I recently finished reading Tolstoy’s The Cossacks. It’s a póvest, a long short story about a young Russian nobleman from Moscow, Olénin, who decides to escape from his life in Moscow to live in the Caucasus among the Cossack people, as a cadet in the Caucasian Army. I was first attracted to the story as a travel narrative. I recently came back from a semester abroad in Senegal, and I have to admit that I recognize some of Olénin’s silly, first-time traveler mistakes. Olénin departs full of daydreams, a naïve and egotistical boy, who thinks that he will discover the key to happiness while on his voyage. Always looking through a romantic lens, Olénin sees the Cossacks as “rough beings (95),” free from convention and social rules, with simple customs, and beautiful women. He views them not without some contempt, as he imagines the Cossacks to be uncivilized, and he seems to think he will ‘wow’ the village as rich Russian nobleman.
As it turns out that he is not so desirable a newcomer. One of the first interactions we see between him and a Cossack women ends in the woman shrieking at him, “May you be shot in your bowels and your heart (126)!” Olénin, comically sometimes, falls into the many typical traps of a traveler: he is awkward, he gets lost, he is duped and overpays for his lodgings. But his greatest failure is his inability to understand the Cossacks and integrate with them as he desires. Olénin actually ends up having difficulty picking up the mannerisms and customs of the region that he once thought so ‘simple’. Wrapped up in his own thoughts about life, Olénin has very little interaction with the villagers, and when he does, it is clumsy and desultory. In general, he is content merely to watch village life without participating. As one of my peers, Kim, put it, he regards the Cossack village as a “sideshow.”
Ultimately, Olénin’s stay is unsuccessful by his own terms: he ends up leaving when he realizes that he cannot fit in. I saw his departure not as an escape, like his flight from Moscow, but a sign that he has realized where he belongs. Though he was not able to get a good grasp on Cossack life, I think Olénin got a sense of his own limitations, realizing that he is not center of the universe. He realizes that people everywhere are leading their lives, and he cannot simply barge in to a community and be the center of attention, fleeing to find a new place when something goes wrong. I think this is a crucial element of a voyage: you may set out to understand another culture, and you certainly can make progress towards doing so, but it’s always somewhat beyond your reach. Rather, you end up leaving rather with a better of understanding of yourself, and I think this is what is crucial to Olénin’s voyage.
2 comments:
Your reflections on the metaphor of the "personal voyage" are very compelling. They remind me of our conversations regarding Nikolai's trip to Moscow in "Childhood," where the physical journey to the city serves as the vehicle for a much more consequential, and endless, metaphysical journey through life. Nikolai's and Olenin's trajectories are inverted, however: one leaves the city and the other makes his way to it. After a semester in Senegal, where your life must have been quite different from how it takes shape in Williamstown, do you find that pronounced cultural and social differences add more to your own "personal voyage" than the more subtle differences that you might notice living alongside people who are, by and large, very similar to you? Or is the insight it brings simply different?
I don’t know if it’s cliché, but by going abroad, my “take-home lessons” seemed to have as much with myself as it did with the place I visited, lessons about myself that I don’t think I could have learned in Williamstown. While living in Senegal, every time I would get temporarily thrown for a loop (for example, learning to live in a polygamous family), I would be forced to examine my own conception of love/marriage and how and why that’s different than the conception of marriage I was observing. Had I never observed another approach to love and marriage, I don’t think I would have ever been able to interrogate my own—it’s just something we can’t really access when among other people who feel more or less the same way we do about something.
I’m not sure what Tolstoy would say about all this, though. He might say that interrogation of one’s morals/perspective is unnecessary—he almost always makes it out to be a corrupting influence (Levin in the city, Natasha at the opera, I think these scenes are both in Moscow). Even city characters that move to the country are unable to adopt the country’s “moral” (according to Tolstoy) way of life (i.e. Anna and Vronsky at V’s estate). Traveling is an act characters perform outside of the home—away from the influence of family, and I think it is this aspect that makes it so risky, and usually corrupting, for Tolstoy. For example, traveling is the act that catalyzes Anna’s downfall—she leaves her husband and son to come to Moscow, where she meets Vronsky. Ultimately for Tolstoy, I think travel is morally risky, but that it can be fruitful, if characters are strong enough to see another way of life, but that realization should not change their actions: that would be artificial—like Levin wanting to marry a peasant woman. Rather, as with Olénin, traveling should make them realize something about themselves that was already there.
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