The Cossacks

Leo Tolstoy

Jun 2010 · Sold by Modern Library

About this ebook

A brilliant short novel inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s experience as a soldier in the Caucasus, The Cossacks has all the energy and poetry of youth while also foreshadowing the great themes of Tolstoy’s later years. His naïve hero, Olenin, is a young nobleman who is disenchanted with his privileged and superficial existence in Moscow and hopes to find a simpler life in a Cossack village. As Olenin foolishly involves himself in their violent clashes with neighboring Chechen tribesmen and falls in love with a local girl, Tolstoy gives us a wider view than Olenin himself ever possesses of the brutal realities of the Cossack way of life and the wild, untamed beauty of the rugged landscape.

This novel of love, adventure, and male rivalry on the Russian frontier—completed in 1862, when the author was in his early thirties—has always surprised readers who know Tolstoy best through the vast, panoramic fictions of his middle years. Unlike those works, The Cossacks is lean and supple, economical in design and execution. But Tolstoy could never touch a subject without imbuing it with his magnificent many-sidedness, and so this book bears witness to his brilliant historical imagination, his passionately alive spiritual awareness, and his instinctive feeling for every level of human and natural life.
 
Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude

Ratings and reviews

I love the story I can kind of relate moved from the big city of Los Angeles to the small town of Conway, SC. You fall in love with the simple things in life. Life just about the things you own or the riches but life its self, the things around you the people. I felt bad that He didn't get the girl at the end. I sure did get my souther belle! I recommend this book. Very simple to read, beautiful story. So what next book of Leo Tolstoy should I read? I know its not gonna be "War and Peace" not ready for that book right just yet.

About the author

Peter Constantine, winner of a PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize and a National Translation Award, has earned wide acclaim for his translation of the complete works of Isaac Babel. His Modern Library translations include Gogol’s Taras Bulba and Voltaire’s Candide.

Cynthia Ozick is the celebrated author of many novels, including The Shawl, The Puttermesser Papers, and Heir to the Glimmering World, and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for her essay collection Quarrel & Quandary.