Once in the Caucasus as a young man, a 22-year-old officer, Tolstoy was fascinated by him for the rest of his life. He spoke of love for the Caucasus in 1854 in expressions that literally coincided with Lermontov's poems: “I am beginning to love the Caucasus, although with a posthumous, but strong love. This wild land is really good, in which two very opposite things - war and freedom - are united so strangely and poetically. " During his service in the Caucasus, Tolstoy meets not only the Cossacks, but also the Chechen people. It is now known that Tolstoy became the first collector of Chechen folklore. He turned to the theme of the Caucasian War at different stages of his work. His first Caucasian stories are freshly impressed and skillfully sketched.
In these first works, the Chechens are shown through the eyes of a Russian officer, from the outside, without deep penetration into the psychology of the Caucasian peoples. Later, in The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1872), the look of the prisoner allowed him to describe the peaceful life of the "non-peaceful" highlanders, to bring them closer to the Russian reader.

Tolstoy, like his great predecessors, does not give decisive preference to either side of the fighting. It can hardly be argued that the gloomy Chechen in Cossacks, who mortally wounded the dashing handsome Lukoshka, evokes more sympathy from the writer than Lukoshka himself. who killed the brother of this Chechen.

This is the everyday life of the Caucasus. There is no right or wrong. If Lukoshka had not noticed and shot the abrek who was sailing to the Russian side of the river, the abrek would have killed one of the Cossacks. And then he sailed, And in the scene on the last pages to bear, a scene of genius in its artlessness, equal rightness on the side of the nine Chechens who came to kill on the Cossack lands, and on the side of the Cossacks who hunted these Chechens. All this, according to Tolstoy, is a natural, natural life, and there are no right or wrong in it. This is the young Tolstoy's view of this war.

The Caucasus played an important role in the formation of Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy as a writer. A short period of Tolstoy's life passed here: two and a half years. But it was in the Caucasus that the first literary works were created and much of what was written later was conceived.

Being already a famous writer, he said that while living in the Caucasus, he was lonely and unhappy, and that "here he began to think as only once in a lifetime people have the power to think." At the same time, Tolstoy calls the Caucasian period "a painful and good time," noting that he never, neither before, nor after, reached such a height of thought.
“And everything that I found then will forever remain my conviction,” he wrote later.

But the beginning of everything - 1851 year... Lev Nikolaevich was 23 years old. It was a time of scattered life in the circle of high society youth. Tolstoy admitted that "he lived very carelessly, without service, without occupation, without a goal." Deciding to end all this, he goes to the Caucasus with his brother Nikolai Nikolaevich, who served in the artillery. His 20th brigade was in the middle of the last century on Tereke under Kizlyar.

The brothers went down the Volga from Saratov through Kazan and arrived in Astrakhan on May 26, 1851.

And then three days of travel by post, here is the Caucasus.

Mountains ... Who did not feel a sense of joy, delight when meeting them!

Tolstoy conveyed his feelings, experienced at the meeting with the majestic nature of the Caucasus through the perception of the hero of the story "Cossacks" Venison.

“Suddenly he (Olenin - AP) saw pure white masses with their delicate outlines and a bizarre, distinct aerial line of their peaks and the distant sky. And when he understood the whole distance between him and the mountains and the sky, the entire immensity of the mountains, and when he felt the whole infinity of this beauty, he was frightened that it was a ghost, a dream. He shook himself to wake up. The mountains were the same.
"Now it has begun," as if some solemn voice had told him. And the road, and the far visible line of the Terek, and the villages, and the people - all this seemed to him now no longer a joke. Look at the sky and remember the mountains. Look at himself, at Vanyusha, and again the mountains. Here two Cossacks are riding on horseback, and rifles in cases are regularly rolled behind their backs, and their horses are mixed with bay and gray feet, and mountains ... Behind the Terek one can see smoke in the aul; and the mountains ... The sun rises and shines on the Terek, visible from behind the reeds; and the mountains ... A cart is coming from the village, women are walking, beautiful women, young; and the mountains ... Abreks prowl in the steppe, and I'm on my way, I'm not afraid of them, I have a gun and strength and youth; and the mountains ... "

Tolstoy, like his hero, left Moscow with a joyful feeling. He is young, full of strength and hope, although he already knew a lot of disappointments. He does not know where to apply his strength. Seized with such an impulse of activity, which only happens in his youth, he travels to the mysterious for him, unknown Caucasus. There, exactly there, he will begin a new, joyful, free life. May 30, 1851 the Tolstoy brothers arrived in the village Starogladkovskaya.
"How did I get here? I do not know. What for? The same, ”Lev Nikolayevich wrote in his diary that evening.

The village of Starogladkovskaya, which was part of the Kizlyar district, is located on the left bank of the Terek, overgrown with thick reeds and forest.

On the left bank there were other villages, between which a road to a cannon shot was laid in the forest - a cordon line. On the right "non-peaceful" side of the Terek, almost opposite the village of Starogladkovskaya, there was a Chechen village Hamamat-Yurt... In the south, beyond the Terek, the Cossack villages bordered on Greater Chechnya, in the north - on the Mozdok steppe, with its sandy breakers.

The houses in the village of Starogladkovskaya were wooden, covered with reeds. The village was surrounded by a fence and a deep ditch. Its population was Terek Cossacks; they were mainly engaged in cattle breeding, gardening, fishing and hunting. They carried out a guard service. Three versts from the village there was a guard post, also fortified with a wattle fence; there was a soldier's guard.

In the first half of the 19th century, the Caucasus was an arena of fierce struggle; it was also a place of exile for the advanced people of Russia - Lermontov and many Decembrists were exiled there. His extraordinary, enchanting nature was sung by Pushkin, Lermontov, Marlinsky. Even under Ivan the Terrible, the Russians tried to penetrate the Caucasus, this desire especially intensified under Catherine II. The best lands of the Caucasian plain were settled by the nobility. The local population of the Caucasus fiercely resisted the penetration of the Russians. The struggle against the mountaineers became more and more fierce and protracted.

IN 1834 year the struggle of the mountaineers against the Russians led Shamilwhich gave her a religious character. Using the religious fanaticism of Muslims, Shamil created a large army, calling into it all men from sixteen to sixty years old.

Trying to delay the Russian advance, Shamil constantly made unexpected sorties, exhausting the Russian troops and constantly threatening the bordering Russian population.

Beginning in 1845, the Russian command undertook a large expedition against Shamil. In the forests, wide glades were cut through which the Russian troops advanced, and the highlanders were forced to go further into the mountains. Russian campaigns against the mountaineers were often of the most cruel nature.

Tolstoy believed that the Russians were fighting a just war, but he was against the cruelty used by the Russians against the mountaineers. Almost every day there were clashes between the Cossacks and the mountaineers. As soon as the enemy crossing the Terek was noticed, beacons were lit along the entire cordon line.

An alarm was announced, and from all the nearby villages soldiers and Cossacks on horseback, without any formation, hurried to the place of the attack.

The Russian command undertook campaigns and sorties against the mountaineers, stormed the mountain fortresses on the way.

At first, life in the Caucasus did not make a very pleasant impression on Tolstoy. He didn’t like the village of Starogladkovskaya, and he didn’t like an apartment without the necessary amenities. He wrote to T.A.Yergolskaya:
“I expected this land to be beautiful, but it turned out not at all. Since the village is located in a lowland, there are no distant views. "
Tolstoy did not find in the Caucasus what he expected to meet after reading the romantic stories of Marlinsky.

A week later, he and his brother move to Old Yurt - a small Chechen village, fortification near Goryachevodsk. From there he writes to Aunt Tatyana Alexandrovna:
“As soon as he arrived, Nikolenka received an order to go to the Staroyurt fortification to cover the sick in the Goryachevodsky camp ... Nikolenka left a week after his arrival, I followed him, and for three weeks now we have been living in tents here, but since the weather is wonderful and I am gradually getting used to these conditions, I feel good. There are wonderful views, starting from the area where the springs are; a huge stone mountain, stones are piled on top of each other; some, having come off, constitute, as it were, grottoes, others hang at a great height, crossed by streams of hot water, which break with a roar in other places and cover, especially in the morning, the upper part of the mountain with white steam, continuously rising from this boiling water. The water is so hot that the eggs are cooked (hard boiled) in three minutes. In a ravine on the main stream, there are three mills, one above the other. They are built here in a very special way and are very picturesque. All day long the Tatar women come to wash their clothes both above and below the mills. I have to tell you what they do with their feet. Exactly digging anthill. The women are mostly beautiful and well built. Their oriental dress is charming, although poor. The picturesque groups of women and the wild beauty of the area are a delightful sight, and I often admire it for hours. " (translated from French).

In Stary Yurt lived not Tatars, but Chechens, but Terek Cossacks, and after them Tolstoy called all mountaineers - Muslims in general - Tatars.

Tolstoy fell in love with the Caucasus. He decides to stay here for military or civilian service, "all the same, only in the Caucasus, not in Russia," although he cannot forget those who remained in Moscow. In the Caucasus, he is still full of the impressions of his last days in Kazan. The image of Zinaida Molostvova stands before him.
"Will I never see her?" He thinks. And on the very first day of his arrival in the Caucasus, he wrote to A.S. Ogolin in a comic form in Kazan:

Mr. Ogolin!
Hurry up, write
About all of you
To the Caucasus
And is Molostvova healthy?
Lend Leo Tolstoy.

A month later, in a letter to him, he again recalls those who remained in Kazan, regrets that he spent a little time with them, and asks to tell Zinaida that he does not forget her.

Whether Tolstoy admires the beauty of nature, whether he admires the daring of the mountaineers, in all that is beautiful he sees her, Zinaida, sees her deep gaze. Before him stands the Bishop's Garden and the side path leading to the lake. He remembers how he and Zinaida walked along the shady path of the park. They walked in silence. She never heard about the overflowing heart of the young man Tolstoy.

And it is precisely what he did not express his feelings, but preserved as something sacred, it is this unspoken that he will remember for the rest of his life.

In the summer of 1851, together with his brother Lev Nikolaevich, he volunteered in a raid on the mountaineers. This was his first baptism of fire. During the campaign, Tolstoy observed the life of soldiers and officers; saw the detachment settling down to rest by the stream, and heard funny jokes and laughter. “I couldn’t notice a shadow of concern in anyone” before the start of the battle.

Returning from a trip to Stary Yurt, Tolstoy takes up his diary. Enters into the diary and the ripe idea of \u200b\u200bwriting a novel "Four eras of development"; three parts of it made up a story "Childhood", "Boyhood", "Youth", the last part, "Youth", Tolstoy failed to implement.

He does not part with his notebooks, writes in them everything that he sees around, in the hut, in the forest, on the street; what is written is reworked, corrected. Makes sketches of landscapes, types of officers, writes down plans for conceived works. Either he is going to describe a gypsy life, then he is going to write a good book about his aunt Tatyana Alexandrovna, then he is going to write a novel. For this purpose, he exercises his style in diaries and translations; develops a view of writing, artistic skill.

In August 1851 year Tolstoy returns to Starogladkovskaya stanitsawhich this time makes a completely different impression on him. He likes the life and life of the Cossacks, who have never known serfdom, their independent, courageous character, especially among women. He studies the Kumyk language, the most widespread among the Muslim mountaineers, and writes down Chechen folk songs, learns to jigit. Among the mountaineers, Tolstoy finds many remarkably brave, selfless, simple and close to nature people. In the village of Tolstoy he met the ninety-year-old Greben Cossack Epifan Sekhin, made friends with him, fell in love with him.

The brother of Lev Nikolaevich, Nikolai Nikolaevich, was also familiar with Epifan Sekhin. In his essay "Hunting in the Caucasus," he says about Epishka:
“This is an extremely interesting, probably the last type of old Greben Cossacks. Epishka, in his own words, was a fine fellow, a thief, a swindler, he drove herds to the other side, sold people, drove Chechens on a lasso; now he is almost ninety years old lonely. What this man has not seen in his life! He was in casemates more than once, and was in Chechnya several times. His whole life is a series of the strangest adventures: our old man never worked; his service itself was not what we are now accustomed to understanding by this word. He was either a translator, or carried out such assignments that, of course, only he could carry out: for example, bring some abrek, dead or alive, from his own saklya to the city; to set fire to the house of Bey-Bulat, a well-known leader of the highlanders at that time, to bring to the head of the detachment honorary old men or amanats from Chechnya; go hunting with your boss ...
Hunting and wandering - these are the two passions of our old man: they were and now remain his only occupation; all his other adventures are just episodes. "

Sitting over a bottle of chikhir, Uncle Epishka told Lev Nikolaevich a lot about his past, about the past life of the Cossacks. With him, Tolstoy disappeared all day hunting, went to hunt wild boars. He wrote to his brother Sergei:
“The hunt here is a miracle! Clear fields, swamps full of hare ... "

Despite his advanced age, Uncle Epishka loved to play the balalaika, dance and sing. Tolstoy portrayed him in The Cossacks as Uncle Eroshka.
“I haven’t grieved in my life, and I will not grieve ... I’ll go out into the forest and look: everything is mine, and I’ll come home, I sing a song,” Eroshka said to himself.

