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The Cossacks
- Narrated by: David Thorn
- Length: 7 hrs and 18 mins
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Mikhail Sholokhov’s groundbreaking epic novel gives a sweeping depiction of Russian life and culture in the early 20th century. In the same vein as War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, And Quiet Flows the Don gives listeners a glimpse into many aspects of Russian culture, and the choices a country makes when faced with war and destruction.
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Do not buy this version!
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Same Mood, The Same Power, Resurrected
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Excellent
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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Do not buy this version!
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A Truly Great Book and a Truly Astounding Narrator
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The Kingdom of God Is Within You is a nonfiction book written by Leo Tolstoy. A philosophical treatise, the book was first published in Germany in 1894 after being banned in his home country of Russia. It is the culmination of 30 years of Tolstoy's thinking and lays out a new organization for society based on a literal Christian interpretation. The Kingdom of God Is Within You is a key text for Tolstoyan nonviolent resistance and Christian anarchist movements.
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hoooooly crap slow down
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By: Leo Tolstoy
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What Men Live By
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
One winter evening a shoemaker finds a mysterious stranger naked and freezing by a shrine in his small village. The shoemaker rescues the man, and takes him home. Though the stranger won’t say where he came from, Simon invites him to work beside him, and stay with his family. As the story unfolds, the stranger transforms, and ultimately reveals an astonishing and deeply moving secret. Late in Tolstoy’s life, after he had written his great masterpieces War and Peace, and Anna Karenina, he underwent a spiritual transformation.
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Short but powerful story from Leo Tolstoy
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By: Leo Tolstoy
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The brilliance of this story is in how a normal bureaucrat, a judge in this case, has a small accident that winds up gradually taking his life. As he deals with this incident, with hope at first and then despair, he comes to terms with his family, his life, and the mediocrities that we all suffer with, except for the exceptional few. This story rings a particularly poignant note for those in early middle age facing the next part of their lives. This story is considered Tolstoy's best.
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Great Book, Great Price, Good Narration
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Performance
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Story
Anna Karenina is beautiful, married to a successful man, and has a son whom she adores. But a chance meeting at a train station in Moscow sets her passionate heart alight, and she is defenceless in the face of Count Vronsky's adoration. Having defied the rules of nineteenth-century Russian society, Anna is forced to pay a heavy price.
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Wonderful reading, but some volume issues
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Tolstoy is primarily known for his impressively long novels, but he also wrote some wonderful short stories. This one, dealing with ambition and greed, has an unforgettable message.
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Great story but...
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In the story, a land owner named Vasili Andreevich Brekhunov takes along one of his peasants, Nikita, for a short journey to the house of the owner of a forest. He is impatient and wishes to get to the town more quickly to purchase the forest before other contenders can get there. They find themselves in the middle of a blizzard, but the master in his avarice wishes to press on. They eventually get lost off the road and they try to camp. The master's peasant soon finds himself suffering from hypothermia.
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excellent. totally enngaging. naratorr quite wonderful!
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By: Leo Tolstoy, and others
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A Selection of Short Stories by Leo Tolstoy read by Bart Wolffe.
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Completed six years after Dostoyevsky's own term as a convict, The House of the Dead is a semi-autobiographical account of life in a Siberian prison camp, and the physical and mental effects it has on those who are sentenced to inhabit it. Alexandr Petrovitch Goryanchikov, a gentleman of the noble class, has been condemned to 10 years of hard labor for murdering his wife.
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This was FAR better than what I was expecting!
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The Master and Margarita
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Performance
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The Devil comes to Moscow, but he isn't all bad; Pontius Pilate sentences a charismatic leader to his death, but yearns for redemption; and a writer tries to destroy his greatest tale, but discovers that manuscripts don't burn. Multi-layered and entrancing, blending sharp satire with glorious fantasy, The Master and Margarita is ceaselessly inventive and profoundly moving. In its imaginative freedom and raising of eternal human concerns, it is one of the world's great novels.
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Satisfying Satanic Satire
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By: Mikhail Bulgakov
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The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
- By: Nikolai Gogol
- Narrated by: Nicholas Boulton
- Length: 17 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories is a bizarre and colorful collection containing the finest short stories by the iconic Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. From the witty and Kafkaesque "The Nose", where a civil servant wakes up one day to find his nose missing, to the moving and evocative "The Overcoat", about a reclusive man whose only ambition is to replace his old, threadbare coat, Gogol gives us a unique take on the absurd.
