Hadji Murad

Hadji Murad, a celebrated Avar military commander, defects from Imam Shamil's resistance to the Russian side after a personal feud leaves his own family held hostage by Shamil as insurance against exactly this kind of betrayal, hoping Russian military backing will let him rescue them. Tolstoy, drawing on decades-old memories of his own service in the Caucasus, refuses either side the moral high ground: Shamil's rule is shown as its own brand of tyranny, ruling through terror and hostage-taking as readily as through faith, while the Russian command that welcomes Hadji Murad treats him throughout as a curiosity and a useful instrument rather than an ally whose stated goal, saving his family, they have any real intention of helping him achieve.

Tsar Nicholas I appears in a late chapter conducting the business of empire with a vanity and casual brutality that Tolstoy renders in unsparing, almost documentary detail, ordering both petty vengeance and mass violence against Caucasian villages with the same untroubled self-regard, a portrait so unflattering that Tolstoy knew it could not be published in Russia during his own lifetime. The thistle of the opening pages, a wildflower Tolstoy describes finding crushed but still rooted, damaged but refusing to simply die, becomes the novella's explicit key to Hadji Murad himself, a man caught and repeatedly wounded between two imperial systems that each regard him as a tool rather than a person, and who keeps acting, right to the end, as though his own survival and his family's were still worth fighting for regardless of how thoroughly both sides have already written him off.

Tolstoy worked on Hadji Murad intermittently for years near the end of his life, revising it obsessively but declining to publish it during his lifetime, aware that its unsparing depiction of Nicholas I and its refusal to flatter Russian imperial conduct in the Caucasus would draw censorship or worse. It appeared only in 1912, two years after his death, and its reputation has grown steadily since: Harold Bloom called it his personal favorite among all short novels, drawn to exactly the quality that made it unpublishable in Tolstoy's own day, its total indifference to which empire the reader might be rooting for.