Have You Read "The Cossacks"?

Have you read "The Cossacks"? Prince Olenin, disillusioned with life and sunk in complete moral decline, goes straight off to the active army in the hope of distracting himself amid new circumstances and places. He hopes that closeness to nature and to the simple folk will help him to be reborn after the conflagration of his disappointments. The prince settles among the Cossacks, befriends Uncle Yeroshka, a seasoned hunter, and falls in love with a Cossack girl, Maryana. Yet the longed-for peace and lifting of the spirit do not come. The prince remains a stranger both to the common people and to his own junior officers; the stanitsa does not accept him, and his beloved Cossack girl chooses another.

It is held that Leo Tolstoy described in the tale his own state of mind in the early 1850s, when he secured an appointment to serve in the Caucasus, where his elder brother Nikolay was also serving.

During his service in the Caucasus Tolstoy worked on the tale "Childhood" and wrote stories about the everyday side of war, "The Raid" and "The Woodfelling". In 1852 he began "Boyhood". In 1854 he asked to be transferred to Sevastopol and took a heroic part in the defence of the Fourth Bastion. "… I asked to go to the Crimea more out of patriotism, which at that time, I confess, came over me strongly," he wrote to his brother. For his courage and fearlessness Tolstoy was awarded the Order of St Anna and two medals "For the Defence of Sevastopol".

During the war years Leo Tolstoy took part in creating a journal, "The Soldiers' Herald" or "The Military Leaflet", which the censors never allowed to appear; he wrote reports and drew up projects "for the reorganisation of the army". But the summit of his reflection on military experience was "Sevastopol Sketches", a new word in Russian battle literature. He describes the terrible faces of war: the torments of the wounded and the horrors of the hospitals, the inner world of the soldier in the face of death, the change in people's psychology in wartime.

Illustration: Leo Tolstoy as a sub-lieutenant. Unknown author, 1854