The Cossacks

Three days out of Moscow, in a sledge, a young man who has gambled away his money and loved nobody decides he is going to be transformed. What waits for him on the Terek is a village of people entirely uninterested in his transformation: an old hunter who drinks and sings and has killed men, a girl who looks straight through him, young Cossacks who ride out at dawn to fight and come back laughing. Olenin lies in a stag's bed in the thicket and understands, for one clean hour, that he is no more and no less than a mosquito, and that happiness might be as simple as living for other people. Then he tries it, and finds he cannot. Tolstoy was twenty-four and in the Caucasus himself when he began this, and the ache underneath it is his own: that a man can see the good life plainly, standing in front of him, and still not be able to walk into it.