Cossack Idealist

Stefan Denosevic, 30 something pathologically and comically naïve Cossack in WWI sees only the good in people, blind to anything sinister. His only useful skills are that he is a master horse trainer, brilliant-self taught surgeon and savant idiot who is a source of entertainment to his Comrades in the field and his family/village back home. After being sent back home with a fake promotion so that he doesn’t endanger his Army buds on the Front, he is led, by his horse, to an herb which gives him advanced intelligence enabling him to see the seedy side of humanity, particularly in the town he grew up in which is now a mob run black market operation with no shortage of moral and political corruption. As a born again ‘cynic’, Stefan uses all manner of sometimes devious manipulation to transform his home into a cooperative Paradise in the middle of the vicious Russian Civil War, but at the price of his humanity and happiness with escalating problems he never imagined possible. The story is told from the perspective of the horse, a human soul who after eating too much of the herb himself was reincarnated into an equine body.