The Caucasus through a young volunteer's eyes: a raid on a mountain village, a woodcutting expedition under fire, an old acquaintance from Moscow met again as a disgraced private; then a night lost in a snowstorm on the steppe, Polikushka, the serf trusted with his mistress's money, and Kholstomír, the old piebald gelding who tells his life to the herd. Tolstoy served as an artillery cadet in the Caucasus and wrote these sketches from what he saw, and the horse's reflections on how men use the word 'mine' are among the strangest things he ever wrote. Much of War and Peace is already here. Thirty-eight plates of mountains, snow and soldiers by painters including Vasily Vereshchagin and Caspar David Friedrich carry the same cold, hard light that falls across these pages.