Forty years after his deployment in the Caucasus, Tolstoy wrote Hadji Murad, based on a real-life figure, over an eight-year period. Published posthumously, it is often regarded as one of the greatest novellas ever written.
Set during Russia’s early 19th-century conflict in the Caucasus, the story follows Hadji Murad, a feared warlord who defects to the Russians in a desperate bid to free his captive family from the ruthless commander Shamil. His gamble fails, and he is ultimately killed by the Russians after a botched escape attempt.
The novella has a cinematic quality, with Tolstoy’s unparalleled ability to render every sight, sound, and emotion anew for the reader. Its themes—rugged mountain landscapes, fundamentalist Islam vs. Christianity, tribal loyalties, imperial arrogance, the suffering of ordinary people, the grief of mothers, and the futility of war—remain strikingly relevant. I couldn’t help but draw parallels with the doomed Russian and American forays into Afghanistan. Tolstoy predicted all of these outcomes a century earlier.
Harold Bloom includes Hadji Murad in his ‘Western Canon’. In his words:
When Tolstoy’s story concludes with Hadji Murad’s heroic last fight, he and a literal handful of devoted supporters against a host of enemies, we are bound to be reminded of what seems to me the most memorable episode in For Whom the Bell Tolls, El Sordo’s last stand with his little knot of partisans against the vastly more numerous and more heavily armed Fascists. Hemingway, always Tolstoy’s eager student, brilliantly imitates his great original. Yet Hadji Murad also lives and dies as the archaic epic hero, combining in himself all of the virtues and none of the flaws of Odysseus, Achilles, and Aeneas.
The admirable qualities that Homer divides between Achilles and Hector are brought together in Tolstoy’s hero, who manifests neither the murderous rage of Achilles against mortality nor Hector’s collapse into a passive acceptance of the end.
Though Hadji Murad has never been adapted into a film, many of its scenes felt strikingly familiar: his surrender and negotiations through a translator, the hubris of the imperial powers, the terror of the Shariah, and Murad’s final, hopeless stand. These are moments we’ve seen countless times on the big screen; I now know what inspired them.
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