The Cossacks
A Moscow nobleman with gambling debts and no convictions takes a commission in a Cossack village on the Terek, where an old hunter kills, drinks and feels guilt about neither. He decides that happiness must lie in living for others, falls in love with a girl already promised elsewhere, and discovers that the village has no use whatever for his conclusions. Ten years in the writing and drawn from Tolstoy's own army service, it was the book Turgenev thought the finest thing written in Russian.
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