Aylmer Maude

'There remains the greatest of all novelists-for what else can we call the author of War And Peace? [Tolstoy's] senses, his intellect, are acute, powerful, and well nourished...Nothing seems to escape him. Nothing glances off him unrecorded...Every twig, every feather sticks to his magnet. He notices the blue or red of a child's frock; the way a horse shifts its tail; the sound of a cough; the action of a man trying to put his hands into pockets that...

Combining detailed physical description with perceptive psychological insight, Leo Tolstoy realistically sweeps aside the sham of surface appearances to lay bare man's intimates gestures, acts, and thoughts.

This novel of love, adventure, and male rivalry on the frontiers of nineteenth-century Russia -- completed in 1862, when Tolstoy was in his early thirties -- has always surprised readers who know Tolstoy best through the vast, panoramic fictions of his middle years. Unlike those works, The Cossacks is lean and supple, economical in design and execution.