XII
On July 18, 1896 Tolstoi visited his brother Sergei Nikolaevich at the Pirogovo estate 35 kilometers from Iasnaia Poliana. While walking on the estate’s periphery, Tolstoi saw a raspberry thistle or Tatar bush, with three stalks: “one broken, its dirt-covered white flower hanging to the side; another broken and trampled into the mud, its stem run over and blackened by dirt; the third stalk protruding to the side, also covered with dust, but alive and in its middle portion still flowering.” The trampled but resilient thistle reminded Tolstoi immediately of Hadji Murat, perhaps because he had come to associate an invincible life force with the Caucasus mountaineers.
Returning to Iasnaia Poliana, Tolstoi spent three weeks re-reading books on the Caucasus war. On August 10 he visited his sister Mariia Nikolaevna at Shamordino, the women’s monastery next to Optina Pustyn’—site of the monastery made famous by F.M.Dostoevskii and V.S.Solov’ev as a locus of Orthodox wisdom. There, in the quiet of this rural sanctuary, Tolstoi wrote the first draft of Hadji Murat—a story which at this stage confined itself to the narrow biographical theme of Hadji Murat’s defection to the Russians and eventual death. On concluding the tale with the dying Hadji Murat’s exclamation, “Allah,” Tolstoi recorded the date of composition in his notebook: August 14, 1896.211
Two months later, when the moment of white-hot inspiration had passed, Tolstoi reread his story. Now he decided, the tale was “no good [ne to].” To improve it, he would have to extend its scope to include the entire period of the mountain rebellion and its principal figure, Shamil. This fateful artistic decision to widen the story-line launched Tolstoi on an obsessive search for printed and manuscript materials on the Caucasus and forced him, as he collected those materials, to revise his narrative strategy He did not complete Hadji Murat until December 1904, more than eight years after he first put pen to paper. Thus, the gestation period of Tolstoi’s last masterpiece exceeded that of his monumental early fiction—War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
From Tolstoi’s letters and diary we can reconstruct the main stages in the composition of Hadji Murat. From late 1896 to May 1898 Tolstoi requisitioned and read books on the Caucasus. On December 27, 1896 he asked his friend Vladimir Vasil’evich Stasov to send him information on “history, geography the ethnography of the Avar khanate.”212 Using his own library resources and Stasov’s list of books, Tolstoi consulted nearly five thousand pages of reference material. He read carefully the memoirs of Arnold L’vovich Zisserman and Vladimir Alekseevich Poltoratskii, both veterans of the Caucasus war.213 Although Poltoratskii’s memoirs had been excerpted in the journal Istoricheskii Vestnik, Tolstoi visited Poltoratskii himself and read 27 volumes of manuscript memoirs and diaries.214 He read relevant portions of the multi-volume Sbornik materialov dlia opisaniia mestnostei i plemen Kavkaza (Collected Materials for the Description of Places and Tribes of the Caucasus);215 he also looked at the Sbornik svedenii o kavkazskikh gortsakh, making over 300 notes. Tolstoi studied Adol’f Petrovich Berzhe’s 12-volume edition of archeological papers on the Caucasus.216 Out of this vast corpus of information Tolstoi added to his story several scenes involving the Russian military and officialdom: the description of soldiers on ambush, the encounter between Hadji Murat and the Vorontsovs, the letter from Viceroy Vorontsov to war minister Aleksandr Ivanovich Chernyshev, the conversation between Hadji Murat and Vorontsov’s adjutant Mikhail Tarielovich Loris-Melikov about the mountaineer’s past. However, throughout this period of intensive research Tolstoi struggled with his main character. On December 21, 1897 he confided to his diary: “I have been thinking through Hadji Murat, but it’s a struggle and I lack confidence.” Three months later he added: “There is a toy called English ‘peepshow’: you look under a glass cover and you see one thing, then another. That is how to show Hadji Murat: brave fighter, religious fanatic, etc.”217 Tolstoi’s idea was to reveal his hero kaleidoscopically, by presenting various facets and hoping they all would add up. But the technique didn’t help, because the terms in which Tolstoi perceived his subject prevented him from drawing Hadji Murat as a sympathetic human being. At this point the working title of Tolstoi’s story was “Ghazawat” and the hero was, among other things, a “religious fanatic.” Frustrated by his lack of progress, Tolstoi dropped the story in May 1898. He did not resume work on it until March 1901.
The second stage in writing Hadji Murat lasted from March 1901 to late September 1902. During this period Tolstoi continued to consult books on the Caucasus, but now his use of the historical and ethnographic record became more focused and highly selective. For example, he re-read E.A.Verderevskii’s edition of the captivity memoirs produced by Princess Orbeliani. Now, however, Tolstoi used the material to good effect in constructing a portrait of Shamil and Shamil’s retinue—a major addition to the text. Tolstoi also re-read his notes on mountain folklore from Sbornik svedenii o kavkazskikh gortsakh. He incorporated into chapter 1 of Hadji Murat various aphorisms and proverbs drawn from that source; he also incorporated mountain songs from that source into chapter 24.218
The major thematic addition of this period was an exploration of imperial decisionmaking on the Caucasus. Earlier drafts of Hadji Murat had mentioned the Vorontsovs and the letter from Viceroy Vorontsov to war minister Chernyshev. Now Tolstoi did further research on these characters. He read parts of the multi-volume Vorontsov papers in search of information on the disastrous “biscuit expedition” of 1845 and to find the original French text of the Vorontsov-Chernyshev letter.219 On June 20, 1902 Tolstoi visited the Vorontsov palace at Alupka, where he studied portraits of Mikhail Semenovich Vorontsov and family. Tolstoi’s companion on this trip Pavel Aleksandrovich Bulanzhe (Boulanger) wrote later that Tolstoi’s “sharp eye seemed to record every trait and subtlety of the faces that peered from within the picture frames.”220 Meanwhile Tolstoi’s search for the Vorontsov—Chernyshev letter failed to turn up the original text, despite an inquiry to grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, the Romanov family historian.221
As Tolstoi pressed his investigation of Russia’s war in the Caucasus, he naturally began to consider the pivotal role played by Tsar Nicholas I in that conflict.
