Hadji Murat—Leo Tolstoy

Scylla and Charybdis in Chechnya

Crimson thistle in a newly plowed field—image generated by AI

Tolstoy worked on this novella for six years, but never published it. An incomplete version came out in 1912 and the full version in 1917, seven years after the author’s death.

When I first read Hadji Murat, it struck me as a simple story simply told. The same plot would work equally as well set in the American west or in medieval Japan. Tolstoy had simply turned a local legend into a short novel. So what? But in the translator’s introduction, Richard Pevear said, “It was virtually his last work, and is one of his finest, if not simply the finest.” And in The Western Canon, Harold Bloom devotes an entire chapter to it instead of to Anna Karenina or War and Peace. In that chapter Bloom calls the novella “my personal touchstone for the sublime of prose fiction, to me the best story in the world, or at least the best one I have ever read.” Such praise convinced me I had missed something.

Upon rereading it, I realized I had mistaken Tolstoy’s consummate skill and meticulous execution for simple, artless storytelling. I began to see how the twenty-five short chapters, each possessing its own beauty, fit together like a mosaic sculpture. The narrator eavesdrops on Russian soldiers at a listening post, and within three pages we feel like we know these fellows. Or notice how he reduces volumes of cultural history into one effortless sentence: “To Vorontsov, and especially to his wife, it seemed that they lived not only a modest life, but one filled with privation; but this life astonished the local people by its extraordinary luxury.” Tolstoy doesn’t continue to harp on this cultural theme, having once made the point. But that one sentence does sharpen the wryness of a conversation late in the novella when a Russian officer greets Hadji Murat and asks him if he liked his stay at Tiflis as an honored guest.

“Aya,” he said.

“He says ‘Yes,’” replied the interpreter.

“What did he like?”

Hadji Murat said something in reply.

“He liked the theater most of all.”

“Well, and did he like the ball at the commander in chief’s?”

Hadji Murat frowned.

“Every people has its own customs. Our women do not dress that way,” he said, glancing at Marya Dmitrievna.

“So he didn’t like it?”

“We have a proverb,” he said to the interpreter. “The dog treated the ass to meat, and the ass treated the dog to hay—and both went hungry.” He smiled. “Every people finds its own customs good.”

Chechen villagers, Russian aristocrats, woodsmen, peasant wives, soldiers, all come alive for us, giving a hundred-page story the feel of a sprawling epic. Like Brahms, who in some of his exquisite chamber pieces gives a tiny ensemble of instruments the harmonic richness and emotional fury of a full orchestra, Tolstoy brings the hardscrabble world of the Caucasus alive with just a few precise scenes.

When Czar Nicholas I invaded Chechnya and Daghestan in 1817, he met with popular resistance, lasting until 1859. Tolstoy begins the novella in the winter of 1851, after Hadji Murat has incurred the enmity of Imam Shamil, the region’s religious and military leader, who leads the fight against the Russian invasion. Before the beginning of the story, Shamil and Hadji Murat had had a falling out, and Shamil has decided that the other, even though his best warrior, must die. Shamil has captured Hadji Murat’s family and held them hostage. The story picks up where Hadji Murat tries to negotiate an agreement with the Russians to help them defeat Shamil. Had he only needed to worry about his own skin, he could have simply switched allegiance to Russia. But with his family held hostage, he conditions his defection on the Russians’ rescuing them. In the end, negotiations for a prisoner exchange stall, so he sets out with a few of his own men to attempt the rescue himself. The Russians, who suspect him of spying, assume he had double-crossed them, so they chase down his little group and kill them.

One can’t help but wonder why Tolstoy wrote this story at all, and why he labored so long over it at the end of his life. On the one hand, it conveys Tolstoy’s disgust at killing and cruelty. Other works explore this theme, but this story revolves around a heroic warrior. Glorification of a murderer looks like a betrayal of Tolstoy’s own pacifism, and that might explain his reticence to publish the story.

Maybe, but maybe not. In the first place, Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat has no good choices. He values his family and his religion above all else, but his own Imam has turned on him and seeks to bargain their lives for his. Caught between a sworn enemy and a treacherous leader, he must navigate a very narrow path. All the real choices lie with others, while he must scheme like Odysseus to survive with his dignity intact.

In the second place, Tolstoy avoids suggesting that Hadji Murat enjoys fighting. In a war-torn world with violence the norm, all the men either lust after glory or feign indifference at the suffering of others. But not Hadji Murat. Like the Aristotelian large-souled man, he has an honest recognition of his fighting prowess, but he neither boasts about it nor seeks opportunities to demonstrate it. He fights dispassionately and when necessary, but otherwise his word and actions bespeak a friendly and generous heart. In fact, I think Tolstoy presents us a model of human virtue, a courageous man forced to live in a world of otherwise decent people whose rulers have yoked them into the service of murdering each other.

Finally, I get the sense that the story would give Tolstoy no rest until he had told it. Tolstoy himself had served in the Russian army, and in 1851, at the age of twenty-three, had taken part in a devastating raid on a Chechen village. He learned of Hadji Murat at about the same time, and he condemned the Tartan warrior as a double turncoat. But Tolstoy’s own complicity in the raid and the legend of Chechnya’s greatest warrior must have rankled for years.

The novella begins when the narrator, on his way home across a freshly mown field, notices a crimson thistle, known as a “Tartar.” He tries to pick the hardy plant, but only succeeds in destroying it. For his vain destruction of something beautiful he expresses regret. Then, a little further on he finds another such thistle mown down and cast into a ditch.

The “Tartar” bush consisted of three shoots. One had been broken off, and the remainder of the branch stuck out like a cut-off arm. On each of the other two there was a flower. These flowers had once been red, but now they were black. One stem was broken and half of it hung down, with the dirty flower at the end; the other, though all covered with black dirt, still stuck up. It was clear that the whole bush had been run over by a wheel, and afterwards had straightened up and therefore stood tilted, but stood all the same. As if a piece of its flesh had been ripped away, its guts turned inside out, an arm torn off, an eye blinded. But it still stands and does not surrender to man, who has annihilated all its brothers around it.

“What energy!” I thought. “Man has conquered everything, destroyed millions of plants, but this one still does not surrender.”

This incident with the thistle Tolstoy described in his diary on December 23, 1851. The Tartar thistle brought to mind the Tartar warrior whose village the young Tolstoy had long ago helped burn down. I see this story as an atonement. Whatever the rationale for writing it, he left us with a literary gemstone, well worth study by all readers and writers.

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Next week, I’ll read and try to offer some thoughts about Little Women or Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, by Louisa May Alcott. I’ll also read Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography, by Susan Cheever.

Once again, I’d like to thank everyone who has subscribed to these reflections. Feel free to share them with others. I welcome new subscribers and I encourage everyone to read, read, read.

Amazon links to works mentioned in this post.

Hadji Murat, by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

The Western Canon, by Harold Bloom

The complete chamber music of Johannes Brahms

Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott

Lousia May Alcott: A Personal Biography, by Susan Cheever

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