The Cossacks

The Cossacks is the story of a disillusioned Russian nobleman, Dmitri Olenin, who attempts to find fulfilment among the wild and free Cossack people of the Caucasus. As Olenin begins to lose himself in the Cossack way of life, he starts to discover many things, the most important of which is his own sense of self.To read Tolstoys early sketch, The Raid, and his first novel, The Cossacks, is to enter the workshop of a great writer and thinker. In The Raid Tolstoy explores the nature of courage itself, a theme central to War and Peace. In The Cossacks he sets forth all the motifs of his whole future life and his work. The hero is a young man-about-town who has squandered half his fortune - and his life - and retires to the desultory existence of a regiment stationed in mountainous Cossack country, where he takes part in the daily life of a Cossack village. But his love for the beautiful Maryanka precipitates a conflict between the belief that "Happiness lies in living for others" and a passion that sweeps self-abnegation aside. As Romain Roland says, "The full force of Tolstoys descriptive powers is already expressed in this splendid [novel] and Tolstoys realism shows itself with equal force in depicting human nature."