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The Cossacks are a people belonging to Europe in terms of their faith and location, but at the same time totally Asiatic in their way of life, their customs and their dress. They are a people in which two opposite parts of the world, two opposing spirits have strangely come together: European prudence and Asiatic abandon; simplicity and cunning; a strong sense of activity and a love of laziness; a drive towards development and perfection and at the same time a desire to appear scornful of any perfection.⁶⁸

As a historian Gogol tried to link the nature of the Cossacks to the periodic waves of nomadic in-migration that had swept across the steppe since 'the Huns in ancient times'. He maintained that only a warlike and energetic people such as the Cossacks was able to survive on the open plain. The Cossacks rode 'in Asiatic fashion across the steppe'. They rushed with the 'swiftness of a tiger out of hiding places when they launched a raid'.⁶⁹ Tolstoy, who had come to know the Cossacks as an officer in the army, also thought of them as semi-Asiatic in character. In The Cossacks (1863) Tolstoy showed in ethnographic detail that the Russian Cossacks on the northern side of the Terek river lived a way of life that was virtually indistinguishable from that of the Chechen hill tribes on the Terek's southern side.

When Pushkin travelled to the Caucasus, in the early 1820s, he

thought of himself as going to a foreign land. 'I have never been beyond my own unbounded Russia', he wrote in A Journey to Arzrum (1836).⁷⁰ But Lermontov, who went there a decade later, embraced the Caucasus as his 'spiritual homeland' and asked its mountains to bless him 'as a son':

At heart I am yours

Forever and everywhere yours!⁷¹

The mountains were the inspiration and indeed the setting of many his works, including his greatest masterpiece, A Hero of Our Times, the first Russian prose novel. Born in Moscow in 1814, Lermontov had suffered from rheumatic fevers as a boy and so he was taken on a number of occasions to the spa resort of Piatigorsk. The wild romantic spirit of its mountain scenery left a lasting imprint on the young poet. In the early 1830s he was a student of oriental literature and philosophy at Moscow University. From that time he was strongly drawn to the fatalistic outlook which he saw as Russia's inheritance from the Muslim world (an idea he explores in the final chapter of A Hero of Our Times). Lermontov took a keen interest in Caucasian folklore, especially the legends told by Shora Nogmov, a mullah-turned-Guards-officer from Piatigorsk, about the exploits of the mountain warriors. One of these tales inspired him to write his first major poem, Izmail Bey, in 1832 (though it was not passed for publication until many years later). It told the story of a Muslim prince surrendered as a hostage to the Russian troops in their conquest of the Caucasus. Brought up as a Russian nobleman, Izmail Bey abandons his commission in the Russian army and takes up the defence of his Chechen countrymen, whose villages are destroyed by the Tsarist troops. Lermontov himself was enrolled in the Guards to fight these mountain tribes, and to some degree he identified with Izmail Bey, feeling much the same divided loyalties. The poet fought with extraordinary courage against the Chechens at Fort Grozny, but he was repulsed by the savage war of terror he witnessed against the Chechen strongholds in the mountain villages. In Izmail Bey Lermontov concludes with a bitter condemnation of the Russian Empire which the Tsarist censor's pen could not disguise:

Where are the mountains, steppes and oceans Yet to be conquered by the Slavs in war? And where have enmity and treason Not bowed to Russia's mighty Tsar? Circassian fight no more! Likely as not, Both East and West will share your lot. The time will come: you'll say, quite bold, 'I am a slave but my Tsar rules the world.' The time will come: the North will be graced By an awesome new Rome, a second Augustus.

Auls are burning, their defenders mastered,

The homeland's sons have fallen in battle.

Like steady comets, fearful to the eyes,

A glow is playing across the skies,

A beast of prey with bayonet, the victor

Charges into a peaceful house,

He kills the children and the old folks,

And with his bloody hand he strokes

The unmarried girls and young mothers.

But a woman's heart can match her brother's!

After those kisses, a dagger's drawn,

A Russian cowers, gasps - he's gone!

'Avenge me comrade!' And in just a breath

(A fine revenge for a murderer's death)

The little house now burns, a delight to their gaze,

Circassian freedom set ablaze!⁷²