaves, 1997), 36-43.

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ethnography of The Cossacks parallels the intensive psychograph of Hadji Murat. Eloquent testimony of Tolstoy's guerilla war with the censor comes, like much of the best evidence, from variant drafts of a text, in this case, again, of The Raid. The first, "clearly calculated for the censor" reads:- . . in the war of the Russians with the Mountaineers, justice (spravedlivost '), flowing from a feeling of self-preservation, is on our side."54 But otherwise he wrote:

Let's take two individuals. On whose side is the feeling of self preservation, and consequently, of justification: is it on the side of that ragamuffin, some kind of Jaimie, who, hearing of the approach of the Russian^, takes down his old rifle from the wall with a curse, and with three old cartridges in reserve (v zapravakh), which he will not fire in vain, runs to encounter the Gyaurs; who, seeing that the Russians go forward no matter what, are advancing toward his sown field, to his homestead (saklya), which they will burn, and toward the ravine in which, trembling from fright, are hiding his mother, his wife, his chil dren, who thinks that everything that might constitute his happiness, eve rything, will be taken from him - in a powerless rage, with a shriek of desperation, will rip off his torn homespun overcoat, throw his rifle to the ground, and, pulling his Caucasus cap (papakha) down to his eyes, will sing a predeath song and with only his dagger in his hand, will hurl himself headlong on the Russian bayonets? Is the justification on his side, or on the side of the officer standing in a general's suite who hums French ditties at precisely the times that he is passing us? Back in Russia he has his family, his relatives, his friends, and peasants and his obliga tions to them; he has no reason or desire to wage war with the mountain eers, but came to the Caucasus . . . just like that, to show his courage.... Or on the part of an adjutant known to me, who only wants to acquire as soon as possible, the rank of captain, a warm little estate, and for that reason has become an enemy of the mountaineers?"55

Scenes of this kind have been re-enacted many times since 1999, particularly during Putin's solution to the Chechen problem. That Tolstoy knew a lot about the Chechens and that they were on his mind from early on is suggested if not demonstrated by the prominence he gave to them in his early drafts when, as noted elsewhere, Luka (then Kirka) fled as a fugitive to the Chechen mountains and became a Chechen leader.

54. Gaitukaev, "Lev Tolstoi i gortsy kavkaza," 71. 55. L. P. Semenov, Kavkaz i Tolstoi 1898-1923 (Vladikavkaz: Norobtainakh-pf, 1928), 234 35.

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Fears that his pro-Chechen voice of civil disobedience would not be permit ted to be heard motivated his artful concealment of Russian atrocities against the Chechens behind a chiasmically orchestrated mirage that has bedazzled readers high and low ever since. His success in this is demonstrated by the fact that, excepting Simmons, critics until very recently never or barely ever mentioned the Chechens or Russian atrocities against them.56 Even Troyat's magnificent and scholarly biography deals with them only in gross stereo types ("fanatic," "half-savage").57

VI. Postscripts Literary anthropology, whether the anthropological study of literature or the literature of anthropology, often ignores politics and power (that is, ques tions of influence, the struggle for power over minds and matter), opposition to war or to colonialism. Yet the generic political is always relevant to the poetic, just as the poetic is always relevant to the generic political. The mu tual, reciprocal relevance may seem marginal or inconsequential in the case of, for example, Millay's Renaissance, written when she was nineteen, or Tolstoy's Childhood, written in his early twenties, but this same political thing comes at us like advancing led in his Caucasus works, as was illustrated above by his problems with censorship, and as remains true today.