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Brilliant writer, fantastic narration, plus TOC
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By: Nikolai Gogol
Publisher's summary
Tolstoy's first novel and acknowledged as one of his best. 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. 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.
Olenin is an aimless young nobleman who is disenchanted with city life. Taking a post as a Cadet in the army, he finds himself assigned to the remote Cossack outpost in the Caucasus. It is here, among the Tatars, the Chechens, and the Old Believers, that he will fall in love with a beautiful Cossack girl. The only problem is that she is promised to a Cossack warrior.
In the setting of what is present-day Kazakhstan, Tolstoy examines two psychological problems. The first is the dilemma 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.
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was born in 1828 about two hundred miles from Moscow. His mother died when he was two, his father when he was nine. 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. After serving in the army in the Caucasus and Crimea, where he wrote his first stories, he traveled and studied educational theories.
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. In 1879 he underwent a spiritual crisis. Tolstoy then sought to propagate his beliefs on faith, morality, and nonviolence, writing mostly parables, tracts, and morality plays. He died of pneumonia in 1910 at the age of eighty-two.
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In The Thirty-Nine Steps, Hannay struggles to thwart an assassination plot designed to hasten war between Britain and Germany. Later he is plucked from the trenches first, in Greenmantle, to frustrate a plot to ferment an uprising in the Islamic world; and then, in Mr. Standfast, to undertake a vital secret mission against a German spy ring operating among pacifist elements in England. After the war, his adventures continue in The Three Hostages; and then in The Island of Sheep, when an old oath to protect the son of a friend from his days in Africa draws him into new danger.
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Values of a bygone era
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Doctor Zhivago
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- Length: 23 hrs and 18 mins
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In celebration of the 40th anniversary of its original publication, here is a new translation of the classic story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago’s love for the tender and beautiful Lara.
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Russian Philosophical Feast
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April Morning
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- Narrated by: Jamie Hanes
- Length: 4 hrs and 42 mins
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Fifteen-year-old Adam Cooper is anxcious to join the excitement and action of the Revolutionary War. On the morning of April 19, 1775, he stands beside his Massachusetts farmer father to face the redcoats marching out of Boston. But suddenly, his father falls on the village green, and Adam’s hands are shaking as he shoots at columns of marching men. With realistic drama and riveting suspense, Howard Fast brings the glory and the agony of the colonial battlefield vividly to life.
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A classic for a reason
- By Gerald Collier on 01-05-22
By: Howard Fast
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Les Misérables
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- Length: 65 hrs and 41 mins
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Victor Hugo's tale of injustice, heroism and love follows the fortunes of Jean Valjean, an escaped convict determined to put his criminal past behind him. But his attempts to become a respected member of the community are constantly put under threat: by his own conscience and by the relentless investigations of the dogged Policeman, Javert. It is not simply for himself that Valjean must stay free, however, for he has sworn to protect the baby daughter of Fantine, driven to prostitution by poverty.
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Great Book, Great Translation, 5 Great Narrators
- By Rain Wiegartner on 06-07-20
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Drums Along the Mohawk
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Drums along the Mohawk, Walter D. Edmonds' masterpiece, is not only the best historical novel about upstate New York since James Fenimore Cooper, it was also number one on the bestseller list for two years, only yielding to the epic Gone with the Wind. This is the story of the forgotten pioneers of the Mohawk Valley during the Revolutionary War. Here Gilbert Martin and his young wife struggled and lived and hoped.
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Wonderful
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Shaman's Crossing, Book One of the Soldier Son Trilogy
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Hugo and Nebula Award finalist Robin Hobb crafts intricate fantasy tales featuring larger-than-life characters and exotic landscapes. Nevare Burvelle survives the King’s Cavalla Academy—where nepotism and corruption reign—to become a soldier in the Gernian king’s army. As he and his fellow soldiers are thrust onto the front lines of the king’s brutal territorial expansion campaign, they struggle against the Plainspeople—forest-dwellers who possess a powerful magic long dismissed by the Gernians.
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Sometimes Magic Isn't A Good Thing
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By: Robin Hobb
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Crockett of Tennessee
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From humble beginnings in rural Tennessee to his heroic death defending the Alamo, frontiersman, adventurer, and politician David Davy Crockett embodies the spirit and ideals of the national character. Even during his lifetime, tales of the sharpshooting, skilled woodsman were - to his delight - told, retold, and elaborated on. As a US congressman, the former Creek War militiaman steadfastly opposed President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act.
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I highly recommend
- By That Man They Call Shad on 05-05-21
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A Hero of Our Time
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In A Hero of Our Time, Grigory Pechorin is a bored, self-centered, and cynical young army officer who believes in nothing. With impunity he toys with the love of women and the goodwill of men. He is brave, determined, and willful, but his wasted energy and potential ultimately result in tragedy.
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Genius Presentation of Ywtsaxt fas
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The Power and the Glory
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Graham Greene explores corruption and atonement in this penetrating novel set in 1930s Mexico during the era of Communist religious persecutions. As revolutionaries determine to stamp out the evils of the church through violence, the last Roman Catholic priest is on the lam, hunted by a police lieutenant. Despite his own sense of worthlessness—he is a heavy drinker and has fathered an illegitimate child—he is determined to continue to function as a priest until captured.
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Lousy recording quality of bad narration
- By Vincent on 10-08-12
By: Graham Greene
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The Mark of the Beast
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When a carousing Englishman disgraces the consecrated effigy of Hanuman, a leprous "Silver Man" marks him with a hideous curse. The ensuing night brings new terrors to the house of the doomed man.
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Must listen again
- By uffdasuzanne on 10-06-17
By: Rudyard Kipling
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One of Ours
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- Length: 13 hrs and 54 mins
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Claude Wheeler resembles the youngest son of an American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It is only when his country enters the First World War that Claude finds what he has been searching for all his life.
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Cather's writing is impeccable
- By Kelly on 12-20-19
By: Willa Cather
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Tolstoy based Resurrection, the last of his novels, on a true story of a philanderer whose misuse of a beautiful young orphan girl leads to her ruin. Fate brings the two together many years later, and the meeting awakens the man's moral conscience. Anger, intimacy, forgiveness, and grace result.
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A Confession, or My Confession, is a short work on the subject of melancholia, philosophy and religion by the acclaimed Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. It was written in 1879 to 1880, when Tolstoy was in his early fifties.
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When Prince Dmitri Nekhludov is called for jury duty on a murder case, he little knows how the experience will change his life. Faced with the accused, a prostitute, he recognizes Katusha, the young girl he seduced and abandoned many years before, and realizes his responsibility for the life of degradation she has been forced to lead. His determination to make amends leads him into the darkest reaches of the Tsarist prison system, and to the beginning of his spiritual regeneration.
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Appallingly bad reading.
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Same Mood, The Same Power, Resurrected
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Appallingly bad reading.
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ABRIDGED VERSION
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The Cossacks
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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.
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Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth
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Leo Tolstoy began his trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth in his early twenties. Although he would in his old age famously dismiss it as an ‘awkward mixture of fact and fiction’, generations of readers and listeners have not agreed, finding the series to be a charming and insightful portrait of inner growth against the background of a world limned with extraordinary clarity, grace and color.
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The Leo Tolstoy BBC Radio Drama Collection
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One of the greatest novelists of all time, Leo Tolstoy is famed worldwide for his masterpieces of realist fiction, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. This comprehensive collection contains both those iconic works, as well as his final novel, Resurrection, his autobiographical essay 'A Confession', Stephen Wakelam's dramatic account of his tempestuous marriage, Mrs Tolstoy, and In Our Time: Tolstoy.
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Excellent adaptation..No chapter titles
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War and Peace is one of the greatest monuments in world literature. Set against the dramatic backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, it examines the relationship between the individual and the relentless march of history. Here are the universal themes of love and hate, ambition and despair, youth and age, expressed with a swirling vitality which makes the book as accessible today as it was when it was first published in 1869.
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A Truly Great Book and a Truly Astounding Narrator
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Glad I finally decided to read it
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A Selection of Short Stories by Leo Tolstoy read by Bart Wolffe.
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Short Stories
- By Mark on 07-03-14
By: Leo Tolstoy
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My Religion
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In My Religion, Leo Tolstoy accuses the church of hiding the true meaning of Jesus, which is to be found in the Sermon on the Mount and the call to resist evil. For Tolstoy, it is this command that has been most damaged by ecclesiastical interpretation. Tolstoy had not always been possessed of the religious ideas set forth in My Religion. For 35 years of his life, he was, in the proper acceptation of the word, a nihilist - not a revolutionary socialist but a man who believed in nothing.
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Why Did We Not Read This In Bible College?
- By JustinBatzUS on 12-09-16
By: Leo Tolstoy
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Hadji Murat
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In 1851 Leo Tolstoy enlisted in the Russian army and was sent to the Caucasus to help defeat the Chechens. During this war a great Avar chieftain, Hadji Murád, broke with the Chechen leader Shamil and fled to the Russians for safety. Months later, while attempting to rescue his family from Shamil’s prison, Hadji Murád was pursued by those he had betrayed and, after fighting the most heroic battle of his life, was killed.
By: Leo Tolstoy
What listeners say about The Cossacks
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- Mike W
- 01-14-18
Cossacks
Story and performance are fine (just not my favorite.). Audio “Skipped” in several places throughout the performance. This kept me from becoming truly immersed in the reading.
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- Adam
- 06-02-22
An excellent, lesser-known Tolstoy work
This audiobook was a very fine discovery — brilliant prose with an excellent performance.
If you’ve never read Tolstoy, this is a superb place to start — much less daunting than his famous epics.
If you have read some Tolstoy, this should be high on your list of must-reads from his extensive bibliography.
I am not especially fond of 19th century literature (though I’ve read a lot of it), and Tolstoy is one of the few timeless novelists from that century. His insights, sentiments, and plot structures still feel modern, and his prose is not overwrought in a way that makes it feel dated.
This novel is arguably the first of his “greatest period” culminating in War & Peace and Anna Karenina. I realize that’s a debatable distinction, since he produced thoughtful works of literature in all the phases of his life, but for those who are just looking for a place to start, or who aren’t looking for “super deep cuts,” this novel is worth your consideration and time.
Personally, I much prefer “The Cossacks” to two of his other shorter works that are more often recommended — “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (a touch boring) or “The Sebastopol Sketches” (innovative and insightful but not very cohesive).
By comparison, The Cossacks is an engaging story that is seamlessly constructed from start to satisfying finish, and it gives you an authentic taste of the talents he will bring to bear on a grander scale in his two epics.
“Daddy Eroshka” is a particular bright spot, though he’s only a supporting character who would be 4th on the cast list — a memorable and touching blend of Thoreau and Hemingway, for an anachronistic analogy. Eroshka’s persistent influence from the background of the main story arc might just be the finest part of this novel.
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- Jefferson
- 11-05-13
A Fool’s Guide to Happiness
The Cossacks: a Tale of 1852 (1863), Tolstoy’s first novel, conveys a vivid sense of a particular time, place, and culture and also explores universal themes about youth, love, nature, and civilization. The story begins with 24-year-old rich boy Dmitri Andreich Olenin leaving Moscow because he’s in debt and has just realized that he doesn’t love this rich woman he was supposed to marry, and he has nothing better to do, having aborted other half-hearted pursuits like attending university and farming, so he expects to get a fresh experience in the Caucasus Mountains as a cadet in the Russian army. As he journeys from Moscow to the mountains with his trusty serf-servant Vanyusha, he passes time complimenting himself for being a fine fellow, wondering what his friends will think about his move, calculating how many months he’ll have to live frugally to pay off his gambling and other debts, and fantasizing about becoming a heroic soldier and possessing a Cossack woman who will be beautiful, wild, clever, enchanting, and submissive. When he sees the mountains clearly for the first time on his first morning there, they penetrate his being, purging him of his trivial dreams, cleansing him of his Moscow shames:
“Suddenly he saw, about twenty paces away as it seemed to him at first glance, pure white gigantic masses with delicate contours, the distinct fantastic outlines of their summits showing sharply against the far-off sky. When he had realized the distance between himself and them and the sky and the whole immensity of the mountains, and felt the infinitude of all that beauty, he became afraid that it was but a phantasm or a dream. He gave himself a shake to rouse himself, but the mountains were still the same.”
