The Cossacks

Classics

Language Russian

Author Leo Tolstoy

Narrator Grigory Perel

Description

The early novella by Leo Tolstoy, "The Cossacks," written in 1852, grew out of his own experiences in the Caucasus. It tells the story of a man who tries to escape the emptiness of the fashionable world and find a real, uninvented life.

A young nobleman, Dmitry Olenin, takes leave of his acquaintances in Moscow, drinks wine, and, with excitement, reflects on the changes awaiting him—only for the morning after, when a troika is already rushing him to the Caucasus.

Far from the drawing rooms of the capital, among the settlement’s Cossacks and the stern mountains, Olenin seems to find himself in another reality. Here different rules apply: simpler, harsher, yet at the same time freer. He becomes captivated by a Cossack girl, Maryana, and grows close to the old hunter, Eroshka—a man of integrity, without pretense, living in harmony with nature and his own conscience. But will the product of the city be able to become one of his own in this world—or will he remain a stranger?

The novella was highly praised by contemporaries. In a letter to Afanasy Fet, Turgenev confessed: “The more often I reread this novella, the more I become convinced that it is a chef-d’oeuvre by Tolstoy and by all Russian narrative literature.” Bunin, too, returned to "The Cossacks" more than once and always wrote about them with admiration.

Leo Nikolayevich himself called this work the best of what he had written. In it you can hear the breath of the Caucasian mountains, feel the weight of choice, see the light of freedom flicker, and hear the bitter thought: you cannot hide from yourself. And the boundary between dream and reality is sometimes as thin as mountain mist. Immerse yourself in this story in brilliant performance by Grigory Perelya!