The Cossacks

A bored young Moscow nobleman joins the army in the Caucasus and finds the Cossack village has no use for him or his conscience. Tolstoy served there himself at twenty-three and worked on this for ten years; he lost the manuscript's advance at cards and had to finish it to clear the debt. This edition includes 57 plates of paintings by Ilya Repin, Ivan Aivazovsky, Ivan Shishkin and others, in the translation by Aylmer and Louise Maude.