Hadji Murat

Leo Tolstoy

Description

Hadji Murat, one of the most feared and venerated mountain chiefs in the Caucasian struggle against the Russians, defects from the Muslim rebels after feuding with his ruling imam, Shamil. Hoping to protect his family, he joins the Russians, who accept him but never put their trust in him - and so Murat must find another way to end the struggle.Tolstoy knew as he was writing this, his last work of fiction, that it would not be published in his lifetime, and so gave an uncompromising portrayal of the Russians' faults and the nature of the rebels' struggle. In the process, he shows a mastery of style and an understanding of Chechnya that still carries great resonance today.

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781847492319
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Hadji Murat
Leo Tolstoy
Translated by Kyril Zinovieff
and Jenny Hughes

ALMA CLASSICS




Alma Classics an imprint of alma books ltd 3 Castle Yard Richmond Surrey TW 10 6TF United Kingdom www.almaclassics.com
Hadji Murat first published in Russian as Khadzhi-Murat in 1912
This translation first published by Alma Classics Limited (previously Oneworld Classics Ltd) in 2011
This revised new edition first published by Alma Classics Ltd in 2015
Translation and notes © Kyril Zinovieff and Jenny Hughes, 2011
Cover image © davidturnerphotography.co.uk
Background material and map © Alma Classics Ltd
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-481-8
All the pictures in this volume are reprinted with permission or pre sumed to be in the public domain. Every effort has been made to ascertain and acknowledge their copyright status, but should there have been any unwitting oversight on our part, we would be happy to rectify the error in subsequent printings.
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Contents
Introduction
Hadji Murat
Notes
Glossary
Extra Material
Leo Tolstoy’s Life
Leo Tolstoy’s Works
Select Bibliography