Uncle Eroshka's outlook on life is quite simple.
"When the end comes, I'll die and I won't go hunting, but while I'm alive, drink, walk, rejoice in the soul."
He is against the war:
“And why is there war? Whether it would be the case, they would live peacefully, quietly, as our old people said. Come to them, they come to you. So side by side, honestly and flattering, and would live. But the fact that? That one beats, that one beats ... I would not order it.

When Tolstoy was leaving Starogladkovskaya, he gave Uncle Epishka his dressing gown with silk laces, in which Epishka liked to walk around the village.

After Tolstoy's death, local residents of the village told the journalist Gilyarovsky about Uncle Epishka:
“And he has never offended anyone in word or deed, unless he calls him“ shvina ”. He was friends with the officers and said "you" to everyone. He did not serve anyone, but everyone loved: there was something to listen to, something to tell ... Then he sings songs. The voice is strong, clear. I didn’t go to the village gatherings, I didn’t touch on public affairs ... I loved Tolstoy very much. They were kunaks; he did not take anyone with him except Tolstoy to hunt. He used to cook kulesh in his little garden, and Tolstoy was with him. Together they cook and eat ... "

Tolstoy struck up a strong friendship with the Chechen youth Sado Misorbiev. In a letter to Tatyana Aleksandrovna Ergolskaya, Tolstoy wrote about him:
“I need to tell you that not far from the camp there is an aul where Chechens live. One young Chechen Sado came to the camp and played. He could neither count nor write, and there were scoundrels officers who cheated him. Therefore, I never played against him, dissuaded him from playing, saying that he was being cheated, and invited him to play for him. - He was terribly grateful to me for this and gave me a wallet. According to the well-known custom of giving away this nation, I presented him with an inferior gun, which I bought for 8 rubles. To become a kunak, that is, a friend, according to custom, firstly, exchange gifts and then take food at the kunak's house. And then, according to the ancient folk custom (which is preserved only by tradition), they become friends to the stomach and to death, and no matter what I ask him - money, wife, his weapon, all that he has the most precious - he must give it to me, and equally I cannot refuse him anything. - Sado called me to his place and offered to be a kunak. I went. Having treated me according to their custom, he invited me to take whatever I like: a weapon, a horse, whatever I wanted. I wanted to choose something less expensive and took a bridle with a silver set; but he said that he would consider it an offense, and forced me to take a checker, which costs at least 100 rubles. ser. His father is a well-to-do man, but his money is buried, and he does not give his son a dime. To get money, the son steals horses or cows from the enemy, sometimes risks his life twenty times in order to steal a thing that is not worth 10 rubles; he does it not out of self-interest, but out of daring ... Sado has 100 rubles in silver, or not a penny. After my visit, I gave him Nikolenka's silver watch, and we became bosom friends. - He often proved his loyalty to me, exposing himself to various dangers for me; they consider it to be nothing - it has become a habit and a pleasure. - When I left Stary Yurt, and Nikolenka stayed there, Sado came to him every day and said that he was bored and did not know what to do without me, and he was terribly bored. “Having learned from my letter to Nikolenka that my horse was sick and that I was asking to find another one for me in Stary Yurt, Sado immediately came to me and brought me his horse, which he insisted that I take it, no matter how I refused.”

Tolstoy admired the Greben women - strong, free, independent in their actions. They were full housewives in their home. Tolstoy admired their beauty, their healthy build, their oriental graceful attire, courageous character, steadfastness and determination.

Tolstoy was so fond of the life and free life of the Cossacks, their closeness to nature, that he even seriously thought, like his hero Olenin, "to be assigned to the Cossacks, to buy a hut, cattle, to marry a Cossack woman ..."

Life in the Caucasus among ordinary people and rich nature had a beneficial effect on Tolstoy. What happened in the Caucasus with the hero of the story, Olenin, can be attributed to some extent to Tolstoy himself. He feels fresh, cheerful, happy and wonders how he could have lived so idly and aimlessly before. Only now it became clear to Tolstoy what happiness is. Happiness is to be close to nature, to live for others, he decides.

Tolstoy also liked the general order of life of the Cossacks; with his belligerence and freedom, he seemed to him the ideal for life and the Russian people. In 1857, Tolstoy wrote:
"The future of Russia is the Cossacks: freedom, equality and compulsory military service for everyone."

But, no matter how he admired Tolstoy and the people and nature of the Caucasus, no matter how he wanted to link his fate with these people, he still understood that he could not merge with the life of the common people. Lukashka cannot become a Cossack. He decides to enter military service, to earn an officer's rank, awards. But he was still not enlisted in the military, and this worried him greatly. He was not enrolled in active service, since he was still listed in the civil service in the Tula noble deputy assembly, although he had long filed a petition for dismissal. Tolstoy shared his feelings with his aunt Tatyana Alexandrovna, who wanted to see her pet as an officer. To get the appointment, Tolstoy made a trip to Tiflis in October 1851.

Tolstoy holds exam for the title junker: in arithmetic, algebra, geometry, grammar, history, geography and foreign languages.

In each subject receives the highest mark - 10. And before receiving documents on exemption from civil service January 3, 1852 issued by decree fireworks IVclass into battery No. 4 battery 20th Artillery Brigade, so that upon receipt of documents, he will be enrolled in active service "from the date of his use in the service at the battery." Tolstoy was glad at last to throw off his civilian coat, made in Petersburg, and put on a soldier's uniform.

In Tiflis, Tolstoy had to stay for several months - there he fell ill. He felt lonely, but despite this, he read a lot, worked on the story “Childhood” that he had just begun. He wrote to Tatyana Alexandrovna:
“Remember, dear aunt, that once you advised me to write novels; so, I took your advice; my classes, which I am telling you, are literary. I do not know if what I am writing will ever appear, but this work amuses me, and I have been busy with it for so long and persistently that I don’t want to quit. ”

In Tiflis, Tolstoy also studied music, which he missed a lot; visited theaters, went hunting; I thought a lot about my life. Lacking funds for the return trip, he was impatiently awaiting money from the manager Yasnaya Polyana. Debts also tormented him, especially the old debt to Officer Knoring, to whom he lost five hundred rubles. And how glad Tolstoy was to receive a letter from his brother Nikolai Nikolayevich, in which there was a torn bill of exchange for these five hundred rubles that Knoring had lost! His friend Sado won the bill from Knoring, tore it up and handed it over to Nikolai Nikolaevich. Now Tolstoy was relieved of the burden of this debt that oppressed him. A few days later Tolstoy left Tiflis and went to Starogladkovskaya stanitsa.

Lonely life in Tiflis inspired Tolstoy with thoughts of family life, he is seriously thinking about getting married. He perfectly understands that the desire to stay in the Caucasus, to marry a Cossack woman is only a dream, a fantasy; his family nest should be built there, in Yasnaya Polyana. Isn't it time to calm down, he thinks, and start life "with the quiet joys of love and friendship"? How good, Tolstoy dreams, it would be to live in Yasnaya Polyana, together with his aunt, to tell her about what she had to endure in the Caucasus. He will have a meek, kind wife, children, they will call Tatyana Alexandrovna a grandmother. Sister Mashenka and older brother, old bachelor Nikolenka, will also live with them, Nikolenka will tell the children fairy tales, play with them, and his wife will treat Nikolenka with his favorite foods.

Returning to the village of Starogladkovskaya, Tolstoy found the beginning of new decisive hostilities against Chechnya. He takes an active part in them, performs in campaigns. The trip to the Dzhalka River was successful. There he shows courage, fearlessness. Tolstoy especially distinguished himself in battle when the enemy attacked on the river Michike... In this battle, he was nearly killed by a cannonball that struck the wheel of the cannon he was aiming at.
“If the muzzle of the cannon, from which the cannonball flew out, was deflected in one direction or the other at 1/1000 of the line, I would have been killed,” he wrote.

With the onset of a lull, Tolstoy again lives in Starogladkovskaya. He again listens to the stories of Uncle Yepishka, goes hunting, plays chess, continues to work on Childhood.

Finally March 23, 1852 the long-awaited enlistment order... But this no longer pleased Tolstoy - the society of officers, occupied most of all with drinking and playing cards, became alien to him. Among the officers, he felt lonely. Subsequently, one officer spoke of him:
“He was proud, others drink, walk, and he sits alone, reading a book. And then I saw it more than once - everything with a book ... "
In the Caucasian period of his life, Tolstoy is more and more interested in artistic creativity, he is working hard and hard on Childhood, he has new ideas.
“I really want to start a short Caucasian story, but I don’t allow myself to do this without finishing the work I have begun,” he writes.
Then the story turned out to be a short story "Raid"... At the same time, Tolstoy plans to write "A novel by a Russian landowner".

Increasingly, he asks himself what his purpose is.
“I am 24 years old and I haven’t done anything yet. “I feel that it’s not for nothing that I’ve been struggling with doubt and passions for eight years. But what am I assigned to? This will open up the future, ”he writes in his diary.

A few days later, turning to the diary again, he argues:
“We have to work mentally. I know I would be happier without knowing this job. But God put me on this path: I have to follow it. "

Tolstoy begins to realize his true purpose - to be a writer.

The story "Childhood" was Tolstoy's first printed work. Tolstoy worked on it at Kazkaz for over a year, and began, as we know, back in Moscow. He rewrote it four times, rewrote it three times. Either he liked her, then he didn’t like her, sometimes he even began to doubt his creative abilities, his talent.

True, he definitely liked some chapters of "Childhood", more than others he touched the chapter "Woe" and, rereading it, he cried.

IN july 1852 from Pyatigorsk Tolstoy sends to the editor of the journal "Sovremennik" N. A. Nekrasov your first letter and manuscript "Childhood"signed with the initials “L. N. ". Tolstoy asks Nekrasov to look through the manuscript and make his own judgment about it.
“In essence, this manuscript is the first part of the novel - four epochs of development; the appearance of the next parts will depend on the success of the first. If by its size it cannot be printed in one issue, then please divide it into three parts: from the beginning to chapter 17, from chapter 17 to 26 and from 26 to the end.
If it were possible to find a good scribe where I live, the manuscript would have been rewritten better and I would not have been afraid for the extra prejudice that you will now certainly get against her, ”he wrote to Nekrasov.

"Childhood" made a favorable impression on Nekrasov, and he told the then unknown author:
“I don’t know the sequel, I can’t say resolutely, but it seems to me that the author has talent. In any case, the direction of the author, the simplicity and reality of the content are the inalienable merits of this work. If in the subsequent parts (as you would expect) there is more liveliness and movement, then it will be a good novel. I ask you to send me a continuation. Both your novel and your talent interested me. I would also advise you not to hide behind letters, but to start typing right behind your surname. Unless you are a casual guest in literature. "

"Childhood" was printed in 9th book"Contemporary" in November 1852 year entitled "The story of my childhood". Tolstoy was delighted with the first printed work, he was pleased to read the commendable reviews of his story. He recalled:
“I am lying on a bunk in the hut, and here is my brother and Ogolin (an officer), I read and revel in the delight of praise, even tears of delight choke me, and I think: no one knows, even here they are, that they are praising me so.

But at the same time, the first work grieved Tolstoy. He was dissatisfied with the title: "The Story of My Childhood." "Who cares about my childhood story?" - he wrote to Nekrasov, and in the introduction to "Memoirs" he said: "My intention was to describe the story not of my own, but of my childhood friends," - he wanted to give a typical image of childhood.

Tolstoy found in his printed story many changes and abbreviations; he was dissatisfied with the fact that they released the love story of Natalia Savishna, and generally considered his story disfigured. It was still unknown to Tolstoy at that time that many reductions and distortions were made not by the editorial board, but by the censor.

Tolstoy said that he would calm down only when the story was published as a separate book. A separate book, Childhood, was published four years later, in 1856. The appearance of the story made a great impression.

Everyone wanted to know who this talented new author was. The keenest interest was shown by Turgenev, who lived at that time in Spassko-Lutovinovo. He kept asking Maria Nikolaevna, Lev Nikolayevich's sister, if she had a brother in the Caucasus who could be a writer. It was assumed that the story was written by Tolstoy's elder brother, Nikolai Nikolaevich. Turgenev asked to greet him. “I bow and applaud him,” he said.

Turgenev, like Nekrasov, believed that "this is a reliable talent."

Aunt Tatyana Alexandrovna was delighted with the appearance of the story. She found that F.I.Ressel and Praskovya Isaevna, whom she knew well in life, and especially the scene of her mother's death, were described very truthfully. “... it is described with such a feeling that you cannot read it without excitement, without passion and without flattery I will tell you that you need to have a real and very special talent in order to give interest to a plot so little interesting as childhood... "- she wrote to Leo Tolstoy.

The noble estate, where the heroes lived, is presented with amazing skill in the story "Childhood"; its furnishings and everyday life are very similar to Yasnaya Polyana. Russian nature is picturesquely depicted in the story, so close and dear.

