Reading The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy

The Cossacks is the second of Leo Tolstoy's three best known novels that I had read this year, my first read was Anna Karenina, followed by War and Peace that I finished in August.

It was a short novel inspired by Leo Tolstoy's own time in "the Caucasus, a geopolitical, mountain-barrier region located between the two continents of Europe and Asia." It was published in 1863.

It is regarded by many Tolstoy scholars as a Tolstoy's semi-autobiographical story. The main character is Olenin, a young wealthy solider who leaves Moscow to be stationed in the Caucasus. There, he befriends with some Cossacks and begins to emulate their way of life in search of a more authentic one, an indication of Tolstoy's turn away from his own class and toward those closer to earth.

Olenin falls in love with a free-spirited local girl, Marianka, betrothed to another, Luka. Olenin feels he must keeps his love for Marianka to himself and not to disrupt the lives of his new friends. In this love triangle, he has a profound but short-lived spiritual awakening. In the end, Luka is killed but Marianka still does not choose Olenin, he losses both friendship and love, eventually returns to where he comes from.

This novel is so short, 96 pages in a volume of 1,526 pages, that I read it on the flight to Taiwan for a family wedding in May this year. Nevertheless, Tolstoy's skills in expressing the spiritual struggles of young Olenin, in describing the rough mountain terrain and the cultures, in exploring the birth and death of love, made it a wonderful read. It is also the first book that opened my eyes about Cossacks as an ethnic group that had played a major role in Russian history and literature, especially in wars against foreign invasion, as it is very evident in Tolstoy's vast, epic novel War and Peace.