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Interviews | November 3, 2009

Sheila A.: IMG On Storytelling: The Powells.com Interview with Donald Miller

2 comments By Sheila A.

donaldmillerDonald Miller is a Christian writer, but the question that Miller asks with his latest memoir, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, is applicable to... Continue »
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    A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

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Hadji Murad

by Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy

Hadji Murad Cover

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

In 1851 Leo Tolstoy enlisted in the Russian army and was sent to the Caucasus to help defeat the Chechens. During this war a great Avar chieftain, Hadji Murád, broke with the Chechen leader Shamil and fled to the Russians for safety. Months later, while attempting to rescue his family from Shamil’s prison, Hadji Murád was pursued by those he had betrayed and, after fighting the most heroic battle of his life, was killed.

Tolstoy, witness to many of the events leading to Hadji Murád’s death, set down this story with painstaking accuracy to preserve for future generations the horror, nobility, and destruction inherent in war.

Review:

“[Tolstoy is the] greatest of all novelists.” —Virginia Woolf

Synopsis:

Tolstoy heard the tales that grew up around the warrior-hero Hadji Murad and wrote this sweeping tale that takes up the viewpoints of all major characters in a gripping first-person narrative. This edition includes newly commissioned end notes. Maps.
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history 244, August 4, 2008 (view all comments by history 244)
No one spoke of hatred of the Russians. The feeling experienced by all the Chechens, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hate. It was not hatred, for they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings…the desire to exterminate them—like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders, or wolves—was as natural an instinct as that of self-preservation.

Russian attempts to annex and pacify the Caucasus Mountains lead to a protracted guerilla war for the first half of the 19th century. Leo Tolstoy had served as an officer in this conflict as a young man, and he chose to write about this experience in the last days of his own life. Hadji Murad, written by Tolstoy between 1896 and 1904, and published posthumously in 1912, examines the war from several viewpoints and offers a comprehensive picture of the Caucasian front. By centering his story on the events surrounding the death of Hadji Murad, a Muslim warlord who attempts to ally himself with the Russians to rescue his family, Tolstoy avoids a one-sided narrative. He is perhaps the first Russian author to depict the Chechen point of view, as exemplified by the above excerpt. In doing so, Tolstoy humanizes the enemy, and rationalizes their resistance.
Tolstoy also empathizes with the plight of the common Russian soldier. The death of Avdeev, a peasant conscript, shows not only the callousness of the Russian officers, but also the pain that death inflicts on the soldier’s mother back home. Tolstoy’s portrait of Russian society stretches all the way to the Tsar. The author dedicates an entire chapter to Tsar Nicholas I, in which he depicts the emperor as being more concerned by love affairs with young courtesans than affairs of state.
Rather than romanticizing the conflict, as other Russian authors had done before him (Lermontov’s, A Hero of Our Time, comes to mind), Tolstoy portrays the war realistically. The story remains pertinent more than a century later, as evidenced by one publisher’s choice to feature a modern Chechen rebel on the cover of Hadji Murad.
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Product Details

ISBN:
9780812967111
Translator:
Nafisi, Azar
Introduction:
Maude, Alymer
Introduction:
Nafisi, Azar
Author:
Tolstoy, Leo
Author:
Tolstoy, Leo Nikolayevich
Author:
Maude, Alymer
Publisher:
Modern Library
Location:
New York
Subject:
General
Subject:
Literary
Subject:
Russian & Former Soviet Union
Edition Description:
Modern Library paperback ed.
Series Volume:
1420
Publication Date:
July 2003
Binding:
Paperback
Language:
English
Pages:
192
Dimensions:
8.12x5.16x.43 in. .32 lbs.
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