In August 1902 Tolstoi sent his friend Stasov a request for anything on the history of Nicholas I and for the court journal [kamer-fur’ierskii zhurnal] containing the record of the tsar’s daily appointments.222 That same month he wrote Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich asking for the tsar’s correspondence with the Vorontsovs “and for Nicholas I’s inscription on memoranda and reports concerning the Caucasus in those years.”223 For the most part, Tolstoi’s research on Nicholas I proved fruitless: he learned that the sought-after court journal had not been published, and he had no luck finding a printed version of the tsar’s correspondence with Vorontsov. Still, the insights he garnered from printed sources comprised a solid foundation for the first drafts of the famous capsule biography of Nicholas I that would appear in chapter 15 of Hadji Murat.
At this point in the genesis of Hadji Murat, Tolstoi had begun to sound critical notes toward Russian policy in the Caucasus. The strongest evidence of his disagreement with the government’s view was his sketch of a raid on an unnamed Chechen village, a sketch that became the basis for chapters 16 and 17 in the final version of the tale. In the sketch, probably based on personal experience in the raid of June 27 and 28, 1851, Tolstoi’s alter ego, the easy-going, dissolute Captain Butler, watched soldiers set an entire village to the torch. During this deliberate orgy of destruction, Butler felt only the “joy of life,” the anticipation of a medal, and “respect for his comrades and Russian friends.” He did not notice the other side of war: “Death, the wounds of soldiers and officers and mountaineers did not present themselves to his imagination. He even unconsciously [bezsoznatel’no] in order to preserve his poetic image of war, never looked at the dead and wounded.”224
In the wake of the awul’s destruction, however, Chechen survivors dealt not with war’s “poetry” but with its mean prose. Aside from burnt houses with fouled interiors, torched haystacks, and beehives, a well polluted by excrement, they faced human losses that the war-intoxicated Butler “unconsciously” did not register. The currant-eyed, 15- year-old son of the villager Sado lay dead, bayonetted in the back. His mother, raped by soldiers, stood wailing over his body Two other dead bodies were brought to the awul’s center, there to be mourned by relatives. To this infernal scene Tolstoi added two paragraphs that sprang from forty years of bad conscience, four decades of trying to understand his own complicity in murder, two score years of attempting to fathom the perspective of the mountaineers:
About hating the Russians no one said a single word. The feeling gripping every Chechen from the youngest to the oldest was stronger than hatred. The feeling was not hatred but a refusal to recognize these Russian dogs as human beings, a feeling of such revulsion, disgust and incomprehension in the face of these creatures’ senseless cruelty that the desire to exterminate them, like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders, and wolves, was just as natural a feeling as self-preservation.
The inhabitants had a choice: to stay there and restore by dint of terrible effort all that had been built up by great labor and that had been so easily and senselessly destroyed, meanwhile expecting at any minute a repetition of the same destruction, or, contrary to the laws of their religion and to their sense of revulsion toward and suspicion of the Russians, to submit to their adversaries. After praying, the elders unanimously agreed to send Shamil a messenger asking for his help, then they immediately began to rebuild the destroyed village.225
As Tolstoi mightily strove to see from the mountaineers’ perspective what could not be seen from the Russian side, he ascribed ever-greater dignity to his hero, Hadji Murat. In the August/September 1902 draft, the hero acquired a military bearing, spiritual awareness, and economy of expression that suggested a rare nobility of character. Whereas in the early phase of the empire’s penetration into the Caucasus, Russian generals had styled themselves Roman heroes, now Russia’s greatest writer attributed classical dignity to the empire’s arch enemy: a complete transvaluation of values.
The third stage of writing Hadji Murat lasted from October 1902 to December 1904. In this period Tolstoi gathered hundreds of small details pertaining to his characters’ physical characteristics, behaviors, and outlooks. As we shall see, this research immensely enriched Hadji Murat but also shifted its literary center of gravity in a critical way
During this two-year period Tolstoi doggedly hunted down material about his protagonist. In December 1902 he wrote Ivan Iosifovich Korganov, the son of Colonel Iosif Ivanovich Korganov, asking for information about Hadji Murat. The questions Tolstoi put were quite specific:
1. Did Hadji Murat live in a separate house or with your father [during Hadji Murat’s stay in Nukha]? How was the house arranged?
2. Was his clothing some how distinct compared to that of ordinary mountaineers?
3. On the day he fled [toward the mountains], did he and his retinue ride out with rifles on their shoulders or unarmed?226
Korganov informed Tolstoi that his memory could not be trusted because “at that time I was only ten years old, and my range of interests [krugozor] was narrow.” Nevertheless, Korganov invited Tolstoi to inquire with his 82-year old mother, who was “very healthy and with excellent memory.” On receipt of Korganov’s invitation, Tolstoi immediately sent a second letter of inquiry to the aged Korganova:
My questions follow:
1. Did he [Hadji Murat] speak even a little Russian?
2. Whose were the horses on which he tried to escape? His own or others’? Were these good horses and of what color were they?
3. Did he limp noticeably?
4. The house, in which you lived on the top floor and he below, did it have a garden?
5. Was he strict in observing the Muslim religious practices—the five daily prayers and so on?227
With his usual thoroughness, Tolstoi paid an emanuensus to deliver this letter and to record Korganova’s answers.