The story describes the life of a child of an old noble family. Although Tolstoy claimed that he did not write the stories of his childhood, nevertheless the experiences and moods of the protagonist, Nikolenka, many events in his life - games, hunting, a trip to Moscow, classes in the classroom, reading poetry - resemble Leo's childhood Nikolaevich. Some of the characters in the story also resemble the people who surrounded Tolstoy in childhood. Volodya - brother Seryozha, Lyubochka, with whom Nikolenka loved to play so much - his sister Masha, the image of a grandmother is very reminiscent of Lev Nikolaevich's own grandmother, Pelageya Nikolaevna, the boy Ivin is Tolstoy's childhood friend Musin-Pushkin. Nikolenka's father resembles the Tolstoy's neighbor, the landowner Islenev, Nikolenka's stepmother - his wife. Nikolenka's mother is the image of his mother, formed in Tolstoy's imagination according to the recollections of those around him. According to Tolstoy, in the story "Childhood" there was "an awkward confusion of truth with fiction", a confusion of the events of his childhood with the events of the life of his friends Islenevs.

Following the story "Childhood" Tolstoy writes a military story "Raid"... In October 1852, he writes in his diary: “I want to write Caucasian essays for the formation of style and money,” and outlines the plan of his essays.

Back in July, Tolstoy conceived of writing A Novel of a Russian Landowner, thought over the plan, and in October began work on it.

In December, Tolstoy wrote to his brother Sergei Nikolaevich:
“I started a serious, useful novel, according to my ideas, and I intend to use all my strength and abilities on it. I call this novel a book, because I believe that it is enough for a person in life to write at least one short, but useful book, and I told Nikolenka how we used to draw pictures: I’ll draw this picture for 3 months ”.

IN november 1852 Tolstoy begins to work on the second part of the trilogy - "Boyhood"... He worked on it with great enthusiasm, but it was given to him with difficulty. In it, the same characters remained as in Childhood, the events that began there developed, but in the new story there was less autobiography, and more fantasy. If in Childhood Tolstoy liked the chapter "Woe", then here it was "The Thunderstorm"; he considered the place "excellent." Three times Tolstoy had to rewrite his story "Boyhood".

December 1852 year Tolstoy ends his story "Raid" and sends him to Nekrasov's Sovremennik. In this story, he portrayed a raid in which he personally took over the site. The main character of the story, Captain Khlopov, is a brave and unshakable man. Captain Khlopov's character traits are similar to the character of the beloved brother of the writer, Nikolenka.

In "Raid" Tolstoy unadorned depicts the destruction of the mountain village, robberies, murders of the local population, encouraged by the Russian command. Tolstoy is clearly on the side of the mountaineers, he sympathizes with them.
“Carabinieri, why did you do that? .. - asks the author of the carabinieri who killed a mountain woman with a child in her arms. He reminds the soldier of the wife and son he left behind. “What would you say,” asks the author of the carabinieri, “if your wife and child were attacked?”

In this excerpt from the story, Tolstoy condemns senseless killings, wars and for the first time speaks of the brotherhood of peoples.

In one of the versions of the story "Raid" Tolstoy wrote:
“How good it is to live in the world, how beautiful this light is! - I felt, - how disgusting people are and how little they know how to appreciate him, - I thought. This is not a new, but involuntary and sincere thought was aroused in me by all the nature around me, but most of all the sonorous carefree song of a quail, which was heard somewhere far away, in the tall grass.
She probably does not know and does not think about whose land she sings, whether on the Russian land or on the land of the recalcitrant mountaineers, she cannot even imagine that this land is not common. She thinks, stupid, that the earth is one for everyone, she judges by the fact that she flew in with love and song, built where she wanted her green house, fed, flew wherever there is greenery, air and sky, brought out children. She has no idea what rights, obedience, power are, she knows only one power, the power of nature, and unconsciously, meekly submits to her. "

"Raid" was printed in 1853 year in 3rd room magazine "Contemporary", as well as "Childhood", signed "L. N. ".

In early January 1853, Tolstoy again took part in a campaign against the mountaineers. After the monotonous life in the village, the campaign gave Tolstoy a release, he felt cheerful, joyful, was full of warlike poetry, admired the majestic nature of the Caucasus. He wanted to be more quickly in business, but the detachment stayed for a long time in the Grozny fortress.

Tolstoy endured an idle, inactive life with difficulty.
“Everyone, especially my brother, drinks,” he writes, “and it is very unpleasant for me. War is such an unjust and bad thing that those who fight try to drown out the voice of conscience in themselves. "

For the first time, Tolstoy begins to doubt the correctness of his participation in hostilities against the mountaineers.

In the middle of February, the assault on Shamil's positions, located on the Michike River, began. Tolstoy commanded a battery platoon. With a shot from his gun, he knocked out the enemy's gun. For this he was promised a reward - the cross of St. George. Tolstoy really wanted to receive this award, mainly to please his family.

Shamil's troops, having suffered defeat, retreated indiscriminately.

For a successful battle on the Michike River, many of its participants received awards, but Tolstoy did not receive the promised Cross of St. George. On the eve of the issuance of awards, he was so carried away by the game of chess that he did not appear on time for the guard, for which he received a reprimand and was put under arrest. And the next day, when the crosses of St. George were handed out, he was in custody.

“The fact that I did not receive the cross made me very sad. Apparently there is no happiness for me. And I confess that this stupidity would greatly console me, ”he wrote.

Tolstoy also presented himself with the second opportunity to receive the St. George Cross - for a successful battle on February 18, 1853. Two crosses of St. George were sent to the battery. The battery commander, addressing Tolstoy, said: "You deserve the cross, if you want, I will give it to you, otherwise there is a very worthy soldier who also deserves it and is waiting for the cross as a means of subsistence." The St. George Cross gave the right to a life pension in the amount of the salary. Tolstoy gave up the cross to an old soldier.

After Shamil's retreat, Russian troops, approaching the Gudermes River, began to break through the canal, and Tolstoy returned with his battery to the village of Starogladkovskaya. There he was awaited by letters and the March issue of Sovremennik, in which the story "Raid" was published. Tolstoy was again delighted, but at the same time upset - the story was disfigured by the censors. On this occasion, Nekrasov wrote:
“Please do not be discouraged by these troubles, common to all our gifted writers. - Without joking, your story is still very alive and graceful, but it was extremely good. Don't forget Sovremennik, who counts on your cooperation. "

Despite Nekrasov's sympathetic review of the "Raid", Tolstoy could not come to terms with the distortion of the story: each work is a part of his soul.

"Childhood" was spoiled, - he wrote to his brother Sergei, - and "Raid" and disappeared from the censorship. Everything that was good, everything is thrown out or disfigured. "

Favorable reviews of the "Raid" caused a creative upsurge in Tolstoy. He writes "Christmas night", but this story remained unfinished. With enthusiasm he works on "Adolescence". At the same time he is considering the plan of "Youth".

In June, during a trip to the Vozdvizhenskoye fortress, Tolstoy almost got captured by the Chechens.

It was a hot summer day. Tolstoy, Sado Miserbiev and three officers separated from their detachment and drove forward. As a precaution, they split into two groups: Tolstoy and Sado drove along the upper road, and the officers - along the lower one. Under Tolstoy there was a beautiful dark gray pacer of the Kabardian breed, he walked well at a trot, but was weak for fast driving. And Sado has a clumsy, lean, long-legged horse of the steppe Nogai breed, but very fast. Tolstoy and Sado swapped horses and rode, carefree admiring the views of nature.

Suddenly, in the distance, Sado noticed Chechens rushing towards them, about thirty. Tolstoy informed the officers who were traveling along the lower road about this, and he himself rushed from Sado to the fortification of Grozny. Tolstoy could easily have galloped off on a fast horse, but he did not want to leave his friend.

The Chechens were approaching. The fortress noticed it. A detachment of cavalrymen was expelled, and the Chechens fled. The danger for Tolstoy and Sado was over, and only one of the officers escaped.

This incident was used by Tolstoy in his story "Prisoner of the Caucasus".

Returning to Starogladkovskaya, Tolstoy falls into despondency, he is dissatisfied with himself, he has entered a period of "soul purification", as he called this state of mind. He makes a promise to himself to do good as much as possible, to be active, not to act lightly. Thinks again about the purpose of life and defines it as follows:
“The purpose of my life is known - the good that I owe to my subjects and my compatriots. I owe to the first that I own them, the second - that I own talent and intelligence. "

Tolstoy clearly recognizes talent in himself, he is not an accidental guest in literature. He has ideas for new works, he thinks of writing "The Diary of a Caucasian Officer", "Fugitive" (these are the future "Cossacks").

He's working hard on the sequel to Boyhood.
"Work! Work! How happy I feel when I work, ”he writes in his diary.
Immerses himself in reading, re-reads "Notes of a Hunter" by Turgenev, which still make a strong impression on him. “It's somehow difficult to write after him,” Tolstoy notes in his diary.

Despite the hard work, he still felt some kind of dissatisfaction with his life. It seemed to him that he was not fulfilling his purpose, which was not yet quite clear to himself, that he was not fulfilling a high calling. On July 28, he writes: "Without a month, twenty-five years, and still nothing!"

From Pyatigorsk, Tolstoy traveled to Kislovodsk and Zheleznovodsk to undergo a course of bathing there. In Zheleznovodsk, he had an idea to write a "Caucasian story", and August 28, on his birthday, he begins a story, which he then calls "The Fugitive" and which appeared the first draft of the famous story "Cossacks". In total, Tolstoy worked on "Cossacks" for ten years with interruptions.

R. Rolland wrote about the works of Tolstoy dedicated to the Caucasus:
"Above all these works, the semblance of the highest peak in the mountain range, the best of the lyric novels created by Tolstoy, the song of his youth, the Caucasian poem" Cossacks "rises above all these works. The snowy mountains, looming against the background of the dazzling sky, fill the entire book with their proud beauty."

The ancestors of the Cossacks came to the North Caucasus from the Don at the end of the 16th century, and under Peter I, when a defensive line was created along the Terek from the attack of the mountaineers' neighbors, they were resettled to the other side of the river. Here were their villages, cordons and fortresses. In the middle of the 19th century, there were slightly more than ten thousand Greben Cossacks. At the time of Tolstoy, the Greben Cossacks - "a warlike, beautiful and wealthy Russian population" - lived along the left bank of the Terek, on a narrow strip of wooded fertile land. In one of the chapters of his story, Tolstoy tells the story of this "little people", referring to an oral tradition that in some bizarre way connected the resettlement of the Cossacks from the Grebn with the name of Ivan the Terrible.

Tolstoy heard this legend when he, like the hero of "Cossacks" Olenin, lived in the Cossack village and was friends with the old hunter Epifan Sekhin, depicted in the story under the name of Uncle Eroshka.

Tolstoy worked on "Cossacks", with breaks, ten years... In 1852, immediately after the story "Childhood" was published in Sovremennik, he decided to write "Caucasian sketches", which would include Epishka's "amazing" stories about hunting, about the old life of the Cossacks, about his adventures in the mountains.

The Caucasian tale was begun in 1853 year... Then for a long time the idea of \u200b\u200bthe novel remained, with an acutely dramatic development of the plot. The novel was called "The Fugitive", "The Fugitive Cossack". As can be judged by the numerous plans and written excerpts, the events in the novel developed as follows: in the village there is a clash between an officer and a young Cossack, Maryana's husband; a Cossack, having wounded an officer, is forced to flee to the mountains; there are various rumors about him, they know that he, together with the mountaineers, is robbing the villages; longing for his home, the Cossack returns, they grab him and then execute him. The officer's fate was portrayed in different ways: he continues to live in the village, dissatisfied with himself and his love; leaves the village, seeking "salvation in courage, in an affair with Vorontsova"; dies, killed by Maryana.

How far is this fascinating love story from the simple and deep conflict of "Cossacks"!

Leaving Moscow and finding himself in the village, Olenin discovers a new world for himself, which at first interests him, and then irresistibly attracts him.

On the way to the Caucasus, he thinks:
"To leave at all and never come back, not to appear in society." In the village, he is fully aware of all the filth, filth and lies of his former life.

However, a wall of misunderstanding separates Olenin from the Cossacks.

He commits a kind, selfless act - he gives Lukashka a horse, and among the villagers this is surprising and even increases distrust:
"Let's see, let's see what will come of it"; "What a watery people of juniors, trouble! .. They'll just set it on fire or something."
His enthusiastic dreams of becoming a simple Cossack are not understood by Maryana, and her friend Ustenka explains:
"And so, he is lying, what has come into his mind. Why does not mine say! Just spoiled!"
And even Eroshka, who loves Olenin for his "simplicity" and, of course, the closest to him of all the villagers, catching Olenin writing his diary, without hesitation advises to leave an empty matter: "What slander to write!"

But Olenin, sincerely admiring the life of the Cossacks, is alien to their interests and does not accept their truth. In the hot season of cleaning, when hard, incessant work occupies the villagers from early morning until late evening, Olenin, invited by Maryana's father to the gardens, comes with a gun on his shoulder to catch hares.
"Is it easy to go looking for hares during working hours!" - Grandma Julitta justly remarks. And at the end of the story, he is unable to understand that Maryana is grieving not only because of Lukashka's wound, but because the interests of the whole village have suffered - "the Cossacks were killed." The story ends with a sad recognition of the bitter truth that neither Olenin's passionate love for Maryana, nor her willingness to fall in love with him, nor his disgust for social life and enthusiastic desire to join the simple and dear to him Cossack world, cannot destroy the wall of alienation.

