But surely he is great and holy because he is a man, a madly and tormentingly beautiful man; a man of the whole of mankind.
Maxim Gorky on Lev Tolstoi, Reminiscences of Tolstoi, Chekhov and Andreev
There was one nation which would not give in, would not acquire the mental habits of submission—and not just individual rebels among them, but the whole nation to a man. These were the Chechens…
Alexander Solzhenitsyn on the Chechens, The Gulag Archipelago
This work began as a post-Soviet project and ended as more of a post-modernist one. In the early 1990s, in dismay over the general level of misinformation on the history of Russian—Chechen relations, we began to search for ways to alert the educated public to the complexities of that history. An obvious point of reference for newcomers to the Caucasus region is Lev Tolstoi’s posthumously published novella, Hadji Murat, whose title character was a major figure in the mountain war of the mid-nineteenth century. Unfortunately, English readers commonly encounter this little gem in the incomplete, unsatisfactory rendition by Tolstoi’s English disciple, Aylmer Maude. The Maude version is rife with archaic Anglicisms and punctuated by dialogue whose meaning is sometimes as remote as the peaks of the Caucasus. We decided, therefore, to begin our project by providing readers with a more accessible translation of Hadji Murat.
We also wanted our readers to have access to at least one indigenous account of the Caucasus’s unhappy history. To capture the mountaineers’ voices, we chose to translate Muhammad Tahir al-Qarakhi’s The Shining of Daghestani Swords in Certain Campaigns of Shamil. A scribe who enjoyed the confidence of Imam Shamil, the military and religious leader of the anti-Russian forces during the mountain war of 1830–1859, al-Qarakhi was exceptionally well placed to know the principal events of the war and to convey the mountaineers’ singular perspective on those events. Moreover, since The Shining of Daghestani Swords derives from the Middle Eastern tradition of chronicling and hagiography, our translation gives readers the chance to examine the formal divergence between mountain techniques of representation and the more familiar European genre of historical fiction.
Thus, our book presents two perspectives on the Caucasus: Tolstoi’s enlightened European viewpoint and al-Qarakhi’s indigenous interpretation. The commentary at the end of this work analyzes the war of worlds between imperial Russia and the Islamic mountaineers. Because of the currency of the subject matter, the eminence of Tolstoi, and the privileged proximity of al-Qarakhi to Imam Shamil and to the imam’s view of the conflict, we think this book is an excellent case study of cultural collision. As such we hope it will be of interest to specialists in Russian and Middle Eastern studies, to teachers of world and European history courses, and to the educated public in the English-speaking world and beyond.
Thomas Sanders, Ernest Tucker and Gary Hamburg