Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 02.djvu/537

 Rh "Everything, altogether!—Are the cutlets ready, Nikoláev?" he asked.

"Why did you go to the Caucasus to serve, if the Caucasus is so displeasing to you?"

"Do you know why?" he replied, with absolute frankness. "By tradition. In Russia, you know, there exists an exceedingly strange tradition about the Caucasus, аs though it were a promised land for all kinds of unhappy people."

"Yes, that is almost true," I said, " the greater part of us —"

"But what is best of all," he interrupted me, "is, that all of us who come to the Caucasus make dreadful mistakes in our calculations. Really, I can't see why, on account of an unfortunate love-affair or disorder in money matters, one should hasten to serve in the Caucasus rather than in Kazán or Kalúga. In Russia they imagine the Caucasus as something majestic, with eternal virgin snows, torrents, daggers, cloaks, Circassian maidens,—all this is terrifying, but, really, there is nothing jolly in it. If they only knew that you never are in the virgin snows, and that there is no special pleasure in being there, and that the Caucasus is divided into Governments, Stavrópol, Tiflís, and so forth —"

"Yes," I said, laughing, "in Russia we take an entirely different view of the Caucasus from what we do here. Have you not experienced this? when you read poetry in a language that you do not know very well, you imagine it to be much better than it really is —"

"I don't know, only I have no use for the Caucasus," he interrupted me.

"No, not so with me. I like the Caucasus even now, but differently —"

"Maybe the Caucasus is all right," he continued, as though provoked a little, "but I know this much: I am not good for the Caucasus."