The artistic effect of Maryana's words is such that when they are uttered, we perceive them both as unexpected and as the only ones possible for her in her position. We suddenly (just suddenly!) Begin to understand with all clarity that Maryana, with her inherent simplicity and naturalness of character and behavior, otherwise simply could not answer. How surprisingly organic and appropriate for her in that calm and obviously cheerful mood in which she is, this is unexpectedly simple and very true in its own way:
"Why not love you, you are not crooked!" How natural and psychologically truthful is the attention she pays first of all to Olenin's hands: "whitish, whitish, soft, like a kaymak."
She herself is not white, and neither is Lukashka, nor are other Cossacks. She draws attention to the fact that in her eyes most of all distinguishes Olenin from people well known to her. These and similar words of Maryana exactly correspond to her character and well convey in her the properties of her personality, her individually unique. They seem to highlight it in front of us, help to create a living, very plastic image. And not only living and plastic - beautiful.

In none of Tolstoy's works were the thoughts about self-sacrifice, about the happiness that consists in doing good to others, expressed with such force of feeling as in "Cossacks". Of all Tolstoy's heroes striving for moral self-improvement, Olenin is the most ardent, unaccountably giving himself up to a young emotional impulse and therefore especially charming. This is probably why he is the least didactic. The same impulse of young forces, which attracted him to self-improvement, very soon destroys the inspired moral theories and leads to the recognition of another truth: "He who is happy is right!" And he eagerly achieves this happiness, although deep down he feels that it is impossible for him. He leaves the village, rejected by Maryana, alien to the Cossacks, but even more distant from his former life.

The title - "Cossacks" - accurately conveys the meaning and pathos of the work. It is curious that, while choosing different names in the course of his work, Tolstoy, however, never once stopped at Olenin.

Turgenev, who considered Olenin a superfluous person in "Cossacks", was, of course, wrong. There would be no ideological conflict in the story without Olenin. But the fact that in the life of the Cossack village Olenin is a superfluous person, that poetry and the truth of this life exists and is expressed independently of him, is beyond doubt. Not only for existence, but also for self-awareness, the Cossack world does not need Olenin. This world is beautiful in itself and for itself.

In the clash of the Cossacks with the abreks, in the wonderful scenes of grape cutting and the stanitsa holiday, in the war, labor and fun of the Cossacks, Olenin acts as an outsider, albeit a very interested observer. From the lessons of Eroshka, he learns both the philosophy of life and the morality of this amazing and so attractive world for him.

In his 1860 diary, Tolstoy wrote:
"It will be strange if my adoration of labor is wasted."
In the story, the simple, close to nature, working life of the Cossacks is affirmed as a social and moral ideal. Labor is a necessary and joyful foundation of the people's life, but labor is not on the landlord's, but on one's own land. This is how Tolstoy decided in the early 1960s the most pressing issue of the era.

"The future of Russia is the Cossacks - freedom, equality and compulsory military service for everyone," he wrote while working on "Cossacks". Later he developed his idea of \u200b\u200ba free land and said that the Russian revolution could be based on this idea. No one more than Tolstoy expressed in his work this dream of the Russian peasant, and no one else built utopian theories, especially in his later years, about peaceful ways of achieving it.

What are the "Cossacks" in this sense? Dream or reality? Idyll or real picture? It is obvious that the patriarchal-peasant idyll lives only in the memories of Eroshka. And at the first meeting with Olenin, and then many times he repeats:
"It's been you, my time, you won't come back"; "Today, there are no such Cossacks. It is bad to look ..."

Eroshka is the embodiment of a living history, a living legend, alien to the new village. Everyone, except for Olenin and Lukashka's nephew, is either hostile or derisive towards him. Eroshka at one time was "simple", he did not count money; the present typical representative of the Cossack society - the cornet - took the garden from his brother and has a long political conversation with Olenin in order to bargain too much for the stay.

It is no coincidence that old man Eroshka represents the human, humane look in the story. He loves and regrets everyone: the child killed in the plundered aul, and the horseman killed by Lukashka, and the wounded animal, and the butterfly, foolishly flying into the fire, and Olenin, whom the girls do not like. But he himself is unloved.
"We are unloved with you, orphans!" - crying, he says to Olenin.

The story affirms the beauty and significance of life in itself. None of Tolstoy's creations is imbued with such a young belief in the elemental power of life and its triumph as the Cossacks. And in this sense, the Caucasian tale marks a direct transition to "War and Peace".

For the first time in his work, Tolstoy created in "Cossacks" not sketches of folk types, but solid, brightly outlined, peculiar, dissimilar characters of people from the people - the stately beauty Maryana, the brave Lukashka, the sage Eroshka.

In Pyatigorsk Tolstoy writes a story "Marker Notes"I am very pleased with. He wrote it in four days. It was a confession of the soul of a young writer, a story about what worried and tormented him.

Tolstoy spent three months in Pyatigorsk. He has pleasant memories of this time. Only service failures worried him, since spring he began to think about leaving military service. The reason for this was the resignation of Nikolai Nikolayevich's brother and the expiration of the period of stay in the Caucasus, which Tolstoy appointed himself; he was tired of the empty society around him. The desire to retire matured, but, not hoping to get it right away, Tolstoy in the spring of 1853 submitted a leave report for a trip to his homeland. However, in June, circumstances changed dramatically: relations between Russia and Turkey worsened. Nicholas I issued a manifesto, according to which the Russian troops were to occupy Moldavia and Wallachia, which were under the dependence of Turkey.

In connection with the outbreak of hostilities, resignations and vacations from the army were prohibited, and Tolstoy turned to the commander of the troops stationed in Moldova and Wallachia, M.D. Gorchakov, who was his second cousin uncle, with a request to send him to the active army.

Tolstoy sadly meets the new year, 1854. He rereads the letter he just wrote to his aunt Tatyana Alexandrovna:
“For some time I have been very sad and cannot overcome this in myself: without friends, without studies, without interest in everything that surrounds me, the best years of my life are fruitless for myself and for others; my position, perhaps bearable for others, becomes for me with my sensitivity more and more painful. "I pay dearly for the misdeeds of my youth."

Tolstoy's request was granted: in January 1854 he was transferred by fireworks to the active army in Bucharest.

Before leaving for the army, Tolstoy decides to visit Yasnaya Polyana, but before going there, he holds an exam for the first rank of an officer. Although the exam was a simple formality, Tolstoy passed it well. On a twelve-point system, he received from 10 to 12 points in eleven subjects for each. Tolstoy so wanted to go to Yasnaya Polyana as an officer that he tried on an officer's uniform the very next day.

At the last minute, Tolstoy felt sorry to part with the comrades with whom he got along, many of whom he fell in love with. All the comrades gathered to see him off, some officers even shed tears at parting.

If we imagine the history of the great life lived by Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, and his rich creative biography in the form of a huge, voluminous book of a thousand sheets, then this folio will contain several very remarkable pages connecting with our land, with the quiet Don, the name of the great writer of the earth Russian.

We remember from childhood a folk tale recorded by Leo Tolstoy.
- It says in it, old man Ivan had two sons: Shat Ivanovich and Don Ivanovich. The wayward Shat was older, stronger, and Don, the younger son, weaker. At first, they lived with their father, but it was time to part - to torture their sons. Their father took them outside the outskirts, ordered them to listen in everything and showed everyone the way. Only Shat disobeyed his father. Hot and strong he was torn through, and - lost his way, got lost in the swamps. And Don Ivanovich - quiet and submissive - walked where his father punished, and walked all over Russia, blazed the road to the southern sea, became famous and famous ...

Rivers carry the history and life of peoples in their waves. If you look into the distant past, it turns out that not the Volga, but the Don was considered the main river in Russia. It was here that the Russians went out to mortal combat with their enemies: the Don banks remember Svyatoslav and Igor, the Battle of Kulikovo and the battle on Kalka. It was on the Don that the Russian fleet was born, the fires of Razin and Pugachev were blazing. And Tolstoy could not but be interested. But only once did Lev Nikolaevich visit the Don. Somewhere near the mouth bystraya river, lost steppe farm Belogorodtsev... Nowadays, you cannot find it on any map, and a hundred years ago, the Yamskaya tract passed through it and was located in a farm, a horse-post station. Blizzard winter 1854 g. Tolstoy turned out to be her guest.

At that time he was traveling on the cross-posts from the Caucasus to Yasnaya Polyana. Just before his departure, Lev Nikolaevich received the rank of ensign and was in a hurry to see his relatives in order to go to the Danube front. In a travel suitcase lay the manuscript of a new story - "Boyhood", also for "Contemporary". He was in a hurry, generously gifted the drivers with tips, drove even at night and - got lost. In the writer's diary, you can find the following entry:
“On January 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27 I was on the road. 24 in Belogorodtsevskaya. 100 versts from Cherkassk, wandered the whole night. And I got the idea to write the story "Snowstorm".
This story was published in the third, March book of Sovremennik for 1856.

Then the writer S.T. Aksakov, who read it, wrote to Turgenev: “Please tell Count Tolstoy that "Blizzard" excellent story "...

But let's turn to the story itself. It starts like this:
“At seven o'clock in the evening, having drunk tea, I left the station, whose name I don’t remember, but I remember, somewhere in the Land of the Donskoy army, near Novocherkassk” ...

IN Novocherkassk, as established by local historians, the writer was January 24, 1854 He rested here in the "European Hotel". By the evening I had already passed through the Kadamovsky farm, where I changed horses, and arrived at Klinovskaya. From Klinovskaya, "having drunk tea," at seven o'clock in the evening, despite the caretaker's good advice not to travel, so as not to get lost all night and not freeze on the road, "the writer went on to station Belogorodtsevskaya... But after a quarter of an hour the driver had to stop the horses and look for a way.
“It was clear,” Tolstoy said, “that we were going, God knows where, because after another quarter of an hour we had not seen a single milestone.”
Until the morning, for twelve hours in a row, the wanderings continued "in a completely naked steppe, what is this part of the land of the Don army." Fortunately, everything turned out well, and Tolstoy got to Belogorodtsevskaya. He will be on the road for two weeks. Will go through farm Astakhov on the Glubokaya river, Nizhne-Lozovskaya, Kazan, then through the lands of the Voronezh province. On February 2, already in Yasnaya Polyana, he will write in his diary:
“Exactly two weeks was on the road. Only a blizzard happened to me ”...

But two more years will pass before Tolstoy writes a story about this. He will visit Sevastopol, take part in battles there. And yet, the impressions of what he experienced in the snow-covered Don steppe will be so deeply engraved in his memory that he cannot help but take up his pen.

And it will not be just a landscape painting - the coachmen, postchairs, and fur-drivers will walk in front of the reader, doing their difficult and sometimes dangerous work calmly, in a businesslike manner, even with some kind of cheerful passion (as, say, the coachman Ignashka). Their lives, their fates - the reader can clearly see this - are inseparably merged with the difficult fate of their native land. Russian land.

"Blizzard" will be the first, but far from the only work of the great writer, which is associated with our region. From his youth and until his last days, Tolstoy was interested in the Don region, its originality, Cossack liberties. And such an entry appears in the diary.
“The whole history of Russia was made by the Cossacks. It is not for nothing that Europeans call us Cossacks. The people want to be Cossacks "...
This was said in the sense that the Russian people strive for freedom, will and justice.

No matter how many disappointments and failures life in the Caucasus brought him, nevertheless this time, by his own admission, was one of the happiest periods of his life and brought him many benefits.

Subsequently, Tolstoy will say that the Caucasus is war and freedom, i.e. a test of the strength and dignity of the human character, on the one hand, and admiration for the life of the Caucasian peoples, who did not know serfdom, on the other. Having left for the Danube army, to another place of service, he will write in his diary:
“I am beginning to love the Caucasus, though with a posthumous love, but with a strong love. This wild land is really good, in which two very opposite things - war and freedom - are united so strangely and poetically. "

Life in the Caucasus gave Tolstoy rich material for thought.
“I began to think as only once in a lifetime people have the power to think. I have my notes from that time, and now, rereading them, I could not understand that a person could reach the level of mental exaltation that I reached then. It was a painful and good time. Never before or since have I reached such a height of thought, have not looked there, as at this time, which lasted 2 years. And everything that I found then will forever remain my conviction ”, - he wrote five years later to AA Tolstoy.

And his melancholy, his inexplicable anxiety and sometimes incomprehensible sadness - all these were signs, as Tolstoy himself said about this, "the birth of a high thought, attempts at creativity."

In the Caucasus, Tolstoy develops his own view of writing, artistic skill.
“It seems to me,” he wrote, “that it is impossible to describe a person properly; but you can describe how it affected me. To talk about a person: he is an original, kind, intelligent, stupid, consistent, etc. ... words that do not give any idea about a person, but have a claim to describe a person, while often only confusing.
And a little later he wrote in his diary: “The most pleasant are those (works. - AP) in which the author seems to be trying to hide his personal view and at the same time remains constantly faithful to him wherever he is found. The most colorless are those in which the look changes so often that it is completely lost. "
Tolstoy follows these rules when portraying the characters of the heroes in his works.

In the Caucasus, Tolstoy first found his true vocation, "not invented, but really existing, corresponding to his inclinations" - a literary work. He now systematically deals with it, develops the principles of artistic mastery.

“When rereading and correcting an essay,” he writes, “do not think about what needs to be added (no matter how good the passing thoughts are), unless you see the ambiguity or understatement of the main idea, but think about how to throw out of it how as much as possible without disturbing the thoughts of the composition (no matter how good these extra passages are). "

Creativity should bring joy to the artist, and he achieves this only if, Tolstoy asserts, if the subject he writes about deserves attention and is vital, serious.

