Crossing the Terek, or, The Two Banks of Life's One River

Abstract

Tolstoy's encounter with the Caucasus as a young man was a formative lesson in alterity, one that inculcated in him a moral vision that would permeate all of his writing.

This article is the republished version of:

Crossing the Terek, or, The Two Banks of Life's One River

Notes

Translation © 2015 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, from the Russian text © 2011 “Voprosy literatury.” “‘Perepravit'sia cherez terek,’ ili dva berega odnoi reki zhizni: Perechitivaia Tolstogo,” Voprosy literatury, 2011, no. 3, pp. 9–47. Translated by Liv Bliss. Translation reprinted from Russian Studies in Literature, vol. 48, no. 3. doi: 10.2753/RSL1061-1975480302.

^* All quotations, above and below, are from “Hadji Murat,” in Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Other Stories, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics/Random House, 2010).—Trans.)

^* The closest English equivalent of the latter translation is perhaps found in Richard Sieburth's “Near and / Hard to grasp, the god. / Yet where danger lies, / Grows that which saves” in his Hymns and Fragments by Friedrich Hölderlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 89.—Trans.

^1. L.N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Iubilenoie), 90 vols. Here and below, references to that publication, by volume and page, are given in the text in parentheses.

^**The Cossacks, trans. Peter Constantine (New York: Random House/Modern Library, 2006), p. 133.—Trans.

^2.Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 69, bk. 1 (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1961), p. 506.

^3. L.M. Leonov, “Slovo o Tolstom,” in Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 69, bk. 1, p. 12.

^4. D. Ikeda, “Po sledam Puti zhizni: beseda o Tolstom,” in Tolstovskii ezhegodnik 2003 (Tula: Izdatel'skii dom “Iasnaia Poliana,” 2006), p. 285.

^*The Raid and Other Stories, trans. Louise Shanks Maude and Aylmer Maude (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1982/1999), p. 16.—Trans.

^*What Is Art? trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London/New York: Penguin Books, 1995), pp. 60, 166, 129, 121.—Trans.

^5. See O.V. Kir'iazev, “Predtecha tsivilizatsionnogo sinteza,” Eticheskaia mysl’, 2004, no. 5.

^6. M.M. Bakhtin, Voprosy literatury i estetiki. Issledovaniia raznykh let (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975), p. 210. [Quoted from Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Austin Press, 1981/2004), pp. 398–99.—Trans.]

^* “Rubka lesa,” published separately in an uncredited translation as The Woodcutting Expedition: The Story of a Yunker's Adventure ([n.p.]: Kessinger, [n.d.]). That translation is too imprecise to be used here.—Trans.

^7. M.M. Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, 3d ed. (Moscow: Khudozhest-vennaia literatura, 1972), pp. 120, 121, 122. [Quoted from Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 252, 70, 72.—Trans.]

^8. I.I. Modebadze, “Simvolika ushchel'ia/puti v kavkazskom tekste russkogo romantizma,” in Sovremennye problemy literaturovedeniia (Tbilisi: Institut gruzin-skoi literatury im. Shota Rustaveli, 2009), pp. 73–74.

^9. V. Kozhinov, Razmyshleniia o russkoi literatury (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1991), p. 53.

^10. R.A. Fadeev, 60 let Kavkazskoi voiny. Pis'ma s Kavkaza. Zapiski o kavkazskikh delakh (Moscow: Gosudarstvennaia publichnaia istoricheskaia biblioteka Rossii, 2007), pp. 258, 410, 402, 441.

^*Anna Karenina, trans. Richard Pevear and Larisa Volokhonsky (London/New York: Penguin Books, 2001/2002), p. 814.—Trans.

^11. Quoted from Tolstoi ili Dostoevskii? Filosofsko-esteticheskie iskaniia v kul'turakh Vostoka i Zapada (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2003), pp. 237, 238.

^12. Platon, Sochineniia, 3 vols., vol. 3, pt. 1 (Moscow: Mysl’, 1971), p. 324. [Quoted from The Dialogues of Plato, vol. 4: The Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett (London: Sphere Books, 1970), p. 299.—Trans.]

^13. I. Babel’, Sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols., vol. 3 (Moscow: Vremia, 2006), pp. 395, 396, 398, 399.

