The Cossacks - Hardcover

Tolstoy, Leo Nikolayevich

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1421809753 ISBN 13: 9781421809755

Publisher: 1st World Library - Literary Society, 2005

Synopsis

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - All is quiet in Moscow. The squeak of wheels is seldom heard in the snow-covered street. There are no lights left in the windows and the street lamps have been extinguished. Only the sound of bells, borne over the city from the church towers, suggests the approach of morning. The streets are deserted. At rare intervals a night-cabman's sledge kneads up the snow and sand in the street as the driver makes his way to another corner where he falls asleep while waiting for a fare. An old woman passes by on her way to church, where a few wax candles burn with a red light reflected on the gilt mountings of the icons. Workmen are already getting up after the long winter night and going to their work - but for the gentlefolk it is still evening. From a window in Chevalier's Restaurant a light - illegal at that hour - is still to be seen through a chink in the shutter. At the entrance a carriage, a sledge, and a cabman's sledge, stand close together with their backs to the curbstone. A three-horse sledge from the post-station is there also. A yard-porter muffled up and pinched with cold is sheltering behind the corner of the house.

About this title

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.

About the Author

Leo Tolstoy was a Russian novelist and moral philosopher noted for his ideas of nonviolent resistance. His diary reveals an incessant pursuit of a morally justified life. He was known for his generosity to the peasants.His best known novels are War and Peace (1869), which Tolstoy regarded as an epic rather than a novel, and Anna Karenina (1877). His work was admired in his time by Dostoyevsky, Checkov, Turgenev, and Flaubert, and later by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

About this edition

• Publisher: 1st World Library - Literary Society
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1421809753
• ISBN 13: 9781421809755
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 268
• Editor: 1stworld Library