Simultaneously with this investigation of Hadji Murat, Tolstoi plunged into a separate program of research on Tsar Nicholas I. Irritated by his inability to obtain published versions of Nicholas’s court journals and correspondence, Tolstoi tried to circumvent these obstacles by calling on his connections in the literary world and high society. He trusted his ideological ally, the Georgian writer Il’ia Petrovich Nakashidze, with the commission to obtain from Tbilisi archives “the most characteristic resolutions of Nikolai Pavlovich concerning the broadest possible range of issue pertaining especially to the years [18]51 to [18]55, and, the main thing, to late [18]51 and early [18]52.”228 With this request Tolstoi enclosed a note to Lieutenant-General Vasilii Aleksandrovich Potto, the director of the Tbilisi Military-Historical Archive, asking full co-operation with his emanuensis. The strategy was to secure from Tbilisi what might not be obtained in St. Petersburg. Simultaneously, Tolstoi wrote Stasov, asking him whether an emanuensis could be sent to the archives in St. Petersburg to examine the manuscript court journals “for five or six days of late 1851 and early 1852.” Almost as an afterthought, Tolstoi asked for “books containing Nicholas’ resolutions. Even if books can’t be sent, maybe copies could be made of the most characteristic resolutions” for the years 1848–1851.229 Still, in spite of the clear widening of his interests in Nicholas’ reign, Tolstoi told his aunt Aleksandra Andreevna that “I am writing not a biography of Nicholas I, but several scenes from his life essential to my story Hadji Murat.230
By April 1903, however, Tolstoi had begun to reconsider Nicholas’ character from an even wider perspective. To Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich he wrote: “I would have composed a rather negative picture of your grandfather’s character and personality, but…I changed my verdict and have been trying to penetrate more deeply into his soul and what made him who he was.”231 In mid-May 1903 Tolstoi wrote his brother Sergei Nikolaevich: “I am writing about Nikolai Pavlovich, and it is very interesting to me.”232 Early the next month he told his daughter Mariia Lvov’na Obolenskaia: “I am busy with Nik[olai] Pav[lovich] and seem to be clarifying what I need… This, you see, is proof that I am writing about power.”233 On June 4 he confessed to Pavel Ivanovich Biriukov that the chapter on Nicholas I in Hadji Murat was now “disproportionally long” [neproportsional’na], but he claimed the length was “necessary to illustrate my understanding of power [vlasti].”234 For the moment, however, he decided “not to touch” Hadji Murat, even as he continued to read material on Nicholas I.235 “If it became necessary,” however, Tolstoi reserved the prerogative “to write separately” on Nicholas.236 Tolstoi’s resolve to leave in Hadji Murat the long chapter on Nicholas I did not become final until February 1904.237
Tolstoi’s determination to place a definitive portrait of Nicholas I within the confines of Hadji Murat shifted the thematic focal point of the tale from the mountain insurgency as such to the “Tolstoian” theme of depotism. That Tolstoi was aware of the shift was already clear from his letters to Obolenskaia and Biriukov, but Tolstoi made his intention even more explicit in a conversation recorded by the historian Sergei Nikolaevich Shul’gin in mid-June 1903. Tolstoi told Shul’gin:
I have taken up not just Hadji Murat and his tragic fate but also the extremely curious parallelism of the two main antagonists of that epoch—Shamil and Nicholas, who together seem to constitute the two poles of governmental absolutism—the Asiatic and the European. In particular, one trait in Nicholas is striking—he often contradicts himself without noticing it and he thinks himself always absolutely correct. That is evidently how people of his milieu raised him to think, the spirit around him overflowing with servile flattery.238
XIII
In final form Hadji Murat was a tale about power, about despotism in its European and Asiatic forms. Structurally, the tale assumed pyramidal shape: the action began in the Caucasus, ascended the bureaucratic pyramid to its apex in St. Petersburg, then descended again to the Caucasus. The central chapters of Hadji Murat focused on the center of the empire, the emperor in the Winter Palace in the capital. Tolstoi knew the absurdity of claiming that St. Petersburg sat at Russia’s geographic center, for Peter the Great’s “window on the West” was just as peripheral spatially as was the North Caucasus. Yet in an empire the “center” is the locus of political authority, the galvanic point to which all compasses necessarily are drawn and from which ordering force invisibly flows. As if to underscore the significance of the tale’s fascination with European despotism, the famous chapter 15 devoted to Nicholas I was the longest and densest in the piece. It occupied 12 of Hadji Murat’s 117 printed pages; none of the other 24 chapters even approached that length. And, as we noted above, the chapter contained two years’ research and reflection on Nicholas’s character, style of government, and policies. Although Tolstoi devoted chapter 19 to Shamil and his privy council at Vedeno, that chapter was less than six pages long, and it lacked the psychological acuity, not to mention the referential density of the chapter on Nicholas. For Tolstoi, Asiatic despotism was a mere counterpoint to European bureaucratic absolutism—the latter being the primary object of investigation and the former being secondary. Put another way, Tolstoi might have intended a story about corrupting power in Europe and the “Asiatic” Caucasus. What he wrote was a tale that, in spite of the many pages on the mountain war, recentered St. Petersburg and the imperial project instead of decentering them.
In Hadji Murat Russian power was depicted as a social, psychological, and cultural phenomenon. From the social pespective, power functioned through social hierarchy; indeed, in Tolstoi’s opinion, power and social stratification were inextricably, perhaps causally, linked. The imperial government passed information from the killing fields of the Caucasus up to St. Petersburg’s elite officials and thence to the tsar; the tsar’s orders were transmitted down the service ladder to the Caucasus where those orders were murderously implemented. Although the effect of a particular decree was not always what the tsar intended, his command had tangible, bloody results: witness the description in chapters 16 and 17 of the Chechen awul’s destruction. Gone from Hadji Murat was the conceit of War and Peace that those highest in government have virtually no power over events. This transformation in Tolstoi’s notion of power carried vast consequences for his humble characters, who now became the monarch’s rough instruments in the mountain war. True, we cannot say that serf soldiers were His Majesty’s willing executioners: Avdeev was swept into the infantry by the serf recruitment system and family coercion, as chapter 2 instructed us. Yet these serf infantrymen and Cossack cavalrymen wreaked such devastation on Chechen awuls that they might as well have been willing executioners. Russia’s common soldiers, then, were power’s victims and tools. Whether victims or victimizers, however, they lacked the agency Tolstoi had accorded to Platon Karataev in War and Peace.
The psychological earmarks of power in Hadji Murat were mendacity and narcissism. Among common soldiers the natural impulse of attachment to fellow human beings—witness Avdeev’s enthusiastic report of conversation with the Chechen intermediaries in chapter 2—was submerged by the military “imperative” to remember that the other would “slit your guts.” In the officer corps falsehood was more deeply rooted: battles were arranged so as to advance careers, enemy casualty figures were inflated, superior officers were routinely deceived. Among policy-makers the art of lying was finely honed: Vorontsov senior’s verbal commications with Hadji Murat consisted of a courtier’s noncommital circumlocutions in which there was no word of truth; war minister Chernyshev arranged the presentation of “facts” to suit his own ends. The tsar was himself a master of the bright shining lie; indeed, Nicholas breathed deception. Linked to lying was self-preservation and self-promotion. Among soldiers the lie of hatred toward the “shaveheads” was helpful in mobilizing the vigilance needed for survival but also in earning the respect of comrades; for officers the dangers of battle served to inflate self-esteem and to win decorations; for policy-makers lying was the sole means of political survival and therefore the skill requisite for advancement; to Nicholas mendacity operated as a means of governing but also as the psychological underpinning of His Majesty’s boundless self-love. In chapter 15 Nicholas’ biggest lies were the assertions of his unique probity (“there is only one honest person in Russia”) and unmatched greatness. Unlike Peter the Great who presented himself as Russia’s most humble servant, Nicholas bestrode the political stage as God’s chosen narcissist.
