I believe the author’s first composition, while he was an officer in the army of the Caucasus, must have been the novelette published later under the title, “The Cossacks.” This is the least systematic of all his works, and is perhaps the one which best betrays the precocious originality of his mind, and his remarkable power of seeing and representing truth. This book marks a date in literature: the definite rupture of Russian poetry with Byronism and romanticism in the very heart of their former reign. The influence of Byron was so strong that the prejudiced eyes of the poets saw the Orient in which they lived through their poetical fancy, which transfigured both scenery and men. Attracted like so many other writers toward this region, Tolstoï, or, rather, Olenin, the hero of the Cossacks (I believe them to be one and the same), leaves Moscow one beautiful evening, after a farewell supper with his young friends. Weary of civilization, he throws off his habitual thoughts as he would a worn-out garment; his troïka bears him away to a strange country; he longs for a primitive life, new sensations, new interests.
Our traveller installs himself in one of the little Cossack settlements on the river Terek; he adopts the life of his new friends, takes part in their expeditions and hunts; an old mountaineer, who somewhat recalls Fenimore Cooper’s “Leatherstocking,” undertakes to be his guide. Olenin quite naturally falls in love with the lovely Marianna, daughter of his host. Tolstoï will now show us the Orient in a new light, in the mirror of truth. For the lyric visions of his predecessors he substitutes a philosophical view of men and things. From the very first this acute observer understood how puerile it is to lend to these creatures of instinct our refinement of thought and feeling, our theatrical way of representing passion. The dramatic interest of his tale consists in the fatal want of mutual understanding that must, perforce, exist between the heart of a civilized being and that of a wild, savage creature, and the total impossibility of two souls of such different calibre blending in a mutual passion. Olenin tries in vain to cultivate simplicity of feeling. Because he dons a Circassian cap, he cannot at the same time change his nature and become primitive. His love cannot separate itself from all the intellectual complications which our literary education lends to this passion. He says:—
“What there is terrible and at the same time interesting in my condition is that I feel that I understand Marianna and that she never will be able to understand me. Not that she is inferior to me,—quite the contrary; but it is impossible for her to understand me. She is happy; she is natural; she is like Nature itself, equable, tranquil, happy in herself.”
The character of this little Asiatic, strange and wild as a young doe, is beautifully drawn. I appeal to those who are familiar with the East and have proved the falsity of those Oriental types invented by European literature. They will find in the “The Cossacks,” a surprising exposure of the falsity of that other moral world. Tolstoï has brought this country before us by his vivid and picturesque descriptions of its natural features. The little idyl serves as a pretext for magnificent descriptions of the Caucasus; steppe, forest, and mountain stand before us as vividly as the characters which inhabit them. The grand voices of Nature join in with and support the human voices, as an orchestra leads and sustains a chorus. The author, absorbed as he was afterwards in the study of the human soul, never again expressed such a profound sympathy with nature as in this work. At this time Tolstoï was inclined to be both pantheist and pessimist, vacillating between the two. “Trois Morts,” a fragment of his, contains the substance of this philosophy:—
“The happiest man, and the best, is he who thinks the least and who lives the simplest life and dies the simplest death. Accordingly, the peasant is better than the lord, the tree is better than the peasant, and the death of an oak-tree is a greater calamity to the world than the death of an old princess.”
This is Rousseau’s doctrine exaggerated: the man who thinks is not only a depraved animal but an inferior plant. But Pantheism is another attempt at a rational explanation of the universe: Nihilism will soon replace it. This monster has already devoured the inmost soul of the man, without his even being conscious of it. It is easy to be convinced of this when we read his “Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth.” It is the journal of the gradual awakening of an intelligence to life; it lays before us the whole secret of the formation of Tolstoï’s moral character. The author subjects his own conscience to that penetrating, inexorable analysis, which later he will use upon society; he tries his hand upon himself first of all. It is a singular book, lengthy, and sometimes trivial; Dickens is rapid and sketchy in comparison with him. In relating the course of a most ordinary journey from the country into Moscow, he counts every turn of the wheels, notes every passing peasant, every guide-post. But this fastidious observance of details, applied to trivial facts, becomes a wonderful instrument when applied to human nature and to psychological researches. It throws light upon the man’s own inner conscience, without regard to his self-love; he sees himself as he is, and lays bare his soul with all its petty vanities, and the ingratitude and mistrust of an ill-humored child. We shall recognize this same child in the principal characters of his great novels, with its nature quite unchanged. I will quote two passages which show us the very foundation of Nihilism in the brain of a lad of sixteen:—
“Of all philosophical doctrines, the one which attracted me most strongly was skepticism; for a time it brought me to a condition verging upon madness. I would imagine that nothing whatever existed in the world except myself; that all objects were only illusions, evoked by myself just at the moment I gave attention to them, and which vanished the moment I ceased to think of them…. There were times when, possessed by this idea, I was brought into such a bewildered state that I would turn quickly around and look behind me, hoping to be able to pierce through the chaos which lay beyond me. My enfeebled mind could not penetrate through the impenetrable, and would lose by degrees in this wearisome struggle the certainties which for the sake of my own happiness, I ought never to have sought. I reaped nothing from all this intellectual effort but an activity of mind which weakened my will-power, and a habit of incessant moral analysis which robbed every sensation of its freshness and warped my judgment on every subject….”
Such a cry might have been uttered by a disciple of Schelling. But listen to what follows from the heart of a Russian, who speaks for his countrymen as well as himself:—
“When I remember how young I was, and the state of mind I was in, I realize perfectly how the most atrocious crimes might be committed without reason or a desire to injure any one, but, so to speak, from a sort of curiosity or an unconscious necessity of action. There are times when the future appears to a man so dark that he fears to look into it; and he totally suspends the exercise of his own reason within himself, and tries to persuade himself that there is no future and that there has been no past. At such moments, when the mind no longer controls the will, when the material instincts are the only springs of life left to us,—I can understand how an inexperienced child can, without hesitation or fear, and with a smile of curiosity, set fire to his own house, in which all those he loves best—father, mother, and brothers—are sleeping. Under the influence of this temporary eclipse of the mind, which I might call a moment of aberration or distraction,—a young peasant lad of sixteen stands looking at the shining blade of an axe just sharpened, which lies under the bench upon which his old father has fallen asleep: suddenly he brandishes the axe, and finds himself looking with stupid curiosity, upon the stream of blood under the bench which is flowing from the aged head he has just cleft. In this condition of mind, a man likes to lean over a precipice and think: ‘What if I should throw myself over head first!’ or to put a loaded pistol to his forehead and think: ‘Suppose I should pull the trigger!’ or when he sees a person of dignity and consequence surrounded by the universal respect of all, and suddenly feels impelled to go up to him and take him by the nose, saying: ‘Come along, old fellow!’”
This is pure childishness, you will say! So it would be in our steadier brains and more active lives, rarely disturbed by these attacks of nightmare. Turgenef has touched upon this national malady of his fellow-countrymen in his last tale, “Despair,” as well as Dostoyevski in many of his. There are several cases in “Recollections of a Dead House,” identical with those described by Tolstoï, although the two authors’ treatment of this theme are so unlike. The word in their language which expresses this condition is quite untranslatable. Despair approaches it nearest; but the condition is a mixture also of fatalism, barbarism, asceticism, and other qualities, or want of them. It may describe, perhaps, Hamlet’s mental malady or attack of madness, at the moment he ran his sword through Polonius, father of his Ophelia. It seems to be a sort of horrible fascination which belongs to cold countries, to a climate of extremes, where they learn to endure everything better than an ordinary fate, and prefer annihilation to moderation.