Introduction
Tolstoy began to write Hadji Murat in 1896 and did not finish until 1904, six years before his death. It was therefore one of his last pieces of imaginative prose, separated from his two great novels by thirty years, by a religious crisis, and by very many pieces of spiritual and didactic writing. He was writing Hadji Murat at the same time as a novel called Resurrection , which was described in 1927 by the great Russian critic D.S. Mirsky as “Tolstoy at his worst” – the work of a seventy-year-old man, tired, angry, resentful, unhappy and not very well. And yet. And yet the same critic describes Hadji Murat as “Tolstoy at his best… a masterpiece of the highest order”. So it is.
It is a masterpiece of many parts. First, it is an irresistible, epic tale which drags you across Jurassic mountains, down precipices and through rushing streams, on and off white horses, in and out of palaces, cottages, barrack rooms and banquets until, with its hero, you come to the end of life. Secondly, most of it happens to be true – or at least, to be based on real events, recorded in detail by various people who were there at the time. Thirdly, it obviously came to Tolstoy not as a duty (like so much of his late writing) but in a flash of happy memory, a return to the spring of his life when he first discovered that he was a gifted writer. For the setting of Hadji Murat is 1852, the year that Tolstoy’s first novel, Childhood , was published to great acclaim. And he made the discovery in, for him, the happiest of circumstances: wild scenery, wonderful horses, no responsibilities and the company of brave young men.
As a relatively old man, sitting at home on the evening of 26th May 1904, Tolstoy suddenly recounted to his family the story of how he went to the Caucasus in his civilian coat, how he stayed with his soldier brother, Nikolai, whose regiment was stationed at Starogladkovskaya on the Russian border with Chechnya, how he went on a raid for the first time wearing his civilian coat, how after two years he joined the artillery as a cadet and how, two years later, he went to serve as an officer in the Crimea. These were not the random memories of an old man but a flare of recaptured excitement and joy that came to him as he put the finishing touches to Hadji Murat more than fifty years later.
Nor did he forget to put himself in the story : “in a black frock coat, buoyed up by an overwhelming joy of life… [Butler] looked at those mountains and filled his lungs with the air around him, rejoicing in the fact that he was alive and that it was precisely he who was alive, and in this lovely world too.” Butler was tall and handsome, which Tolstoy never was; but both of them gambled disastrously at cards, both were refugees from St Petersburg and both were lovers of horses. Unlike Butler, however, Tolstoy never met Hadji Murat, though he arrived in the region in the spring of 1851 and Hadji Murat defected to the Russians in November of that year.
Tolstoy’s account of the story must, of course, be given a moral if it was to justify a place in his late œuvre. It wouldn’t be sufficient for him just to enjoy himself. So Russia and imperial courtiers are bad, mountain tribesmen and Cossacks good; autocrats on both sides bad, free and independent spirits good. But even here – in the description of the court of Nicholas I, of the farewell dinner for poor General Kozlovsky, who was better at fighting Chechens than at making speeches, of the Imam Shamil stood up in his own harem by his youngest wife – there are scenes that are wickedly funny even when they burn with distaste.
What was happening in the Caucasus in the middle of the nineteenth century was, give or take, much the same as is happening in the Caucasus at the beginning of the twenty-first century: an armed insurgency by native Islamic militants from numerous small tribal communities against a powerful Russian presence – indeed, the leader of the Chechen insurgency until his death in 2006, Shamil Basayev, was named after the Imam Shamil. The weapons have become more frightful, the prize no longer the passage to India and the Silk Road to China but the control of oil pipelines and intercontinental missile sites. Then, as now, the natural state of the small tribal communities was disunity. The military historian John Baddeley, writing in 1908, describes “the very height and ruggedness of the great ranges, the profound depth and steepness of the valleys, the vast spread of the primeval forest” which “made union impossible” – until the arrival of a religious movement, which converted itself into a political and military movement and produced, for a time, a religious and military leader with a unifying strategic vision. From 1784 (when she accepted the protectorate of Georgia and Sheikh Mansur emerged as a unifying leader of the tribesmen) until 1859 (the final surrender of the Imam Shamil to Prince Baryatinsky), Russia waged war in the eastern Caucasus, enduring losses on a scale that would not be tolerated by a modern democracy.
That war went on for sixty years. And in the end, when he finally surrendered, Shamil was defeated not by the Russians but by the disintegration of tribal loyalty. The Russians subsequently treated him with respect and sensitivity, so that he wrote to the Grand Duke Mikhail from his deathbed in Medina: “Your benevolence is that of God towards the Prophet Job. I can never repay you”, signing himself: “the very ill and very ancient pilgrim, Shamil.” Sixty years was a long war – and, indeed, that wasn’t the end of it. Perhaps the impatient twenty-first century might learn something from those sixty years.
The Caucasus at the end of the eighteenth century marked the limits of Russian influence southward. The spine of the area was the range of huge mountains running west by a little bit north from the Caspian to the Black Sea; the Kingdom of Georgia which at its own request had become a Russian protectorate; and its capital Tiflis (Tbilisi), which became the Russian centre of government and seat of its viceroy. To the south-west of the mountains lay Turkish-dominated pashalics, to the south-east Persian-dominated khanates and, just north of them, straddling the mountain range at its eastern end, lay two wild territories dominated by nobody but their inhabitants: Chechnya and Dagestan. These covered an area roughly 150 kilometres long at its longest and 150 kilometres wide at its widest, packed with mountain chains rising to over 4,000 metres which, in turn, were raked by river beds carved into ravines some 1,000 metres deep. On the precipitous sides of these crags clung villages – aouls – which were virtually unassailable except by raiders prepared to fight house-by-house and hand-to-hand.
The mountains, the precipices and the unassailability were most extreme in Dagestan and southern Chechnya. In northern Chechnya, towards the border with Russia, both the geology and the tribesmen were more amenable. Here, the Russians had allies – some more reliable than others – and a fairly well-established defensive line. This was manned by Orthodox Christian Cossack communities which had settled there over the previous two hundred years. By the 1830s, these settlements had developed so that they formed “the Cossack Line” of outposts along the Terek River, which flowed east into the Caspian Sea along Russia’s southern border; the Cossacks cultivated their own land, bred their own horses, brought up their families (having often intermarried with local tribes), manned defensive positions along the river (whose crumbling banks they were responsible for repairing) and supplied mounted troops and garrisons for the forts and fortresses with which the Russians were gradually consolidating their advance.
But as fast as Russia pushed south, building forts and acquiring quisling allies, the mountain tribes of Chechnya and Dagestan were discovering a unifying cause: the Ghazavat or Holy War against the Russian invaders, led first by Sheikh Mansur, then by the Imam Ghazi Mullah and finally, for nearly thirty years, by the Imam Shamil. They were fighting in the name of Allah and a new Muslim sect – Muridism. Their enemy was the giaour : the infidel