At Astrakhan the tarantas was unloaded, patched together and harnessed, and they took to the road again. They had one hundred and sixty-four miles to cover across the steppe before reaching the Staro- gladkovskaya stanitsa where Nicholas' regiment was quartered.
PART II
A Time of Violence
I. The Caucasus
Since the beginning of the ccntuiy the eyes of every young Russian who dreamed of mystery, adventure and deeds of glory had been turned to the Caucasus. Alexander I had annexed the kingdom of Georgia in 1801, but the savage tribes who lived high in the mountains were still fighting the regular army troops sent to occupy their territory. The tsar's forces had set up a cordon of military posts on the left bank of the Terek and the right bank of the Kuban from which thev could make gradual inroads into the rebels' land; the posts were held by Cossacks, and were known as stanitsas. Expeditions went out from these stanitsas to raid the aouls, or Circassian villages; they destroyed the pastureland, kidnapped the livestock, took as many prisoners as possible, and dashed back to camp. The riposte was swift and certain. Often, the Russians were ambushed before they could get back inside their lines. Or, just as the stanitsa was dropping peacefully off to sleep, warriors agile as devils would spring up out of nowhere in the midst of the camp, slit the guards' throats, bear off the screaming women and set fire to the huts. In the course of this last-ditch war, which had been going on for the past fifty years, Cossacks and mountain-dwellers had gradually- acquired a kind of bitter esteem for each other. The most dreaded of the Caucasian tribes were those of Daghcstan and Chcchcnya. Their leader, Shamil, had managed to convince his men that they were engaged in a holy war against the Christian invader; for these fanatics, death was Allah's reward.
Although he knew the Caucasian poems of Pushkin and Lermontov by heart, Tolstoy was sure a revelation lay in store for him. When would he finally sec those snowy peaks he had heard so much about? One evening the postilion waved his whip at some grayish shapes that stood out against a background of cloud. He was disappointed. But upon
awakening the following morning to the distant white architecture in the limpid sky, he felt an almost religious thrill of joy. They began to meet occasional Cossacks on horseback; high up on the other side of the Terek, thin plumes of smoke identified the enemy aouls. Tolstoy took it all in, but he was not going to be tempted by any postcard prettiness. To look closer, weigh one's words, tell the exact truth, already seemed to him, at twenty-two, to be the key to art, and perhaps to human relations as well.
When, on May 30, 1851, lie entered the Starogladkovskaya stanitsa, he was appalled: a tiny Cossack encampment at the bottom of a hollow, encircled by woods, copses and thickets, with little houses on stilts, a watchtower, an old cannon on a wooden gun-carriage, an alarm bell and a few shops where sunflower seeds, gingerbread and lengths of cloth were sold. That evening he wrote in his diary, "ITow 011 earth have I ended up here? I don't know. Why? I know even less!"1 And a little later, he wrote to Aunt Toinette (in French): "I was expecting the country to be very beautiful, but it isn't at all. The stanitsa is on low ground, so there is no view, and the quarters are inadequate, along with every other amenity of life. As for the officers: they are, as you can imagine, an ignorant lot, but very decent fellows otherwise and, above all, devoted to Nicholas."
He had no time for further complaint. A week after he arrived Nicholas was sent with a detachment to Fort Stary Yurt, to protect the patients being treated at the hot springs in the nearby village of Goryachevodsk, and thither Leo Tolstoy followed his brother. This time, he met the real Caucasus, the one he had dreamed about and begun to doubt the existence of, down in the hollow at Starogladkovskaya. Sheer rock, dizzying paths, steam-draped boiling waterfalls. Three mills, one 011 top of the other, stood over the main stream, whose water was so hot that it would cook an egg in three minutes. The Tatar women did their laundry there, and squeezed the water out by jumping up and down. Seated 011 the bank with his pipe in his mouth, Tolstoy delighted in the scene. He could not resist describing it to Aunt Toinette, but lie emphasized the purely artistic quality of his admiration: "It is like an anthill in perpetual movement. Most of the women are handsome and well built. Despite their poverty, their oriental dress is attractive. The picturesque groups they form, coupled with the wild beauty of the place, make a truly splendid sight. I often spend hours admiring this scene."2
Even in his tent at night, the charm of this life of freedom occupicd his thoughts. His head filled with all the things he had seen, it seemed to him that his communion with nature brought him closer to God.
Nevertheless, he refused to yield to grandiloquence. How to reconcile the loftiness of his feelings with simplicity of expression? The preoccupations of the artist mingled with the preoccupations of the Christian. He wrote in his diary, "I don't know how other people think, but everything I have heard and read proves to me that they do not think as I do. They declare that the beauties of nature make them conscious of the immensity of God and the insignificance of man; lovers see the image of their beloved in the water; others say the mountains seem to speak, the leaves say this and that, the trees are calling to us. . . . How do such ideas take root in people's brains?"3 The thoughts that came into his head, when he let himself be carried away by his imagination, were, in his opinion, either trivial or untrue. But when he tried to tell what he saw and felt in plain, everyday words, it seemed to him that there was indeed a mystery in the commonplace, and greatness in what was least. Could it be that in literature as in morality, simplicity- was a paying proposition?
When everyone else in camp lay sleeping, he jotted down a few skctchy notes, which could presumably be of interest to no one. "The night is clcar. A cool brcc/.e passes through the tent and makes the candle flame waver. Far away, the aoul dogs are barking and the sentries are calling out to each other. The air is full of the fragrance of the oak- and plane-tree leaves used to thatch the tent. I sit on a drum in a little shed adjoining the tent. . . . Everything in there is dark, except for one bar of light falling across the end of my brother's bed. But just in front of mc, in full light, a pistol, sabers, a sword and a pair of underpants are hanging on a partition. Silence. A gust of wind. A gnat buzzes past my ear. Close by, a soldier coughs and sighs."4