The Cossacks - Softcover

Tolstoy, Leo

3.8

8,704 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1420926748 ISBN 13: 9781420926743

Publisher: Digireads.Com, 2006

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"The Cossacks" is one of Tolstoy's greatest works. In this semi-autobiographical work we meet the central character of Olenin, a young man of twenty-four who has yet to make anything of himself in life. Olenin joins the Russian army and is assigned to a remote post. There he falls in love with a beautiful young Cossack woman who has already been promised to another man, a Cossack warrior. What will become of Olenin? Will he fight for the love that he has found? Read this gripping narrative set in pre-revolutionary Russia and find out for yourself.

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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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