Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 06 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/13



HE COSSACKS" and the three Sevastopol sketches which were published in the early fifties were the direct outcome of Count Tolstoï's own experience. After he had quitted the University of Kazan and had Hved some months in retirement on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, his favorite brother, Nikolaï Nikolayevitch, who was a captain in the artillery serving at one of the outposts of the Caucasus, returned to Russia in 1851 on a furlough, and when he went back Count Lyof Nikolayevitch accompanied him and enlisted as a yunker. For two years he entered heartily into the strenuous life of that mountain frontier, became friendly with the Chechen tribesmen, engaged in wood-cutting expeditions, hunted and fought and gambled and wrote; for even then the passion for literary expression was on him. Among the earliest of his published works was that entitled "Kazaki" or "The Cossacks"; it bears the date 1852.

Turgenief called "The Cossacks" the best novel in Russian, and declared that it gave "an incomparable picture of men and things in the Caucasus."

Interesting as it is from a picturesque standpoint, full as it is of the atmosphere and spirit of that "Olympus of Russian Poetry," it is also interesting as betraying the first intimations of the author's altruism. He pictures Olyenin, who is the count himself, in the halcyon days of his youth and strength, coming from the empty, dissipated life of the capital to the region of noble snow-capped mountains, of fierce, independent men and women, children of the wild, untamed nature which is such a revelation to the blasé man of the world. He has a conscience, a sense of right and wrong, a desire to