Hadji Murat

Overview

About one hundred and twenty pages, Tolstoy’s last work of fiction, written between 1896 and 1904 and published in 1912, set in the Caucasus in 1851. Hadji Murat, a famous Avar commander, quarrels with the imam Shamil and defects to the Russians, hoping they will help him rescue his family, whom Shamil holds hostage. The Russians treat him as a curiosity and a bargaining chip.

Tolstoy cuts between his hero, the Russian officers, the peasants, and Tsar Nicholas I, and ends with Hadji Murat’s attempt to escape and his death, told first through a crushed thistle.

What happens

The thistle. The narrator, gathering flowers in a ploughed field, finds a Tartar thistle crushed by the plough but still standing, and remembers a story from the Caucasus.

The defection. Hadji Murat, hunted by Shamil’s men, takes shelter in a Chechen village and sends word to the Russians that he will come over. He rides into the Russian lines and is received by the young Prince Vorontsov, who is charmed by him.

Tiflis. At the viceroy’s court in Tiflis the old Prince Vorontsov and his wife treat Hadji Murat as an exotic guest. He tells the story of his life, his blood feud with Shamil, and asks for help to ransom his family; the viceroy writes to Petersburg.

Petersburg and the mountains. Tsar Nicholas I, vain and cruel, decides Hadji Murat’s fate between an assignation and a sentence of running the gauntlet. In the mountains Shamil, equally vain, holds Hadji Murat’s mother, wife and son and threatens to blind the boy.

The raid. A Russian detachment burns a Chechen village in a routine raid, and the villagers, their hay and mosque destroyed, feel a hatred Tolstoy records without comment. The young soldier Avdeyev is killed in a skirmish, and his family at home receives the news.

The escape and the death. Despairing of Russian help, Hadji Murat rides out with his five men, kills his Cossack escort, and is run down in a marsh. He fights until his body is full of wounds, rises once more, and is cut down; his head is brought back to the Russian camp.

How to read it

Read the thistle as the novella’s whole meaning stated before its plot begins, and notice how the frame lets Tolstoy tell a death without raising his voice.

Pay close attention to the cuts between Hadji Murat, the officers, the burned village and the Tsar, and to how the two empires are set side by side with the same vanity and cruelty at the top of each.

Notice that the hero is given neither a cause nor a conversion, only a family to rescue and a body that fights, and ask why Tolstoy, who by then distrusted fiction, gave his last hero so little to argue.

Consider the book’s date, written after What Is Art condemned most literature including Tolstoy’s own, and weigh its restraint as the fruit of everything he had learned and then disowned.

Read this novella alongside the Iliad to compare two deaths of warriors told without sentiment, and to see what Tolstoy took from Homer’s way of looking at a killing.

Questions it raises

• Why does Tolstoy, who condemned his own novels as art for the upper classes, write in his last years a story so free of preaching? Is Hadji Murat a betrayal of What Is Art or its fulfilment?
• Are Shamil and Nicholas really mirror images, and what does it mean for the story that its hero cannot belong to either side?
• What does the burned village chapter, told from the Chechens’ side, do to a reader’s sympathy with the Russian officers the story has made likeable?
• Is Hadji Murat’s death heroic, or simply the last thing his body can do, and does the thistle tell us how to read it?
• What is the role of the small scenes far from the action, Avdeyev’s family receiving the news, the Tsar’s dinner, and why does the story need them?
• Why was the novella left unpublished at Tolstoy’s death, and what does its survival say about the fiction he tried to give up?