Hadji Murad

As others have noted, this is possibly the best written novella of all time, and is solidly based on Tolstoy's military service in the Russian campaign to conquer the tribes of the Caucasus Mountains, led for decades by the Imam Shamil. The Avar chieftain Hadji Murad, a doomed tragic figure, is painted with respect, and Tolstoy's pacifist views are the same as in War and Peace. His acid portrayal of Czar Nicholas is one-sided, but his characterization of the Russian nobility as shallow one dimensional people with an excessive taste for gambling, drinking, and violence is an accurate accounting of the conditions that would soon lead to their downfall.

Even though this was published shortly after Tolstoy's death in 1910 and with the Chechen war still raging today it is easy to imagine the events that unfold before Hadji Murad occurring recently. Tolstoy's flavorful writing is such that you can almost smell the smoke of the cigarettes and burning wood from the forts and aouls. I will not go over what this book is about since so many other reviews have already done a fine job, but one thing I would like to mention is the excellent introduction by Azar Nafisi. Azar Nafisi, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, outlines and provides a compact analysis of Hadji Murad as well as some historical information. It is worth reading the introduction before AND after you finish Hadji Murad.

This is the partially fictionalized account of the last days of Hadji Murad, a renowned and feared Chechen -more precisely, Avar- warrior in 1851-52. Feared by the ruthless Imam Shamil, ruler of Chechens and other Caucasians, Murad is forced to defect yet again to the Russians, who recieve him warmly but suspiciously (he has switched sides before). Murad keeps telling the Russians he won't be of much help unless they support him in getting his family safe and back from the cruel Shamil. Some of them incline to do so, but others fear he might be just spying on them. The action drags on, with no resolution arrived at, until Murad makes his final dash.As literature, the story is incredibly well written; as background information on the origins of the still-going-on Chechen war, it is priceless. Tolstoi show here his very literary genius: in only 125 pages, he conveys a portrait of many characters, each and every one with his/her own full personality. It is marvelous how Tolstoi can give a whole personality to even the minor characters in a short work.The depictions of landscapes and circumstances are also masterful, and you can really feel the cold wind and see the wooded mountains of that magnetic and troublesome corner, neither fully European nor Asian. It is, then, the story of a real man who got caught between the despised Russians and the murderous Chechen leader, really a tragic figure in the sense that he has to make decisiones in front of certain death for him and for his family, whom he deeply loves. Great literature tends to be that which posts credible and appealing characters in limit-situations, and this is clearly one of the best. Refreshing to read an action-packed, well-written, historically interesting story with compelling characters.

Like most everyone who's read his terrific book The Western Canon, it was Harold Bloom who sent me scurrying to find Hadji Murad. We, all of us, take a stab at War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and many schools assign the shorter Death of Ivan Ilych as required reading. But not many of us venture beyond these narrowly circumscribed borders. Heck, the thousands of pages required just to finish his major works seems like all we should be required to stand. But then came Bloom's soaring endorsement of this minor work, and suddenly it was back into the breech.Now, I confess, though I did like the novella and found it much easier reading, perhaps only because shorter, than his other books. But I can't fathom Bloom's statement that : It 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.Bloom seems particularly taken by the character of Hadji Murad, his heroic qualities, and by the "growth" he displays over the course of the tale. Indeed, he is likable in a roguish way, but he's also utterly unreliable and ultimately foolish. These are not heroic qualities in my book. He's unreliable in the sense that his allegiances switch back and forth between the Russians and the Chechens whenever changing circumstances make the one side or the other more personally convenient. Absent is the kind of consistent political philosophy or moral matrix that makes for a great hero. And he's foolish in that he rides off to near certain death in a futile effort to rescue his family. Though appealingly sentimental, this is the suicidal gesture of an unserious person. What good does adding his death to theirs do anyone?Tolstoy does an impressive job of detailing many of the layers of the society of the time and of presenting both sides in the conflict. He is generous with the Chechens, whom, as a Russian, he might be expected to treat ill, and ungentle with the Tsar, who he might be expected to spare. Hadji Murad, even if he does not rise to the level of archetypal hero, is nonetheless someone we root for and who we are genuinely sorry to see meet tragedy. All of this is more than enough to recommend the book, without being enough to call it the greatest piece of prose in the history of man.GRADE : A-

Tolstoy's brilliant but quiet and cold-eyed satire of war-makers, both Russian and Chechen, from the lordly heights of the Tsar's Winter Palace to the scattered villages of Muslim fighters at the Caucasian edge of empire, and all players between. A "war story," yes, but in a league with For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Naked and the Dead, The Things They Carried, all of which it surpasses I think. Hard to convey the power of this little book. Much is in the structure: 25 chapters in 125 pages, the action alternating between the Russian and the Chechen sides, and from one place to another within each side, this alternation itself effecting a kind of commentary on the plot. (The brief, parallel glimpses of the Russian and Chechen homefronts in chapters 8 and 17, which show how differently, but how horribly in both cases, the war is brought home, are especially keen.) Also a meditation on the nature of true heroism, and on what it means to live one's life with a true awareness of death, of which attitude the title character, Hadji Murad, becomes the doomed and blessed embodiment. Perhaps not (pace Bloom) the greatest single narrative in the Western canon, but Perfect, in its own formidable terms.