FALL 2004

Volume 56, Number 4

PAULFRIEDRICH

Tolstoy, Homer, and

Genotypical Influence
A LTHOUGH IT IS COMMON KNOWLEDGE among lovers of Russian litera-
J^\. ture that Leo Tolstoy was profoundly and throughout his life influenced by
Homer, key questions remain regarding the nature, scope, and depth of his in-
debtedness. In the pages that follow I will attempt to answer some of these ques-
tions from four different perspectives: biography, fundamental values and themes,
phenotypical traits such as the heroic epithet, and, most important of all, geno-
typical poetics—in this case chiasmus, or the repetition of elements in reverse
order. I will do so by looking mainly at Tolstoy's earliest masterpiece. The Cos-
sacks, with a concluding supplementary glance at his last, Hadji Murad.

1. Biography
Tolstoy read Homer as a boy on his family estate, Yasnaya Polyana, and, while
in the Caucasus in his middle twenties, returned to the Greek poet with mounting
enthusiasm. Somewhat later, while coming out of a deep depression in August,
1857, he wrote, "I was/have been reading (chital) the Illiad. That's it! What a
wonder! It is compelling me to rethink The Caucasus Tale [i.e.. The CossacksY'
(Opul'skaya 364). (The Russian translation that so inspired him, incidentally,
was Nikolay Gnedich's, which Pushkin so admired and which stands, paradig-
matic and unsurpassed, to this day.) On December 9, 1870, Tolstoy announced
to his wife that he was going to learn Greek and began immersing himself in the
language fervidly on an almost daily basis: Xenophon, some Plato, above all.
Homer. These originals were like "spring water that sets the teeth on edge, full of
sunlight and impurities and dust motes that make it seem even more pure and
fresh" (Troyat 327). He taught himself with a rapidity that astonished scholars,
ignoring grammar as a matter of principle,' and seems to have believed that he

' The way that Tolstoy studied Greek (and later Hebrew) by comparing several translations—but
"without grammar"—has to be understood in relation to his intense earlier studies of Latin, Russian,
and French grammar before he went to Kazan University.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/284

had found in the Greek poet an art similar to his own: "Without false modesty,"
Tolstoy would later declare of War and Peace., "it is like the Iliad" (Steiner 71).
Hugo von Hoffmannsthal apparently agreed, and wrote that he could not read a
page of The Cossacks without being reminded of Homer. Much more recently,
Harold Bloom has written eloquently on the Homeric qualities of Tolstoy's last
novel, Hadji Murad. One reason critics have been responding in this way is the
chiasmic symmetry that both authors share, a structure that, as will be shown,
can be internalized and creatively adapted without the benefit of hearing "the
spring water" of the original.

2. Values
Homer's gift to Tolstoy also consisted of fundamental, axiomatic values: not
just a warrior ethic but a patriarchal culture, "interacting local and urban scenarios
. . . a dry fidelity to the facts . . . an affirmation of life . . . an anthropomorphic
image of reality... an immanent realism rooted in the senses (Steiner 78). Tolstoy
drew from Homer an empathy for the natural world that reinforced his own
experiences, as well as his reading of all of Rousseau by age eighteen: in Homer
the horses of Achilles weep, while Tolstoy allows us to see the world through the
eyes of a gelding; the dog who dies upon seeing his master in Homer is paral-
leled by the setter in Tolstoy who thinks about the folly of his bird-hunting mas-
ters. In both authors the realm of nature is often quintessentialized through
depicting the time of day or the season: the epiphany of Homer's rosy-fingered
dawn is equaled aesthetically by the autumnal dawns and times of twilight in
Tolstoy. This attentiveness to the natural cycles is paralleled by an acute sensitivity
to occasional and annual rituals coded in formulae and traditional phrasing that
reinforce the idea of the repeated emergence of culturally defined activities:
rituals for receiving a guest or sacrificing to a god in Homer find their match in
Tolstoy's word pictures of a (wolf) hunt or a baptism. Both authors also display a
comparable interest in ethical values, not only in their realization but also in how
they are threatened or degraded by human weakness: the absolute dignity of
manual work—plowing and haying—versus the sloth and luxury of Helen's bed-
room or of Helene in her boudoir; the absolute value of man and wife living
together in harmony as distilled in Odysseus's words and Tolstoy's happy mar-
riages versus the conflicted marriages and the varieties of adultery that inspire
both authors; the physical courage of Sarpedon and Prince Andrew versus abject
cowardice in combat situations. In both, the warrior ethic is in fact balanced by
the capacity to see the enemy and his point of view, be this the mortal fear of
Hektor in flight or the young French officer with blue eyes whom Nicholas rec-
ognizes as so much like himself that they could have grown up together in the
same family. These values are, in turn, set in contexts, not just of war and peace,
but of the more general conflict between private standards and loyalty to the
polity: should I run the king through because of a slave-girl, or must the great
king compromise his majesty by leaving that slave-girl untouched? must I show
hospitality to this ritual brother although it puts my family at risk (as in the case
of Hadji Murad), or should I slaughter the suitors for my wife because they have
 TOLSTOY & HOMER/285

violated the rules of hospitality (as in The Odyssey). At the level of gender these
and other values are concretized hetween, on the one hand, a patriarchal, male-
dominant culture and, on the other, the complex relations between a man and
woman who are conceptualized as equal: Levin and Kitty during courtship and
many other scenes, or Odysseus and Penelope during the negotiation of his recog-
nition. A similar tension surrounds issues of deeper philosophical import: although
both writers seem to acknowledge a controlling necessity or fate—be it the causes
of war, or of Anna's suicide, or the foreordained doom of Achilles—both also
leave the door ajar to freedom of will and choice, whether the question involves
marrying a Russian princess or going home to one's wife. This unresolved ten-
sion between absolute freedom and absolute fatalism is conveyed in the language
of both authors, in the counterpoint between formulaic language and language
that is inebriatingly free and original, between the rigorous architecture of
Ciceronian sentences in Tolstoy or Homer's lines balanced in dactylic hexam-
eter and a choice of words in a narrative sequence that, in its synthesis of seem-
ing freedom and seeming inevitability, has struck all readers as "natural." On a
dozen axes of values, then, there is a deep congruity, much of it reflecting the
influence of the archaic epic bard on the nineteenth-century novelist.

