Hadji Murad

Some thoughts on Tolstoy's Hadji Murad, which I finished reading today:

• Published posthumously in 1911, the novella tells the real-life story of the eponymous Chechen freedom fighter who defected to Tsarist Russia in 1851 with disastrous consequences.


• Tolstoy penned the novella in the twilight of his career, when his prophetic fervor had made him disown his earlier works, having condemned the art of fiction itself on religious grounds.


• In the story, Tolstoy contrasts the pious and ascetic lifestyle of the Avar leader and his followers with the dissolute lifestyle and moral turpitude of Russian army officers and soldiers.


• Battlefield manipulation of truth and wanton punishment of civilians in the story resonate with certain contemporary events. This brings to mind Ezra Pound's claim that literature is news that stays news.


• Tolstoy is unstinting in his admiration of Hadji Murad. He is savage in his contempt of Czar Nicholas I. The former is gentle, brave and noble. The latter is vain, pompous and tyrannical.


• The last word belongs to the critic Harold Bloom, who claimed Hadji Murad to be "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."