Postscript (I). The contemporary relevance of Tolstoy's Chechens The Russian attitudes toward the Chechens that Tolstoy was combating have considerable time depth. As far back as 1834 General Platon Zubov had pronounced: "The only way to deal with this ill-intentioned people is to de stroy them to the last."58 Ingrained and established state terrorism and ethnic hatred has been copiously illustrated during the recent Chechen Wars (1994 96, and 1999-present), as reported on many pages, often enough front pages, of leading American newspapers such as The Washington Post. After the fall of Grozny in 2000, for example, one Russian officer was reported to have said that now the Chechens had fallen into small groups that "crawl about like cockroaches" (actually, when the Chechen defenders of Grozny found their planned escape route blocked, their four main leaders led them out over the landmines (two dying, two others maimed)). Vladimir Putin, à propos of Chechen leader Rudayev after his capture and week-long torture: "You've seen what he looks like on the screen, like an animal" (the identical idiom used in The Cossacks by Luka). A few months later, after a Moscow subway and apartment houses had been bombed - by Chechens of course, Putin said:

56. E.g., Aucouturier, Autour de Tolstoi. 57. Troyat Tolstoy, 75, 81. 58. Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya, 18.

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"We have allowed an enclave of terrorists in this country," and then, "The terrorists will be finished off in their breeding grounds."59 National Public Radio recorded a young Russian soldier: "Only when we kill them all, will there be peace." Pesman reports "Zina" as saying that the Caucasians in Omsk were "Chechens."60 In turn, all these classificatory .Chechens were "beasts." The Chechens, then, are regularly scapegoated as a synecdoche of all "blacks" or Caucasians, as the most aggressive and "masculine" of these disliked or hated minorities.61 On January 7, 2002, The New York Times re ported that the Chechen War "rumbles on" although Russian authorities keep claiming victory. The same item reported that on New Years Day 2002, there was a crackdown: villages were encircled and all the men seized in a search were imprisoned (for torture, one may assume, and, in some cases, execu tion). Russian journalists and other media people who tried to give the Che chen point of view have been repeatedly silenced and otherwise persecuted. Since coming to power, heavily on a Chechen War plank, Putin has been in creasingly successful in having the Chechen people categorized as "terror ists". The practical taboos, blackout and state censorship of the state terroristic war against the Chechens today replicates in more extreme form the problems of writing about, to say nothing of defending, the Chechens that Tolstoy spoke of so eloquently. Tolstoy's Caucasus writings are relevant this day of heartily reciprocated ethnic hatred between Russians and Chechens, when governmental policies of mass destruction obscure the human suffering and civil rights abuses suffered by the people among whom the Chechnia freedom fighters are ensconced.

Postscipt (2): Homer vs. Jesus or Homer cum Jesus? While not obviously germane to the anthropology and ethnopoetics of "Tolstoy and the Chechens," there are profound factors of aesthetics and eth ics that pervasively inform Tolstoy's Caucasus writings and that motivated him and churned him up during the decade of composing The Cossacks (roughly 1852-1862) and, indeed during his long life toward the end of which the smoldering ash burst into the white flame of Hadji Murat. One primary fact is that Tolstoy was an intense intermittent student of both Homer and the Bible, a study that has been exceptionlessly misinterpreted by all the authori ties. Aucouturier, for example, puts it: "for the traditional moral criteria Toi

59. The Washington Post, Aug. 10, 2000, A22. 60. Dale Pesmen, Russia and Soul (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 2000), 245. 61. Alaina Lemon, Between Two Fires: Gypsy Performance and Romani Memory from Pushkin to Postsocialism (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2000), 61.

