The Cossacks (written in the early 1850s, published 1863) draws directly on Tolstoy’s own military service in the Caucasus. A young Moscow nobleman, dissatisfied with society life, flees to a Cossack village where he falls in love with the wild freedom of Cossack existence and with the beautiful Maryanka — only to discover that the freedom he idealizes cannot be seized by an outsider.
Turgenev called it the best prose work in Russian literature, and it retains all its freshness and lyrical beauty. Download the free EPUB to read Tolstoy’s most purely beautiful early work.