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The colorful Cossack way of life is made alive and real in this historical novel.

Tolstoy's first novel and acknowledged as one of his best, it is based on his own forays into the Caucasus, abandoning his aristocrat life of gambling and carousing in Moscow and volunteering to be attached to the regular army.

Dmitry Andreich Olenin, in the hope of escaping the hollowness of his privilege, joins the army and heads to the Caucasus. There among the foothills he will meet the Cossacks: a people he considers to be at one with the land. In their company he will hunt, he will drink, he will fall in love and, slowly, he will begin to understand that between people, between cultures, there is often a space that cannot be traversed.

The Cossacks is a short novel by Leo Tolstoy, published in 1863. It tells the story of the nobleman Dmitry Olenin who joins the army in the hope of escaping the boredom and superficiality of daily life. He longs to find fulfilment among the people of the Caucasus. While spending life as a Cossack, he learns lessons about the nature of reality, moral philosophy, the complexities of psychology, and his own inner life.

Fifteen Montana cowboys and 500 longhorns are embarking on a one-of-a-kind Wild West adventure: a cattle drive across 1,000 miles of Siberia. The clash of cultures between East and West, American six shooter and Russian saber, begins immediately when a band of Cossacks arrives to escort them to their destination. Cowboys and Cossacks must work together or they’ll never survive the journey, which includes a meeting with the warrior Genghis Kharlagawl and his army of bloodthirsty Tartars.

Dissolute, disenchanted Dmitri Olénin decides to join the army as a cadet and is despatched to the Caucasus. There, he is transformed by seeing how the indigenous people live in harmony with nature, how their lives have more meaning than those of the superficial social elite in Moscow, and he finds a new sense of self and purpose. But nothing is ever quite that simple.

Love and loyalty are tested to the very limits in this semi-autobiographical novella, which is one of Tolstoy’s best-loved works.

In 1851, at the age of 22, Tolstoy joined the Russian army. The four years he spent as a soldier were among the most significant in his life and inspired the tales collected here. In The Cossacks, Tolstoy tells the story of Olenin, a cultured Russian whose experiences among the Cossack warriors of Central Asia leave him searching for a more authentic life. In writing about individuals and societies in conflict, Tolstoy has penned some of the most brilliant stories about the nature of war.

In the setting of what is present-day Kazakhstan, Tolstoy examines two psychological problems. The first dilemma is that of a young man who desires both fulfilling love and a place as a respected member of society. The other is the difficulty of a primitive society to accept domination by a higher culture that has no understanding of the traditions it asks its colonists to cast aside.

As Maxim and Lizaveta, a young married couple, drive home from church on Easter, Maxim finds the joy and beauty in everything. As the newly married couple drives home on their first Easter together, carrying a blessed Easter cake, they see a Cossack at the side of the road. They soon learn that he is sick and too weak to make it home, and he asks for some food if they have any. Maxim immediately wants to share the Easter cake with him; however, his wife refuses to allow this, ripping the cake away from her husband.

The history of Ukraine is a fascinating story of how cultures, political systems, religions, and power have met, intersected, morphed, and expanded. After various cultures helped develop the region, the legendary Cossacks arrived during the early modern period and dominated the region for several centuries, forming an independent republic that helped forge Ukrainian identity to this day. Even as the origins of these ferocious fighters remain murky and obscure, the Cossacks have continued their growing international appearance with the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.

This novel is believed to be partially based on Tolstoy's own experiences. It is the story of a Russian soldier, Dmitri, and his time spent in the Caucasus. He befriends an old Cossack and meets a Cossack girl, Maryanka, and falls in love. As the story progresses, he learns more about himself and comes to realize how wrong and immoral his former life in Russian High Society was.

The Cossacks is one of the finest depictions of Cossack society in Russian literature. Against that primitive background, Tolstoy examines two psychological problems. The first is that of a young man who wants to love and wants to fit into society. The other is that of the difficulty of a primitive society in accepting the domination of a higher culture. This is a brilliant exploration of the themes of individuality and social identity.

The modern myth of the Cossack presents striking images of a stern warrior mounted on horseback, with a long woolen coat, papakha (distinctive tall fur cap ) and fur-lined cloak, with bandoliers holding large-caliber bullets crisscrossing his chest.

In his new book The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack, human paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall argues that a long tradition of "human exceptionalism" in paleoanthropology has distorted the picture of human evolution. Drawing partly on his own career - from young scientist in awe of his elders to crotchety elder statesman - Tattersall offers an idiosyncratic look at the competitive world of paleoanthropology.

The Cossacks (1863) is an unfinished novel which describes the Cossack life and people through a story of Dmitri Olenin, a Russian aristocrat in love with a Cossack girl. This text was acclaimed by Ivan Bunin as one of the finest in the language.Additional proof-listening was done by mim@can & katzes.

Aussie Cossack Simeon Boikov shares his opinion on local, national and international affairs

Dubbed by many pundits as “The Most Stupid War in the World,” the Ukraine conflict is one that hardly anyone saw coming back in 2010. However, it is close to a decade old already. In this conflict in the evenly divided Ukraine, brinkmanship by the local players in the country, by the West that wants to drag Ukraine into its orbit, and by Russia that fears losing Ukraine and its security in the process, is the norm. At the same time, the world watches in a seemingly helpless manner as Ukraine gets torn apart at the seams. Most of the governments in the West blame Russia for instigating ...

Professor Soren Pafko has made a life and career out of lying, conniving, manipulating, and abusing everyone in his path. So far, it’s working great: he’s Chair of his College’s Department of Comparative Literature; he’s leader of the local chapter of the Democratic Communists of America; and when he wants to cheat on his wife, he’s got his pick of women who think he’s the second coming of Che Guevara. But when he flunks local yokel Gus Dropo’s teenage son for a politically incorrect classroom comment, everything in Professor Pafko’s world begins to go hilariously wrong.

Leo Tolstoy: The Novellas includes unabridged recordings of Leo Tolstoy's 10 greatest novellas in one audiobook, all read by Audie Award-winning narrators.

Terrorism comes to the rural Midwest heartland — can one ordinary man stop it? Islamist terrorists frame small-town Minnesotan Nat “Hack” Wilder for the murder of his friend Amir Mohammad. Hack must survive a January blizzard, elude the police and FBI, track down the real killers, infiltrate a terrorist gathering, and stop a terrorist attack on his nine-year-old daughter’s school. This is a suspenseful, fast-paced action thriller that is often disturbing, sometimes surprisingly funny, and always PC-indifferent.

Mrs. Moses is a small woman with a big heart and enormous courage. The only survivor of a Cossack raid on her village, she takes with her a big cast-iron frying pan, so heavy that she can only sling it over her back. Yet this is no ordinary frying pan, it's The Family Frying Pan, blessed with a Russian soul.