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Title: Inferences from a Sabre by Claudio Magris, Mark Thompson ISBN: 0-7486-6036-4 Publisher: Small Press Distribution Pub. Date: December, 1993 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: Cossack speculations
Comment: The Cossacks are best known as the roving horsemen of the Russian steppes, famed for their ungovernability and violence, epitomized by tales of wild fighters like Stenka Razin and Yermak. In the 20th century, one of the most famous portrayals of Cossacks was in that early classic of Russian cinema, "The Battleship Potemkin", in which a body of these perennial soldiers, dressed in the white jackets of the Tsar, gun down a crowd of civilians on a set of steps in Odessa ("Cossack massacre on the steps" in English works well as a pun).

A little-known aspect of Cossack history is explored in Claudio Magris' pseudo-novel, "Inferences from a Sabre" (1986). In June 1941, shortly after Hitler's invasion of Russia, German agents persuaded General Pyotr Krasnov, "ataman" (chieftain) of a band of Cossacks, to command a battalion of these fighters, famed for their aversion to communism. Krasnov, then 72 years old, was one of the most colorful figures of the 20th-century. As Neal Ascherson writes in his engrossing book, "Black Sea", Krasnov's hatred of "Bolshevism" was matched "only by his contempt for the Judaeo-democratic West." After joining the White Russian armies in the civil war, he fled to Paris, "where, to the astonishment of this tough old soldier's friends, he became a prolific novelist." After World War II, so the story goes, Krasnov was betrayed by the English, handed over to Stalin, and hanged as a traitor.

Magris' "novel" takes the story up in October 1944. Hitler had promised the Cossacks a homeland in Carnia, that mountainous part of northeast Italy wedged between Venice, Austria, and Slovenia, and, the end of the war approaching, these exiles of the steppes were fighting it out with the Italian partisans. The book is a letter by Father Guido, a priest from Trieste, to one of his superiors.

In 1944 Guido was sent to interecede with the Cossacks and try to mitigate the cruelty meted out on the Carnians. While he was there, he thinks he met Krasnov, whose life and death intrigue him from then on. The crux of the book is the "enigma woven around the death of Krasnov", an enigma that begins on 2 May 1945. As the Cossacks flee on horseback through the Val di Gorto to hide out in the forests of Austria, one of them is shot dead by the partisans. His companions bury him in a poorly marked grave and throw in a broken sabre. Father Guido explores the possibility that, contrary to the official story, this soldier was Krasnov.

Blurring the lines between fiction and reality, Magris plumbs the depths of Krasnov's character. Apart from the fact that Guido never existed, this lyrical "novel" would be an interesting work of speculation. Magris "plays through the pathetic coda to Krasnov's life". We see the Cossack commander and his men as living contradictions, romantic figures ("the flash of the blade in the air evoked for a moment the vague yearning glow of certain brief, blustery evenings, of curling sea-waves that seem to shine with the promise of everything we lack"), medieval men, "untamed and feudal" who "saw the revolution as the anonymous assault of modernity, the sunset of the individual, the end of adventure", yet also as anti-Semites, butchers, and the enemies of their own dream ("the Cossacks reached that corner of the world [Carnia] to build themselves a house and to take shelter from the indeterminacy of nothingness, and instead they destroyed the hospitable order enclosed by these walls and delivered it back to formlessness.")

The novel is a great read, one of the best I've read this year. I also recommend Magris' depressing book, "The Other Sea", about an Italian on the plains of Patagonia, plus Ascherson's book mentioned above.