Bored with life on the family estate, the young Lev Tolstoy accompanied his older brother Nikolai, who was serving in the Caucasus, to his deployment location in 1851 - Starogladkowskaja, a Cossack settlement on the Terek River. For decades, the Russian Empire had been waging war in the region. It was not until 1859 that they succeeded in defeating the Muslim Caucasian principalities united by Imam Shamil. But at what cost! Tolstoy, who participated in battles as a ensign and was wounded, knows war and its actors from personal experience. He describes the tragedy from all perspectives: alongside Russian soldiers who destroy a Chechen village for leisure, and next to the inconsolable survivors huddled in the ruins of their homes. With sharp observational skills and an ethnographic gaze, he depicts the captivating story of the "Caucasians," the Russian A.