3. OvertPoeties
At a relatively superficial and obvious level, Tolstoy's art language shares much
with his beloved Homer, including the figure of inventory, the heroic epithet,
formulaic scenes, certain kinds of repetition (notably anadiplosis), lyric epiphany,
and an inspiring tension between the literal and figurative, between literary real-
ism and associative lyricism—and something else nobody has been able to de-
fine: clarity and simplicity.
One hallmark of Homer's poetics is the list, be it of warriors or of ships. In
Tolstoy the list serves diverse purposes—as in the mysterious list of ten field fiow-
ers at the start of Hadji Murad. A second, more widely recognized trope is the
heroic epithet, from "much-enduring, crafty Odysseus" to the down on Lisa's lip
or the bared bosom of Helene, even if the novelist's irregular usage of this trope
is far from the rules of economy and thrift that control the Homeric epithet. A
third striking feature is formulaic and hence repeated scenes or "situation rhymes":
the rituals of sacrifice, hospitality, and the battlefield in Homer were a template
for Tolstoy's analogous scenes of battle, hunting, and the ballroom. A fourth
resemblance involves a striking but not systematic repetition of words between,
as the case may be, lines, clauses, and sentences; what in Homer is an irregular
repetition between lines becomes in Tolstoy the repetition of a word at intervals
within the sentence or between sentences (see Sankovitch). The last of the obvi-
ous connections between the two writers is the presence of "lyric epiphany"
(Friedrich, "Lyric Epiphany"): in the course of the narrative one encounters,
often suddenly, an increased density of phonic texture and an increased inten-
sity of images and their sequencing. For example, the corporality of Homer's
description of the pole entering the Cyclops' eye is not only paralleled but matched
by Tolstoy's account of Levin mowing with the peasants. Similarly, for lyric inten-
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/286

sity, Anna's suicide matches the death of Patroclus. Indeed, Homer's intricate
relation to subsequent lyric poetry, notably Sappho, is a critical commonplace,
as are Tolstoy's intricate debts to lyric poetry.^

4. Genotypical Poetics: Chiasmus and the Creative Process

Chiasmus or an abccba order is universal, if intermittent, in cross-cultural aes-
thetics, occurring saliently, for example, not only in Homer and the European
Baroque, but also in the Old Testament (II Samuel 21-24), Archaic Greek and
Hopi pottery, and hundreds of other Western and non-Western art products. As
an orchestrating principle chiasmus was terribly important to Tolstoy; his excite-
ment about it was matched only by his skill at concealing it. Indeed, a careful
examination of the role played by chiasmus in the history of the composition of
The Cossacks sheds light not only on Tolstoy's indebtedness to Homer but also on
Tolstoy's creative process.'
Let us review eight empirical facts germane to this process. To begin. The Cos-
sacks was inspired by the Caucasus itself, and the resulting three and a half chap-
ters were later added to in Moscow, Paris (where they got entangled in Tolstoy's
horror at a guillotining), and his estate on Yasnaya Polyana (where they got en-
tangled with his torrid affair with the serf Askinia). Second, Tolstoy did in fact
work on The Cossacks off and on for over a decade, as evidenced by dozens of
diary entries that refer to it and other Caucasus works such as Wood-Felling. Third,
he wrote out by hand hundreds of drafts of chapters or parts of chapters, many
of them rewritten several times, and he kept shifting them around. To quote
Opul'skaya, "This shifting of pages from one manuscript to another was one of
the techniques (priyomov) of Tolstoy in the course of which, often relocating

^ Many times throughout his long life Tolstoy composed poems, "about 40" according to one
scholar (Sloane 70-71), but many more if we include the lines and stanzas that he composed in his
head while en route to some meeting or occasion. He often corresponded in verse (Sloane 70-71).
Tolstoy also wrote two long poems, and The Cossacks actually began as a ballad in Cossack Russian
(Opul'skaya; see also Maude 53). It was rewritten as numbered paragraphs that hark back to the
stanzas of the original long poem tbat he was carrying in the depths of his mind. Moreover, in
letters and diary entries Tolstoy sometimes refers to The Cossacks as "my Caucasus Poem." Tolstoy
was a close friend with two of the greats of Russian lyric poetry: Nikolay Nekrasov (who published
Childhood and other early works of Tolstoy), and Afanasy Fet, with whom he talked about poetry and
(mainly German) philosophy. Tolstoy revered Pushkin, whose Gypsies and Caucasus Prisoner rival
Homer as a deep source of inspiration for The Cossacks. He also, if less reverently, reread Lermontov,
particularly A Hero of Our Time, which had demolished one kind of falseness in the poetry of the
Caucasus. The Cossacks contains many passages tbat either avoid or parody conventional Caucasus-
style poeisis at the same time that it synthesizes not only prose realism and lyric subjectivity but epic
and lyric as well. To do so Tolstoy drew from Homer both lyric epiphany (some of whicb, such as
Hektor's farewell, he identifies), and, as I will demonstrate below, the overall strategy of Homeric
chiasmus, or perhaps more accurately, chiasmic symmetry.
' Homer's influence was reinforced by Tolstoy's deep roots in the eighteenth century (see Berlin,
"Tolstoy and the Enlightenment"; and Eikhenbaum). Indeed, an important aspect of Enlighten-
ment culture was the use of chiasmus in all the arts, especially music. For example, the music of
Bach and Mozart, with which Tolstoy was familiar, is often strikingly chiasmic in its organization.
Thus, by a sort of serendipity, the two ages in Western civilization when chiasmus flourished most
vigorously as an aesthetic principle—^Archaic Greece and eighteenth-century Western Europe—
were also two of the main sources of Tolstoy's art.
 TOLSTOY & HOMER/287

pages or endre chapters, he gave the text a different sequencing {posledovatel'nost').