In cultural terms Russian power exerted itself through the written word. Whereas the oral exchanges among common soldiers generally represented a window on their spontaneous, natural, and “true” emotions, printed reports generally constituted calculated lies—the “unnatural” medium of “artificial” hierachy. Susan Layton is right to note that Hadji Murat devalued the written word as “false mediation.”239 One might add that the more European the literary word, the more false: hence, the courtiers’ use of French over Russian was a cultural marker of falsehood.
In Hadji Murat religion in its two guises informed the cultural order. Among common soldiers the “true” religion of self-renunication and simple piety had space to operate: Avdeev gave up his own happiness for his brother’s sake; in chapter 7 the fatally-wounded Avdeev manfully faced death, asking for a candle in a last pious moment of self-surrender. Tolstoi showed the false guise of religion—religion as power—in chapter 15. After seducing a virginal teenager at a court dance, Nicholas prayed formulaic prayers to which he ascribed no meaning. At a religious service he compared the body of his amorous conquest to the ample charms of his “official” mistress Nelidova. Worst of all, he based his political decisions not on self-sacrificial love but on self-aggrandizing hatred for others—for unhappy Poles and rebellious mountaineers.
Meanwhile, Hadji Murat treated Shamil’s “Asiatic” despotism as a comparable but lesser-scale instance of power. Within the mountain societies, power created a hierarchy of three sorts: the authority of the khanates as described by Hadji Murat in chapter 11; the religious power of the murshids over their murids; and the hierarchy of rank in the mountaineers’ army. Surmounting all three social pyramids was Shamil, who destroyed the rival khanates, and enforced his personal authority in the religious community and in the insurgent army. As in the Russian case, the operation of power among the mountaineers depended upon deception and was linked to the leader’s inflated self-image. In chapter 19 we see Shamil returning to his headquarters at Vedeno knowing that the insurgents’ war was going badly yet doing all he could to sustain his followers’ universal conviction that the Russians had been defeated. The essence of his deception was theatrical projection of a brave, uncompromising image to his followers. Like Nicholas, Shamil stifled in himself feelings of natural compassion and self-renunciation. The imam’s treatment of Hadji Murat’s captive son Yusif in chapter 19 (he pledges not to kill, but to blind Yusif) was a perfect analogue to Nicholas’s “mercy” toward the Polish student (no capital punishment, but 12,000 strokes of the rod). In the end, Shamil’s cruelty in the name of God was a self-deception that perpetuated the insurgent leader’s “greatness.”
The most interesting feature of Asiatic despotism in Hadji Murat was the treatment of religion as a cultural system. On the one hand, the tale highlighted the piety of the mountaineers. The first sounds Hadji Murat heard on riding into the awul Makhket were “the strained singing of muezzin, calling villagers to prayer. The hero punctiliously observed the Muslim rituals praying five times a day washing himself in the rite of purification and so on. Hadji Murat and his murids offered to women a reverential respect that stood in stark contrast to the Russian habits of familiarity and sexual fliration. The murids’ obedience to their master was regarded as a religious duty. Even the exhausted Shamil, hoping for a liaison with his favorite wife, surrendered himself to midday prayer, which was for him “as essential as his daily bread.” And—the acid test for Tolstoi—just before his final skirmish with the Russians, Hadji Murat performed his prayers. For the mountaineers the “true” religion of piety, respect for others, and self-sacrifice constituted virtually the entire cultural landscape. Nevertheless, as in the Russian case, the natural religion competed with a false, worldly religiosity. We encounter religion as power in Shamil, who ordered violators of the sharia punished and treated others with hatred. We see a perversion of “true” religion in the murid system of obedience. We even discover in Hadji Murat himself a willingness to take money from the corrupt Russians—a pactus diabolis that he did not survive.
If we compare European with Asiatic despotism, then, we discover substantial similarities “under the skin” along with the not inconsiderable difference that European absolutism, being more “advanced,” was more hierarchical, more mendacious and narcissistic, and more hostile to “true” religion. In Tolstoi’s criterion of judgment, political power was inherently evil, so that being a “great power” entailed concentrated evil. A great state, like Russia, was, axiomatically, more evil than an aspiring state, like Shamil’s imamate.
We can scarcely be surprised about Tolstoi’s revulsion against political authority. Hostility to the state sprang directly from his pacifist reading of the Sermon on the Mount, and it informed his novel Resurrection (1899) as well as his 1902 letter to Tsar Nicholas II.240 What is surprising, however, is the hidden element of calculation that probably accounted for Tolstoi’s elaboration of the Hadji Murat incident. Hadji Murat was the perfect liminal figure: he fought on both sides of the mountain war, first against Shamil, then alongside him; he had held political authority on both sides, first in Avaria and later in the imamate; in 1851–1852 he sought personal advantage by crossing back to the Russian side; his tragedy was that, like the falcon in the Tavlinian story recounted in chapter 22, he finally belonged to no flock. As a border figure, Hadji Murat afforded Tolstoi the “neutral” perspective on the mountain war he needed in order to condemn power politics on both sides.
Yet if Tolstoi succeeded in viewing through the marvelous lens afforded by Hadji Murat the structures of power in the Russian empire and the North Caucasus, he failed in the enterprise of cultural crossing and religious mediation. How could he, possessed by formidable erudition and gifted with relentless intelligence, have fallen short of the mark in a task he was seemingly born to carry out?
