Much like our modern craze of brands such as North Face and Patagonia, the outdoors and rustic living and adventure is something that is attractive and marketable. Especially to urbanites, rural symbols seem to represent a fantastical status symbol of being organically rooted.

The Cossack people and the Caucasus seem to have a similar symbolic value to the characters of Tolstoy’s The Cossacks. Just as people in America once fetishized and wore appropriated symbols of Native American culture to represent a connection to a natural past, and just as people wear outdoor brands today, Olenin on his exodus to the Caucasus similarly fetishizes the Cossack people in a series of daydreams, “All his dreams about the future were connected with images of Amalat-Beks, Circassain maids, Mountains, precipices, fearsome torrents and dangers” (12). Regardless of the dangers of living outside of city walls and moving to a less developed place, Olenin fetishizes the place for the status and brand-like-attributes of the Caucuses, “All of this appeared dimly and vaguely; but, glory, with its allure, and death, with its menace, constituted the interest of that future” (12). Instead of realizing the potential hardships of living rustically and within a different culture, Olenin plays off the branded stereotypes and the mythic fantasies of the land. Olenin does not see the realities of the Cossacks, but the romanticized Taras Bulba like allure to the location.

Olenin then begins to have two different fantasies, one of adventure and one way more problematically of a Circassain maid. Olenin sexually fetishizes this woman imagining her as his “slave girl… with submissive eyes… covered in dust, blood and glory” (13). Olenin’s dream of his Circassain maid begins to illuminate the elitism and supremacy he feels towards the Cossack people. Not only does he fetishize her ruralness and imagine her as a savage (with reference to the blood) but further imagines her as someone who he can educate and in a way save, “In the longer winter evenings he began to educate her” (13). Olenin’s fetishized Cossack is not one of their original cultures, but one that he adapts and assimilates.

Olenin’s fantasy begins to tell us how Russian urbanites of the time viewed the Caucasus and their culture. Instead of viewing the realities of a less developed (I say this in the sense of infrastructural developed, not culturally) society, they exotified the culture for its seemingly organic rustic way-of-life. If I had more time, I would talk further about the stakes of Olenin fetishizing the Cossack people and specifically more analysis on the daydream of the Circassain maid.