The theme of the Caucasus runs through many of Leo Tolstoy's works, right up to the very latest. The writer never visited the Caucasus again, but he retained his love for this land until the last days of his life.

One cannot say about Tolstoy's life: "in his declining years." The last decade of his life, ten years after the novel "Resurrection", was filled with work, searches, literary designs. Tolstoy was old for years, but not a creative force. In him, even in old age, until the end of his days, there was an amazing fullness and richness of mental, spiritual life.

Hadji Murad is the hero of the story by Leo Tolstoy "Hadji Murad" (1896-1904)- a real historical person, famous for the bravery of the naib (authorized) Shamil, in 1834-1836. one of the rulers of the Avar Khanate. In 1851 he went over to the side of the Russians, then tried to flee to the mountains to save the family that remained in the hands of Shamil, but was overtaken and killed. Tolstoy spoke of H.-M .: "This is my hobby." Most of all, the artist was captivated by the energy and strength of H.-M.'s life, the ability to defend his life to the last. And only 45 years later, in 1896, Tolstoy began work on the story.

What prompted Tolstoy to begin work on the story, we read in his diary entry dated July 19, 1896:
“Yesterday I was walking along the black earth fallow before the war. Until the eye turns - nothing but black earth - not a single green grass. And on the edge of a dusty, gray road, a Tatar bush (turnip), three branches: one is broken, and a white, polluted flower hangs; the other is broken and splashed with mud, the black stem is broken and dirty; the third branch sticks out to the side, also black with dust, but is still alive and blushes in the middle. '' Hadji Murad recalled. I would like to write. Defends life to the last, and alone among the whole field, at least somehow, but defended it. "
This entry formed the basis of the prologue to the story.

Tolstoy wrote:
"Well done! - I thought. And a feeling of vivacity, energy, strength seized me. It should be so, it should be so. "
In the image of H.-M., in addition to courage, love of freedom, pride, Tolstoy especially emphasized simplicity (H.-M. did not come from a wealthy family, although he was friends with the khans), almost childish sincerity. In the story, the hero is given a childish smile that seduces everyone and is preserved even on a dead head (this detail is not in any of sourcesread by Tolstoy at work; according to the calculations of a specialist, these sources more than 170). Consciousness of one's own dignity is united in H.-M. with openness and charm.

He charms everyone: the young officer Butler, and Loris-Melikova, and the simple Russian woman Marya Dmitrievna, and the Vorontsovs' little son Bulka. To brother Sergei Nikolaevich in December 1851 Tolstoy wrote from Tiflis:
“If you want to flaunt news from the Caucasus, then you can tell that the second person after Shamil, a certain Hadji Murad, was recently transferred to the Russian government. He was the first reckless driver (horseman) and a fine fellow in all of Chechnya, but he did a mean thing. "
Working almost fifty years later on the story, Tolstoy thought quite differently. First of all, because he denied war, any war, for people, all people are brothers and must live in peace.

The war turns out to be necessary only for two persons - Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich and the inspirer of the "holy war" against the Gentiles, Imam Shamil. Both are cruel, insidious, power-hungry, immoral despots, equally sharply condemned by Tolstoy.

H.-M. is their victim, like the Russian soldier Petrukha Avdeev, who loved the murids H.-M. In the course of work on the story, Tolstoy had the idea to show one negative feature in Kh. M. - "deception of faith." Instead of the title “Burr” there appeared, it was, “Khazavat”, but in the very first copy from the autograph, in 1896, the final one was recorded: “Hadji Murad”. The hero is not at all characteristic of religious fanaticism. The daily prayer of Muslims - namaz performed several times a day - is all that is said about the commitment of H.-M. to your faith. In 1903, when telling the American journalist James Creelman about his work, Tolstoy said:
“This is a poem about the Caucasus, not a sermon. The central figure, Hadji Murad, is a national hero who served Russia, then fought against it along with his people, and in the end the Russians blew his head off. This is a story about a people who despise death. "

The image of H.-M. fanned by genuine poetry. Mountain tales, legends and songs, which Tolstoy admired long before working on the story (correspondence of the 1870s with A. A. Fet); wonderful descriptions of nature, especially the starry sky, - all this accompanies the life and mortal path of H.-M. The unsurpassed artistic power of these descriptions admired M. Gorky. According to the testimony of the poet N. Tikhonov, when the story was translated into the Avar language and it was read by people, some of whom remembered Shamil, they could not believe that it was written by a count, a Russian officer:
"No, it was not he who wrote ... It was written by God ..."
Ch. Aitmatov, for his part, admires the psychological insight into another national character:
“Both Hadji Murad and his naibs are written so that you see them and believe in their real existence. I happened to speak with the descendants of Hadji Murad, and they claim that Tolstoy created a reliable, accurate character. How did he do it? The secret, the great secret of the artist. This is the secret of the huge heart of Leo Tolstoy, who possessed an understanding of "man in general."

After the memorable January blizzard of 1854, Leo N. Tolstoy never visited our area again, but he was keenly interested in the events that took place on the Don. He corresponded with his readers from Rostov, Taganrog, Novocherkassk, the villages of Veshenskaya, Razdorskaya, Bagaevskaya, villages and farms of the Don.

Tolstoy has a series of stories for children: a story about Pugachev "How my aunt told her grandmother about how the robber Emelka Pugachev gave her a dime" (1875), story "Ermak" (1862). The writer conceived a novel about the era of Peter I. And in his epic "War and Peace" Tolstoy deserves credit for the deeds of arms of the sons of the Don steppes - Ataman Platov, Major General Grekov, Count Orlov-Denisov, their esauls, cornet, and just ordinary Cossacks ...

And one more Don trace in the fate of Leo Tolstoy: having broken with his family and the surrounding environment, Tolstoy on the night of October 28, 1910 left Yasnaya Polyana, where a significant part of his life passed, and at the Volovo station of the Ryazan-Ural railway took a ticket to Rostov-on-Don... Tolstoy was going to come to Novocherkassk to his niece E. S. Denisenko. But on the way, he fell seriously ill and December 7, 1910 died at the station Astapovo.

List of used literature:

1. Burnasheva, N. I. Early work of L. N. Tolstoy: text and time / N. I. Burnasheva. - Moscow: MIC, 1999 .-- 336 p. : ill.
2. Maymin, Evgeny Alexandrovich (1921-). Leo Tolstoy: The Writer's Way / EA Maimin; otv. ed. D.S. Likhachev. - 2nd ed. - Moscow: Nauka, 1984 .-- 191 p. - (From the history of world culture).
3. Popovkin, Alexander Ivanovich. L. N. Tolstoy / A. I. Popovkin. - Moscow: Detgiz, 1963 .-- 287 p., 16 l. Sheet.
4. Tolstoy, Lev Nikolaevich (1828-1910). Cossacks; Hadji Murad: [stories] / L. N. Tolstoy; silt E. Lancere. - Moscow: Fiction, 1981 .-- 304 p. : ill., color. silt

Filmography:

• Caucasian tale [Video]: based on Leo Tolstoy's story "Cossacks" / dir. Georgy Kalatozov. - Moscow: Film and Video Association "Close-up" - 1 electron. wholesale disc (DVD-ROM) (2 hours 11 min.): sound, color ; 12 cm, in a container. - (National cinema of the XX century) - Out. Dan. orig .: Georgia-film, 1978

Tolstoy L. N. and the Caucasus

For the competition of research papers and projects of students

"The sciences of young men feed"

"War and" others "in Caucasian works

L.N. Tolstoy "

"Bolshareshevskaya secondary school" of Kizlyarsky District RD Magomedov Patimat

Razhabovna

Scientific adviser-Hasanov

Ibrahim Abakarovich, candidate

philological sciences, teacher of Russian

language and literature MCOU

« Bolshareshevskaya secondary school "

Introduction

The theme of war and the rejection of the alien, the other is becoming one of the leading

russian literature of the XIX-XX centuries, moreover, the main vector of the image is concentrated on the image of war as a phenomenon of violence against life and the natural course of things.

The actual tension in the anti-war theme in Russian literature is given by the essays of A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, the works of M. Yu. Lermontov, in particular his poem "I am writing to you by chance, right ...". Anti-war motives receive new powerful impulses in the Caucasian works of L.N. Tolstoy ("Logging", "Raid", "Hadji Murad", "Cossacks", "Prisoner of the Caucasus"). Rejection of violence and war is formalized by L.N. Tolstoy in his diary entries during his stay in Dagestan and Chechnya.

The depiction of war as a phenomenon contrary to the human spirit is more convincing precisely in the works of Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, Lermontov, Tolstoy, because they themselves were direct participants in the events, knew the value of human life and death.

In Tolstoy's Caucasian works, we observe a final departure from mythopoetics in the depiction of war, which in Tolstoy's view is only blood, death, human suffering, moreover, the writer, with equal sympathy, describes both ordinary Russian soldiers and the mountaineers as victims of artificially created circumstances full of enmity and hate.

Through the spiritual world of his heroes, for whom enlightenment comes, Tolstoy seems to say to all mankind: “People, stop, stop killing each other, what are you doing !!!”.

War gives rise to alienation between peoples, they are at war with "others", strangers, in the Caucasian texts of Tolstoy they are mountaineers, but, in spite of everything, ordinary Russian soldiers and highlanders can understand and respect each other.

Main part

As a participant in hostilities against the mountaineers, Tolstoy tries to comprehend the meaning of this war, by instinct understands the meaninglessness of what is happening.

The fact that the war repels the writer does not inspire inspiration, like many officers eager for ranks and awards, can be seen from a brief entry in the diary on July 3, 1851. in the Old Yurt: "Was on a raid." ... On the same date, however, another entry follows, which conveys the writer's admiration for the beauty of the landscape: “Now I was lying behind the camp. What a wonderful night! The moon had just emerged from behind a hillock and was illuminating two small, thin, low clouds. " ...

This opposition of a clear, pure nature to immoral, cruel actions of people will accompany Tolstoy's work to the end (recall how Tolstoy describes the singing of nightingales during the death of Hadji Murad as a symbol of the triumph of life over death).

All the stories of Tolstoy's Caucasian cycle are the result of his intense inner life and the constant question that torments him: What is war? Why is she?

Entry from the diary 1852, June 18: "I pray like this: God, deliver me from evil, that is, deliver me from the temptation to do evil, and grant good, that is, the opportunity to do good." ...

In describing the war, Tolstoy threw out all the romantic bravado, clichés and myths.

In the story "Raid", there are motives of double movement: one mechanical - the path, the route of the detachment making a trip to the mountain village and the path of stepwise insight, the movement of a person to the truth. The purpose of the senseless raid was conveyed by the writer in simple words (the aul was empty): “There the roof collapses, an ax knocks on a strong tree and breaks down a wooden door; here a haystack, a fence, a saklya light up, and thick smoke rises in a column through the clear air ... ". ...

Knowing that the inhabitants have left, the generals still order to destroy everything that has been done by a whole generation of people, but there is still a secret goal of the campaign: to receive encouragements and awards, ranks. As a result - killed and wounded soldiers, including a mortally wounded and a warrant officer, whom the main character-narrator admires a minute earlier.

“Two soldiers held him under the arms. He was as pale as a handkerchief, and a pretty head, on which only a shadow of that warlike delight, which had animated her a minute before, was somehow terrifying, deepened between his shoulders and descended to his chest. ...

To emphasize the unnaturalness of war, Tolstoy often resorts to the antithesis - happy-tragic, life-death. Until recently, the young warrant officer was happy. He has a "childish voice", "a timid smile." Both the "child's voice" and "timid smile" are Tolstoy's universal ways to give the human soul naturalness and spontaneity. Especially a smile. And Hadji Murad also has a "childish smile" - a detail that symbolizes the purity of his soul. Both the ensign and Hadji Murad die in battle. A non-verbal means of communication (gesture, smile) indicates the inadmissibility of violence against life.

In The Raid, as an important overture to the subsequent scenes of murder and robbery, a phrase with a philosophical meaning stands out: "Nature breathed with conciliatory beauty and strength." ...

The experience of demythologizing war continues at another deep level by the writer in the story "Cossacks", in which two alien worlds - Russians and highlanders - not only collide in the process of war, but are also able to understand the motives of behavior and customs of each other.

The well-known literary critic Kazbek Sultanov, noting in the story "Cossacks" the ways in which Russians and highlanders escape from confrontation, bringing mutual death, writes: "Tolstoy sees beyond the topography of the day, distinguishing the two banks of the same river of life and revealing the imaginary impenetrability of the border. The border is dual, ambivalent, divides, but also connects, being not only a defensive line separating “ours” from the alien, but also a place of meeting, exchange of words and gestures ”. ...

Tolstoy conveys the anti-humanity of war through his description of the death of heroes. Here is Lukashka, full of life and energy, dying from a Chechen bullet. Tolstoy describes his death throes. Cossacks and Chechens are sometimes friends with each other, sometimes they fight, but they communicate, respect each other, go to visit.

Not all Cossacks and Chechens have been given to understand the godlessness and cruelty of war and violence: they live in their own world, full of battles, deaths, and raids.

