Book description
In 1851, at the age of twenty-two, Tolstoy joined the Russian army and
travelled to the Caucasus as a soldier. The four years that followed
were among the most significant in his life, and deeply influenced the
stories collected here. Begun in 1852 but unfinished for a decade, The
Cossacks describes the experiences of Olenin, a young cultured Russian
who comes to despise civilization after spending time with the wild
Cossack people. Sevastopol Sketches, based on Tolstoy's own experiences
of the siege of Sevastopol in 1854-55, is a compelling consideration of
the nature of war, while Hadji Murat, written towards the end of his
life, returns to the Caucasus of Tolstoy's youth to explore the life of
a great leader torn apart by a conflict of loyalties. Written at the end
of the nineteenth century, it is amongst the last and greatest of
Tolstoy's shorter works.
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828 - 1910) was a Russian novelist,
social reformer, pacifist, and moral thinker. Tolstoy is widely
regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists, particularly noted
for his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina; in
Paul Foote was, until his retirement, a University Lecturer in
Russian and Fellow of the Queen's College, Oxford.
David McDuff was educated at the University of Edinburgh and has
translated a number of works for Penguin Classics, including
Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.
