Hadji Murad by Leo Tolstoy

First published:Khadzi-Murat, 1911 (English translation, 1911)

Type of work: Historical realism

Time of work: 1851-1852

Locale: The Caucasus Mountains

Principal Characters:

• Hadji Murad, a Moslem Caucasian warrior who defects to the Russians
• Nicholas I, the Czar of Russia
• Shamil, the Imam (holy leader) of the Chechen mountaineers
• Hamzad, Shamil’s predecessor as Imam
• Prince Simon Mikhailovich Vorontsov, the Russian commander at Vozdvighensk
• Princess Marya Vasilevna, his wife
• Michael Semenovich Vorontsov, his father, viceroy and sirdar
• Loris-Melikov, the aide-de-camp to the viceroy and sirdar
• Captain Butler, the commander of the Fifth Company
• Poltoratsky, the Russian company commander
• Peter Avdeev, a Russian soldier, killed in a skirmish
• Sado, the man who shelters Hadji Murad in Makhmet
• Yusuf, Hadji Murad’s son

The Novel

Hadji Murad takes place in the mid-nineteenth century Caucasus Mountains, where a religious civil war has been waged by the Tartar Moslem mountaineers, also known as the Chechen, against the Russian imperial army and Orthodox church, who are attempting to repress them and to extend the empire. As the story opens, Hadji Murad, a Tartar governor and a warrior of legendary prowess, has defected from the forces of Shamil, the Chechen holy leader (Imam), and is in flight. Hadji Murad is trying to negotiate with the Russians to join their forces and take revenge against Shamil, who has killed many of his kin and who holds his mother, two wives, and five children hostage. He finds refuge and hospitality in the home of Sado, who runs some risk because the rest of the village hope to capture his guest. Hadji Murad sends messengers to the Russians to offer his surrender on the condition that they accept him into their forces, help him regain his family, and let him fight with them to destroy Shamil.

Meanwhile, the villagers try to capture Hadji Murad, who gallops through their barricade and escapes into the forest, where he finds the rest of his men waiting for him. The next day, he is received at Fort Vozdvighensk by Prince Vorontsov, whose father is the viceroy and sirdar in the Caucasus. Both father and son hope to benefit from Hadji Murad’s defection, and they receive him with much ceremony.

Hadji Murad relates his past life to the sirdar’s aide-de-camp, Loris-Melikov. As a child and young man, Hadji Murad was a close friend of the Khan family. When a holy war erupted between the Chechens and the Russians, the Moslem Imam, Hamzad, urged the Khans to join. When they asked him first to explain the war, he mutilated their messengers and betrayed and killed the Khans; his second-in-command, Shamil, threw the youngest son over a precipice. Hadji Murad fled. That was the only time in his life that he was afraid. In revenge, he and his brother killed Hamzad in the mosque. During the assassination, the brother was killed, but Hadji Murad escaped. When Shamil succeeded Hamzad, he invited Hadji Murad to join him, but the latter refused; the blood of his brother and the Khans was on Shamil’s hands. Instead, Hadji Murad joined the Russians and was made governor of Avaria. A rival soon traduced him, had him imprisoned, and then had his men take him, as a bound prisoner, up a mountain pass—with orders to kill him if he tried to escape. From a height of 120 yards, Hadji Murad jumped off a cliff, pulling a soldier with him. Though his skull, ribs, arms, and a leg were fractured, he survived. Feeling betrayed by the Russians, he finally joined Shamil, who promised to make him ruler of Avaria again. For years, Hadji Murad fought the Russians in a series of bold raids and campaigns. Yet all this time, he hated Shamil, and when Shamil learned that Hadji Murad expected to succeed him, he confiscated his property and attempted to capture and kill him. At that point, Hadji Murad once again went over to the Russians.

