The Cossacks

Dmitry Olenin, a young Moscow nobleman weary of empty drawing rooms and gambling debts, throws it all over to join the army in the Caucasus. There he hopes to find a truer way of living among the Cossacks of a frontier village. He takes up with an old hunter named Eroshka, learns the rhythms of the place, and falls hard for a local girl, Maryanka, only to discover that longing for a simpler life does not make him one of the people he admires. Tolstoy drew on his own service in the mountains, and the book carries an early version of the ideas about nature and honesty that shaped everything he wrote later. This free PDF and EPUB edition brings one of his warmest early works to new readers.