From the outset Tolstoi’s interest in the mountain war was idiosyncratically confessional. Having gone to the Caucasus to discover war’s terrible secret—why men kill one another—he had guiltily watched a Chechen awul laid waste, then had himself taken part in the killing game. Tormented by bad conscience for decades, Tolstoi had seized on Hadji Murat as the vehicle of settling accounts. The apology sounded in the tale’s first page when the narrator, seeking to add a Tatar thistle to his bouquet, wrested the flower violently from its stalk, in the process wounding his own hand on the plant’s protruding thorns. “I regretted needlessly destroying a flower that had looked beautiful in its proper place, and I threw it away.” We know from the subsequent paragraphs and from Tolstoi’s diaries that the Tatar thistle was the emblem of the mountaineers’ life force. Susan Layton has argued that the narrator’s despoilment of the symbolic thistle inculpated Tolstoi “in his nation’s failure to connect properly and find a modus vivendi with the Muslim tribes.” The verdict is exactly right, but Layton did not stress the specificity of Tolstoi’s confession. He did not write Hadji Murat for an “ideal audience” of his upper-class Russian peers whom he wished to admonish for their forebears’ crimes in the Caucasus. Indeed, the evidence of his correspondence with Chertkov indicated a firm resolve not to publish the story in his lifetime.241 Tolstoi wrote mainly for himself: to express his sorrow, to “explain” himself to himself.
The confession, signalled by the tale’s first page, reached its climax in chapters 16 and 17, recounting the destruction of the awul Makhket. As we have seen, the events of the raid in Hadji Murat follow the script of Tolstoi’s early diaries and fiction. Where guilt presses on the soul, the urge to confess repeatedly overwhelms the sinner, leading to a repetition of the guilt narrative—a point made by Dostoevskii in Crime and Punishment. In Hadji Murat Tolstoi repeated the details of his criminal deeds. He relived the awful raid of 1852 vicariously, first through the superficial, heedless officer Butler, then through the injured and offended Chechen villagers.
The confession was surely sincere, but we must not miss the paradoxical element of exculpation. Butler, the commanding officer during the destruction of Makhket, acted unconciously, or rather, conscious only of life’s joy and of the positive side of war. He did not “see” the evil he had done, for he was caught in the machine of imperial power. In fact, every character in Hadji Murat was implicated, to a greater or lesser degree, in one or the other of the two power structures, and, to that degree, was unfree. Even Tsar Nicholas I, the embodiment of malice and deceptiveness, was the product of a milieu that determined his character and dictated his (dys)functional behavior.
By confessing his guilt, then displacing it onto the mechanism of imperial Russian power, Tolstoi directed readers’ attention away from the complexities of mountain culture. His self-laceration and inculpation of imperial power created in Hadji Murat a narrative asymmetry. What purported to be a story of the Caucasus became, by virtue of Tolstoi’s moral-ideological obsession with himself and with his imperial masters, another tale about the Russian conquest of the region.
It may be objected that the Russocentrism of Hadji Murat was balanced by Tolstoi’s deep research into mountain ethnography and politics and by his profound sympathy for Russia’s victims. In this respect, whatever the unevenness of the tale, Hadji Murat represented mountain life in a more compellingly realistic fashion than did its fictional precursors. The objection is well taken, and yet…
And yet Tolstoi did not identify the mainspring of mountain cultural life, the driving force behind the mountaineers’ resistance to Russia: the distinctive religious credo of the Sufi brotherhood. As we have seen, Tolstoi rejected the supernatural element of religious belief. For him, “true” religion was altruism, self-sacrifice, and charity This “true” religion was at the heart of every confessional credo, so that “true” Christians and “true” Muslims must be alike. The author’s compassion in Hadji Murat extended equally to common Russian soldiers and their mountain adversaries, because both instinctively felt sympathy for others even as both were by power forced to do unnatural evil deeds. The unstated hypothesis was that, absent power, the two peoples would be identical in their religious outlooks.
As we saw in our analysis of al-Qarakhi’s chronicle, however, the Islamic insurgents lived by the will of Allah. They understood Shamil to be a figure raised by God for the purpose of saving believers from the infidel Russians. The warrants for their faith included Shamil’s many escapes from enemies and from death itself—escapes inexplicable to infidels but transparently explicable to believers. The ties that bound together the mountain armies were not the interstices common to all states—bureaucracies, armies, written laws—but the unseen bonds of common belief. For Tolstoi, Shamil was an Asiatic despot, an analog to Nicholas I. For al-Qarakhi, Shamil was imam—a spiritual master far advanced on the path to God whose behavior should be emulated and whose will should be obeyed because it proceeded from knowledge of God.
Perhaps Tolstoi was unlucky in having no access to al-Qarakhi’s The Shining of Daghestani Swords. Tolstoi did not know Przewalski’s translation of the chronicle. Although Dubrovin had consulted it during the writing of his history of the mountain war, Tolstoi did not refer to Dubrovin’s work.242 Nor did Berzhe include The Shining of Daghestani Swords in his monumental edition of documents on Russia’s mountain war,243 a set of documents that Tolstoi read carefully and annotated. Nor did Tolstoi seek out in the far-away Caucaus native eyewitnesses of the mountain wars. He remained unaware of his contemporary Habibullah, al-Qarakhi’s faithful son, who at the very moment Tolstoi completed Hadji Murat was trying to publish The Shining of Daghestani Swords.
Tolstoi may have been unlucky, but it is difficult to suppose that al-Qarakhi’s chronicle would have changed in any essential the narrative direction of Hadji Murat. As he had dispensed with the supernatural in Russian Orthodoxy Tolstoi would certainly have discarded the “superstitious” components of The Shining of Daghestani Swords. Like his fictional alter ego Butler, Tolstoi could see only what his consciousness allowed him to see.
Tolstoi stood in the line of religious enlighteners who sought to save religions from themselves by reducing them to their ethical imperatives. Like his predecessor Voltaire who warred against church and absolutist state, Tolstoi saw human beings as essentially good and noble until corrupted by power. Like Rousseau, he saw a nearly unsullied spirit of generosity and wisdom reposed in the common man. He knew too much about the world not to mark the differences between cultures, but he thought the differences superficial: underneath the peasant kaftan and mountaineer’s burka there beat the same heart. But what he discarded of religion, its supernatural component, its maddeningly, idiosyncratically alien conceptions about God, that discarded thing was what made religion attractive to its adherents, that thing made each religion distinctive and irreducible.
