In his diary for 19 July 1896, Tolstoy noted that, as he was crossing the plowed fields that day, he came upon a crimson Tartar thistle that had been broken down by the plow. “It made me think of Hadji Murat. I want to write. It defends its life to the end, alone in the midst of the whole field, no matter how, it defends it.” The novella begins and ends with that same encounter. Tolstoy worked on it from 1896 to 1904, with the express wish that it not be published in his lifetime. It testifies, as Michel Aucouturier has written, to “that which is most spontaneous and most obstinate in him,” his irrepressible need for artistic creation. The symbol of the Tartar thistle thus acquires a more personal, unspoken meaning.
But even before the encounter with the thistle, the events of 1851 were stirring in him. On 29 May 1895 he mentioned in his diary that he was reading and enjoying the memoirs of General V. A. Poltoratsky, published in the Historical Messenger in 1893. Poltoratsky began his military career in the Caucasus and was a witness to some of the events described in the novella. Tolstoy not only drew from his memoirs, but included him as a character. M. T. Loris-Melikov, who later became minister of the interior, also appears as a character. Tolstoy took long passages from the transcripts of his conversations with the Avar chief, who told him his life story. He also made use of General F. K. Klügenau’s journals and his letters to Hadji Murat, and in chapter XIV he transcribed the whole of Prince M. S. Vorontsov’s letter to the minister of war Chernyshov, which he translated from the French. Documentary evidence was as important to him in writing Hadji Murat as it had been in writing War and Peace. As late as 1903, he asked his cousin Alexandra Alexeevna, who had been a lady-in-waiting at court, for details about Nicholas I, though his final portrait of the emperor is far less flattering than the one she gave him.
Tolstoy likened the technique of his narrative to “the English toy called a peepshow—behind the glass now one thing shows itself, now another. That’s how the man Hadji Murat must be shown: the husband, the fanatic …” (diary for 21 March 1898). Not only Hadji Murat, but all the characters and events of the novella are shown in brief flashes, taking us from the clay-walled houses of a Chechen village, to a frontline fortress, to the regional capital at Tiflis, to the imperial palace in Petersburg, and back again; portraying Russians, Tartars, Cossacks, peasants, foot soldiers, officers, statesmen, Russian princesses, Tartar wives, the imam Shamil, the emperor Nicholas I. The story of the peasant conscript Avdeev illustrates the technique in miniature. We are introduced to him in the second chapter; in the fifth he is badly wounded in a chance skirmish; in the seventh he dies; in the eighth Tolstoy goes back to Avdeev’s native village, to his parents, family squabbles, his drunken brother, his unfaithful wife. No more is heard of Avdeev; he and his familly are quite irrelevant to the main story; but like the social comedy of the scenes in Tiflis and Petersburg, like the village scenes among the mountaineers, they go to make up the world of the novella. The composition is as inclusive as in War and Peace, if not more so, but rendered with an economy of means that is the final perfection of Tolstoy’s art.
Few things written about the two centuries of struggle in Chechnya are as telling as the page and a half of chapter XVII, the briefest in the novella, a terse, unrhetorical inventory of the results of a Russian raid on a mountain village. Nowhere in Tolstoy’s polemical writings is there a more powerful condemnation of the senseless violence of war. Moral judgment is not pronounced in the novella; it is implicit in the sequence of events, and in the figure of Hadji Murat, with whom Tolstoy identifies himself. He is present even where he is absent, as in the scenes in Petersburg, or in Shamil’s stronghold, or in the carousing of Russian officers in the fortress. He is the immanent measure of human dignity in the novella.
Hadji Murat is a new kind of hero for Tolstoy. He is not a self-conscious seeker after the meaning of life; he is not a converted sinner to whom the light is revealed in extremis; he is not sensually enslaved, but also not a holy fool or innocent. And he has no fear of death. As a military leader, he first betrays the Chechens, then the Russians; he kills without hesitation or remorse. Yet he is also not a savage: he carefully performs his ritual duties as a Muslim, he shares unquestioningly in the traditional culture of his people, and he is fiercely loyal to what is most dear to him. He is a warrior and a natural man, who, in the words of the great chorus from Sophocles’ Antigone, finds himself “pathless on all paths.” The equity of Tolstoy’s portrayal of his fate lends it a transcendent beauty, set off by the indifferent singing of the nightingales. This final scene, deliberately placed out of sequence, casts its light over the whole novella, and over the whole of Tolstoy’s work.
RICHARD PEVEAR
The Prisoner of the Caucasus
(A TRUE STORY)
I
A GENTLEMAN WAS serving as an officer in the Caucasus. His name was Zhilin.
A letter once came for him from home. His old mother wrote to him: “I have grown old, and would like before I die to see my beloved son. Come to me to say farewell, bury me, and then with God’s help go back to the army. And I have found you a bride: intelligent, and nice, and there is property. If she is to your liking, perhaps you will marry her and stay for good.”
Zhilin fell to thinking: “And in actual fact the old woman’s doing poorly; I may not get to see her again. Why don’t I go; and if the bride is nice, I might just get married.”
He went to his colonel, obtained leave, said good-bye to his comrades, stood his soldiers to four buckets of vodka in farewell, and made ready to go.
There was war then in the Caucasus. There was no traveling the roads by day or by night. As soon as a Russian rode or walked out of a fortress, the Tartars either killed him or carried him off into the hills. And so it was arranged that twice a week an escort of soldiers would go from fortress to fortress. The soldiers went in front and behind, and people went in the middle.
It happened in the summer. At dawn the baggage trains assembled outside the fortress, the escorting soldiers came out, and they started down the road. Zhilin went on horseback, and the cart with his belongings went with the train.
There were sixteen miles to travel. The train went slowly; now the soldiers would stop, then a cart wheel would fall off or a horse would refuse to move, and they would all stand there waiting.
The sun had already passed noon, and the train had only gone half the way. Dust, heat, a scorching sun, and nowhere to take shelter. Bare steppe; not a tree, not a bush along the road.
Zhilin rode ahead, stopped, and waited while the train caught up. He heard them start blowing the horn behind, meaning they had stopped again. And Zhilin thought: “Why don’t I go on by myself, without the soldiers? I’ve got a good horse under me; if I come across Tartars, I can gallop away. Or maybe I shouldn’t? …”
He stood there pondering. Then another officer, Kostylin, with a gun, rode up to him on his horse and said:
“Let’s go on alone, Zhilin. I can’t stand it, I’m hungry, and it’s so hot. My shirt is soaking wet.” Kostylin was a heavy man, fat, all red, the sweat simply pouring off him. Zhilin thought a little and said: