The Cossacks and Other Stories

Oct 28, 2024 4:27 PM

Author:Leo Tolstoy,Paul Foote,David McDuff

In 1851, at the age of twenty-two, Tolstoy joined the Russian army and travelled to the Caucasus as a soldier. The four years that followed were among the most significant in his life, and deeply influenced the stories collected here. Begun in 1852 but unfinished for a decade, The Cossacks describes the experiences of Olenin, a young cultured Russian who comes to despise civilization after spending time with the wild Cossack people. Sevastopol Sketches, based on Tolstoy's own experiences of the siege of Sevastopol in 1854-55, is a compelling consideration of the nature of war, while Hadji Murat, written towards the end of his life, returns to the Caucasus of Tolstoy's youth to explore the life of a great leader torn apart by a conflict of loyalties. Written at the end of the nineteenth century, it is amongst the last and greatest of Tolstoy's shorter works.

Reviews

What i admire most is Su Tong's style ...delicate yet bizarre. His strokes are restrained but merciless. He is a true literary talent.

—— Anchee Min

Su Tong writes beautiful, dangerous prose.

—— Meg Wolitzer

For RAISE THE RED LANTERN, 'A remarkable story, subtle and profound'

—— The New York Times

Sensual and tragic

—— Sunday Times

Su Tong's evocation of one family's destiny in 1930s China is stark and vivid in the extreme. A chilling and macabre tale, characteristically told with imagination and unflinching honesty

—— Time Out

For MY LIFE AS EMPEROR: Su Tong's Xie Empire is a dreamlike, beautiful, brutal place ...his prose is full of gorgeous images

—— Sunday Times

Praise for RICE: Su Tong has fashioned a cruel, heartrending and enormously passionate assault on the traditions of the Western novel. There's no love here; no redemption, no triumph of the individual. Unless you count the triumph inherent in Su Tong's overwhelming imaginative virtuosity

—— Rick Moody

Breath-taking ... Su Tong renders these people so vividly they possess of us, the individuality that they deny one another

—— Los Angeles Times

Scorching ...spinning a plot featuring blackmail, adultery, incest and scandal, Su Tong creates visceral drama that moves rapidly in Goldblatt's fluid translation

—— Publishers' Weekly Starred review

A riveting melodrama ... page by page, the novel stuns us with a sequence of hallucinatory, disturbing inventions ...Balzac and Zola would have recognized a kindred spirit in Su Tong

—— Kirkus Reviews

These are stories that will sneak into the back of your brain and lurk there long after you are finished reading.

—— Global Review

Poignant and wonderful story...concentrates, without effort, all Malouf's themes...it needs to be read

—— Prospect

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