(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)<br><br>“Tolstoy's lavish and always graphic use of detail,” wrote John Bayley, “together of course with its romance and exotic setting . . . has made <i>The Cossacks</i> the most popular of all his works.” This vibrant new translation of Tolstoy's 1862 novel, by PEN Translation Award winner Peter Constantine, is the author's semiautobiographical depiction of young Olenin, a wealthy, disaffected Muscovite, who joins the Russian army and travels to the untamed frontier of the Caucasus in search of a more authentic life. Quartered with his regiment in a Cossack village, Olenin revels in the glories of nature and the rough strength of the Cossacks and Chechens. Smitten by his unrequited love for a local girl, Maryanka, Olenin has a profound but ultimately short-lived spiritual awakening. Try as he might to assimilate, he remains an awkward outsider and his long search for a more enlightened and purposeful existence comes to naught.<br>With the philosophical insight that would characterize Tolstoy's later masterpieces, this long overdue major new translation is a revelation.