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stoy substituted essentially aesthetic ones"62 (that is, Homeric for Christian). The distinguished Russianist, Jackson, writing with eloquent understatement of Tolstoy's struggles against literature without morality, puts it: "the con frontation between the aesthetic and the ethical, Homer and Jesus, the artist and the moralist, is not a passing phase in Tolstoy's thought."63 The world class humanist and literateur, George Steiner, to take a final example, com plains about "the real difficulty" of connecting and reconciling Tolstoy's un qualified acceptance of Homer's art with his lifelong, passionate involvement with the figure of Christ and the values of Christianity.64 Tolstoy seems to support these quotes by his well-known exclamation, à propos of War and Peace: "How could Homer not know that the good is love (liubov ')?" Yet the asseverations by the critics are fallacious because they counterpose and confuse Homer qua total artist versus Jesus (and, implicitly, the authors of the Gospels) as totally ethical: a black-and-white antithesis. In fact, Homer teems with ethical issues, axioms, and wisdom more generally, that have been lessons to the Western world for going on three millennia, regarding, for example, friendship, physical courage, and family solidarity65: Homer the Teacher. The Gospels, on the other hand, particularly Luke, are aesthetic mas terpieces full of implied principles and concrete aesthetic strategies regarding the narrative line, the uses of the parable and similar analogies, from which our author learned much (e.g., in his "God sees the truth but waits"). Biblical repetition and parallelism, which are reflected throughout Tolstoy, work to gether with and resemble Homeric repetition and parallelism; chiasmic paral lelism, as noted, is a hallmark of The Cossacks. In sum, Tolstoy synthesized and in a significant sense unified and tran scended basic ethical and aesthetic common denominators of Homer and the Bible. Prisoner of the Caucasus draws on Old Testament and Homeric narra tive and New Testament (including Pauline) morality of love between ene mies and across the boundaries of ethnicity and politics - and the deeply Homeric morality of perceiving the enemy as human. The axiom that one's enemy is human motivates Tolstoy's treatment of the dead Chechen abrek, the adolescent Chechen Zina, and the leader of Chechen insurgents, Hadji Murat. Tolstoy's synthesis of Homer and the Bible was sharpened by intense rereading of both texts in 1850. His own loaded statement quoted above about Homer not knowing that "the good" was love, refers to a certain kind

62. Miche] Aucouturier, "Le Caucase et la tentation paiënne de Tolstoï," in Autour de Tolstoï (Paris: Institute d'études slaves 1995), 49. 63. Jackson, "The Archetypal Journey," 380. 64. George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoievsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (New York: Vin tage Books, 1959), 113, 126. 65. Wemer Jaeger, Paideia: the Ideals of Greek Culture, trans, by Gilbert Highet (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1945), 1: 15-57.

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of Christian love and does not support the scholars' antithesis of Homer the artist versus Jesus the moralist.

Postscript (3) As Tolstoy says somewhere, the best way to appreciate a work of art is to reread, or memorize it (that is, not comment on it). In this spirit, let us con clude with one page from Hadji Murat, which, as much as any of his pages, synthesizes the tropes of image, synecdoche and mood to depict or character ize the genesis and perpetuation of inter-ethnic hatred:

The aoul that had been destroyed was that in which Hadji Murâd had spent the night before he went over to the Russians. Sado and his family had left the aoul on the approach of the Russian detachment, and when he returned he found his sâklya in ruins - the roof fallen in, the door and the posts supporting the penthouse burned, and the interior filthy. His son, the handsome bright-eyed boy who had gazed with such ecstasy at Hadji Murâd, was brought dead to the mosque on a horse covered with a bürka: he had been stabbed in the back with a bayonet. The dignified woman who had served Hadji Murâd when he was at the house now stood over her son's body, her smock torn in front, her withered old breasts exposed, her hair down, and she dug her nails into her face till it bled, and wailed incessantly. Sado, taking a pickaxe and spade, had gone with his relatives to dig a grave for his son. The old grandfather sat by the wall of the ruined sâklya cutting a stick and gazing stolidly in front of him. He had only just returned from the apiary. The two stacks of hay there had been burnt, the apricot and cherry trees he had planted and reared were broken and scorched, and worse still all the beehives and bees had been burnt. The wailing of the women and the little children, who cried with their mothers, mingled with the lowing of the hungry cat tle for whom there was no food. The bigger children, instead of playing, followed their elders with frightened eyes. The fountain was polluted, evidently on purpose, so that the water could not be used. The mosque was polluted in the same way, and the Mullah and his assistants were cleaning it out. No one spoke of hatred of the Russians. The feeling ex perienced by all of the Chechens, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hate. It was not hatred, for they did not regard those Rus sian dogs as human beings, but it was such repulsion, disgust, and per plexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures, that the desire to ex terminate them - like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders, or wolves - was as natural an instinct as that of self-preservation.66

University of Chicago

66. Tolstoy (Bayley), Hadji Mural, 629.

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