"The Cossacks" and "Hadji Murad".

"THE COSSACKS" AND "HADJI MURAD"

In Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy

Translations by Louise and Aylmer Maude. HarperPerennial, $7.50.

"A PRISONER IN THE CAUCASUS"

In Walk in the Light While There Is Light and Twenty-Three Tales By Leo Tolstoy. Translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude. Orbis, $17.

After I assigned "The Cossacks," "Hadji Murad," and "A Prisoner in the Caucasus" to my second semester Freshman English class, a student complimented me on my artful selection of readings. "I see what you're doing," he said nodding sagely. "Israel ... Chechyna...."

Honestly, Jonathan, it was a sad coincidence that we were reading about cultural and territorial conflicts! Tolstoy makes everything he is writing about seem immediate and, if not in our own living room, then right next door. So even if glorious peace fell like snow on Chechnya and Israel, Tolstoy's stories still would resonate and make us think of any of the world's other ethnic or religious wars.

The Cossacks were various groups of Russian settlers who made their way to the outskirts of Russia to maintain either religious or cultural freedom from governmental interference. In the Caucasus the Cossacks were in the traditional lands of the Muslim Chechens (or Tatars), and they regularly skirmished (the Cossacks were famous and infamous for their willingness to fight). The young Cossacks, though Christian, faithfully imitated in manners, fashion, and vocabulary their Muslim foes. The Cossacks and Tatars were, Tolstoy shows us, more similar to each other than to the Russian soldiers and they respected each other; they both resented the recent intervention of Russian troops, including the novel's hero, Olenin (Tolstoy's standin). "The Cossacks" is a love story, but it is also about how an outsider, a privileged outsider, is, in spite of his earnest good will and best intentions, finally only an outsider.

"A Prisoner in the Caucasus" is the most thrilling escape story I know (Tolstoy wrote it as a tale for all readers, from children on up). Zhilin is a Russian soldier trying to return home on leave from the Caucasus to visit his sick mother. Instead, Tatar warriors intercept and capture him and hold him prisoner in a mountain village for ransom. Zhilin is an ordinary but decent young man; he becomes the local fixit man, and in the mean time notices everything and respectfully observes his captors' unfamiliar customs and Islamic ceremonies and even tries to learn Tatar. He befriends an adolescent girl who later helps him escape. I have read the story aloud with my students, and it takes a bit more than forty minutes. Occasionally I break off half way and let them complain that we haven't finished. Yes, it's a trick to make them want to read the rest of the story on their own. Most of them will. It's that exciting. When Tolstoy was an old man, in his seventies, committed to pacifism and socially and morally uplifting fiction, he wrote, on the sly, a novella about a great warrior, Hadji Murad. (Art was always Tolstoy's refuge--and is always a refuge from political and religious convictions.) Hadji Murad was a real man, a Tatar guerilla, who, to save his family, jumps to the Russians' side, and then, when he figures out that the Russians are not going to let him fight or even help him retrieve his family, decides to escape and complete his mission on his own. In writing the story Tolstoy the old man is again Tolstoy the young artist, more interested in vitality than in moralizing. There's lots of action; students like it.

Bob Blaisdell

Kingsborough Community College 

City University of New York