Hadji Murad – Leo Tolstoy
Read: Feb. 6th 2024
Published: 1912
Country: Russia
Length: 162 pages
Interesting that he wrote this book almost secretively during his last years deep in midst of his religious fervor. I think he even admitted that he had to “write it on the sly from myself” since he knew that the work betrayed his narrow, didactic aims for art and consideration and rejection of anything that smacked of love, character, philosophy and reason as a sin at the time. Thank god for sinners. I liked the ending. I’m a sucker for a blaze of glory final shootout.
Brief Summary:
Tolstoy’s final work—a gripping novella about the struggle between the Muslim Chechens and their inept occupiers—is a powerful moral fable for our time.
Inspired by a historical figure Tolstoy heard about while serving in the Caucasus, this story brings to life the famed warrior Hadji Murat, a Chechen rebel who has fought fiercely and courageously against the Russian empire. After a feud with his commander he defects to the Russians, only to find that he is now trusted by neither side. He is first welcomed but then imprisoned by the Russians under suspicion of being a spy, and when he hears news of his wife and son held captive by the Chechens, Murat risks all to try to save his family.
Quotes:
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“Harold Bloom, has gone so far as to claim that Hadji Murád “is my personal touchstone, for the sublime of prose fiction, to me the best story in the world, or at least the best that I have ever read.”
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“Tolstoy’s genius—the source of his rivalry with God—lies precisely in his ability to locate the divine and the sublime at the core of the earthly and the mundane, reminding us of Vladimir Nabokov’s advice to his students to “caress the details, the divine details.”
- “None of them saw in this death that most important moment of a life—its termination and return to the source whence it sprang—but they only saw in it the valor of a gallant officer, who rushed at the mountaineers sword in hand and desperately hacked them.”
- “The old woman, when this news reached her, wept for as long as she could spare time, and then set to work again.”
- “Yet, though convinced that he had acted properly, some kind of unpleasant aftertaste remained behind, and to stifle that feeling he began to dwell on a thought that always tranquilized him—the thought of his own greatness.”
- “Nicholas knew that twelve thousand strokes with the regulation rods were not only certain death with torture, but were a superfluous cruelty, for five thousand strokes were sufficient to kill the strongest man. But it pleased him to be ruthlessly cruel, and it also pleased him to think that we have abolished capital punishment in Russia.”
- “War presented itself to him as consisting only in his exposing himself to danger and to possible death, and thereby gaining rewards and the respect of his comrades here, as well as of his friends in Russia. Strange to say, his imagination never pictured the other aspect of war: the death and wounds of the soldiers, officers, and mountaineers. To retain this poetic conception he even unconsciously avoided looking at the dead and wounded. So that day, when we had three dead and twelve wounded, he passed by a corpse lying on its back, and only saw with one eye the strange position of the waxen hand and a dark red spot on the head, and did not stop to look.”
- “…one spoke of hatred of the Russians. The feeling experienced by all the Chechens, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hate. It was not hatred, for they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings; but it was such repulsion, disgust, and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures, that the desire to exterminate them—”
- “The dog gave meat to the ass, and the ass gave hay to the dog, and both went hungry,’” and he smiled. “Its own customs seem good to each nation.””
- “The Cossack was called, and brought in the bag with the head. It was taken out, and the Major looked at it long with drunken eyes. “All the same, he was a fine fellow,” said he. “Let me kiss him!”
- “That was his last consciousness of any connection with his body. He felt nothing more, and his enemies kicked and hacked at what had no longer anything in common with him.”