The Cossacks by graf Tolstoy Leo (leveled readers .txt) 📖

to the name—I feel unendurably revolted. I then see

before me those obtuse faces, those rich eligible girls whose

looks seem to say:

 

“It’s all right, you may come near though I am rich and eligible”-

-and that arranging and rearranging of seats, that shameless

matchmaking and that eternal tittle-tattle and pretence; those

rules—with whom to shake hands, to whom only to nod, with whom to

converse (and all this done deliberately with a conviction of its

inevitability), that continual ennui in the blood passing on from

generation to generation. Try to understand or believe just this

one thing: you need only see and comprehend what truth and beauty

are, and all that you now say and think and all your wishes for me

and for yourselves will fly to atoms! Happiness is being with

nature, seeing her, and conversing with her. “He may even (God

forbid) marry a common Cossack girl, and be quite lost socially” I

can imagine them saying of me with sincere pity! Yet the one thing

I desire is to be quite “lost” in your sense of the word. I wish

to marry a Cossack girl, and dare not because it would be a height

of happiness of which I am unworthy.

 

‘Three months have passed since I first saw the Cossack girl,

Maryanka. The views and prejudices of the world I had left were

still fresh in me. I did not then believe that I could love that

woman. I delighted in her beauty just as I delighted in the beauty

of the mountains and the sky, nor could I help delighting in her,

for she is as beautiful as they. I found that the sight of her

beauty had become a necessity of my life and I began asking myself

whether I did not love her. But I could find nothing within myself

at all like love as I had imagined it to be. Mine was not the

restlessness of loneliness and desire for marriage, nor was it

platonic, still less a carnal love such as I have experienced. I

needed only to see her, to hear her, to know that she was near—

and if I was not happy, I was at peace.

 

‘After an evening gathering at which I met her and touched her, I

felt that between that woman and myself there existed an

indissoluble though unacknowledged bond against which I could not

struggle, yet I did struggle. I asked myself: “Is it possible to

love a woman who will never understand the profoundest interests

of my life? Is it possible to love a woman simply for her beauty,

to love the statue of a woman?” But I was already in love with

her, though I did not yet trust to my feelings.

 

‘After that evening when I first spoke to her our relations

changed. Before that she had been to me an extraneous but majestic

object of external nature: but since then she has become a human

being. I began to meet her, to talk to her, and sometimes to go to

work for her father and to spend whole evenings with them, and in

this intimate intercourse she remained still in my eyes just as

pure, inaccessible, and majestic. She always responded with equal

calm, pride, and cheerful equanimity. Sometimes she was friendly,

but generally her every look, every word, and every movement

expressed equanimity—not contemptuous, but crushing and

bewitching. Every day with a feigned smile on my lips I tried to

play a part, and with torments of passion and desire in my heart I

spoke banteringly to her. She saw that I was dissembling, but

looked straight at me cheerfully and simply. This position became

unbearable. I wished not to deceive her but to tell her all I

thought and felt. I was extremely agitated. We were in the

vineyard when I began to tell her of my love, in words I am now

ashamed to remember. I am ashamed because I ought not to have

dared to speak so to her because she stood far above such words

and above the feeling they were meant to express. I said no more,

but from that day my position has been intolerable. I did not wish

to demean myself by continuing our former flippant relations, and

at the same time I felt that I had not yet reached the level of

straight and simple relations with her. I asked myself

despairingly, “What am I to do?” In foolish dreams I imagined her

now as my mistress and now as my wife, but rejected both ideas

with disgust. To make her a wanton woman would be dreadful. It

would be murder. To turn her into a fine lady, the wife of Dmitri

Andreich Olenin, like a Cossack woman here who is married to one

of our officers, would be still worse. Now could I turn Cossack

like Lukashka, and steal horses, get drunk on chikhir, sing

rollicking songs, kill people, and when drunk climb in at her

window for the night without a thought of who and what I am, it

would be different: then we might understand one another and I

might be happy.

 

‘I tried to throw myself into that kind of life but was still more

conscious of my own weakness and artificiality. I cannot forget

myself and my complex, distorted past, and my future appears to me

still more hopeless. Every day I have before me the distant snowy

mountains and this majestic, happy woman. But not for me is the

only happiness possible in the world; I cannot have this woman!

What is most terrible and yet sweetest in my condition is that I

feel that I understand her but that she will never understand me;

not because she is inferior: on the contrary she ought not to

understand me. She is happy, she is like nature: consistent, calm,

and self-contained; and I, a weak distorted being, want her to

understand my deformity and my torments! I have not slept at

night, but have aimlessly passed under her windows not rendering

account to myself of what was happening to me. On the 18th our

company started on a raid, and I spent three days away from the

village. I was sad and apathetic, the usual songs, cards,

drinking-bouts, and talk of rewards in the regiment, were more

repulsive to me than usual. Yesterday I returned home and saw her,

my hut. Daddy Eroshka, and the snowy mountains, from my porch, and

was seized by such a strong, new feeling of joy that I understood

it all. I love this woman; I feel real love for the first and only

time in my life. I know what has befallen me. I do not fear to be

degraded by this feeling, I am not ashamed of my love, I am proud

of it. It is not my fault that I love. It has come about against

my will. I tried to escape from my love by self-renunciation, and

tried to devise a joy in the Cossack Lukashka’s and Maryanka’s

love, but thereby only stirred up my own love and jealousy. This

is not the ideal, the so-called exalted love which I have known

before; not that sort of attachment in which you admire your own

love and feel that the source of your emotion is within yourself

and do everything yourself. I have felt that too. It is still less

a desire for enjoyment: it is something different. Perhaps in her

I love nature: the personification of all that is beautiful in

nature; but yet I am not acting by my own will, but some elemental

force loves through me; the whole of God’s world, all nature,

presses this love into my soul and says, “Love her.” I love her

not with my mind or my imagination, but with my whole being.

Loving her I feel myself to be an integral part of all God’s joyous

world. I wrote before about the new convictions to which my solitary

life had brought me, but no one knows with what labour they shaped

themselves within me and with what joy I realized them and saw a

new way of life opening out before me; nothing was dearer to me than

those convictions… Well! … love has come and neither they nor any

regrets for them remain! It is even difficult for me to believe that

I could prize such a one-sided, cold, and abstract state of mind.

Beauty came and scattered to the winds all that laborious inward toil,

and no regret remains for what has vanished! Self-renunciation is

all nonsense and absurdity! That is pride, a refuge from well-merited

unhappiness, and salvation from the envy of others’ happiness: “Live

for others, and do good!”—Why? when in my soul there is only love for

myself and the desire to love her and to live her life with her?

Not for others, not for Lukashka, I now desire happiness. I do not

now love those others. Formerly I should have told myself that

this is wrong. I should have tormented myself with the questions:

What will become of her, of me, and of Lukashka? Now I don’t care.

I do not live my own life, there is something stronger than me

which directs me. I suffer; but formerly I was dead and only now

do I live. Today I will go to their house and tell her

everything.’