I got through it, but didn't really enjoy the novel like I hoped to because of the quality of the audio. The narrator sounds distant and muffled like he read the entire novel with a 20 gallon paint gallon on his head. The transitions (I think its a balalaika) is too loud and doesn't quite work. The major problem with this audiobook is the audio quality. Again, if you've read 'War & Peace' and 'Anna Karenina' and are looking for another good Tolstoy, this is a solid piece (it happened to be Turgenev's favorite Tolstoy novel). There is part of it that reminded me a lot of an early Hemingway novel: a war, women, real men, horses and lots of food and drink.
#Audio settings cossacks european wars full
This minor masterpiece is full of Tolstoy's fascination with the Cossacks (both men and women) and the Chechen braves (abreks), his love of the mountains, rivers, and flora and fauna of the Caucuses. The novel explores the nature of happiness, the purpose of life, and Tolstoy's particular interest in rural life vs the more urbane Moscow/Saint Petersburg society. It combines Tolstoy's philosophy with his religious moralizing with his love of the land and the simplicity of nature and those close to it. This is one Tolstoy that is easily overlooked, but shouldn't be missed. Tolstoy masterpiece is wounded by terrible audio He died of pneumonia in 1910 at the age of eighty-two. Tolstoy then sought to propagate his beliefs on faith, morality, and nonviolence, writing mostly parables, tracts, and morality plays. In 1862 he married Sophia Behrs and for the next fifteen years lived a tranquil, productive life, finishing War and Peace in 1869 and Anna Karenina in 1877. After serving in the army in the Caucasus and Crimea, where he wrote his first stories, he traveled and studied educational theories. His parents were of noble birth, and Tolstoy remained acutely aware of his aristocratic roots, even when he later embraced doctrines of equality and the brotherhood of man. His mother died when he was two, his father when he was nine. Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was born in 1828 about two hundred miles from Moscow. 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. The first is the dilemma of a young man who desires both fulfilling love and a place as a respected member of society. In the setting of what is present-day Kazakhstan, Tolstoy examines two psychological problems. The only problem is that she is promised to a Cossack warrior. It is here, among the Tatars, the Chechens, and the Old Believers, that he will fall in love with a beautiful Cossack girl. Taking a post as a Cadet in the army, he finds himself assigned to the remote Cossack outpost in the Caucasus. Olenin is an aimless young nobleman who is disenchanted with city life. Leo Tolstoy's firsthand insight to the magnificent landscape and the colorful Cossack way of life is lushly descriptive, in a text translated from his manuscript by close friends. The Cossacks is based on Tolstoy's own forays into the Caucasus, abandoning his aristocrat life of gambling and carousing in Moscow and volunteering to be attached to the regular army. Tolstoy's first novel and acknowledged as one of his best.