The Cossacks

Tolstoy, Leo

3.8

8,704 ratings by Goodreads

ISBN 10: 9626341319 ISBN 13: 9789626341315

Publisher: Naxos Audio Books, 2010

Dissatisfied with his life of frivolity among the aristocracy of Moscow, young Dmitri Andreyevitch Oleynin sets out for the Caucasus region. Here, among the natural beauty of his surroundings and the honest and industrious peasant people, Oleynin hopes to obtain a more meaningful existence. Yet Oleynin is marked out as an outsider from the very beginning, and his ill-fated passion for Maryanka, who is betrothed to a local hero, does little to ingratiate himself with this society. This beautifully articulated novel of self-discovery, youthful idealism and romance is read with great sympathy by Jonathan Oliver.

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From the Inside Flap:

"Tolstoy's lavish and always graphic use of detail," wrote John Bayley, "together of course with its romance and exotic setting . . . has made "The Cossacks the most popular of all his works." This vibrant new translation of Tolstoy's 1862 novel, by PEN Translation Award winner Peter Constantine, is the author's semiautobiographical depiction of young Olenin, a wealthy, disaffected Muscovite, who joins the Russian army and travels to the untamed frontier of the Caucasus in search of a more authentic life. Quartered with his regiment in a Cossack village, Olenin revels in the glories of nature and the rough strength of the Cossacks and Chechens. Smitten by his unrequited love for a local girl, Maryanka, Olenin has a profound but ultimately short-lived spiritual awakening. Try as he might to assimilate, he remains an awkward outsider and his long search for a more enlightened and purposeful existence comes to naught.
With the philosophical insight that would characterize Tolstoy's later masterpieces, this long overdue major new translation is a revelation.

"From the Hardcover edition.

From the Back Cover:

This novel of love, adventure, and male rivalry on the frontiers of nineteenth-century Russia -- completed in 1862, when Tolstoy 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.

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