Tolstoy’s Last Gasp of Fiction: The Overlooked Masterpiece of “Hadji Murat”
One of Tolstoy’s greatest stories is one of his least known, and certainly belies the more common perception of Tolstoy as a writer of triple-decker novels such as Anna Karenina and War and Peace. “Hadji Murat” is also one of his last, written at a time when he had virtually abandoned fiction as a decadent art. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the subject matter takes him back to his earliest fiction, such as The Cossacks, which drew upon his own war-time experiences in the Caucasus (in the 1850’s). Today we would call this experiment ‘historical fiction,’ as it uses real characters and events; but Tolstoy plays fast and loose with the material in order to examine who these people might have been, and to examine a historical fiasco (the war itself) from every conceivable angle.
A better term for the work is a novel-essay, as novelistic development is absent from the work; there is no great hero, no existential crisis, and only fleeting attempts to tell a story. Instead, the story is a Ted-Talk that never was, Tolstoy breezing us through history from his own idiosyncratic perspective, lingering over the characters and events that interest him, but never for long. The story ends with an abrupt remark by the narrator that reverberates like a chilling echo: his last words as a writer of fiction.
“Hadji Murat” first appeared between 1911 and 1912, though he started work on it as early as 1903 in fits and starts. His slow progress is partially explained by his ambivalent attitude toward fiction at this stage of his life. Having written the controversial (and frankly annoying) essay, “What is Art?”, Tolstoy made a break with the European tradition of fiction. He rejected anything that smacked of love, character, philosophy, and reason; instead, he wanted sermons and fables that preached the virtues of Christianity and the peasant lifestyle. Unfortunately, for all his rhetoric, Tolstoy continued to indulge in aristocratic vices, such as taking numerous mistresses, and most damning of all (in his eyes), writing stories. “Hadji Murat” was one such sin of his old age, and in 1903 he admitted to a friend that he had to “write in on the sly from myself,” since he knew the work betrayed his narrow, didactic aims for art.
Yet despite some dark nights of the soul, Tolstoy never abandoned the work, perhaps realizing why people continue to read poetry and novels: they allow us to travel to places we can never go, experiences lives we could never experience, and emerge richer from the playacting of art. Hardly such a sin after all!
One writer who refused to cast stones was Harold Bloom, who in his book, The Western Canon, singled “Hadji Murat” out as one of his favorite works of literature. As he writes, “[the story 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…[its] originality, in the sense of strangeness, is the quality that, more than any other, makes a work canonical.”
Whether or not one generally agrees with Bloom, his statement on the canonical qualities of the work is well-stated. So often, the greatest works seem to follow no established plan or conform to any traditional genre; they make their own rules and proceed at their own pace, alternately delighting and frustrating their readers. Someone going into “Hadji Murat” expecting an exotic war novel or a tale of forbidden love will be sorely disappointed. Though still infected by the bug of fiction, he was thoroughly inoculated against the trends of nineteenth-century popular taste (which largely persist today).
In essence, the story concerns the defection of Hadji Murat, the most famous lieutenant of Shamil, the leader of the Caucasian resistance. Hadji switches sides out of fear for his life (Shamil was something of a rival) and because Shamil’s forces have kidnapped his family. Hoping to liberate them with the help of the Russians, Hadji brokers an alliance with Prince Mikhail Vorontsov, who admires his prowess and gentlemanly demeanor. But few of the Russians trust him, as he made his name mowing down Russian officers, and even his band of loyal followers hopes the relationship goes south. Yet there is no real suspense in the narrative, as the story opens with the narrator reflecting on Hadji’s death (see below), and the sense of grim inevitability haunts every twist and turn of the story. Writing with the hindsight of history, Tolstoy knew what would happen to the Caucasus by 1859: if not utterly conquered, then desecrated and absorbed into the Russian empire.