Because of Hadji Murad’s past, the Russians are not sure that they can trust him. While they treat him as an honored guest, they also restrict his freedom and keep him guarded. When he defected, Hadji Murad had to leave his family behind, and they became prisoners of Shamil. Until they are freed, Hadji Murad cannot fully help the Russians overthrow Shamil. He urges them to negotiate with the Imam, to arrange an exchange of prisoners or, failing that, to undertake a rescue operation. Instead of giving Hadji Murad a command, the Russians, from the czar down, dawdle and play politics, with Hadji Murad as a pawn. Meanwhile, Shamil has threatened to give Hadji Murad’s mother and wives to various villages and to blind his eldest son, Yusuf. By terrorizing the mountaineers who are sympathetic to Hadji Murad, Shamil eliminates the possibility of their helping in a rescue attempt.

Finding that the Russians show no serious interest in freeing his family, that they waste time with bureaucratic trifles, Hadji Murad decides to escape and rescue his family himself. Hadji Murad is allowed a daily ride, with two of his men and a military escort. On the day of the escape, however, he takes all of his men. In a brief skirmish, his men kill several of the soldiers. When word reaches the fort, the commander sends his cossacks and the local militia in pursuit. Figuring that the pursuers will expect him to go right, to the mountains, Hadji Murad turns left, hoping to cross the river, go downstream, and cross back to the mountains by an unanticipated route, but he makes a fatal blunder, for the rice fields between him and the river have flooded and turned into a bog in which the horses flounder helplessly. By nightfall, the fugitives have reached a small patch of scrubby higher ground, where the troops catch them. Though vastly outnumbered, Hadji Murad refuses to surrender; he and his five men put up a heroic defense, but they are overwhelmed. Mortally wounded, Hadji Murad fights until he can no longer move. He can still fell pain when one of his enemies stabs him in the head. Then, the enemy beheads him.

The Characters

Though Hadji Murad is a short novel or novella, it has a panoramic scope and a large cast of characters. Writing as a detached omniscient third-person narrator, Leo Tolstoy moves among the characters freely. Hadji Murad, although the title figure, is present in only about half the novella, but his character dominates the narrative. A devout Moslem (a Hadji is one who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca), he never fails to make the prescribed Islamic prayers. In one sense, he is a turncoat and renegade. Yet, he also appears as a man of honor, driven twice into defection through betrayal by his allies. As a warrior, he is bold, resolute, and fearless; his prowess is legendary. In person, he is tall and slender, with a shaved head and black wide-set eyes. Despite his limp, he moves with the sinuous grace of an untamed panther. He is a man of action rather than contemplation. Thus, the reader rarely gets into his mind. Charismatic, Hadji Murad is a natural leader: haughty and contemptuous toward those he scorns, charming toward those he admires. His generosity and courtesy are Homeric. Whatever his faults, he is more admirable than either the czar or Shamil, to whose power plays he is victim.

Czar Nicholas I, who appears in several chapters, and Shamil, who makes only a brief appearance when he threatens to mutilate Hadji Murad’s son, but whose presence is felt throughout the narrative, are both evil manipulators of power. As the critic Henri Troyat observes, they resemble each other in many ways; each is tall, with a pale face, “big white hands,” and a cold, lifeless expression. The czar, however, is obese whereas Shamil is powerfully built. Each believes that he receives divine inspiration for his deeds of cruelty. Both are absolute despots. The czar is a hypocrite as well. Committing adultery and thanking God that Russia has no death penalty, he sentences a student accused of striking his master to twelve thousand strokes in the gauntlet—tantamount to death by torture. He orders all peasants who balk at baptism to be court-martialed and justifies any crime by the sanctity of his imperial office. Shamil uses his role as religious leader only to inflame his followers for a fanatical holy war. His is a religion of hatred, not love.