Olenin thinks, looking at Lukashka: “The man killed another, and he is happy, contented, as if he had done the most wonderful thing. Doesn't anyone tell him that there is no reason for great joy? That happiness is not in killing, but in sacrificing oneself? " ...

There is no cruelty in Lukashka, but he does not understand what he is doing. Understanding comes only late.

Tolstoy gradually leads the reader to the idea that any violence against life is unnatural, war is a disgusting phenomenon.

Death is equally painful for both the Russian and the mountaineer. Tolstoy does not directly write that the war is not good, does not say that it brings misfortune to ordinary Russian people and mountaineers - he simply describes the process of death of mountaineers or Russians wounded in battle.

“Death in the eyes of Tolstoy keeps in itself some kind of deep secret,” writes V.V. Veresaev. ...

Great acuteness and depth of depiction of the anti-humanity of war and the description of "aliens" Tolstoy reaches the mountaineers in the famous story "Hadji Murad". Conceived as the apotheosis of life over death, the story vividly highlighted the values \u200b\u200bmost dear to Tolstoy: life as a gift from God, the inadmissibility of violence against it, and the equality of all people, regardless of religion and nationality.

According to Tolstoy, wars are created by a selfish gang of people who advance their interests, seek ranks and awards, and power over people. Ordinary mountaineers and Russian soldiers do not need war and is disgusting, they quickly find a common language.

There is an episode in the story "Hadji Murad" when Hadji Murad's murids and Russian soldiers meet. There is a dialogue between them. Mixing Russian and Turkic words, highlanders and soldiers communicate with each other. Soldier Avdeev says:

And what are these, my brothers, good naked guys. By golly. I got into such conversation with them. - Really, just like the Russians. ...

There is no war, there are no "others" - there are people who look into each other's eyes and can no longer shoot at their own kind. This way of aversion from war is typical of Tolstoy's artistic methodology.

In the story "Hadji Murad" the author also draws another line. The artificial world of officials, military bureaucracy, fed by the war, for whom the death of their soldiers and mountaineers is only a stepping stone to ranks and awards.

The theme of war in Tolstoy's Caucasian works is bound up with the problem of "strangers", "others." This problem is also at the center of another story from Tolstoy's Caucasian cycle, "The Prisoner of the Caucasus"

Highlanders and Russian soldiers and officers are at war with each other, but nevertheless the path of gradual recognition of "others" begins. War also brings death and destruction to mountain houses, like death in battle and to the Russian soldier.

The psychology of communication between highlanders and Russians is a psychology that pushes them to look at each other through the sights of their guns.

Here Zhilin is in captivity, he is surprised to recognize the mountain world, there are haters and fanatics in it, like an old Chechen who shot at Zhilin, but there are other highlanders: sincere, simple, by no means "animals", they are not going to someone kill. These are, for example, Abdul and his daughter Dina.

The whole simple-minded philosophy of Abdul lies in the phrase he repeatedly repeats addressed to Zhilin: "Your Ivan is good, my Abdul is good."

Abdul often smiles, and a kind smile in Tolstoy's artistic methodology is simplicity, life, spontaneity, the absence of lies.

Oddly enough, the highlanders, who attract the writer with their simple way of life, natural values, fullness of life, become carriers of the ideas of Tolstoy's philosophy of life. We learn that not all mountaineers make raids, not all highlanders are fanatics, not all highlanders love war and plunder.

The death of the soldier Avdeev in battle is one of the significant episodes of the story. They did not grieve for him for long at home, his wife, in his absence, went on a spree with another and managed to forget him, having heard about her husband's death, howled for decency only. He died for "the king and patronymic" - a short epitaph to the soldier Avdeev, who did not understand why he fought with the mountaineers. The painful process of dying of the wounded Avdeev gives rise to a feeling of protest and indignation in the reader, makes him think about the meaning of the war as such. The soldiers themselves have already been erased from life since the day of their mobilization.

"The soldier was a cut-off piece, and to remember him is to resent the soul." ...

The war only cripples and kills, the sergeant Nazarov, who is just rejoicing in the sky, air and life, is killed by Hadji Murad, and the soldier Petrakov is also dying senselessly. In the description of his death, Tolstoy put into full artistic power the cruel essence of war, bringing suffering and pain to people.

"Petrakov was lying on his back with his belly cut in, and his young face was turned to the sky, and he was dying like a fish sobbing." ...

The expression "like a fish sobbing, died" better than extensive descriptions tells us that the consequences of war are terrible for people, taking away from them what was created by God.

Tolstoy does not distinguish between the death of the Russian people and the death of the mountaineers. Also terrible is the death of Hadji Murad himself, who defended his life to the last.

Tolstoy has his own artistic secrets, techniques with the help of which he voices what he wants to say, express. He pays great attention to describing eye color. Tolstoy's black eyes symbolize life and energy, spontaneity and naturalness. Hadji Murad has "quick, black eyes", the son of Sado from the story "Hadji Murad" has "shiny black eyes", and Yusuf, the son of Hadji Murad, also has "burning black eyes." The subsequent course of events in the Caucasian texts, however, leads to the fact that all the "carriers" of black eyes perish: Hadji Murad dies in the battle, Yusuf perished in Shamil's prison, and Sado's son was killed with a bayonet. War does not spare black eyes, that is, life.

Tolstoy truthfully shows the destructive essence of the war in Hadji Murad: “Sado found his sakla destroyed: the roof was blown down, and the door and gallery pillars were burned, and the interior was fenced. His son, that handsome boy with shining eyes, who gazed with enthusiasm at Hadji Murad, was brought dead to the mosque on a horse covered with a burka. He was stabbed in the back with a bayonet. " ...

Both sides, Russian and mountain, endure hardships and misfortunes. Everyone is equally hurt, everyone is crying the same for their loved ones.

The mother of the soldier Pyotr Avdeev (the one who spoke well of the highlanders), upon hearing about the death of her son, “howled as long as there was time, and then took up work.” ...

The poor old woman has no time to grieve for her son for a long time - she has to work to live on. The echo of war resonates in distant Russia, in a poor family. In the same way, a cruel war brings grief to another, a mountain family. Sado's wife "a fine-looking woman who served during his visit to Hadji Murad, now, in a shirt torn on her chest, revealing her old sagging breasts, with her hair loose, stood over her son and scratched her face in blood and howled incessantly." ...

War deprives people of beauty, many deaths of Russians and highlanders occur against the background of beautiful pictures of nature, which the writer opposes to human destruction.

In the Caucasian works of Tolstoy, before talking about the death of characters, they are mentioned more than once, different details of the portraits of the heroes, their smiles, eye color, speech features are noted - this, apparently, should sharpen the theme of war and death. The artist seems to be telling us: “Look what unique character traits and details of appearance are leaving life.” This makes a strong impression on the reader, because we get used to the hero, his appearance, voice, peculiarities of speech - and suddenly all this ceases to exist.

In The Prisoner of the Caucasus, Tolstoy uses colors to denote evil.

Tolstoy divides the world of "others", i.e. mountaineers, bad and good, like the world of Russian people, the writer does not have a previously set theoretical approach to depicting people.

The writer debunks the stereotypes of portraying the mountaineers of the Caucasus as people who are always at war, dreaming only of raids and robberies and who constantly live in war, and who are not at all physically or morally hurt by the war.

There are no “others” in Tolstoy's artistic space; he paints both the soldier Avdeev and Hadji Murad with the same pain and sensitivity.

The point of view of the Caucasian highlanders as savages and animals who must be enlightened by force found supporters in Russian society as well.

In particular, the famous tsarist historian R. Fadeev summed up: “The population of the mountains, despite the fundamental differences between the tribes in external type and language, was always imbued with exactly the same character in relation to neighbors, whoever they were: the character of people with predation, that it came to them in blood, formed of them a predatory breed, almost in the zoological sense of the word. " ...

Tolstoy, on the other hand, sees the Caucasian world with different eyes: the cause of the war for him is the military bureaucracy of tsarism and the elite of fanatical mountaineers. The writer moves away from the question: on whose side he is: he is on the side of good and truth, from whoever they come from and against those who sow enmity and hatred.

The story "Hadji Murad" is one of Tolstoy's most humane anti-war works, devoid of even the shadow of romanticism and exoticism in the description of the highlanders.

He condemns blood feud in Hadji Murad, but lovingly paints his unique character, full of recklessness, courage, some adventurism, loyalty and chivalry.

Scientist Z.I. Hasanova notes: "Leo Tolstoy, unlike Pushkin, Lermontov, Poletaev, Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, did not poeticize blood feud, being a principled opponent of violence in any form." ...

Tolstoy is against the forcible implantation of a foreign culture, in the specific case of Russian culture in the Caucasus, it is necessary, in accordance with local traditions, religion, way of life, to gradually and steadily converge, otherwise - war, therefore, blood, death, ruin. Tolstoy conveyed this idea in the words of Hadji Murad: "We have a proverb," \u200b\u200bhe said to the translator, "she treated the donkey's dog with meat, and the donkey's dog with hay, - both remained hungry." ...

In the Caucasian works of Tolstoy, the idea is carried out that only in the hour of testing can a person comprehend the meaning of life, and there are no friends and strangers, Russians and mountaineers, and in order to comprehend this secret, the writer makes his beloved heroes go through the death throes (there is no doubt that both Avdeev and Hadji Murad touch Tolstoy with their simple philosophy of life). It is through the emotional experiences of the heroes that the idea of \u200b\u200bthe worthlessness of political events, including war, in the face of human tragedy, is comprehended.

Tolstoy shows that many officers and soldiers of the Russian army understand the cruelty and barbarity of war, for them the highlanders are people just like themselves.

The captain from the story "Raid" directly says that he does not see enemies in the highlanders, and ensign Alakin is ready to defend a Chechen child whom, as he thought, the Cossacks wanted to kill.

Scientist G.Sh. Chamsetdinova notes: “Tolstoy, as an objective artist-realist, does not hide the fact that the war brings many troubles to the indigenous people of the Caucasus. The picture of the pogrom in the "Raid" is especially impressive. Condemning the bloodshed, emphasizing that the common people do not accept the war, which is unleashed by despotic forces, Tolstoy raises questions of heroism, duty and honor. " ...

Developing the theme of war and its victims, Tolstoy focuses the reader's attention in the story "Hadji Murad" on the death of a boy, which immediately sharpens the problem of the meaning of war in general, for children are a symbol of purity and innocence (this motive was developed especially by Nekrasov and was continued by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy ). Literary critic V.M. Mukhina notes: “First, the work culminates in the military plot - this is the Russian raid on the mountain village. It gives a close-up view of the death of a mountain boy, which allows Tolstoy to raise the pacifist pathos of the story to the utmost possible height, to reveal the inhuman essence of war, its extreme cruelty and unnaturalness ... children". ...

Through the death of adolescents and children, Tolstoy extremely sharpens the problem of innocent human suffering, therefore, Tolstoy's field of vision is always children-victims of adult deadly games (son of Sado from Hadji Murad, Petya Rostov from War and Peace).

Dina from "Prisoner of the Caucasus" does not understand at all why the Russian Ivan is sitting in a deep hole - he is good, he can do everything, sculpts dolls.

Tolstoy would like the peoples to look at each other through the eyes of children, and then there would be no strangers and their own, bloodshed and violence, hatred and enmity.

The writer has no illusions about what different Russian people think of the highlanders.

The scene of Hadji Murad's farewell to the Russians is noteworthy: some officers said that he was a good fellow, others that he was a deceiver, and Marya Dmitrievna expresses an assessment of Hadji Murad, and this assessment comes from the author himself: “Courteous, intelligent, fair ... But why condemn when a person is good. He is a Tatar, but a good one. " ...

Findings:

List of references

Tolstoy L.N. Coll. op. in 22 volumes.T.21. Diaries 1847-1894. M .: Khudozh.lit., 1985 .-- 574p.

Tolstoy L.N. Selected Op. in 3 volumes.T.3. M .: Khudozh.lit., 1989 .-- 671s.

Sultanov K.K. "Cross the Terek", or two banks of one river of life. // Questions of literature. Issue III, 2011. - P.9-47.

Tolstoy L.N. Coll. op. in 14 volumes.Vol. 3. Moscow: State Publishing House of Art Literature, 1952 .-- 443p.

Veresaev V.V. Live life. About Dostoevsky and Tolstoy: Apollo and Dionysus. M .: Politizdat. 1991 .-- 336s.

Tolstoy L.N. Stories and stories. Moscow: Soviet, Russia. 1985 .-- 512s.

Fadeev R. Caucasian War. M .: Algorithm. 2005 .-- 635s.

Hasanova Z.I. Gorsky mentality in the story of L.N. Tolstoy "Hadji Murad". Makhachkala. Aleph, 2009 .-- 58p.

Chamsetdinova G.Sh. "War and Freedom" in the story of L.N. Tolstoy's "Raid" // Leo Tolstoy and the Caucasus in the context of the dialogue of cultures and times. All-Russian scientific and practical conference. 27-29 oct. 2008 DGPU. Pp. 139-141.

Mukhina V.M. Caucasian cycle of Tolstoy's works: structural and thematic aspect // Leo Tolstoy and the Caucasus in the context of the dialogue of cultures and times. All-Russian scientific and practical conference. 27-29 oct. 2009 DGPU. S.103-108.