As a soldier in the Caucasus himself, Tolstoy couldn’t approach this story abstractly, as a story of ‘great men’ in exotic locales making important decisions. Instead, he could personally detail the acts of horror that hid behind the pages of history: during the war, Russian soldiers routinely burned villages, killed women and children, and were disemboweled and beheaded in turn. The story features a particularly gruesome scene when, during a routine scouting mission, a Russian soldier is shot in the stomach and slowly dies with only the most cursory medical attention.
As Tolstoy writes, “Avdeev was turned over again and for some time the doctor probed in his stomach. He found the bullet but could not extract it. After dressing the wound and fixing it with sticking plaster, the doctor left. All the time his wound was being probed and dressed Avdeev lay with his teeth clenched and eyes closed, but when the doctor had gone he opened his eyes and looked around in surprise. His eyes were looking towards the other patients and the orderly, but he appeared to see not them, but some other thing that surprised him greatly.” The soldier dies a few minutes later.
What’s amazing about this scene is not just its brutal realism, but the amazing life Tolstoy invests in this minor character, who we barely meet before he’s dispatched to his maker. After a brief snapshot of his death, we’re whisked away to his family’s farm, where we learn Avdeev volunteered to fight in the place of his brother, who was older but already had a family. And now the family gets the bitter news that Avdeev is dead, further fraying the splintered threads of guilt and resentment they feel for one another.
This approach, which some liken to “head hopping” in modern parlance, is the very “sense of strangeness” that Bloom earlier cites. The book never settles on a true hero of cast of characters, but excitedly travels through the eyes and experiences of everyone, large and small, engaged in the conflict. In one chapter we look through the eyes of Tsar Nicholas I himself (as documented below), and in another, we come face to face with Shamil, a less fearsome creature (despite his obvious power) than history might have us believe.
As a further act of distancing, the story is told by an unnamed narrator, possibly Tolstoy himself, who opens the story with a slender frame narrative, restoring it only at the very end of the story. Yet the opening preface sets the stage for the entire work, which is less a work of history than about history, and how people get inevitably swept up in the wake of human progress. The narrator is reflecting on this as he examines a field of earth that has recently been ploughed. Everything is destroyed in an organized, methodical fashion; and yet, a small bush remains, a Tartar-thistle bush, defiantly poking out of the earth, despite the defeat of its comrades. As the narrator reflects,
“One [shoot] has broken off and the remnant of stalk stuck out like a severed arm. There was a flower on each of the other two. The flowers had once been red, but were now black. One stalk was broken and its upper half with the soiled flower at the end hung down; the other, though caked with black mud, still stood erect. It was evident that the whole bush had been run over by a cart wheel and had then picked itself up again: for that reason it was standing crookedly, but still it was standing. It was like having part of its body torn away, its innards turned inside out, an arm pulled off, an eye plucked out. But still it was standing and would not surrender to man who had destroyed all its brethren around.”
This defiant thistle reminds him of Hadji Murat, a man who defied both Shamil and the Russian army, and stood defiantly even though his life — and indeed, his way of life — had already surrendered to the dust. Yet it’s not just Hadji who is lamented through the metaphor; throughout the story, an entire way of life and thinking seems to be laid to rest. The Russian soldiers who sacrifice themselves in this endless war are themselves thistles, mowed down by the imperial indifference of the tsar, while they, in turn, ravage the fields and lives of the Caucasians. Perhaps Tolstoy felt how strongly change was in the air, and how the very fields themselves would soon rebel against the farmers.
Similar to War and Peace is Tolstoy’s contempt for the ‘great men’ of empire, and standing in for Napoleon is Tsar Nicholas I, who emerges from the shadows of history as a wrathful, boastful tyrant. Tolstoy devotes an entire chapter to his point of view, so we can better appreciate the narrowness of his vision, and the inevitable downfall of Russia under his guidance. The following passage is one of his most searing indictments of the powerful, and could be applied to a laundry list of twentieth-century tyrants, and quite a few in the twenty-first:
“The plan for achieving a slow advance into enemy territory…had been put forward by Ermolov and Valyaminov. It was the exact opposite of Nicholas’ own plan…despite this, however, Nicholas also claimed credit for the policy of slow advance…One would have supposed that in order to believe that the plan of slow advance was his plan, he would find it necessary to conceal the fact that he had actually insisted on carrying out the operation of 1845 which was its complete opposite. But he did not conceal it, and, despite the obvious contradiction, prided himself both on his plan…and on the plan for slow advance. The blatant, unceasing flattery of those around him had so far detached him from reality that he was no longer aware of his own inconsistency and ceased to relate his words and actions to reality, logic or plain common sense, fully convinced that all his decisions, however senseless, unjust and consistent they were in fact, became sensible, just and consistent simply by virtue of having been made by him.”
