The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy, Fiction, Classics, Literary - Softcover

Tolstoy, Leo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1592243789 ISBN 13: 9781592243785

Publisher: Wildside Press, 2003

Synopsis

Olenin was a youth who had never completed his university course, never served anywhere (having only a nominal post in some government office or other), who had squandered half his fortune and had reached the age of twenty-four without having done anything or even chosen a career. He was what in Moscow society is termed un jeune homme. But he did find a career -- he took a post as a Cadet in the army, and ended up assigned to Transcaucasia. This is the place -- here among the Tatars, the Chechens, and the Old Believers -- this is the place where Olenin will find love in the arms of a beautiful Cossack girl -- a young woman who is promised to a Cossack warrior. Both Ivan Turgenev and the Nobel prize-winning Russian writer Ivan Bunin gave the work great praise, Turgenev calling it his favorite work by Tolstoy.

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.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1592243789
• ISBN 13: 9781592243785
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 260