The three years spent by the young Russian count in the Caucasus became not only an important milestone in his personal evolution, but also gave the world the greatest prose writer and thinker.

The role of the Caucasus Mountains as a huge forge of artistic talents can hardly be overestimated. Having pleased it here on their own or someone else's will, poets, writers and artists of the first magnitude came out of its crucible. In their creations, this proud land took on a new life, was populated by the heroes of the era and characters of legends, and became a center of magnetic attraction.

And only thanks to Tolstoy's prose did the literary Caucasus become completely different - the focus of attention shifted from romantic mythology to the essence of human existence. Being fragile and timid, but destroyed by alien political ambitions and "state interests."

In his declining years, Tolstoy said that his life can be divided into seven periods, and the one he spent in the Caucasus was one of the most important. Although, at first glance, in May 1851, the 23-year-old landowner found himself here almost by accident. Without finishing the university course, without a position, without specific occupations, almost losing half of the inheritance at cards, Lyovushka heeded the persuasions of Nikolai's older brother - an artillery officer - and went "for company" to the latter's place of service, beyond the Caucasus Range.

Indeed, it was possible to live here much more economically than in Moscow or St. Petersburg. In addition, the burden of household worries that burdened the young owner of Yasnaya Polyana disappeared by itself.

But Tolstoy would not have been Tolstoy if he had simply escaped from the hardships and inconveniences, without having a real and serious goal in mind. In the diary, which he kept all his life, subjecting his actions and motives to merciless introspection, an immediate explanation was given to the Caucasian voyage:

“I rode in order to be alone, to experience need, to test myself in need, to experience danger, to test myself in danger, to redeem my mistakes with labor and deprivation, to break free from the old rut at once, to start all over again - and my life and your happiness. "

Not according to Marlinsky

The village of Starogladkovskaya on the left bank of the Terek, where the brothers arrived, at first greatly disappointed Lev Nikolaevich. Later, with a fair amount of self-irony, he admits that in his ideas about the Caucasus, like most of his compatriots, he was under the hypnotic influence of Marlinsky's stories and Lermontov's romantic poems. Impeccable ice peaks, rocks, stormy streams, warlike mountaineers in burqas and with daggers, plane trees and blue-eyed Circassian women were imagined to his imagination.

Expectations were disappointed - none of this set of stamps was found in the village of Grebensky Cossacks. Neither were the necessary amenities found in the rented apartment, where Lev and Nikolai were assigned. In a letter to his beloved second cousin aunt Tatyana Aleksandrov, Ergolskaya Tolstoy wrote:

“I expected this land to be beautiful, but it turned out not at all. Since the village is located in a lowland, there are no distant views. "

The impression of the Caucasus was "corrected" a week later, when Nikolai was ordered to go to Stary Yurt - a fortification near Goryachevodsk - to guard and cover the sick in the camp. Here, the eager for novelty Tolstoy discovered huge stone mountains, and springs in which "eggs are hard-boiled in three minutes", and beautiful Tatar women in "lovely oriental costumes." Russian officers called all Muslim mountaineers Tatars, imitating the Terek Cossacks, despite the fact that Chechens lived in a peaceful village.

And in the summer of the same year, Lev Nikolaevich received his first baptism of fire - he and his brother took part in a raid on the mountaineers. He did not have an officer's rank, but was just a volunteer, volunteering: formally, Tolstoy continued to be in the civil service in the office of the Tula noble assembly. Only in October he will be able to pass the exam for the fireworks of an artillery battery, having received the rank of non-commissioned officer, and only in January 1854, before the start of the Crimean campaign, for the ensign.

During his debut military campaign, the future author of War and Peace saw for the first time the everyday life of soldiers and officers up close. I watched with amazement as on the eve of the battle the detachment calmly settled down to rest by the stream. Then he wrote down in his diary what struck him the most: "I could not have noticed a shadow of anxiety in anyone before the fight."

Through barriers

After Tolstoy began to open up the real Caucasus, decisively displacing the painted sham image, he saw from a new side the Cossack village of Starogladkovskaya. Proud, free people who never knew serfdom, their prowess, military status and independent disposition charmed the Russian master, who, it seemed, even yesterday, was trying with all his might to appear "comme il faut" "Secularism".

Now he remembered this with shame and disgust. Real, genuine life was here, against the background of pristine nature, far from the deadening conventions of civilization.

"Everything you have is false!" - said Tolstoy's new friend, 90-year-old Cossack Epifan Sekhin, and Lev Nikolaevich could not disagree with him. The endless tales of the old Cossack, the joint hunt for wild boars were a hundred times more interesting to him than empty small talk. It is not surprising that the colorful new acquaintance would later become the prototype of the most charming Tolstoyan character - Uncle Eroshka from the story "The Cossacks".

The brother of Lev Nikolaevich, Nikolai Nikolaevich, was also familiar with Epifan Sekhin. The brother of the writer himself was not bad at his pen - in the essay "Hunting in the Caucasus" he gave Uncle Epishka a very curious description:

“This is an extremely interesting, probably the last type of old Greben Cossacks. Epishka, in his own words, was a fine fellow, a thief, a swindler, he drove herds to the other side, sold people, drove Chechens on a lasso; now he is almost ninety years old lonely. What this man has not seen in his life! He was in casemates more than once, and was in Chechnya several times. His whole life is a series of the strangest adventures: our old man never worked; his service itself was not what we are now accustomed to understanding by this word. He was either a translator or carried out such assignments that, of course, only he could carry out: for example, to bring some abrek, dead or alive, from his own saklya to the city; to set fire to the house of Bey-Bulat, a well-known leader of the highlanders at that time, to bring honorary old men or amanats from Chechnya to the head of the detachment; to go hunting with the chief ... Hunting and wandering - these are the two passions of our old man: they were and now remain his only occupation; all his other adventures are just episodes. "

Tolstoy loved the way of life and the free life of the Cossacks so much that he seriously thought, like his hero Olenin, "to join the Cossacks, buy a hut, cattle, marry a Cossack woman." Dreams did not come true: the invisible barriers between the Russian count and the "children of nature" were too strong. Many sincere impulses of Lev Nikolaevich were perceived by the stanitsa as a master's whim and an accidental whim.

However, the whole system of life of the Cossacks for a long time seemed to him the ideal for the life of the Russian people. In 1857, Tolstoy wrote: "The future of Russia is the Cossacks: freedom, equality and compulsory military service for everyone."

Brother and friend

While living in Stary Yurt, Tolstoy became close friends with the Chechen youth Sado Misorbiev. Somehow the count protected him from card cheaters who, during the game, took advantage of the fact that a Chechen cannot count and write. The grateful Sado presented Lev Nikolayevich with a purse: this was the first step that is being taken on the path to cunicess.

In a witty French letter to Tatyana Aleksandrovna Ergolskaya, Tolstoy described in detail the rite that he went through to become Sado's kunak:

“According to the well-known custom of this nation to give away, I gave him an inferior gun, which I bought for 8 rubles. To become a kunak, that is, a friend, according to custom, first, exchange gifts and then take food at the kunak's house. And then they become friends for life and death, and no matter what I ask him - money, wife, his weapon, all that he has the most precious - he must give me, and equally I cannot do anything. refuse him. - Sado called me to his place and offered to be a kunak. I went. Having treated me according to their custom, he invited me to take whatever I like: a weapon, a horse, whatever I wanted. I wanted to choose something less expensive and took a bridle with a silver set; but he said that he would consider it an offense, and forced me to take a saber, which costs at least 100 rubles in silver. His father is a well-to-do man, but his money is buried, and he does not give his son a dime. To get money, the son steals horses or cows from the enemy, sometimes risks his life twenty times to steal a thing that is not worth even 10 rubles; he does it not out of self-interest, but out of daring ... Sado has either 100 rubles, or even a penny. After my visit, I gave him Nikolenka's silver watch, and we became bosom friends. He often proved his loyalty to me by exposing himself to various dangers for me; they consider it to be nothing - it has become a habit and a pleasure. "

It was not for nothing that Sado called himself Tolstoy's kunak. Once, when a detachment of mountaineers chased them, the young man gave up his horse to a Russian friend - a faster and more enduring one, and he himself diverted the attention of the chase to himself.

Another time, a Chechen saved Tolstoy from a sure shame - failure to pay a card debt. Gambling has more than once played a cruel joke with the luminary of Russian literature: in his youth, he lost at cards the main building of Yasnaya Polyana - the beloved house in which he spent his childhood. Instead of 5000 rubles in banknotes, the neighbor Gorokhov took the whole building in order to pay off the debt: he took it apart brick by brick and took it 30 miles away.

This time, Sado managed to recoup his kunak. Tolstoy was without money in Tiflis when a Chechen brought his brother Nikolai Nikolayevich a torn bill for five hundred rubles, which Levushka had just lost to officer Knorring. It was an unequivocal debt relief. "Will my brother be pleased?" Sado asked happily.

No drumbeat

During the Caucasian period, from 1851 to 1854, Tolstoy wrote things with which he immediately declared himself as the new hope of Russian literature, a mature and confident master. At small intervals, the Sovremennik magazine published the story “Childhood”, the stories “Raid”, “Cutting the Forest”, “Demoted”, “Marker's Notes”.

It was clear that the young author was not looking - he had already found it. Tolstoy's literary style, completely devoid of imitation, was distinguished by close attention to the inner life of a person. He opened to the Russian reader what was previously inexpressible in words: the dialectic of the soul.

Literary critics claim that the hand of the creator of the epic novel War and Peace is already visible in Tolstoy's early Caucasian sketches. The corporate identity is reflected in the character of the depiction of battle scenes and a special military environment.

From childhood notions of war as a "youth" with which the writer arrived in the Caucasus, he gradually comes to interpret it as a fratricidal massacre, a general disaster, a state unnatural for a person. However, pacifist ideas did not in the least cancel the personal courage of the artilleryman Tolstoy: for military merits he was twice presented to the St. George's Cross, although he never received it. The first time - because of a minor disciplinary violation, the second - because he lost it to an old soldier.

“Is it really cramped for people to live in this beautiful world, under this immeasurable starry sky? the narrator asks in The Raid. - Can it be that, among this charming nature, the feeling of anger, revenge or the passion of extermination of their own kind can be retained in a person's soul? All the unkindness in the human heart should, it seems, disappear in touch with nature - this most direct expression of beauty and goodness. "

But even in the face of evil and death, the best human manifestations do not fade. Tolstoy was the first of the "military writers" to be able to discern the colorful types of Russian soldiers, to depict their living physiognomies, to convey the true language. He explained what real courage is and how it differs from ostentatious prowess and romantic exaltation.

“In a Russian, real Russian soldier,” writes Tolstoy in “Cutting the Forest,” “you will never notice boasting, bravery, a desire to be foggy, to flare up in times of danger: on the contrary, modesty, simplicity, and the ability to see in danger something completely different from danger, constitute distinctive features of his character ”.

The image of Captain Khlopov from "Raid" embodies the best features of the Russian officer corps. Alien to external effects and bravado, he calmly performs his military craft, not jerking soldiers in vain, who already know their job very well, but only shouting at them if they stick out under enemy bullets for no reason:

“He was exactly the same as I had always seen him: the same calm movements, the same even voice, the same expression of ingenuousness on his ugly, but simple face; only by a more than usual bright gaze could one notice in him the attention of a man calmly busy with his business. It's easy to say: the same as always. But how many different shades have I noticed in others: one wants to appear calmer, the other more severe, the third more cheerful than usual; on the face of the captain, it is noticeable that he does not understand why to appear. "

"God wrote it"

The Caucasus continued to fuel Tolstoy's work for many years, if not always. Delayed in time, the fruit of the Caucasian period is the "Cossacks", published in 1863. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries "Hadji Murad" was written - the last big story published after the writer's death.

“This is a poem about the Caucasus, not a sermon,” Tolstoy explained to the American journalist James Creelman in 1903. - The central figure is Hadji Murad - a folk hero who served Russia, then fought against it along with his people, and in the end the Russians blew his head off. This is a story about a people who despise death. "

Working on the story almost 50 years after the real events underlying the plot, the writer unconditionally denies any war, no matter what slogans it may hide behind. All people are brothers and must live in peace. The war turns out to be necessary only for two persons - Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich and the inspirer of the "holy war" against the Gentiles, Imam Shamil. Both the one and the other in the author's image are cruel, insidious, power-hungry, immoral despots, equally harshly condemned by Tolstoy.

According to the testimony of the poet Nikolai Tikhonov, when the story “Hadji Murad” was translated into the Avar language, it was read by those who still remembered Shamil. They could not believe that it was written by a count, a Russian officer.

“No, he didn't write it. God wrote this, ”said the Avars.

Such a force of penetration not only into the character, but into the very structure of the soul of another people cannot be explained rationally. This is what is called the secret of the artist, which is akin to the creation of new worlds.

But in addition to the mature Tolstoyan genius, in all the "Caucasian" works of different years, the amazing energy of youth - the youth of feelings and colors, the freshness and power of artistic expression, powerfully declares itself. Tolstoy did it, and the Caucasus did it:

“Then I began to think as only once in a lifetime people have the power to think. I have my notes from that time, and now, rereading them, I could not understand that a person could reach the level of mental exaltation that I reached then. It was both excruciating and good time. Never - not before, not after - did I reach such a height of thought, did not look there, as at this time, which lasted two years. And everything that I found then will forever remain my conviction. "

Irina RODINA
for the journal "Bulletin. North Caucasus"

In 1848-1851, the village seclusion of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy alternated with periods of noisy, as Tolstoy himself defined, "disorderly" life in the capital - in Moscow, in St. Petersburg.