If Russians would understand the Other in the North Caucasus, they would have to apprehend the Other’s God. Put another way for Russians to cross completely the cultural chasm between the Orthodox world and the Islamic world, they would have to revere, if not worship with the Sufis, al-Muqtadir, God the Decreer of Destiny.
That the Russians would not do. Empires have their imperatives, the first of which is security. So long as the Ottoman Turks imperilled Russia’s southern borders, so long as their co-religionists in the Caucasus anxiously awaited for that threat to materialize in order that they might rise up and throw off the hated Russian yoke, so long as the Russian empire’s Islamic peoples refused to disappear quietly into the good night of historical oblivion, the Russian elites’ task was plain: intimidate, subdue, oppress, displace or annihilate their internal Muslim opponents.
Nor, in the final analysis, could Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi bring himself to embrace the warring mountaineers and their militant religion. Hadji Murat twice crossed over to the Russians, and twice he returned to the mountains, on both occasions sowing death among the Russians. He died fighting for his “freedom,” for his God, for the ghazwa. In the Caucasus, as outside it, Tolstoi, try as he might, could find no kinder, gentler Islam. Tolstoi’s nightmare vision—Hadji Murat’s severed head lifted as a trophy of Russia’s vaunted power—was the bloody surreality he ultimately acknowledged. Eerily, in December 1897 Tolstoi’s friend Gavriil Andreevich Rusanov had shown the great writer a drawing of Hadji Murat’s leonine face, whose curving brow and shapely skull were so expertly limned that the shaken writer wrote in his diary: “Rusanov has Hadji Murat’s head.”244 From that moment to his death in 1910 Tolstoi was haunted, as Russia is today haunted, by the disembodied Other from the Caucasus.
Notes
1 Ibn Khurdadhbih (825–911) wrote a geographical treatise, Kitab al-Masalik wa’lmamalik [Book of Itineraries and Kingdoms], that became one of the standard geography texts in the Arabic language. For a short biographical note and bibliography, s.v. Encyclopedia of Islam (2nd edition), article “Ibn Khurdadhbih.”
2 See Povest’ vremennykh let. Chast’ pervaia. Tekst i perevod. (Izdatel’stvo ANSSSR: Moscow-Leningrad, 1950), pp.59–60; Povest’ vremennykh let. Chast’ vtoraia. Prilozheniia (Izdatel’stvo ANSSSR: Moscow-Leningrad, 1950), pp. 328–329. For Arabic versions of Vladimir’s religious “test,” see “Sbornik anekdotov,” Zapiski Vostochnogo otdeleniia Russkogo arkheologicheskogo obshchestva, Tom IX (St. Petersburg, 1896), pp. 262–267.
3 On Peresvetov and like-minded reformers see the magisterial book by Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Zimin, I.S.Peresvetov i ego sovremenniki. Ocherki po istorii russkoi obshchestvenno-politicheskoi mysli serediny XVI veka (Izdatel’stvo ANSSSR: Moscow, 1958).
4 See Janet M.Hartley, A Social History of the Russian Empire 1650–1825 (Longman: London and New York, 1999), p. 74.
5 The Russian-Tatar interaction is as yet little understood, but the recent scholarly work of Allen J.Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia. The Islamic World of Novuzensk District and the Kazakh Inner Horde, 1780–1910 (Brill: Leiden, Boston, Köln, 2001) suggests the degree to which Tatar Muslims managed to construct a semiautonomous social world.
6 Hartley, A Social History of the Russian Empire, pp. 74–75.
7 See Nikolas K.Gvozdev, Imperial Policies and Perspectives toward Georgia, 1760–1819 (London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 2000).
8 “Vsepoddanneishee pis’mo Ermolova ot 12 iiulia 1825 g.,” Cheteniia v Obshchestve Istorii i Drevnostei Rossii, 1867, kn. 3, p. 177, quoted in Anatolii Vsevolodovich Fadeev, Rossiia i Kavkaz pervoi treti XIX veka (Moscow:ANSSSR, 1960), p. 192.
9 Mikhail Petrovich Pogodin, ed., Aleksei Petrovich Ermolov. Materialy dlia ego biografii (Moscow: 1863), pp. 23, 288–289.
10 Zapiski Alekseia Petrovicha Ermolov s prilozheniiami v dvukh chastiiakh (Moscow: 1865–1868), II, p. 112. Quoted in Natan Lakovlevich Eidel’man, Byt’ mozhet za khrebtom Kavkaza (Moscow: Nauka, 1990), p. 39.
11 Quoted in Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan (London: Frank Cass, 1994), p. 34.
12 Semen Bronevskii, Noveishie geogrqfischeskie istoricheskie izuestiia o Kavkaze v dvuzh tomakh (Moscow, 1823), I, p. 32, quoted in Fadeev, Rossiia i Kavkaz p. 347.
13 Griboedov’s project entailed the establishment of a Russian “East India” company. The company would hold title to 120,000 desiatins of land on which it would grow “tropical products” for export. Apparently, Griboedov saw himself as the head of this monopolistic enterprise: he expected the right to use the Russian army against any enemies in the region, to build fortifications to control the Caucasus and so on. For a draft of the scheme see Polnoe sobranie sochinenii Griboedova (Moscow: 1889), I, pp. 135–153. Natan Eidel’man has analyzed the project in Byt’ mozhet za khrebtom Kavkaza, pp. 107–118.
14 See Susan Layton, “Nineteenth-Century Russian Mythologies of Caucasian Savagery,” in Daniel R.Brower and Edward J.Lazzerini, eds., Russia’s Orient. Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 80–100, here p. 87.
15 A.S.Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: ANSSSR, 1948), 8/1, pp. 441–490, here pp. 446, 456, 477, 482.
16 A.S.Griboedov, Sochineniia, 1953, pp. 574–575, quoted in Fadeev, Rossiia i Kavkaz, p. 353.
17 Nikolai Ivanovich Lorer, Zapiski dekabrista (Moscow: 1931), p. 214.
18 M.M.Bliev, “K voprosu o vremeni prisoedineniia narodov Severnogo Kavkaza k Rossii,” Voprosy istorii, 1970, no. 7, pp. 43–56, here p. 54.
19 Even so, Georgia was far from quiescent. In 1819, under the leadership of two bishops and their supporters within the landed nobility, the Imeritian elites resisted the reorganization of the Georgian church proposed by the Russian Exarch of Georgia. In 1828 there was a peasant uprising in Guriia. In 1832, Georgian officials plotted to assassinate Russian imperial officials at a ball in Tbilisi.
