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Title: The Cossacks
Series: (The Russians)
Author: Leo Tolstoy
Translator:
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 230
Words: 66K
A story of a young man without a guiding hand trying to figure out the best way to live. Olenin is a rich young man who leaves the city life, with all of it’s problems, including his debts, both monetary and social, to join up with the army and be stationed in some Cossack village. He is an outsider, not knowing how to fit in with the Cossacks, or his army buddies or himself for that matter. He makes a friend of an older cossack and falls in love with the beautiful daughter of the headman of the village. The story ends with her refusing to marry him, him leaving the village and nobody caring at all that he is leaving.
What a roller coaster this was to read. I went from being totally disgusted with Olenin and his thoughts and behavior (not that he did anything bad, but he was so unsure of himself and everything) to feeling sorry for him to thinking “Boy, this guy is going to have to grow up fast if he wants to survive”. The biggest issue is that Olenin is by himself in trying to figure out how to live life in a way that suits him. He’s tried the “idle rich” of Moscow lifestyle and it didn’t work. Now he’s trying the “simple life” of a cossack peasant and by book’s end, he realizes that isn’t for him either. It made me incredibly thankful for all the mentors I had throughout the years growing up, from my teens and up into my 20’s. It’s not that I didn’t have questions, but people who had already gone through those same questions could tell me their experiences and what they found out. I didn’t need to repeat all the same mistakes, if I was willing to learn from others. But I had to be around them, I couldn’t be by myself. And that is the thing, Olenin was by himself. It was sad to see.
I found the ending to be truly sad though. He’s leaving the village and the guy who he thought was his friend just ignores him, because he’s gotten everything from him that he could. Since Olenin is leaving, there’s nothing more to be got from him and so he is no longer worth paying attention to. The issue with the headman’s daughter did leave me confused. I was under the impression that she was willing to marry Olenin, but then suddenly, she’s not. There’s a lot of unsaid stuff alluded to and I couldn’t tell if that vagueness was in the original writing or the translator’s fault. Either way, it felt like walking into a brick wall when you were expecting an open door.
Glad to have read this but I doubt I’ll ever attempt to re-read it.
★★★✬☆
From Wikipedia
Synopsis – Click to Open
The young idealist Dmitry Andreich Olenin leaves Moscow, hoping to start a new life in the Caucasus. In the stanitsa, he slowly becomes enamored of the surroundings and despises his previous existence. He befriends the old Cossack Eroshka, who goes hunting with him and finds him a good fellow because of his propensity to drinking. During this time, young Cossack Luka kills a Chechen who is trying to come across the river towards the village to scout the Cossacks and in this way gains much respect. Olenin falls in love with the maid Maryanka, who is to be wed to Luka later in the story. He tries to stop this emotion and eventually convinces himself that he loves both Luka and Maryanka for their simplicity and decides that happiness can only come to a man who constantly gives to others with no thought of self-gratification.
He first gives an extra horse to Luka, who accepts the present yet doesn’t trust Olenin on his motives. As time goes on, however, though he gains the respect of the local villagers, another Russian named Beletsky, who is still attached to the ways of Moscow, comes and partially corrupts Olenin’s ideals and convinces him through his actions to attempt to win Maryanka’s love. Olenin approaches her several times and Luka hears about this from a Cossack, and thus does not invite Olenin to the betrothal party. Olenin spends the night with Eroshka but soon decides that he will not give up on the girl and attempts to win her heart again. He eventually, in a moment of passion, asks her to marry him, which she says she will answer soon.
Luka, however, is severely wounded when he and a group of Cossacks go to confront a group of Chechens who are trying to attack the village, including the brother of the man he killed earlier. Though the Chechens lose after the Cossacks take a cart to block their bullets, the brother of the slain Chechen manages to shoot Luka in the belly when he is close by. As Luka seems to be dying and is being cared for by village people, Olenin approaches Maryanka to ask her to marry him; she angrily refuses. He realizes that “his first impression of this woman’s inaccessibility had been perfectly correct.” He asks his company commander to leave and join the staff. He says goodbye to Eroshka, who is the only villager who sees him off. Eroshka is emotional towards Olenin but after Olenin takes off and looks back, he sees that Eroshka has apparently already forgotten about him and has gotten back to normal life.