^14. K. Bek [Karin Beck], “Iazyk kak priem. Semiotika rechevogo akta v romane ‘Voina i mir,’ ” in Lev Tolstoi i mirovaia literatura (Tula: Izdatel'skii dom “Iasnaia Poliana,” 2008), pp. 106, 107, 108. [An abstract of Beck's dissertation “Beyond the Napoleonic Principle: Two Modes of Language Use as Bilingualism in Leo Tolstoy's ‘War and Peace,’” from which this quotation is taken is at http://tinyurl.com/7wlrkey.—Trans.]

^*War and Peace, trans. Anthony Briggs (New York: Viking Penguin, 2006), p. 1124.—Trans.

^** “The Prisoner of the Caucasus,” in Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Other Stories, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics/Random House, 2010), p. 23.—Trans.

^15. M. Shulakevich [Marek Szulakiewicz], “Traditsiia kak problema sovremennoi kul'tury,” Kosmopolis, 2008, no. 2, p. 113.

^16. A. Ageev, “Zanoza”: www.rus.ru. (11/9/2005) [Found at http://www.russ.ru/Kniga-nedeli/Zanoza.—Trans.]

^*www.stihi-rus.ru/1/Tarkovskiy/13.htm. All URLs accessed in March and April 2012.—Trans.

^** Presumably Georg Adolph Erman, the natural scientist, with whom Bestuzhev-Marlinskii collaborated in exile.—Trans.

^17. The Sado of “Hadji Murat” was also a real person. He was the grandson of Sheikh Mansur, whose name translated from the Arabic means “victorious” and who was the Caucasus mountain men's first imam, and he saved Tolstoy when the latter was attacked by Shamil's murids during a mounted troop movement. Tolstoy never forgot his close brush with death and later corresponded with Sado: Kavkazskii gorets (Prague) 1925, nos. 2–3, p. 50.

^18. In his article “M.Iu. Lermontov, Poet of the Supermen” [M.Iu. Lermontov. sverkhchelovechestva] (1908–9), Dmitrii Merezhkovskii applied a precise formulation to pull together in a lineal succession the two authors' interpretations of war triggered by impressions they had gained in the Caucasus. “ Valerik’ is world literature's first manifestation of the uniquely Russian view of war that Tolstoy delved into so endlessly”: D.S. Merezhkovskii, V tikhom omute. Stat'i i issledovaniia raznykh let (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1991), p. 407.

^* Quoted from Dostoevsky, Memoirs from the House of the Dead, trans. Jessie Coulson (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1956/1965), pp. 72, 77.—Trans.

^19. V.B. Shklovskii, Povesti o proze. Razmyshleniia i razbory, 2 vols., vol. 2 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1966), p. 390.

^20. P.V. Annenkov, “O mysli v proizvedeniiakh iziashchnoi slovesnosti. Zametki po povodu poslednikh proizvedenii gg. Turgeneva i L.N.T.,” Sovremennik, 1855, no. 1, p. 24.

^21. L.Ia. Ginzburg, Literatura v poiskakh real'nosti. Stat'i, esse, zametki (Len-ingrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1987), p. 23.

^22. A. Belyi, Veter s Kavkaza. Vpechatleniia (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1928), pp. 175, 5.

^23. K.N. Leont'ev, “O vsemirnoi liubvi,” in Leont'ev, Zapiski otshel'nika (Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 1992), pp. 407, 430, 431, 427 [www.vehi.net/leontev/dost.html].

^24. Quoted from A.L. Zisserman, Fel_dmarshal kniaz’ Aleksandr Ivanovich Bariatinskii. 1815–1879, 3 vols., vol. 2 (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1890), p. 334.

^* Muraveinye brat'ia, an invention of ten-year-old Nikolai, the eldest Tolstoy brother, who believed that love would rid the world of pain and all men would become “Ant Brethren.” Tolstoy believed that Nikolai may have been deliberately or accidentally playing with the name of the Moravian Brethren [Moravskie brat'ia].—Trans.

^25. E.M. Kapiev, Izbrannoe, 2 vols., vol. 2 (Makhachkala: Dagestanskoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo, 1971), p. 129.