20 A.S.Pushkin, “Puteshestvie v Arzrum,” p. 449.
21 On the prolonged Circassian struggle, see Paul B.Henze’s fine article, “Circassian Resistance to Russia,” in Maria Broxup, ed., The North Caucasus Barrier. The Russian Advance toward the Muslim World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), pp. 62–111. For an analysis of Sheikh Mansur’s rebellion, see Alexandre Bennigsen, “Un mouvement populaire au Caucase au XVIIIe siècle,” Cahiers du monde russe et sovietique V/2 (1964), pp. 159–197, and Tarik Cemal Kutlu, Kuzjey Kajkasya’ nin ilk Milli Miicahidi ve Önderi, Imam Mansur (Istanbul: Bayrak Yayincilik, 1987). On the mass migration see Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims 1821–1922 (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1995).
22 Fadeev, Rossiia i Kavkaz p. 283; Rasul Madonedoran Magomedov, Obshchestvenno—ekonomicheskii i politicheskii stroi Dagestana v XVIII—nachala XIX v. (Makhachkala: Dagestanskii gos. univ., 1957), p. 83.
23 Fadeev, Rossiia i Kavkaz, p. 281.
24 Alexandre Bennigsen, “Au mouvement populaire au Caucase au XVIIe siècle,” pp. 176–179. For an overview of Sufi brotherhoods with occasional illuminating remarks on the Naqshbandi, see Carl W.Ernst, The Shambala Guide to Sufism (Boston and London: Shambala, 1997), pp. 120–146, and the more specialized J.Spencer Trimingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971).
25 See Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar, pp. 39–44.
26 According to one Soviet source, the commitment to holy war came in 1824, when Muhammad al-Yaraghi and other Daghestani ulama associated the fulfillment of sharia with ghazwa. In this account, the first battles of the holy war were fought under Beibulat Taimazov against Russian forces at Amir-Adji-iurt and the awul Gerzel’. Fadeev, Rossiia i Kavkaz, p. 327. Other Soviet scholars hold that “holy war” was not prosecuted until 1830. The earlier confrontations between indigenous and Russian troops they interpreted as part of an “anti-colonial war” by the Chechens and Daghestanis. Their transparent calculation was to privilege the indigenous national movement over the “reactionary” Islamic religious movement. See, for example, ANSSR. Dagestanskii filial. Istoriia Dagestana. Tom II (Moscow: Nauka, 1968), pp. 79–88:
27 For brief but illuminating remarks on the Naqshbandiyya, see the classical book by Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1975), pp. 363–367.
28 On Sirhindi’s teachings, see Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, pp. 367–369.
29 On the origins and spread of Naqshbandi ideas see the splendid book of Anna Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom. The Sufi Response to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus (New York: New York University Press, 2000), pp. 75–89, especially pp. 80, 86–87. For the Ninety-Nine Names of God and their place in Sufi prayer, see Ernst, The Shambala Guide to Sufism, pp. 81–119.
30 On the devotional practices of the Naqshbandiyya-Khalidiyya, see Hamid Algar, “Devotional Practices of the Khalidi Naqshbandis of Ottoman Turkey,” in Raymond Lifchez, ed., The Dervish Lodge. Architecture, Art and Sufism in Ottoman Turkey (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 209–227.
31 See Friedrich von Bodenstedt, Die Völker des Kaukasus und ihre Freiheitskämpfe gegen die Russen: Ein Beitrag zur neuersten Geschichte des Orients (Frankfort: Kessler, 1848), pp. 161–162, quoted in Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom, pp. 106–107.
32 Bodenstedt, Die Völker des Kaukasus, p. 168, quoted in Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom, p. 117.
33 Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom, p. 109.
34 The Arabic text was published three-quarters of a century after its writing. See Jamal al-Din al-Ghazi-Ghumuqi, al-Adab al-Murdiyya fi al-Tariqa al-Naqshbandiyya (Petrovsk: 1905). Zelkina has made “a full translation” of this work, which she promises to publish in the near future with annotations. Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom, p. 108, fn. 1.
35 Jamal al-Din al-Ghazi-Ghumuqi, al-Adab al-Murdhiyya fi al-Tariqa al-Naqshbandiyya, pp. 32–33, quoted in Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom, pp. 114–115, my translation.
36 In a recent book Alexander Knysh has argued that “the Russian officers and colonial administrators, who produced most of the accounts of the Caucasus and its inhabitants, were captives to the European and Christian stereotypes and anxieties about Islam and the Muslims which were as rife in their age as they are today.” Knysh noted that colonial administrators generally took a “conspiratorial view” of Sufism, regarding it as the core of the Muslim anti-colonial resistance; meanwhile, these officials looked on the “scriptural” Islam of the urban elites as more “civilized” and therefore more “manageable.” In the Maghrib region, French officials called the Sufi orders “a new sort of religion born of Islam”; analogously, in the Caucasus, “their Russian colleagues railed against ‘the blind zealotry’ of myuridizm, zikrizm, and dervishestvo, all of which were seen as a uniquely Caucasian (and innately militant) version of Islam. See Alexander Knysh, Islamic Mysticism. A Short History (Brill: Leiden, Boston, Köln, 2000), pp. 296–297.
37 Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar, pp. 24, 52, 58.
38 Ibid., p. 307, fn. 12.
39 Ibid., pp. 149–161.
40 Ibid., pp. 56, 271–273. The captives, generally well treated, were ransomed for silver at Qidhlar; they were exchanged for Russian-held prisoners and for silver at Alazan. The incident at Alazan provoked an international outcry against the “fanatic and barbarian” Shamil. It also led to publication of two important captivity narratives.E. A.Verderevskii, Plen u Shamila (St. Petersburg: 1856) and Edouard Merlieux, Les Princesses Russes Prisonnières au Caucase. Souvenirs d’une Française Captive de Chamyl (Paris: 1857), republished as Anna Drancey, Princesses russes, prisonnièrres au Caucase (Paris: A. Michel, 1980).
41 Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar, p. 99.
