The Cossacks (Modern Library Classics)

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War and no Peace. A friend asked why there is so little literature about the Crimean War — I am not yet in a position to answer that, but I though I'd start with an eyewitness account, Tolstoy's Sevastopol Sketches , available free on Gutenberg in a translation by Isabel Hapgood.

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But her first sentences gave me pause: The flush of morning has but just begun to tinge the sky above Sapun Mountain; the dark blue surface of the sea has already cast aside the shades of night and awaits the first ray to begin a play of merry gleams; cold and mist are wafted from the bay. The light of daybreak is just beginning to tint the sky about the Sapun-gora.

The dark surface of the sea has already thrown off the night's gloom and is waiting for the first ray of sunlight to begin its cheerful sparkling. From the bay comes a steady drift of cold and mist. In fact, reading on, I saw that both translations were more or less equally flowery, but in different ways. It is clear that, already the ironist, Tolstoy exploited the radiance of nature as contrast to the scenes of death and battle.

So I stuck with the Penguin, which also has the advantage of notes, maps, a glossary, and an excellent introduction by Paul Foote. By , when the Crimean War broke out, he was now a regular officer. At his own request, he was posted to Sevastopol, then near the start of its eleven-month siege by French and British forces. It is this that would give him the authenticity to write War and Peace a decade later, although this earlier book is a much grimmer, more compact work: The stories form an interesting progression: Each of the three stories is twice as long as its predecessor, at roughly 25, 50, and pages respectively.

In date, they cover the final nine months of the siege; they are labeled December , May , and August ; as these dates are old style, the final story ends with the surrender of Sevastopol, which took place on September 9, , in the Western calendar. Narratively, they begin with the eye of a reporter and end with the sensibility of a novelist.

The December story is written entirely in the second person, as though the writer were showing you around.

The effect is much like a newsreel, where the narrator tours the scene with a portable camera as he moves unflinching from the harbor to the fetid horrors of the hospital, into this barracks or that guardroom, and finally to the most notorious of the gun emplacements, the 4th bastion, amid an almost constant barrage of cannonballs and mortar shells. In the May section, Tolstoy introduces named characters, from a young prince and other aristocrats treating the war as a kind of social adventure, to hardworking regular officers and men with no such claims to privilege.

But in his second-to-last paragraph he dismisses the lot of them, saying that nobody is capable of being either the villains or the heroes of his story. The third and longest tale may not have heroes either, but it does have fully-realized characters. It begins with two brothers meeting up by accident on the road to Sevastopol. The elder has been wounded earlier in the siege, and sent away to convalesce before returning to his regiment.

The younger is a volunteer, like Tolstoy originally was himself, and will be seeing battle for the first time.

The Cossacks (Modern Library Classics)

Their fond reunion tapers off into one of those human comments that could only be Tolstoy if not Thackeray or Trollope: When they had talked all they wanted to, and had finally begun to feel the way close relatives often do -- namely, that although each is very fond of the other, they neither of them have terribly much in common -- the brothers fell silent for quite a long time. Subsequent chapters will shift between the two of them, gaining much from the contrast between the innocent and experienced views, and full of fascinating vignettes of their fellow soldiers -- in the end showing that no man is immune to fear, but that there is a spark of heroism in all of us.

The climax, seen interestingly through a telescope from a distant lookout, shows the capture of the vital Malakoff Hill by the French, which led to the Russian evacuation of the city the next day. As for the progression from patriotic fervor to numb despair in Tolstoy's attitude to war, I can do no better than to quote brief excerpts from all three stories: You will suddenly have a clear and vivid awareness that those men you have just seen are the very same heroes who in those difficult days did not allow their spirits to sink but rather felt them rise as they joyfully prepared to die, not for the town but for their native land.

Eugene Hutz is a fun and talented guy. But Eugene will also admit to you that his Ukrainian identity is "Russified. So, when Eugene gives you his authorative view on what Taras Bulba is or means, keep that in mind. For example, Eugene tells us that the Zaprozhian Sich, was really only marginally Ukrainian. So, claiming that this enterprise is some sort of paen to Ukrainian history and identity strikes me as an odd thing to say.

Eugene is also a very articulate and bright guy, but his forward reads exactly like he talks: If a folksy, direct from me to you effect was the point in this straight transcription, well, in my opinion it just distracts from the points he is making, and ultimately just comes off sounding affected. He's an exceptionally fine lyricist, but even on the occasions where he lapses into mildly mangled English when singing with Gogol Bordello there it works well as a texture, giving the song a sweaty rough hewn urgency. Here, however, it reads like barbed wire. Okay, the meat of the matter: The translation is a chore to read.

It is lumbering and stilted. Hurts the eyes and the head.

I put the book down after about 4 pages. If the attempt was to create a tongue in cheek pulp fiction than this should have been served up as a graphic novel. Look, I know these larger than life characters are about as subtle as scimitar, but if you're going for a cartoon angle, make the thing into a comic book - or get a better translator.

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Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. This novel of love, adventure, and male rivalry on the Russian frontier—completed in , 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. Leo Tolstoy — was born in central Russia. After serving in the Crimean War, he retired to his estate and devoted himself to writing, farming, and raising his large family.

His novels and outspoken social polemics brought him world fame. Fiction Classics Literary Fiction Category: Fiction Classics Literary Fiction.

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