It was precisely this technique that he applied for the first time in The Cossacks
and then used extensively in the course of his entire creative path" (372) ."* Fourth,
for the first eight years he worked on the novel, practically all the time that Tolstoy
gave to The Cossacks was spent on the first third of the eventual book, which he
started over and over again. He kept redoing and relocating and reshuffiing the
earlier chapters and paragraphs and pages. Indeed, the first third has to be seen
as "a separate whole or entity {otdel'noe tseloe)" (Opul'skaya). The last third of The
Cossacks, on the other hand, was not begun until February, 1860, and was fin-
ished in a year of off-and-on writing while Tolstoy was also redoing and orches-
trating the first parts. Fifth, over time Tolstoy worked with many alternative plots
and subplots, their ordering relative to each other, and their internal organiza-
tion; notable variants include Olenin marrying Maryana and their having a child,
Luka killing or wounding Olenin out of jealousy and becoming one of the lead-
ers of the Chechens, and Luka being caught and executed. The names of the
characters changed many times, as did the title of the book {The Furtive and
Notes of an Officer in the Caucasus were two early titles). Sixth, the final, published
version differs from earlier drafts in a multitude of key details; for example, the
description of Beletsky sniping at sparrows from his window was replaced by one
of him lying on his cot reading The Three Musketeers in Chapter 24—thus match-
ing the reference to The Deerslayer in Chapter 19. Seventh, during the period in
question, but especially during the last two years, Tolstoy let friends, relatives,
and editors know about The Cossacks, but at the same time repeatedly writes that
he is tired, can't start it, can't finish it, can't find a "plan." Eighth, near the end of
the creative process in 1860, he excitedly reports that he has at last figured out
how to write the book—a comment that coincided with another burst of enthusi-
asm about the Iliad.
The above suggests six stages in Tolstoy's writing of The Cossacks:first,the over-
all idea of writing a Caucasian tale that would surpass those of his predecessors
—an idea that actually generated three and a half chapters and that was inspired
both by his sojourn in the Caucasus and a rereading of parts of Homer; second,
years of writing and rewriting, shuffiing and reshuffiing chapters, fragments, and
pages in terms of dozens of alternative plots and versions, while intermittently
reading Nikolay Cnedich's Iliad; third, tightening and intensifying the first third
and, to a lesser extent, the first half, with an ever sharpening definition of the
four main characters in terms of what Tolstoy called "the poetry of reality"
{deisvitel'nost'), even while campaigning against the established and conventional
"poetry of the Caucasus"; fourth, the realization in 1860, while Tolstoy was again
rereading Homer, that the work should be ordered chiasmically; fifth, the over-
all drafting of the entire work together with a first drafting of many of the later
chapters; and sixth, during the final two years, the intercalating and ingrafting of
hundreds of key details to emphasize the parallelism between chapter dyads.

'' Opul'skaya's superb and minutely detailed analysis of the composition of The Cossacks draws on
a huge archive of personal letters, historical documents, textural variants, and dozens of successive
drafts and outlines, many of the latter containing the author's marginalia.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/288

5. Chiasmus in 77ie Cossacks: Chapter Dyads

inThe Cossacks there are ahout 75 chiasmic parallels over the 42 chapters (dis-
counting the many intra-chapter parallels), distributed unevenly from one in
some dyads to over a half-dozen in others. A few occur twice only (Olenin's wealth,
Maryana's beauty), while the specifics of inter-ethnic conflict involve five chap-
ters, women's work and powerful women, six, and vespertinal or auroral settings,
seven. Of special interest are thematically counterposed dyads such as Romantic
illusion versus realistic rejection. The majority of chiasmic dyads involve Luka as
dzhigit (brave): flirting, womanizing, hunting, trading or stealing horses, killing
Chechens. Chiasmic analysis thus confirms Tolstoy's deep concern with the char-
acter of Luka, the hero of earlier versions of The Cossacks and presumably a pro-
totypical sketch for the truly Homeric hero that emerged in Hadji Murad (Bloom).
Other dyads are aesthetically fascinating: Luka cutting a withy vs. switching a
horse (8-35), Luka stripping to his pants vs. Maryana exposing her leg (9-34),
Eroshka being teased as a pimp vs. Olenin caught prowling, Eroshka smelling of
wine and dried blood vs. Maryana smelling of marjoram and pumpkin (also in
11-32), Maryana fetching cold red wine vs. picking bunches of luscious red grapes
(12-32), Eroshka being teased for "licking the jug" vs. Maryana drinking from
one (14-28), Maryana's arm offering tea to Olenin vs. her thigh being struck by
him (18-25), wild grapes growing on trees vs. the smell of grapes in a party room,
and Olenin being reminded of The Deerslayer vs. his friend's reading The Three
Musketeers (19-24).
Here is a detailed analysis of the chiasmus of five chapter dyads—three that
involve the beginning and end of the narrative (1 and 42, 2 and 41, 3 and 40)
and two that are present at the novel's midpoint (20 and 23, 21 and 22) .*

Chapters 1 and 42
The underlying and ubiquitous chiasmus of The Cossacks is illustrated near the
very end, as if the author were teasing us: "Then as now a three-horse convey-
ance (troyka) was standing at the porch." However, now (in Chapter 42), in con-
trast to then (in Chapter 1), Olenin is not promising himself a new life. A deeper
strand shared by the two chapters is the breakup of a courtship: in Chapter 1,