Tolstoy then introduces the local inhabitants, the Grebensk Cossacks, who live in a village near the Terek River, across which live their rivals, the Muslim Tartars (Chechens), with whom they are continuously engaged in small scale horse-trading, raiding, and ambushing. The Cossacks are Old Believer Christians, free-spirited, down-to-earth, and feisty, close to nature, poor in material things but rich in passion and pride. They feel more akin to and respectful of their Islamic enemies across the river (and speak a lot of their Tartar language) than of their Russian allies whom they must billet in their villages.
Tolstoy develops his story by depicting the developing relationships between three Cossacks and Olenin. Taking the Russian under his muscular wing is Daddy Eroshka, a “solitary and superannuated,” powerfully-built, seventy-something guy who loves nothing better than hunting, drinking, gossiping, mooching, and boasting about his youthful exploits. Marianka, the young daughter of the village cornet in whose house Olenin is lodging, is a masculine girl who strikes Olenin as being as beautiful and inaccessible as the mountains and becomes his Cossack muse. And Rukashaka, the most dashing, plucky, and handsome of the young Cossacks, becomes Olenin’s unacknowledged rival. There are many neat moments: Olenin going hunting, being swarmed by mosquitoes, and having an epiphany about the best way to live; Daddy Eroshka wondering why Russians are so well educated but never know anything or explaining to Olenin why animals are at least as wise as people; Marianka cracking seeds, harvesting grapes or perching atop the stove; Rukashaka waiting in ambush or communicating with his deaf and dumb sister.
Tolstoy is not telling a page-turning, action-packed adventure story! With two notable exceptions, every scene of violent action happens off-stage, and most of the “action” consists of people drinking and talking as Tolstoy evokes Cossack culture (poised as it was between the Tartars and Russians in the fertile and sublime mountains), and to examine Olenin’s heart in that context. Will he forever remain an outsider? Will he learn what love is, or how to be happy in life?
David Thorn reads the novel with enthusiasm, irony, and clarity, and, fortunately, doesn’t try to make female voices sound female. Unfortunately, this audiobook production is damaged by two flaws: the end of each chapter is signaled by some pseudo “Russian” music that sounds like a digital guitar or harpsichord from a low-budget fantasy computer game, and the number of each new chapter is announced by a horribly syrupy, buttery, and American-sounding woman’s voice, and there are 42 of the durn things in this short novel. An awful mood-breaker. Oh, and the cover picture has egregiously little to do with the content of the novel.
The Cossacks is a perfect book to begin an acquaintance with Tolstoy, because it’s short and is accessible, filled with the psychological and philosophical insights of his longer tomes, but set in an exotic place and told with a more humorous tone.
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- Emily Helal
- 09-03-18
Казаки
Казаки (The Cossacks) - The regionalisation of accents/language patterns from Russia to the UK is necessary because it conveys class differences that simply couldn’t be reproduced (or couldn’t be reproduced without it being a total disaster) in, say, US or Canadian English.
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- Ray
- 06-26-18
Sounded very English.
.... not at all Russian, Cossack, or whatever. Ending was in consequential, left me hanging.
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- Darwin8u
- 07-24-13
Tolstoy masterpiece is wounded by terrible audio
This is one Tolstoy that is easily overlooked, but shouldn't be missed. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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).
The major problem with this audiobook is the audio quality. The transitions (I think its a balalaika) is too loud and doesn't quite work. The narrator sounds distant and muffled like he read the entire novel with a 20 gallon paint gallon on his head. I got through it, but didn't really enjoy the novel like I hoped to because of the quality of the audio.
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- Lucie
- 02-17-18
Interesting story
Not on the same level as some of his more famous works, but still Tolstoy!
As other reviewers have said, the cheesy MIDI music at the end of the chapter is irritating, but it’s bearable.
The regionalisation of accents/language patterns from Russia to the UK is necessary because it conveys class differences that simply couldn’t be reproduced (or couldn’t be reproduced without it being a total disaster) in, say, US or Canadian English.
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- See Reverse
- 01-12-19
Great Performance of Tolstoy
I'm not familiar with Tolstoy's works, and I was happy to find this relatively short work as an introduction. Tolstoy has a depth that could be hard to pick-up in an audiobook, but overall this was an enjoyable story that feels modern and relevant even if it is set in a world that is becoming increasingly unfamiliar today. The ending is sudden and open for interpretation, so this work might not be for every listener.
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