Available Formats
Paperback
Published: 3rd April 2006
Hardback
Published: 27th May 1994
Hardback
Published: 7th February 2023
The Cossacks
By (Author) Leo Tolstoy
Penguin Books Ltd
Penguin Classics
7th February 2023
3rd November 2022
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Narrative theme: Interior life
Fiction in translation
891.733
Hardback
272
Width 120mm, Height 167mm, Spine 28mm
271g
Introducing Little Clothbound Classics- irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Dmitry Andreich Olenin, in the hope of escaping the hollowness of his privilege, joins the army and heads to the Caucasus. There among the foothills, he will meet the Cossacks- a people he considers to be at one with the land. In their company he will hunt, he will drink, he will fall in love and, slowly, he will begin to understand that between people, between cultures, there is often a space that cannot be traversed . . .
Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 in the Tula province. He studied at the University of Kazan, then led a life of pleasure until 1851 when he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus. He established his reputation as a writer with The Sebastopol Sketches (1855-6). After a period in St Petersburg and abroad, he married, had thirteen children, managed his vast estates in the Volga Steppes and wrote War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). A Confession (1879-82) marked a spiritual crisis in his life, and in 1901 he was excommuincated by the Russian Holy Synod. He died in 1910, in the course of a dramatic flight from home, at the railway station of Astapovo.