The Cossacks - Softcover

Tolstoy, Leo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 812910301X ISBN 13: 9788129103017

Publisher: Rupa & Co, 2003

Synopsis

The Cossacks (Kazaki, 1863) is a novel by Count Leo Tolstoy. The central character, Olenin, tired of life in civilized society, attempts to find happiness in the wild, free-living Cossacks of the Caucasus. The portraits of the old Cossack, Eroshka and the native girl, Maryana are especially successful. Critics generally cite this short work as the finest book written by Tolstoy before War and Peace

About this title

About the Author:

Leo Tolstoy was born in Tula in 1828. He was educated privately and then went on to study law and Oriental languages at Moscow. After War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy abandoned his beliefs and way of living for the simplicity of peasant life, and described the changeover in Confession, published in 1882. Several other books followed including The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Resurrection. Because of his new beliefs, family life became unbearable. He died in November 1910.

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 this edition

• Publisher: Rupa & Co
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 812910301X
• ISBN 13: 9788129103017
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 220