When Tolstoy first began writing in the early 1850s while with the Russian army in a Cossack stanitsa along the Terek, he faced the tremendous challenge of finding a new word to say about the Caucasus. The works of Bestuzhev-Marlinsky and Lermontov were a big thorn in his side. As Tolstoy recalled in the unfinished essay “Notes on the Caucasus. A Trip to Mamakai-Yurt”, he had embraced these two writers as his principal sources of knowledge about the territory during his adolescence. By the time he reached his twenties, however, he rebelled from Bestuzhev-Marlinsky and Lermontov in a quest for greater realism. Up in arms against the literary heritage, young Tolstoy felt convinced that people did not swoon over mountains, nor have tumultuous love affairs with savages, nor conduct war, nor even die in combat in the ways previously depicted. His first stories about the Caucasus accordingly sought to replace romantic modes with a more hardheaded, fact-oriented outlook. This same general objective governed his short novel The Cossacks, which was tentatively begun in verse in 1852, written mainly in the latter part of the decade and published in 1863.

As an adversary of romantic inventions, Tolstoy certainly had his work cut out for him. By the 1850s, studies of Caucasian geography, ethnography and history had proliferated massively in Russia. The readership could now consult an enormous body of non-fiction (not all of which met the most rigorous intellectual standards, of course). Moreover, a major new dispenser of information about the territory had appeared on the scene – the Caucasus (Kavkaz), a newspaper founded by the Viceroy Mikhail Vorontsov in Tim's in 1846.