Hadji Murád, Leo Tolstoy [romantic books to read txt] 📗

The details of Hadji Murád’s life as given by Tolstoy in his story are not always historically exact; but the main events are true, and the tale is told in a way that gives a vivid and faithful picture of those stirring times.

Of the struggle for independence carried on in the Caucasus with such desperate bravery for so many years, very little was known to English readers until the publication of Mr. Baddeley’s The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus, which gives an excellent account of that involved, confusing and long drawn-out, but important, contest.

The Caucasus is peopled by so many tribes, differing so much among themselves, and all so strange to Western Europeans, that it is not easy to summarise the history of the conflict in a way at once correct and clear. There are, however, certain main facts which should be borne in mind when reading Hadji Murád.

As her only possible way of escape from the oppression of Persia on one side and of Turkey on another, Christian Georgia⁠—lying to the south of the Caucasian Mountains⁠—submitted to Russia as long ago as the commencement of the nineteenth century.

Even before that Russia had spasmodically attempted to conquer the northern part of the Caucasus; but from then onwards she had a special incentive to press forward and annex the territories dividing her from Georgia which was already hers.

The internecine feuds of the native tribes generally prevented them from offering a united resistance to Russian aggression; but the dense forests of Chechnya, and the exceedingly mountainous character of Daghestan, rendered the subjugation of those regions a matter of great difficulty.

In addition to the geographical obstacles there was another, due to a strong religious revival which sprang up among the Mohammedan population and, despite the feuds among the tribes, to a considerable extent and for a considerable time united them in a holy war against the infidel Russians.

Like all great religious movements this revival had roots in a distant past. It also had currents, religious and political, which swept now in one direction and now in another.

To begin with, there was a Murid movement which appears to have been almost identical with Sufi’ism, and to have existed from the third century of the Mohammedan era. That movement, going beyond the Shariát (the written law), inculcated the Tarikát (the Path) leading to the higher life. It also proclaimed the equality of all Mussulmans, rich and poor alike, and enjoined temperance, abstinence, self-denial, and the renunciation of the good things of both worlds, that man may make himself “free to receive worthily the love towards God.” In Muridism a teacher was called a Murshíd (“one who shows” the way), while a Murid was a disciple or follower (“one who desires” to find the way).

Such was Muridism for several centuries: a peaceful, religious movement of a highly spiritual character; but within the last few generations the struggle against Russia had given a new quality to the movement, and from being spiritual it had become strongly political.

As early as 1785 Mansúr, a leader of unknown origin, appeared in the Caucasus preaching the Ghazavát, or Holy War, against the infidels; and from 1830 onwards, when Kazi-Mullá, the first Imam (uniting in himself supreme spiritual and temporal power) took the field, Muridism became identified with the fierce struggle for independence carried on by the native tribes against the Russian invaders.

Mansúr and Kazi-Mullá are both mentioned in Tolstoy’s story, in which also Hadji Murád tells of the part he took in the execution or assassination of Kazi-Mullá’s successor, Hamzád. Shamil, too, who succeeded Hamzád and was the greatest of the Imams, figures as one of the principal characters in the story.

How little the nature and importance of that war in the Caucasus was understood by Western Europe is shown by the fact that when the Crimean War broke out⁠—the year after Hadji Murád’s death⁠—no serious attempt was made to support or encourage Shamil in the struggle which, even after the conclusion of the Crimean War, he desperately maintained against Russia till his last fortress fell in 1859, and he himself was sent prisoner to Kaluga.

We may be said to owe the existence of this story to the severe illnesses from which Tolstoy suffered in 1901 and 1902, for his sickness kept him in a state in which he found it difficult to work at “What is Religion?” or the other didactic essays he was engaged upon, and by way of relaxation he turned to fiction and produced Hadji Murád. It is worth noticing that in the fifth chapter of this⁠—one of the last stories he ever wrote⁠—Tolstoy describes a skirmish and a soldier’s death in a way that closely reminds one of an incident he had handled in “The Wood Felling,” nearly half a century before. He thus, at the outset and at the close of his literary career, told almost the same tale in almost the same way and with almost the same feeling.

On comparing the Caucasian stories he wrote between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-four with the one he wrote when he was seventy-four, one finds in them all the same wonderfully acute power of observation which seized the characteristic indications both of the inner and the outer life of man; the same retentive memory; the same keen interest in life, and the same discrimination between things sympathised with and things disapproved of, but there is this very noticeable difference: each of the earlier stories contains a character who more or less closely represents Tolstoy himself, through whose eyes everything is seen. Hadji Murád, on the contrary, is written quite objectively. Before he wrote it Tolstoy had become sure of himself, and felt that he had only to tell the story, and that his judgment of men and of actions would justify itself without his own point of view even needing to be explicitly stated.

In Hadji Murád, as in all his later