^ For the benefit of readers who are tmfamihar with this work, here is a one-paragraph summary
of The Cossacks (modeled on Aristotle's summary of the Odyssey). An aristocratic rake, Olenin, turns
his back on Moscow dissipations and a courtship gone awry and heads for the Caucasus as a volun-
teer officer brimming over with Romantic illusions about heroic combat, egalitarianism, and the
beauty of nature and native women. On reaching a village there he makes friends with an old Cos-
sack wbo teaches him about bunting, local customs, and human nature; a young Cossack who incar-
nates Cossack horsemanship, martial arts, and womanizing; and a beautiful, strong virgin with whose
family be lives and with whom he becomes infatuated. Memorable episodes include the young Cos-
sack shooting a Chechen guerilla from ambush as be tries to swim a river, a hunting seqtience that
focuses on the meaning of Olenin's encounter with a great stag and its lair, a party given by Russian
officers for young Cossack women, and a skirmish in which the young Cossack is gravely wounded
while his detachment is killing nine Chechen infiltrators. Olenin exits Cbechnia as a wiser man, but
alienated from both nature and the Cossacks, wbo are already forgetting him as he leaves. (All
translations of The Cossacks here are my own.)
 TOLSTOY & HOMER/289

Olenin is leaving a young woman whom he has compromised; in Chapter 42,

Olenin is spurned by a young woman who has lured him on. In both chapters,
albeit differently, the young woman is loved by another man who is also a friend
of Olenin, and there is some indication that she will move on to that man: in
Chapter 1, the jilted Moscow aristocratic lady will be courted by the "thin ugly
man," who has been nurturing a secret affection for her, whereas in 42 Maryana
will move on to Luka. Both of these chapters are pervaded more generally by the
attitude that love between men and women is impossible or false. Olenin says as
much in Chapter 1 when dismissing the young woman's embarrassment: his lack
of guilt reflects his belief that "It is impossible to love" and that "To be loved is
unhappiness." In Chapter 42, Olenin recognizes that the cultural barriers to his
love for Maryana are insuperable.
As these comments about love suggest, alienation is in fact central to The Cos-
sacks. Near the end of 42, for example, Eroshka exclaims to Olenin, "What a
bitter one you are, always alone, always alone. What an unloved one you are"
(Tolstoy's emphasis). Likewise, at the end of Chapter 1, Olenin's friends turn
almost immediately from saying goodby to him to planning for the next meeting
of their club. Eroshka in essence does the same at the end of the novel: he sponges
a gun from Olenin, whom he ostensibly "loves," and then, in the book's last sen-
tence, begins "to chat with Maryana, obviously about their affairs, and neither
the old man nor the young woman were looking at him [Olenin]."

Chapters 2 and 41
Chapters 2 and 41 appear to be quite disparate at first glance: six pages of
Olenin's expectant illusioning in the first instance versus three pages of bloody
fighting in the second. Yet it is precisely the hiddenness of the chiasmus that
renders it profoundly signifying. Chapter 2 depicts Olenin's fancied and actual
alienation from Moscow, high society, the never named friends to whom he has
just tearfully bidden farewell, and even the socially lofty Sashka (with whom he
uses the second person pronoun ty, implying intimacy). He is also alienated from
a series of women, be it the young aristocrats with whom he has had flirtations,
the gypsies with whom he has done "some foolish things," or a recent affair that
went too far and from which he is now escaping—avoiding, as he always does,
any serious commitment. All in all, nine persons are named or partly titled "who
represent the social world he leaves behind him, each indicating either debts he
has failed to repay or a love relation that he is fleeing along with those debts"
(Bagby and Sigalov 480). Swathed in illusions of his youthful strength, Olenin
feels that he has never actually loved, that "there is no love." He dreams of a
Circassian slave woman who will pine for him and afford him pleasure when he
returns heroically from war covered with gore, who will learn French and read
Hugo, and whose key trait will be submissiveness {pokornost').
In Chapter 41, on the other hand, Olenin, now violently in love or at least
infatuated with a flesh-and-blood beauty—albeit not Circassian but Cossack—
and seeking her hand in marriage, is violently rejected, with her "beautiful sad-
ness" {krasivaya pechaV) expressed in five successive negations, including a triple
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/290

negative, during five conversational turns that are climaxed by a look of "abhor-
rence, contempt, and anger" from which our hero, totally excluded, departs for-
ever. The chiasmus between Chapters 2 and 41, then, involves a set of illusory
pluses counterposed to a set of actual minuses. The dyad also provides support
for the argument that the hub of The Cossacks is a theory of love that draws, in
particular, on the Bible and Plato, both of which Tolstoy read repeatedly during
his three years in the Caucasus.
In both chapters amorous dreams are spiced with martial scenes. Fn route to
the Caucasus, Olenin dreams of "killing or subduing innumerable highlanders"
or even of becoming one of their leaders and fighting against his own Russians.
In Chapter 41, however, Olenin is totally rejected by the Cossacks as a coward (he
ducks sniper bullets) and, as an outsider, is deemed fit only to watch the battle as
a bystander. He is categorically set off from the ideal Cossack Luka, who is gravely
wounded when the Cossacks, using a hay wagon as cover, kill all the Chechens.
He is even more categorically set off from the red-bearded, aquiline Chechen,
who, after wounding Luka, is gunned down unarmed by the real coward in the
crowd, the young cornet.

Chapters 3 and 40
Chapters 3 and 40 are chiasmically parallel in at least eight ways. Both are set
at sunrise, with sightings across great expanses (in Chapter 3 of steppe leading to
the mountains, and in Chapter 40 of steppe that is vacant and austere like the
social and psychic vacuum with which the book ends). In both chapters mounted
Cossacks are in action—in the first case near at hand, their guns swinging rhyth-
mically, in the second assembling in the village and then riding to combat, "car-
rying their weapons (rifles) so that they neither jingle nor rattle." In both chapters
there is an omen, be it, in 3, of a "terrible murder," with the implied danger to
travelers, or, in 40, "of bad luck among the Cossacks," when the fine horse of the
leader stumbles and becomes restive. In both chapters Olenin is approaching
the dangers of guerilla warfare with the Chechens, sighting (in Chapter 3)
Chechen abreks "cantering about the plain" and ( in Chapter 40) the nine
Chechens who, entrenched behind a low mound of sand, have tied themselves
together and are readying to fight to the death.
Perhaps the most tightly focused chiasmus here is the crucial role that is played
in both chapters by the Nogay (pastoralists north of the Terek Cossacks): in 3 it is
the Nogay carriage driver who points out the distant mountains to Olenin, who
can't see them, and then when he does, responds "indifferently." In 40, on the
other hand, the Cossacks first pass a Nogay cart carrying a family and then "two
tattered Nogay women," who confirm the presence of "many Chechens." In both
cases, then, it is Nogay Others who interpret a distant reality—mountains and
Chechens—that symbolizes the wildness and exoticism of the Caucasus. At the
deepest level, though, the chiasmus between Chapters 3 and 40 is antithetical or
dialectical. In the earlier chapter Olenin is immersed in an illusion of human
equality that seems to be in the process of realization: fantasies of Cossack and
Caucasian indigenes and their women and a view of the mountains which he
 TOLSTOY & HOMER/291

questions and doubts (like the music of Bach or woman's love) are replaced by
what seem to be real Cossacks, real mountains, and real native beauty. Thus, in
40, he is not only stripped by Luka, the cornet, and others of any illusion of
equality; he is actually demoted to an inferior, noncombatant status which he
accepts, his "meaningless questions" ignored by the Cossacks. In short, whereas
Chapter 3 depicts a joyous entry into a seemingly realized realm of "grand" and
"majestic" illusion, Chapter 40 depicts an unhappy descent from lost illusion
into a stark reality of debasement and humiliation. In 3 Olenin looks back at the
false illusions and shame of his Moscow existence and ahead to an illusory
Caucasus, whereas in 40 he looks directly at a reality characterized by his own
exclusion and shame.

Chapters 20 and 23
The first part of both Chapter 20 and 23 depicts Olenin's all-day hunts with his
dog. He mingles and identifies with nature, although his Romanticism is tem-
pered by Tolstoy's classic realism. Thus, in 20, Olenin finds himself covered with
mosquitoes which "sting him and mingle with his sweat," each one of them a
distinct individual "separate from all else like me." Olenin is no longer a Russian
aristocrat, but a mosquito.
Olenin also deeply identifies with the stag he had heard the day before while
hunting with Eroshka. Now he lies in its lair, smells its sweat, sees its droppings
and the earth it has turned. Olenin's moments of identification with the stag and
with the mosquito are themselves blended or bonded through the shared idiom
of "separate from all": "I, Dmitri Olenin, am separate from all, alone, like this
stag." There is even a phonic identification between the stag (olen'), the name
Olenin, and the Russian word for "one" or "alone," odin (a tradition of its own in
Russian romantic poetry, as initiated in a poem by Lermontov with whose oeuvre
Tolstoy was so decisively engaged). These phonic connections remind one of
Homer's play with Odysseus as "No man" in the Cyclops episode, just as the stag
and its lair probably hark back to Odysseus's olive bush lair, the boar's lair, and
his encounter with a stag (10:157-63). Olenin's identification with the stag not
only harmonizes with his name but also with his epiphanic discovery of himself
and his own true nature: he reunites with the primal, etymological meaning of
his name (Pomorska).
Let us go deeper. These chapters are also bonded to each other by an eruption
of simple, elemental joy: in 20, Olenin senses the stag from being in its lair whereas
in 23 he senses Maryana from watching her moving about her house and yard—
locations that are synecdoches, respectively, of nature and culture. Moreover,
both moments of elemental happiness are undercut by sharp turns toward alien-
ation and fear. In 20, Olenin, emerging from the stag's lair, finds the forest spooky,
uncanny (zhutko), and fearful (strashno). In 23, as if to complement this, Olenin's
imagined communality with Maryana, which he would be "afraid" to spoil with
"a word of jestful love," is violently interrupted by the visit of a friend with his
banal, French-laden lingo, Moscow gossip, and shallow social ambitions. The vil-
lage Cossacks soon accept Olenin's visitor, however, and approve of his addiction
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/292

to wine and women, whereas Olenin again is left alone to talk and drink with the
likewise marginal Eroshka.*
These two chapters are also locked together structurally: the order of elements
within each is roughly parallel, as is true of many chiasmically linked books in
Homer (1 and 24 in the Iliad, for example) and other dyads in The Cossacks. What
locks the two chapters together most tightly, however, is the rejection of self-
ishness and egoism (originally a French word that is used in both chapters and
nowhere else in The Cossacks). The egoism in 20 is Olenin's own; in 23 it is that of
Russian society as represented by his friend Beletsky. In both, the rejection is
also coupled with an enthusiastic embrace of values beyond the self: in 20, a
selfiess love for others, in 23, feminine beauty as exemplified by Maryana. In
each case Olenin's soul soars toward higher and transcendental ideals which are
strengthened by the semi-parodic and certainly ironic image of Olenin stagger-
ing out of the stag's lair to look for someone on whom to practice his version of
selfiess love.

