Leo Tolstoy, Two Hussars

It is not easy to understand how Tolstoy constructs his narratives. What other fiction writers make explicit – symmetrical patterns, supporting structures, counterbalances, link sequences – all remain hidden in Tolstoy. But hidden does not mean non-existent: the impression Tolstoy conveys of transferring ‘life’ just as it is on to the page (‘life’, that mysterious entity to define which we have to start from the written page) is actually merely the result of his artistry, that is to say an artifice that is more sophisticated and complex than many others.

One of the texts in which Tolstoyan ‘construction’ is most visible is Two Hussars, and since this is one of his most characteristic tales – at least of the early, more direct Tolstoy – as well as being one of the most beautiful, by observing how it is made we can learn something about the way the author worked.

Written and published in 1856, Dva Gusara appears to be a reevocation of what was by then a bygone age, the beginning of the nineteenth century. Its main theme is that of vitality, a thrusting, unrestrained vitality which is seen as something distant, lost, mythical. The inns where the officers on a new posting wait for a change of horses for the sledges, and fleece each other at cards, the balls given by the local provincial nobility, the wild nights ‘with the gypsies’: it is in the upper classes that Tolstoy represents and mythicises this violent, vital energy, as though it were the natural, but now lost, foundation beneath Russian military feudalism.

The entire story hinges on a hero for whom vitality is the sole reason for success, popularity and power, a vitality that finds in itself, in its very disregard for rules, in excesses, its own morality and consistency. The character of Count Turbìn, the Hussar officer who is also a great drinker, gambler, womaniser and dueller, is simply the concentration within the one character of the vital energy spread throughout society. His power as a mythical hero consists in his achieving positive outcomes for that force which in society displays only its destructive potential: for this is a world of cheats, despoilers of the public purse, drunkards, boasters, scroungers, libertines, but also one in which a warm, reciprocal tolerance turns all conflicts into games and festivity. This genteel civility barely masks a brutality worthy of the barbarian hordes; for the Tolstoy who wrote Two Hussars barbarism was the immediate predecessor of aristocratic Russia, and in this barbarity lay its truth and health. A good illustration is the apprehension with which, at the ball held by the aristocrats of K., the entrance of Count Turbìn is viewed by the hostess of the ball.

However, Turbìn combines within himself both violence and lightness: Tolstoy always makes him do things which he should not do, but endows his every movement with a miraculous rightness. Turbìn is capable of borrowing money from a snob with no intention of giving it back, in fact he insults and maltreats him; he can seduce in a twinkling a poor widow (his creditor’s sister) hiding himself in her carriage, and casually compromising her by parading around wearing her late husband’s fur coat. But he can also perform acts of selfless gallantry, such as coming back from his sledge-ride to give her a kiss as she sleeps and then leaving again. Turbìn is capable of telling everyone to their face what they deserve: he calls a cheat a cheat, then forcibly strips him of his ill-gotten gains and returns them to the poor fool who had allowed him to defraud him in the first place, and donates the money that is left over to the gypsy women.

But this is only half the story, the first eight chapters out of sixteen. In chapter 9 there is a jump of twenty years: we are now in 1848, Turbìnhas died some time before in a duel, and his son is in his turn now an officer in the Hussars. He too reaches K., on his march to the front, and meets some of the characters from the earlier story: the foolish cavalryman, the poor widow, now an elderly matron resigned to her fate, as well as her young daughter, to make the young generation symmetrical to the old. The second part of the tale, we immediately notice, is a mirror image of the first, only everything is inverted: instead of a winter of snow, sledges and vodka, we have a mild spring with gardens in the moonlight; as opposed to the wild early years of the century with their orgies in the caravanserai at the staging posts, we are in mid-nineteenth century, a settled epoch of knitting and peaceful ennui in the calm of the family (for Tolstoy this was the present, but it is difficult for us to put ourselves in his perspective).

The new Turbìn is part of a more civilised world, and is ashamed of the wild reputation his father left behind. Whereas his father had beaten and maltreated his servant but had established a sort of bond and trust with him, the son does nothing but grumble and complain about his servant: he too oppresses him but in a strident, effeminate manner. There is also a card game in this half, but played in the family home for just a few roubles, and the young Turbìn with his petty calculations has no scruples about taking money off his landlady, while at the same time playing footsie with her daughter. He is as mean-spirited as his father had been overbearing and generous, but above all he is vague and incompetent. His courting of the girl is a series of misunderstandings, his nocturnal seduction is nothing but a clumsy advance which leaves him looking ridiculous, and even the duel which this is about to cause dies away as daily routine prevails.

In this story about military ethos written by the greatest writer of open warfare, one has to admit that the great absentee is war itself. And yet it is a war story: of the two Turbìn generations, the aristocratic and the militaristic, the first was the one that defeated Napoleon, the second the one that suppressed the revolutions in Poland and Hungary. The verses that Tolstoy places as the epigraph to the tale take on a polemical overtone, attacking History with a capital H, which usually only takes account of battles and tactics, ignoring the substance of which human existences are made. This is already the polemic that Tolstoy will develop ten years later in War and Peace. Even though here we never leave the officers’ world, it will be his development of this same subject that will lead Tolstoy to set up as the real protagonists of History the masses of peasants turned ordinary soldiers as opposed to the great military leaders.

Tolstoy is not, then, so much interested in exalting the Russia of Alexander I over that of Nicolai I as in seeking out the ‘vodka’ of the story (see the story’s epigraph), the human fuel. The opening of the second half (chapter 9) – which acts as a parallel to the introduction, and its nostalgic, rather clichéd, flashbacks – is not inspired by a generic lament for times past, but by a complex philosophy of history, and a weighing up of the cost of progress. ‘Of the old world much that was beautiful and much that was ugly had disappeared, and in the new world much that was beautiful had developed. But much, much more that was monstrous and immature had surfaced under the sun in the new world.’

That fullness of life which is so much praised in Tolstoy by experts on the author is in fact – in this tale as much as in the rest of his oeuvre – the acknowledgement of an absence. As in the most abstract of narrators, what counts in Tolstoy is what is not visible, not articulated, what could exist but does not.

[1973]