Part II

INTRODUCTION

The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the powers of my soul, whom I have tried to reproduce in all his splendor, and who always was, is, and will be beautiful—is Truth.

Lev Tolstoi

Their god is freedom, their law is war.

Mikhail Lermontov on the Chechens (1832)

The tragic drama of Chechen and Daghestani resistance to Russian military conquest in the nineteenth century is the inspiration for Hadji Murat, the last work by one of the greatest novelists in the history of world literature. Lev Tolstoi was close to seventy years old when the project that became Hadji Murat began to gestate in his creative consciousness. The full mastery of his powers is still evident in his penetrating characterizations and his deft imparting of mood and scene. It is an astonishing accomplishment.

Tolstoi labored over this task for eight years, finishing it in 1904. It was not published until after his death in 1910. It is worth noting that ten drafts of the novel exist and that an “authoritative version based on Tolstoi’s manuscripts was established only in 1950 for the ninety-volume Jubilee edition of the author’s works.”1 This final, posthumous work of the great master is, we feel, unjustifiably obscure in the West. This no doubt stems from the fact that the commonly available English translation by the English adept of Tolstoi, Aylmer Maude, is seriously flawed as a translation project and is based on an earlier, incomplete draft of the novel. There is no need to cite chapter and verse of the shortcomings of Maude’s translation in this Introduction, but a brief example will give a sense of the problem. Maude translates the Russian word buket, which is a direct transliteration of the French original bouquet, as “nosegay.” More serious than the many, to our ears, odd examples of early twentieth-century British that are peppered throughout his translation are his renderings of conversations, which frequently are quite meaningless.² A far cry from Tolstoi’s Russian original, which is in the words of one critic, “Crystal-clear, exciting and supremely well narrated, it has claims to belong to that category of universal literature which Tolstoi prized so highly in his treatise What is Art?; for …its pathos is grounded in what Tolstoi called ‘those very simple, everyday feelings accessible to all’—the feelings of family solidarity and of compassion for human life.”3 It is this Tolstoi that we have sought to capture in our translation.

Here, in sharp contrast with The Shining of Daghestani Swords, the narrative structure matters a great deal As the existence of ten drafts indicates, Tolstoi was not rendering a “true” historical narrative of the defection of Hadji Murat, the sometime naib of Shamil, to the Russians and then his attempt to return to the “mountain” side of the conflict. What we have is a carefully structured and meticulously researched and written tale, expressive of the tortured, anti-imperialist conscience of Tolstoi. R.F.Christian has noted that the action moves from inanimate nature, through the lower ranks of the Russian social hierarchy to the imperial chambers in St. Petersburg and back down again to the natural setting of Hadji Murat’s death and the pbughed fields of the narrator’s setting. This is not the place to discuss Tolstoi’s philosophy of history, but, as the reader will see, Tolstoi believed that imperial power corrupted the very souls of the ruling classes. Meanwhile, the common people—for example, Hadji Murat’s messenger Bata and the common Russian soldier Avdeev—can and do have much in common. Whether Tolstoi’s moral universalism and his effort to salve his tormented conscience would have been received sympathetically by the Chechens and other mountain peoples who fell under Russian rule is one of the questions for the reader of these texts to resolve.

One of our goals in presenting these works is to present them to the reader in as direct and urifiltered a way as possible, so we will end these introductory remarks by mentioning the two central metaphors of Hadji Murat. The first is the “beautiful raspberry thistle in full flower—the kind our folk cal ‘Tatar,”’ the pointless destruction of which inspires the narrator to tell his tale. The other is the Tavlinian tale of the captured falcon, which attempted to return to its own kind, but was rejected by them, because it still wore the fetters and bells of its captivity. Using these two literary devices, Tolstoi presents the fates of both the mountain peoples in general and of Hadji Murat in particular to the reading public in the linear and secular fashion characteristic of the European novelistic tradition for much of the nineteenth century. This is a profoundly different mode of presentation and matrix of understanding of what the conflict represented than that offered in al-Qarakhi’s The Shining of Daghestani Swords. The reason we have put these two texts together is so that the reader can decide whether Tolstoi’s empathetic understanding of the conflictjrom, he thinks, the perspective of the mountain peoples is actually shared by them or whether the radically different presentation and focus of al-Qarakhi’s work constitute a root-and-branch rejection of all Russian points of view, however sympathetic. If you will, whether Harold Bloom is right, when he asserts that “Tolstoi holds Hadji Murad in his hands, as if indeed he held the man, and not a fiction.”⁴ Regardless of how the individual reader resolves those questions, we hope that we have succeeded in translating for the English-speaking reading public “the greatness,” again in Bloom’s words, “almost beyond the reach of art, of Hadji Murad.”⁵