Chapters 21 and 22
The parallelism in these central chapters is dense, but is also disguised more
craftily than in any other dyad in The Cossacks; perhaps, after leading us through
the first half of the book, the author did not want to make his trope too obvious.
On the one hand, 21 focuses on the brother of Luka's victim, a tall, well-built
man with a beard dyed red, who notwithstanding his tattered coat and hat, is
"serene and majestic as a tsar." He has come down out of the hills to ransom the
body. His past and motives (three brothers killed by Russians), and his hatred
and infinite contempt for Russians, particularly Luka, dominate here. Chapter
22, on the other hand, focuses on Olenin's gift to Luka of a fairly ordinary
horse and the enormous disparity of wealth between the two men: one owns
hundreds of horses worth 300 rubles each, whereas the other needs a horse in
order to get married.
Yet there are important connections beneath the overt disparity. In Chapter
21 Olenin is emerging from the forest, and in Chapter 22 he is returning home
through that same forest. Both chapters throw Olenin and Luka against each
other as reciprocal touchstones of their respective characters. Near the start of
21, for example, Olenin encounters the hostility of the Cossaciks in the barracks,
whereas near the end of 22 the Cossacks, including the elders and Maryana's
mother, have become suspicious of him because of his (to them incomprehen-
sible) gift of a horse to Luka. One third of the way through 21, Luka boasts of his
Chechen kunak friend, Cirei Kan, and two thirds of the way through 22 he again
tells Olenin of this same kunak, who has invited him to participate in an ambush.
Deeper parallelisms involve the relation between false appearances and un-
derlying sincerity or genuineness. In 21 the Cossack captain shifts from stilted

^ Olenin's alienation from the village Cossacks is also indicated by the fact that Maryana never
names him directly or indirectly. Moreover, Luka never even refers to him (Bagby and Sigalov 482,
485). Olenin always stands onomastically outside the Cossack world he dreams of entering.
 TOLSTOY& HOMER/293

formulae to natural, unaffected expressions, whereas in 22 the contrast is be-

tween Olenin's presentation of a horse at insignificant cost to himself, a philan-
thropic ego trip, and the more natural and reciprocal, or potentially reciprocal,
flow of exchange among Luka and the other Cossacks.
The deepest shared issue in both chapters was also half of the deepest ethical
and religious problem for the author: the Biblical prohibition against killing. In
21 this issue is raised early on in relation to the dead Chechen and his brother; it
is then elaborated by means of Luka's exultant joy at having killed the Chechen
and Olenin's objections to the slaying and the lack of any regret or remorse on
the part of his friend. The local resignation to war and blood vengeance as a way
of life is distilled into parallel statements by Luka and his heroic adversary: the
Chechen older brother says, "Yours kill ours and ours kill yours," and, near the
end of the chapter, when answering Olenin, Luka asks, "Don't they kill our brother
too?" In Chapter 22, in a similar answer to a similar question ("Don'tyou feel any
horror (strashno) at having killed a man?"), Luka, interpreting Olenin's guilt and
remorse as a fear of external danger, answers, "What is there to fear? I want to go
on a campaign!" Here, as elsewhere, the opposition between Luka and Olenin is
part of a larger opposition that, in terms of categories, is much wider in scope:
exchange, gift-giving, theft (especially of horses), the extended family, ritual kin-
ship and friendship, marriage, and love.

6. Homeric Chiasmus
Let us return now to the particular "Homeric question" with which we began.
In Homer chiasmus works synergisdcally with narrative line and character devel-
opment as one of the basic principles of construction. This is a case where what
can be simply defmed can also be projected as the orchestration of a vast work:
on the one hand, "I love you and you love me"; on the other hand, the orchestra-
tion of the Iliad—or of Mozart's Requiem Mass. In Homer, as in Tolstoy's The Cos-
sacks, chiasmus involves a parallelism between the first and last chapters or books,
the second and next-to-last book, and so forth. It is also present within a given
book or chapter.
It should suffice for now to summarize the working of chiasmus in the first and
last books of the Iliad. Book 1 begins with the plague sent by Apollo (whose priest
had been rejected) and the funeral pyres of the Greeks; 24 ends with the funeral
of Hektor. Next in the first book comes the quarrel between the king and Achilles
and the abduction by the former of the "spear woman" or captive slave of the lat-
ter; in Book 24, on the other hand, the next-to-last event involves the reconciliation
between Achilles and the king of Troy and the return of Hektor's body. A third
parallel can be drawn between Achilles' encounter with his sea goddess mother
and her appeal to Zeus in Book 1 and the message from Zeus to Achilles and his
mother, Thetis, in Book 24. Odysseus's journey by boat to return the girl captive
in Book 1 likewise corresponds to King Priam's journey in the dead of night to re-
trieve his son's mutilated body in Book 24. In Book 1 Thetis entreats Zeus to ac-
cept her son's cause, which he does, whereas in 24 her encounter with Zeus re-
sults in a modification of that cause. Finally, the end of Book 1 portrays a quarrel
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/294

on Olympus, whereas a quarrel on Olympus provides the opening of Book 24.

These intricate parallels are captured in one of Whitman's elegant charts (260):
-Plague and funerals
— Quarrel and seizure
— Thetis and Achilles—appeal to Zeus
Bookt
• Journey to Chrysa
I—Thetis and Zeus—adoption of hero's cause
— Quarrel on Olympus

— Quarrel on Olympus
'—Thetis and Zeus—modification of hero's cause
-Thetis and Achilles—message from Zeus Book
• • Priam's journey XXIV
'—Reconciliation and restitution of Hector's body
-Funeral of Hector