The large breadth of characters expands the novella’s setting to encompass all Russia. One sees the mountain people—Hadji Murad’s followers—brave, rash, and blindly loyal; the villagers, hating the Russians, who have burned and looted their community; the Russian officers, flirting, fornicating, drinking themselves senseless, gambling recklessly, and going into battle casually, as if to a hunt; the soldiers killed abruptly and pointlessly; their families mourning them; and the politicians caught in the web of their own intrigue. Among the soldiers, Captain Butler is much like young Tolstoy, who served with the Russian army in the Caucasus at the time of his narrative’s plot. He, too, flirts, drinks to excess, ruins himself at cards, and goes blithely into battle as if senseless of the danger. Poltoratsky, in turn, is much like Captain Butler. During an evening of cards with his commander, Prince Vorontsov, he flirts with the princess. In the morning, he gets one of his men killed in an unnecessary skirmish. The victim, Peter Avdeev, is a likable fellow who enlisted to save his married brother with children from being conscripted; his death means nothing to the officers but is devastating to his parents. His wife, though, is rather relieved, because she has been made pregnant by another man.

Critical Context

After the publication of Anna Karenina (1875-1877; English translation, 1886), Tolstoy experienced a brief bout of profound depression, followed, in 1879, by a religious conversion. The conversion caused him to reject the concept of art for aesthetic or entertainment value and to endorse only that art which advanced a high moral purpose and could be understood by the simplest people. Thereafter, he wrote comparatively little fiction, devoting himself more to religious, philosophical, and political essays; his short stories were often parables aimed at a popular audience. In 1898, he published his literary manifesto, “What Is Art?” In it, he maintains that people have no real need for most music, painting, and literature—which are mere idle distractions—and that the true artist should be a prophet, preaching moral values and confronting urgent problems of politics, economics, and human relations.

Yet, in the same year, he began Hadji Murad, which is free from this sort of didacticism and is generally considered one of his supreme artistic works. Written between 1898 and 1904 and published posthumously in 1911, Hadji Murad is Tolstoy’s last major work of fiction. In it, he returns to the manner and subject matter of such youthful stories of Caucasian adventure as “Nabeg: Razskaz volontera” (“The Raid: A Volunteer’s Story”), “Rubka lesa” (“The Wood-Felling”), and Kazaki (1863; The Cossacks, 1872). From 1851 to 1854, Tolstoy served in the Caucasus as an officer in the Russian army and took part in numerous raids against Shamil and the Chechen. The major events and characters in Hadji Murad, including Hadji Murad himself, are historically accurate, drawn from firsthand experience and observation. In addition, Tolstoy did extensive research on the Caucasus and the war between Shamil and the Russians. One of the merits of Hadji Murad is the vividness with which Tolstoy reconstructs the sense of time, place, customs, and conflicting cultures of the mountain people and the Russian soldiers and imperialists. Tolstoy the young officer who fought carelessly in the Caucasus and was repeatedly cited for bravery, however, was quite different from Tolstoy the aged moralist, who is critical of the debauchery and immaturity of such soldiers as Butler and Poltoratsky and who sees war not as a youthful diversion but as the grim reaper.

Usually Tolstoy is thought of as a realist; in Hadji Murad, he combinesa realistic technique with the romantic and exotic subject matter of the Caucasus that earlier appeared in fiction by Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov. In structure, Hadji Murad is cinematic, cutting abruptly from one quick, vivid scene to another. The novella stresses a visual quality, minimizes dialogue, and avoids authorial editorializing.

The aged Tolstoy, torn between conflicting claims of morality and art, sometimes dismissed Hadji Murad as rubbish. “If that is so,” asked one guest, “why did you write it?” “But it is not finished yet,” replied Tolstoy. “You came into my kitchen and no wonder it stinks with the smell of cooking.” The critical consensus is that Hadji Murad is a small masterpiece; critic Ernest J. Simmons calls it “almost a perfect example of the ‘good universal art’ that Tolstoy had acclaimed.”

Bibliography

Bayley, John. Tolstoy and the Novel, 1966.

Crankshaw, Edward. Tolstoy: The Making of a Novelist, 1974.

Simmons, Ernest J. Leo Tolstoy, 1946.

Tolstoy, Leo. The Portable Tolstoy, 1978. Edited by John Bayley.

Troyat, Henri. Tolstoy, 1967.