This is Tolstoy’s most clear-eyed criticism of empire: that it breeds soulless despots who make a game of contradiction, delighting in telling the masses that “the sun shines at night” until they accept it as gospel. If fields can only be useful if plowed, then only the useful can be beautiful; thus, thistle bushes, flowers, and inevitably, people, must be blotted out of a blighted landscape. Only the tsar and his vision (or whatever vision he chooses to appropriate that day) can remain.
Not surprisingly, Tolstoy has far more sympathy for Hadji, who emerges as a fascinating contradiction himself. Both a merciless killer and a compassionate father, a man who looks away bashfully when women enter the room, but accepts with equanimity (if distaste) the fate that will befall his wife and mother if he doesn’t liberate them from Shamil (both will be gang-raped by the camp). While in many respects Tolstoy views him as a heroic vestige of a simpler, if crueler age, Hadji is also wise enough to understand the present moment. He knows, for example, that his people will have to capitulate, and those who refuse will be like falcon in the old folk tale (Tolstoy excels at bringing in the folk ideology of the Caucasus):
“the falcon…was caught, lived among people and then returned to his home in the mountains. The falcon returned wearing jesses on his legs and there were bells still on them. And the falcons spurned him. ‘Fly back to the place where they put silver bells on you,’ they said. ‘We have no bells, nor do we have jesses.’ The falcon did not want to leave his homeland and stayed. But the other falcons would not have him and tore him to death. Just as they will tear me to death, thought Hadji Murat.”
Though thinking primarily of him own return to the mountains, the same is true of all people of the Caucasus. Having accepted Russian arms and technology, having learned Russian words and customs, how can they ever return home? The bells aren’t so easily shaken off, and the mountains won’t so easily suffer the plow and yoke of Russian domination (as endless wars in Afghanistan would prove).
Sadly, Hadji’s defection and subsequent coup falls apart out of sheer bureaucratic indifference. Hadji demands the Russians help him free his family from Shamil’s camp, but such an order has to be approved from on high, and this person hasn’t heard from this one, and this person can’t act until such a time, etc. As time is pressing, Hadji is forced to flee in the night with his men to make a bold, and suicidal, attack on Shamil’s camp. Yet Russian guards stand in the way (who are dispatched), and Hadji soon has an entire troop of Russians — along with some native allies, who resent Hadji — on his trail. He is quickly gunned down after a brief standoff, and every soldier gets a chance to bayonet his fallen body (much as the Greeks once did to a fallen Hector in a very different battlefield).
The story ends with this bathetic denouement, leading the narrator to laconically remark, “This was the death that was brought to my mind by the crushed thistle in the ploughed field.” These are the last words of the story, and with them, Tolstoy washes his hands of the story — and of his career in fiction — in one swift stroke. It’s an abrupt and hollow conclusion, but in its own way triumphant. For Tolstoy refuses to glorify the past, his nation, or even the hero of his tale. Like the thistle, it merely sinks into the mud, its color fading, its story forgotten.
Or not quite forgotten: few who read this story can ever forget the tragic portraits of men and women stuck in the gears of history, their actions rendered meaningless by so many Nicholases and Shamils. We can’t change the past nor demand an accounting of the present, Tolstoy suggests; but we can stand our ground, and force the executioner to look us in the eyes before lopping our heads off. Or as he writes in the preface of the tale, “Man has conquered everything, destroyed millions of plants, but still this one will not give in.”