Indeed, as Whitman and his predecessors (Sheppard, for example) have shown,
the entire Iliad is chiasmically orchestrated around the pivotal ninth book, "The
Embassy," just as Tolstoy's The Cossacks is chiasmically ordered, from the bracket-
ing 1 and 42 to the central 20-21.
All of the above should remind us that Tolstoy participated in a Russian liter-
ary tradition that was far more oral than its Western counterparts in terms of
reading one's work aloud, writing by dictation, and the manifold uses of the memo-
rization and the recitation of poetry (granted that for Tolstoy and his totally
literate readership, chiasmus did not have the mnemonic function that it does
for a bard in the purely oral cultures of Ancient Creece or the South Slavs). For
Tolstoy chiasmus became a tactical principle by which elements in the first third
or half of a work function to generate analogies in the second half, analogies
which the rfeader, ignorant of their source, might find novel and unpredictable;
in other words, a simple rule of transformation generates hundreds of fairly regu-
lar correspondences that seem totally spontaneous. As such, chiasmus became
for Tolstoy an organizational principle employed toward the end of the creative
process rather than an integral part of that process ab ovo. Furthermore, if Tolstoy
and Homer agree in using isolating, individuating epithets and "dramatically
pertinent details" (Steiner 66), Tolstoy goes farther than his Greek predecessor
in projecting scores or hundreds of details that are both "dramatically pertinent"
and chiasmic; this double function gives The Cossacks some of its mysterious charm.
Thus, while in both Homer and Tolstoy chiasmus and narrative (line) are com-
plexly synergistic, in the latter artist it can and does have the additional function
of obscuring (or, insidiously, highlighting) a political message. In Tolstoy, in sum,
chiasmus is a technique or device that can be artfully, even craftily exploited, a
compositional principle, in other words, by which he slyly attempted to perfect
the several big ideas that the hedgehog in him had built into "one thing" (Berlin) .^

' See Isaiah Berlin's celebrated essay, "The Hedgehog and the Fox," the title of which stems from
two lines by the sixth-century Greek poet Archilochus ("The fox knows many things/But the hedge-
 TOLSTOY & HOMER/295

7. Conclusions: Genotypieal Influence

The types of infiuence dealt with above in their historicity, thematics, and po-
etics are, of course, synecdoches of a much broader spectrum of relevant theo-
ries, all of which are at once problematic and instructive. The first approach,
while basic in traditional criticism, has been cast out as "the biographical fallacy"
or "vulgar (auto)biographism" (Jakobson 320) because it allegedly leads to dodg-
ing the inner significance of a work of art. And yet it enriches one's reading,
especially in the case of authors such as Tolstoy (or Thoreau) where the minu-
tiae of a life correlate in intrinsically fascinating ways with those of a great book:
the specifics of Tolstoy's relations with the Chechens give depth to our reading
of The Cossacks and its details about Chechen red hair (both natural and dyed).
The second approach, the thematic one, may veer into a mixture of sociology
and philosophy that is allegedly alienated from a fetishized text and that, like
"vulgar biography," deafens us to much that is in that text—in The Cossacks, for
example, to a panoply of kinship terms and their nuances and significations. Yet
the thematic approach also creates a cultural context that is crucial for a deep or
"heroic" reading; the cultural palimpsest in The Cossacks with its Russian, Cos-
sack, and Chechen meanings and its sources in Rousseau, Pushkin, and Homer.
The third approach, that of phenotypical poetics involving relatively visible or
obvious features, has also been derided as superficial or as a structuralism that
focuses frivolously on forms at the expense, for instance, of the role of the poet
or the poem in the encapsulating political economy. Yet just such a poetics of the
overt can yield many insights: instead of it being a jaded or superficial "heroic
epithet" or personal trait, we see that Eroshka's song and bitter laugh play a
critical role in representing the larger tracks of this novel's characterology, nar-
rative fiow, and mordant critique of tsarist politics (Friedrich, "Tolstoy and the
Chechens").
Contrasting with the three kinds of influence just named is a fourth, the geno-
typical. The term genotypical is adapted from biology, where it refers to hereditary
traits. In literature genotypical infiuence refers to a common source or instances
in which one author or work is the source of another author or work, but in a
manner that is covert and not generally discerned because, as with Tolstoy, it is
artfully hidden, or, as with Joyce's use of the Odyssey, brilliandy transmogrified
(the reader, even while knowing the overall parallels, misses the details). Geno-
typical infiuence can involve anything from a type of clause to the principle of
orchestration of an entire novel.
hog knows one big thing"). I disagree categorically with Berlin here: in my view Tolstoy and Dostoevsky
were both foxes who knew many little things and hedgehogs who knew one big thing. I do, however,
agree with Berlin's opposition to the widespread critical position (see, for example, Eikhenbaum)
of situating Tolstoy too completely in the intellectual climate of Nicholaevan Russian of the 1850s.
Berlin's simplistic view of the place of The Cossacks in Tolstoy's life work was laid to rest in a fine but
neglected critique by Hagan, who pointed out that the Cossacks, rather than realizing a Russian or
Rousseauian ideal, are mortally flawed in terms of Tolstoy's own ethics and are in fact close to their
Russian high society counterparts when it comes to sexual promiscuity, alcoholism, and physical
brutality—although in their case these flaws are to some extent redeemed by their energy and
naturalness (32, 39). Jackson, going much further, puts it this way: "These Cossacks are quite clearly
quasi-epic heroes in an anti-epic novel. They have fallen into the hands of a guilty Homer" (403).
The best philosophical discussion of The Cossacks or, more accurately, of the Tolstoy who wrote The
Cossacks is by Orwin.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/296

