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  • Published: 3 April 2006
  • ISBN: 9780812975048
  • Imprint: Random House US Group
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $34.00

The Cossacks




Unique to the Modern Library, a spirited translation of Tolstoy's short masterpiece, with a new, stand-out introduction by Cynthia Ozick, a MAP of the Caucasus, Notes, and a Reading Group Guide.

This 1862 novel, in a vibrant new translation by Peter Constantine, is Tolstoy’s semiautobiographical story 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. While striving to adopt the rough and ready lifestyle of the local Cossacks, Olenin falls in love with a free-spirited girl whose fiancé turns out to be a formidable opponent. Showcasing the philosophical insight that would characterize Tolstoy’s later masterpieces, this long overdue translation is a revelation.

  • Published: 3 April 2006
  • ISBN: 9780812975048
  • Imprint: Random House US Group
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $34.00

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About the author

Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy was born in central Russia in 1828. He studied Oriental languages and law (although failed to earn a degree in the latter) at the University of Kazan, and after a dissolute youth eventually joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus in 1851. He took part in the Crimean War, and the Sebastopol Sketches that emerged from it established his reputation. After living for some time in St Petersburg and abroad, he married Sophie Behrs in 1862 and they had thirteen children. The happiness this brought him gave him the creative impulse for his two greatest novels, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). Later in life his views became increasingly radical as he gave up his possessions to live a simple peasant life. After a quarrel with his wife he fled home secretly one night to seek refuge in a monastery. He became ill during this dramatic flight and died at the small railway station of Astapovo in 1910.

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Praise for The Cossacks

"Peter Constantine's fine new translation of The Cossacks conveys Tolstoy's voice with an inevitability that demonstrates yet again why Mr. Constantine is one of our most acute translators...Tolstoy's nineteenth-century tale, beautifully timeless and now unerringly retranslated, could not be timelier for the twenty-first-century reader." Marian Schwartz, former president, American Literary Translators Association