'To Mold Clay, Fashion Men From It'

Certain writers lay claim to a piece of geography. Think of Cavafy’s Alexandria and William Kennedy’s Albany. Outsiders may visit but the deed is ironclad. When I hear something in the news about the Caucasus, that often-contested band of mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, I think of Tolstoy. In 1851, he fled to the Caucasus to escape gambling debts and joined the Russian army. During the Crimean War he served as an artillery officer and took part in the Siege of Sevastopol. Tolstoy turned the experience into grist for literature in such works as the 1863 novel The Cossacks and the 1872 novella “The Prisoner of the Caucasus.” His finest use of the setting comes in one of his masterpieces, Hadji Murad (1904). The first-century Roman poet Martial got there long before Tolstoy. In his recently published Pleasing the Diners: Translations from the Latin of Martial (Contubernales Books), R.L. Barth tells me the epigram “IX.45 is perhaps my favorite.” The poet addresses his…