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Dmitri Olenin, a rich young Muscovite tired of society, joins the army as a cadet and is posted to a Cossack village on the Terek River in the Caucasus…
Dmitri Olenin, a rich young Muscovite tired of society, joins the army as a cadet and is posted to a Cossack village on the Terek River in the Caucasus. Living among the Cossacks, he is enchanted by their free, natural life, hunting in the forest with the old hunter Eroshka, a magnificent storyteller, and falling in love with Maryanka, a proud, beautiful Cossack girl who is engaged to the young warrior Lukashka. But Olenin discovers that he can never truly become one of them.
Context and significance
Leo Tolstoy, who served in the Caucasus himself in the early 1850s, worked on the novel for ten years and published it in 1863. It is a fresh, lyrical picture of the region and its people. The translation is by Louise and Aylmer Maude. Then turn to his Childhood and Sevastopol.
About the author
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), born at Yasnaya Polyana and a veteran of the Crimean War, wrote two of the summits of the novel, War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
In later life he preached simplicity and non-violence in The Kingdom of God Is Within You, a book that deeply influenced Gandhi.