A primary example of genotypical influence is Anna Karenina, in regard to

which Tolstoy's boast, "Nobody has seen my design," was finally proved wrong—
first by Elizabeth Stenbock-Fermor and later by Pamela Meyer, who has demon-
strated the pervasive role played by Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary in the
novel's overall architecture, as well as in dozens of its details. The role of geno-
typical influence in this case is made all the more decisive for us by Tolstoy's
apparent disregard for his unacknowledged French master (two of his three re-
corded statements are highly negative), and the way he promoted, as a sort of
efficient cause and more acceptable Russian source, the notion that he awak-
ened from a nap following a rereading of Pushkin's Tales of Belkin with Anna
Karenina in his mind.
A second prime example in the Russian context is afforded by the master poet,
Fyodor Tyutchev, of whom Tolstoy said, "I cannot live without my Tyutchev." Per-
haps the most fascinating of his many brilliant poems, "Silentium," turns out to
build on three levels. The dominant one is a strongly emotive, rhetorical alterna-
tion between the indicative, interrogative, and imperative moods; for example,
each stanza ends with a command. Beneath the modal level runs a metrical (mainly
iambic) one. Yet even deeper lies a third level based on accent (three stresses per
line) that derives from innovations in German lyric by Tyutchev's friend Heinrich
Heine (some of whose poems he translated). Here, again, we encounter the kind
of covert connection I have termed genotypical.
Another prime example of genotypical influence is Henry David Thoreau's
Walden. Although at the phenotypical level, Walden is patently organized in terms
of the Gita, at a deep, genotypical level there are also hundreds of details that
reflect the author's ecstatic appreciation of the "tremendous cosmogonal phi-
losophy" of the "Bible of Hinduism" (199). For example, the incident where his
ax slips below the ice and he retrieves it with an inventive noose (120) reflects
not only a parable in the Old Testament (II Samuel 6), but, more to our point,
critical passages in the Cita where "the ax of knowledge" can be lost or found,
can be used to sever the roots of illusion, and so forth (e.g., IV. 42, XV.3).
This account of the chiasmic form of The Cossacks and Tolstoy's debt to Homer
also may have several larger implications. In terms of ethics, moralists like Homer
and Tolstoy at least subconsciously sense that chiasmus implies a responsibility at
the end of one's life/text for acts and attitudes scattered along the earlier stages.
This reminds us of Buddhist karma and the Hebrew Ecclesiastes, texts to which
Tolstoy was deeply sympathetic (and which incidently are roughly contemporary
with Homer). Psychologically speaking, chiasmus may create a cognitive coil of
partly conscious narrowing, then an end area of concentration, followed by an
opening up of the coil as fate decrees: the narrowing coil of Olenin striving to
realize his romantic illusions followed by—after the stag in the forest—the un-
coiling self-realization of the tawdry turns he has been taking. Aesthetically speak-
ing, the chiasmic form, like its strictly lyrical first cousin the sestina, creates
subliminally for most readers a series of possibilities that are progressively con-
strained even as potentials are created in their unpredictable specifics (the num-
ber of possible analogies in a later chapter to an element in an earlier one is an
infinite set). Chiasmus in Tolstoy as in Homer means heading inevitably and
fatefully toward a goal or telos while also making free choices en route.
 TOLSTOY & HOMER/297

The power of chiasmus, as I have repeatedly suggested, can be made more

complex and hence insidious through being concealed artfully, because then it
works subconsciously, subliminally, invasively, beyond the control of reader or
hearer.* That during the fourteen decades since its publication, chiasmus in The
Cossacks, as well as its Homeric origins, have not been analyzed or even noticed
by legions of Tolstoy specialists provides eloquent testimony to the skill with which
Tolstoy concealed the way in which he employed a traditional mnemonic device
found in Homer as a way of consciously crafting a modern novel.
The underlying chiasmic structure of The Cossacks is echoed by the conspicu-
ous ring composition (initial elements repeated at the end) we encounter in
Tolstoy's late (1904) Hadji Murad. Indeed, the two novels form a tandem remi-
niscent of Homer's epics. In his Hadji Murad, Tolstoy depicts a Caucasus leader
who, because of conflicts with an insurgent warlord, defects to the despised Rus-
sians. Held for a time with honor, he nevertheless escapes, only to be trapped
and killed. Hadji Murad is thus Tolstoy's second reincarnation of such Homeric
values as physical courage, friendship, and the rituals of hospitality. Both The
Cossacks and Hadji Murad, for example, start with the main protagonist entering
a Chechen border village and end with the slaughter of North Caucasus fighters.
Hadji Murad is also bracketed by the image of a tough red thistle that, at the
outset, contrasts metonymically with ten tame flowers (Friedrich, "Lyric Epiphany").
After a profound and complex representation of inter-ethnic confiict, the same
red thistle re-emerges on the last page, but now as a "Tatar," a metaphoric con-
densation of the heroic spirit of Hadji Murad. In form and content, then, Leo
Tolstoy's earliest and latest novelistic masterpieces reflect the inspiration and the
genotypical influence of Homer.'

University of Chicago

" Tolstoy also artfully concealed other orchestrating structures in his works. "The Kreutzer Sonata,"
as one might expect and as analyzed by two critics, is an analogue, not only of the Beethoven origi-
nal (Green), but, beyond that, of the sonata form more generally (Rosen 12). His later masterpiece.
Master and Man, is to a significant degree modeled on Flaubert's "The Legend of St. Julien," and
includes Christian and numerical symbolism (the circle, the numbers two and three) that was woven
in late in the writing process and has been barely noticed by readers (Trahan; Swanson).
' Thanks to the following for their critical comments: Tom Bartscherer, Sascha Goluboff, Alaina
Lemon, Paul Liffman, Katia Mitova, Dale Pesmen, Kevin Tuite, and the two anonymous readers for
Comparative Literature. I am grateful to Ann Ch'ien of the University of Chicago's Anthropology
Department and to Katie Gruber of the Linguistics Department for their meticulous, informed
typing of various stages of the manuscript, to Maureen Mahowald for her library searches, and—
last but not least—to my daughter Joan Friedrich for her help with making the English in my trans-
lations more natural. A complete analysis of chiasmus between all 42 chapters is available in xerox
form on request.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/298

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