Tolstoy was increasingly attracted to literary pursuits, he conceived a story “from a gypsy life,” but the scattered social life interferes with concentrated work. Dissatisfaction with himself, the desire to abruptly change his life, to replace the empty chatter of the secular drawing rooms with a real business led him to a sudden decision to leave for the Caucasus.

Nikolai Nikolaevich, returning to the regiment, invited his brother to go with him, and they set off. On May 30, 1851, the Tolstoys arrived at the Cossack village on the left bank of the Terek - Starogladkovskaya. The military service of Lev Nikolaevich began here. In those days, service in the Caucasus was dangerous: there was a war with the detachments of the mountaineers, united under the leadership of Shamil. Once Tolstoy almost got captured by the Chechens when their detachment was moving from the Vozdvizhenskaya fortress to Groznaya.

There was a very playful horse under Tolstoy, and he could easily gallop away. But he did not leave his friend Sado Miserbiev, a peaceful Chechen, whose horse lagged behind. They successfully fought back and galloped to Groznaya for reinforcements.

In the officer society, which was not distinguished by high spiritual interests, Lev Nikolaevich felt lonely. He was more attracted to soldiers, in them he was able to appreciate simplicity, a kind heart, fortitude and courage. But the free life of the Cossacks was especially attractive to him. He made friends with the old kzak-hunter Epifan Sekhin, listened to and wrote down his stories, Cossack songs. The features of Epifan Sekhin are depicted in the image of Uncle Eroshka in the Cossacks (the story began in the Caucasus, finished in 1862).

In the Caucasus, Tolstoy experienced a strong passion for the Cossack woman described in the story "Cossacks" under the name of Maryana. Here in the Caucasus, many of the features that characterize the mature Tolstoy as a thinker and artist were definitely outlined. He read a lot.

“I have books, classes and leisure time, because no one comes to bother me, so in general I don’t miss,” he wrote from Tiflis in 1851.

Military service could not completely occupy Tolstoy. The feeling of confusion and dissatisfaction with himself does not leave him in the Caucasus either. On his birthday, August 28, 1852, Tolstoy writes in his Diary: “I am 24 years old, and I have not done anything yet. I feel that it is not without reason that I have been struggling with doubt and passions for eight years now. But what am I assigned to? This will open up the future. " It so happened that the next day he received a letter from St. Petersburg from N. A. Nekrasov, which praised the manuscript of his first completed story, Childhood: “I read your manuscript. It has so much interest in it that I will publish it. Not knowing the continuation, I cannot say for sure, but it seems to me that the author has talent. In any case, the direction of the author, the simplicity and reality of the content are the inalienable merits of this work. "

In the Caucasus, Tolstoy made his most important choice in life - he became a writer.

“… Remember, good aunt, that once you advised me to write novels; So I took your advice - my occupations, which I am telling you about, are literary. I don’t know if what I am writing will ever appear, but this work amuses me ”- this is how Tolstoy wrote from the Caucasus to Yasnaya Polyana Tatyana Aleksandrovna Ergolskaya. He conceived the novel "Four Epochs of Development" in which he wanted to depict the process of a person's spiritual growth, "to sharply outline the characteristic features of each epoch of life: warmth and fidelity of feeling in childhood; skepticism in adolescence, in youth the beauty of feelings, the development of vanity and self-doubt. "

The first part of the planned novel, Childhood, was written in the Caucasus; later "Boyhood" (1854) and "Youth" (1856) were created; the fourth part - "Youth" remained unwritten. There were also written "Christmas night" ("How Love Dies"), "Marker Notes", based on fresh impressions, based on his own experience, he began to write military stories: "Raid", "Cutting the Forest", began "The Novel of a Russian Landowner "," Cossacks "," Diary of a Caucasian officer ".

During Tolstoy's stay in the Caucasus, the idea of \u200b\u200bhuman unity faced in the war conditions one of the deepest and most tragic contradictions in the historical life of mankind. Understanding the reasons giving rise to wars leads Tolstoy to pose the question of conscience and moral purity (real and false) and patriotism (true and imaginary). The psychology of war is at the center of the stories "Raid" and "Logging". In the characteristics of the three prevailing types of soldiers, Tolstoy highlights the principle that unites both the "submissive" and the "desperate" and the "commanding", which manifests itself differently in each of these categories of soldiers. It declares itself as indestructible calmness, extraordinary honesty and contempt for all the vicissitudes of fate (in the category of "submissive"), nobility and high poetic impulses (in the category of "commanding"), unshakable gaiety, tremendous ability for everything, nobility of nature and daring (in the category of "desperate"). It is in the soldiers that Tolstoy finds the manifestation of the strength and dignity of the human character.

In the history of Tolstoy's creative work on Caucasian motifs, three periods can be noted, in our opinion.

We refer to the first period those works that were written or started by him in the Caucasus, under the direct impression of what he saw and experienced there. These works are as follows: "Raid" (1852), "Cutting the forest" (1855), "Meeting in a detachment with a Moscow acquaintance" (1856) and "Cossacks" (1863). A characteristic feature of the works of this period is deep autobiography. Especially many personal motives are put into the story "Cossacks". The outline of this story, as established by biographers, largely coincides with the actual facts of the writer's life: Olenin's departure from Moscow, dissatisfaction with an empty social life, striving for moral renewal, arrival in the Greben village, rapprochement with the Cossacks, friendship with the hunter Eroshka, passion for a young Cossack woman, dreams of marriage with her and of "simplification" - all this, not to mention the minor details of the narrative, vividly reminds us of Tolstoy himself.

The second period includes stories for children written in the mature period of creativity - a cycle of textbook essays about Bulka and Milton and "Prisoner of the Caucasus". In artistic terms, "Prisoner of the Caucasus" is extremely valuable. The following features are noteworthy in this story - the weakening of autobiographical motives, the desire for complete objectivity, an increase in interest in the depiction of mountain life, the continuation of the struggle against the romantic tradition. Indeed, the reason for writing this work was a genuine incident from the life of Tolstoy himself - a meeting with the Chechens, which almost ended with the capture of him and his faithful companion - Sado; however, personal details are not underlined here. The main goal of the author is a truthful description of mountain life. The motive of love, which came to the fore in a similar plot in Pushkin and Lermontov, is replaced here by the motive of friendship (friendship between Zhilin and Dina). Here in the foreground is the image of the external life of the highlanders, their customs. Tolstoy describes their dwelling, clothing, food, funeral ceremony, treatment of prisoners, and so on.

The third period is the time of the writing of Hadji Murad (1896-1904). The image of Hadji Murad has long attracted Tolstoy's attention. We first meet the name of a Caucasian hero in Tolstoy's letter of December 23, 1851. L. Tolstoy wrote to his brother Sergei Nikolaevich from Tiflis: “If you want to flaunt news from the Caucasus, you can tell recently handed over to the Russian government. He was the first reckless driver (horseman) and a fine fellow in all of Chechnya, but he did a mean thing. "

In Hadji Murad, as can be seen from these lines, Tolstoy was struck by two features - heroism and the ability to betray. The image of Hadji Murad emerges before Tolstoy ten years later, during the period of his pedagogical work.

It was only in 1896 that Tolstoy took up the creation of a story, the impetus for writing which was a well-known incident described by him in his diary: “Yesterday I was walking along the pre-war black earth fallow. Until the eye turns, nothing but black earth, not a single green grass; and so on the edge of a dusty, gray road, a bush (burdock) Three branches: one broken and a white, dirty flower hanging; another broken and splattered with black mud, the stem is broken and dirty; the third branch sticking out to the side, also black with dust, but still alive and blushing in the middle. He reminded Hadji Murad. I would like to write. Defends life to the last, and alone among the whole field, somehow, but defended it. "

“And I remembered one long-standing Caucasian story, part of which I saw, partly heard from eyewitnesses and partly imagined. This story, as it developed in my memory and imagination, is what it is,” Tolstoy says in the prologue of Hadji Murad.

Let us note a number of features that bring the story "Hadji Murad" closer to his early Caucasian works and testify to the stability of Tolstoy's stylistic devices and his gravitation towards his favorite images and ideas.

The motive of the highlander's betrayal, which formed the basis of Hadji Murad, was first touched upon by Tolstoy in The Prisoner of the Caucasus.

This is a great man! - the owner told Zhilin about one old man. - He was the first horseman, he beat many Russians, he was rich. He had three wives and 8 sons. Everyone lived in the same village. The Russians came, ravaged the village and killed seven sons. One son remained and passed on to the Russians. The old man went and passed himself on to the Russians. He lived with them for three months, found his son there, killed him himself and fled.

"Hadji Murad replied with a smile to his smile, and this smile struck Poltoratsky with his childlike good nature. Poltoratsky did not expect to see this terrible mountaineer like that. He expected a gloomy, dry, alien person, and in front of him was the simplest man smiling with such a kind smile, that he seemed like a familiar friend. "

This smile made the same impression on Princess Marya Vasilievna Vorontsova: "Marya Vasilievna liked his smile as much as Poltoratsky."

The historical bias, which did not occupy a large place in the previous Caucasian works, comes to the fore in the new story. In "Cossacks" Tolstoy confined himself to a brief account of the reasons that influenced the settlement of the Terek bank by the Combs and their character. In Hadji Murad, the author seeks to reproduce as fully as possible the historical setting, to resurrect historical images with documentary truthfulness and thoroughness.

The successive connection between "Hadji Murad" and Tolstoy's previous Caucasian works is, of course, not only in these details. Tolstoy, even in the last Caucasian tale, continues to struggle with romance, with "marlinism" that have survived in contemporary literature, for example, in the Caucasian novels of Nemirovich-Danchenko. The usual romantic motive - love - is not of paramount importance here; in Hadji Murad, as in Prisoner of the Caucasus by the same author, love is replaced by friendship between Hadji Murad and Marya Dmitrievna.

Autobiographical motives do not occupy a significant place, although the memories of the Caucasus at times strongly possessed him during the time he was working on Hadji Murad. In February 1897, Tolstoy notes in his diary: "45 years ago I was in battle." Personal traits can be noticed in Butler, but in general the author strives for objectivity, which is already strongly revealed in "The Prisoner of the Caucasus".

Military service weighs heavily on Tolstoy. But his resignation request was satisfied only after serving in the Danube army (1854) and staying in besieged Sevastopol, where he was transferred in November 1854

Fate confronted Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy with Don and his people more than once. At the beginning of his career, he almost froze to death in the Upper Don steppes in January 1854, when he left the Caucasus, where he began serving in order, after staying at home in Yasnaya Polyana, to go to the theater of the Crimean War in the Danube Army, and then to besieged Sevastopol.

Lev Nikolaevich was preparing thoroughly for the upcoming trip: he bought a fur coat, a hat, a sheepskin coat, a burka, a beshmet. True, he scolded himself for "rash unnecessary expenses." However, the winter in our area, through which he was traveling, turned out to be harsh, with strong frosts, a prickly wind, lingering snowstorms, and "rash" purchases turned into reasonable prudence. Diary entry: “I was on the road, on the 24th in Belgorodtsevskaya, 100 miles from Cherkassk, wandered the whole night, the idea came to me to write the story“ Snowstorm ”. Wandering among the diverging elements and constituted the plot of the work.

In addition to The Blizzard, Tolstoy created many works, one way or another connected with Don and his people. These are "Shat and Don", "Ermak", "Posthumous notes of Elder Fyodor Kuzmich" and others. Many pages of "War and Peace" are dedicated to the Don people. It marks the high military qualities of the Cossacks, their daring and desperate bravery, along with humanity and generous attitude towards the defeated enemy. Characteristic in this respect is the scene with the captured young French drummer, whom our fellow countrymen warmed, fed and renamed from Vincent to Vanya in their own way.

Cossack ataman Platov, the leaders of the Cossack freemen Stenka Razin, Bulavin are not ignored in the writer's work. In the story “How an aunt told her grandmother about how the robber Emelka Pugachev gave her a dime”, you can read how the kind nanny of the landowner's children left in her care, when Pugachev's detachments appeared, dressed them in peasant clothes and passed them off as her granddaughters. Pugachev, entering the room, called the older girl, took it by the cheek and with the words "Look, what a white-faced woman, she will be," took a handful of silver from his pocket, chose a dime and gave it to her.

"The dime is the one that Pugachev gave me," the aunt concludes, "I still keep."

Lev Nikolaevich had an idea to write a novel about the Azov campaign of Peter I.

From his youth and until his last days, Tolstoy was interested in the Don region, its originality, Cossack liberties. And such an entry appears in the diary.

“The whole history of Russia was made by the Cossacks. It is not for nothing that Europeans call us Cossacks. The people want to be Cossacks ”... This was said in the sense that the Russian people strive for freedom, will and justice.

And Tolstoy planned his last trip from Yasnaya Polyana to Rostov-on-Don. But he did not get there: he was sick, he was taken off the train at the Astapovo station, where he died.