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Informationen zum Autor Leo Tolstoy; Introduction by John Bayley Klappentext A brilliant short novel inspired by Leo Tolstoy's experience as a soldier in the Caucasus! The Cossacks has all the energy and poetry of youth while also foreshadowing the great themes of Tolstoy's later years. His naïve hero! Olenin! is a young nobleman who is disenchanted with his privileged and superficial existence in Moscow and hopes to find a simpler life in a Cossack village. As Olenin foolishly involves himself in their violent clashes with neighboring Chechen tribesmen and falls in love with a local girl! Tolstoy gives us a wider view than Olenin himself ever possesses of the brutal realities of the Cossack way of life and the wild! untamed beauty of the rugged landscape. This novel of love! adventure! and male rivalry on the Russian frontier-completed in 1862! when the author was in his early thirties-has always surprised readers who know Tolstoy best through the vast! panoramic fictions of his middle years. Unlike those works! The Cossacks is lean and supple! economical in design and execution. But Tolstoy could never touch a subject without imbuing it with his magnificent many-sidedness! and so this book bears witness to his brilliant historical imagination! his passionately alive spiritual awareness! and his instinctive feeling for every level of human and natural life. Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude Leseprobe 1 Moscow lies silent. From time to time screeching wheels echo in the wintry streets. Lights no longer burn in the windows, and the streetlamps have gone out. The ringing of church bells rolls over the sleeping city, warning of the approach of dawn. The streets are empty. The narrow runners of a nighttime sleigh mix sand and snow as the driver pulls over to a corner and dozes off, waiting for a fare. An old woman walks past on her way to church, where candles, sparse and red, are already burning asymmetrically, throwing their light onto the golden icon stands. The workers of the city are waking after the long winter night and preparing to go to work. But fashionable young gentlemen are still out on the town. Light flickers illegally from behind the closed shutters in one of Chevalier's windows. A carriage, sleighs, and cabs are huddling in a line by the entrance. A troika is waiting to leave. A porter, bundled in a heavy coat, stands crouching behind the corner of the house as if hiding from someone. "Why do they keep blathering, on and on?" a footman sitting in the hall at Chevalier's wonders, his face drawn. "And always when it's my shift!" From the brightly lit room next to the hall come the voices of three young men. One is small, neat, thin, and ugly, and gazes with kind, weary eyes at his friend, who is about to leave on a journey. The second, a tall man, is twiddling his watch fob as he lies on a sofa next to a table covered with the remains of a banquet and empty wine bottles. The man about to leave on a journey is wearing a new fur jacket and is pacing up and down the room. From time to time he stops to crack an almond with his thick, strong fingers, whose nails are meticulously clean. For some reason he is continually smiling. A fire burns in his eyes. He speaks passionately, waving his arms. But it is clear that he is searching for words, and that the words which come to him seem inadequate to express what has moved him. He is constantly smiling. "Now I can tell you everything!" he says. "It's not that I am trying to justify myself, but I want you, of all people, to understand me as well as I understand myself--I don't want you to see things the way a vulgar person would. You say that I have done her wrong!" He turns to the small man, who is gazing at him with kindly eyes. "Yes, you have done her wrong," the small, ugly man answers, and it seems that even more kindness and weariness are reflect...
