Tolstoy’s “The Cossacks” (1859) traces the development of Dmitri Anréich Olenin, a privileged young man who abandons the world of Moscow society life to pursue his imagined idea of openness, freedom, authenticity and the natural life in the Caucasus. Leaving debts and boredom behind, Olenin enters this new world as a cadet, or apprentice officer, in the Tsar’s military operation to put down the insurgency of abreks in Chechnya, then as now a center of resistance to the central authority. The novel presents a vivid picture of country life in a district far from Moscow and its artificial conventions. In addition to Olenin, the principal characters include Maryanka, the beauty of the village, whom Olenin soon falls in love with, imagining he could easily make his life with her by walking away from his privileged upbringing and transplanting himself to the Caucasus.

The portrait of Maryanka: “she was certainly not pretty but beautiful. Her features might have been considered too masculine and almost harsh had it not been for her tall stately figure, her powerful chest and shoulders, and especially the severe yet tender expression of her long dark eyes which were darkly shadowed beneath their black brows, and for the gentle expression of her mouth and smile. She rarely smiled, but her smile was always striking. She seemed to radiate virginal strength and health…”

Other characters include Ustenka, the squeaky-voiced gamine, the young warrior Lukáshka, champion hunter, friend to everyone and soon to be betrothed to Maryanka, and Papa Eoshenka, a mountain man, a sage, an emblem of primitive vitality, an emotional old patriarch who breaks into tears at the memories and feelings that unexpectedly and often interrupt him in the midst of his everyday doings; Eoshenka is a sharp observer of Olenin and other people, knows the land and animals, has a weather eye, is an expert horseman and hunter, a teller of tales, a prolific giver of gifts, drainer of flagons, merry-maker among women, the center of attention and interest in whatever situation in field or mountain or village that he finds himself in.

To the end, though, Olenin remains detached and distant, self-conscious and unable to rid himself of the residue of city and society convention that clings to him despite all his efforts to throw it off. His naïve idea that he could marry a Cossack girl and be happy with her in the village, even as he remembers with disgust the rich, available Moscow girls with their pomaded hair and jeweled gowns, is turned topsy-turvy when the Chechens ambush the Cossacks, killing some of them and gravely wounding Lukáshka. In the shadow of this hard reality Maryanka rejects Olenin, still the outsider, who quietly leaves the village to join the military staff closer to the center of state power. After a tearful farewell with Eoshenka he departs, still with a sense that he never truly belonged, either in village life in the Caucasus or in society life in Moscow.