42 Ibid., p. 160.
43 Ibid., pp. 252–254.
44 Ibid., pp. 187–188.
45 For example, in 1843 Tsar Nicholas I personally directed Minister of War Chernyshev and General Neidgart to send proclamations to the mountaineers that Russia had no designs against their religion or property. See John F.Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus (London, 1908), pp. 379–380.
46 See Anthony L.H.Rhinelander, Prince Michael Vorontsov. Viceroy to the Tsar (Montreal Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), p. 175. See also RGIA fond 1268 (Kavkazkii komitet) op. 1, delo 799, II. 1–3, letter from M.S.Vorontsov to Minister of War A.Chernyshev, June 19, 1845.
47 Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar, pp. 177–179.
48 Ibid., pp. 122–123.
49 See Miliutin’s memorandum, “O polozhenii na Kavkaze,” in RORGB fond 169 (Miliutina), k. 18, ed. khr. 13, 1. 4; quoted in la. T.Sarapuu, “Kavkazskii vopros vo vzgliadakh i deiatel’nosti D.A.Miliutina, Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta. Seriia 8, Istoriia, 1998, no. 3, pp. 71–89, here 81–82.
50 See K.M.Iachmenikhin, “Voennye poseleniia na Kavkaze v 30–50-e gody XIXv.,” Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta. Seriia 8. Istoriia, 1991, no. 4, pp. 18–28.
51 D.A.Miliutin complained in his 1840 memorandum “O polozhenii na Kavkaze” about the counterproductive policy of shifting local tribes to new settlements. Yet in his 1844 memo “Mysl’ o razlichnykh obrazakh deistviia na Kavkaze,” he decided that the only way to counteract the tribes’ habit of staging bandit raids was to move ethnically Russian Cossacks to the border of the north Caucasus. The Cossacks, who shared the custom of raiding, would neutralize the non-Russian tribes. See la.T. Sarapuu, “Kavkazskii vopros vo vzgliadakh i deiatel’nosti D.A.Milutina,” pp. 83–84.
52 See “Obshchii vzgliad gen. Murav’eva na voinu s gortsami na Kavkaze,” Akty sobrannye Kavkazskoiu arkheogrqficheskoiu kommissieiu, Tom 11, pp. 65–67.
53 See the letter from Rostislav Andreevich Fadeev to his father, July 2/14, 1856; quoted in Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar, pp. 277–278. For the original, see “Pis”ma Rostislava Andreevicha Fadeeva k rodnym,” Russkii vestnik, October 1897, p. 64.
54 Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar, p. 278.
55 For the argument that ethnic cleansing was a twentieth-century phenomenon see Norman M.Naimark, The Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
56 This is the curious argument of B.N.Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii XVIII—nachalo XX v.: Genezis lichnosti, demokraticheskoi sem’i, gmnzhdanskogo obshchestva i pravovogo gosudarstva, Tom 1 (Dmitrii Bulanin: St. Petersburg, 1999), pp. 64–65. Mironov’s entire discursus on “the advantages of Russia’s vast spaces,” together with his ode to imperial rule, was dropped from the English-language translation of his “classic” book, probably because it would have offended American academic sensibilities. See Boris Mironov with Ben Eklof, A Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700–1917 (Westview Press: Boulder, CO, 1999). To be fair to Mironov, we must note his awareness of the mountain war’s cost, at least from the Russian perspective. He calculates that “Russia paid 200,000 lives to subjugate the Caucasus.” He also cites the estimate of Russian diplomats that “after the subjugation of the Caucasus, roughly 400,000 people emigrated to Turkey.” Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii. Tom 1, pp. 35–36. Astonishingly for a historian famed for his mathematical precision, Mironov does not distinguish between the Circassians in the northwest Caucasus, who emigrated en masse to Turkey in the 1860s, and the indigenous peoples of the northeast Caucasus, who after their defeat in 1859 largely remained in Chechnia and Daghestan.
57 See Thomas M.Barrett, “Lines of Uncertainty. The Frontiers of the Northern Caucasus,” in Jane Burbank and David L.Ransel, eds., Imperial Russia. New Histories for the Empire (Indiana University Press: Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1998), pp. 148–73. To be sure, understanding social processes on the Caucasus frontier is a worthy goal, to be pursued for its instructiveness about the lived history of the empire. But it is ungenerous or mistaken to imply that previous scholarship on the Caucasus was somehow flawed because it has concentrated on the conquest and its deleterious results.
58 On Shamil’s childhood see the excellent popular biography by Shapi Kaziev, Imam Shamil’ (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2001), pp. 13–21. His spiritual guide in the mountain caves was a childhood friend, Muhammad, two years his elder, In 1830 this friend became the first imam of Daghestan, Ghazi Muhammad.
59 He became a book collector, proud of the small library of efficacious spiritual works he managed to amass. During the mountain war he carried his most precious volumes across the battlefields of Daghestan and Chechnia, bitterly lamenting the moments of peril when he had to abandon his books and rejoicing at their recovery At several points in The Shining of Daghestani Swords al-Qarakhi mentioned Shamil’s attachment to these books, which the imam appeared to regard as animate beings, worthy of direct address.
60 The legend has Shamil swearing on the Quran to kill himself if his father did not stop tending grapes—a virtual impossibility since the Quran forbids suicide.
61 See Kaziev, Imam Shamil’, p. 46.
62 Istoriia Dagestana. Tom II (Moscow, 1968), pp. 99–107.
63 These conferences convened in 1841 at Darghiyya and 1848 at Andi. The conferences resembled war councils since their principal aim was to co-ordinate military action. However, the Andi conference also dealt with treatment of Russian deserters, requisitioning of gunpowder, and rectifying certain abuses by the naibs. See Istoriia Dagestana. Tom II, p. 101.
64 For published versions of the letters, see Kh.A.Omarova, ed, 100 pisem Shamilia (Makhachkala: Izdatel’stvo DNTS RAN, 1997) and R.Sh.Sharafutdinova, ed., Araboiazychnye dokumenty epokhi Shamilia (Moscow: Vostochnaia literature RAN, 2001).
65 “Pis’mo Shamilia ko vsem naibam, kadiiam, miuridam i prochim musul’manam (v period s 6 noiabria 1850 g po 26 sentiabria 1851 g.), in Araboiazychnye dokumenty epokhi Shamilia, pp. 84–85.
66 “Pis’mo Shamilia Khadzhimuradu (ne pozdnee avgusta 1850 g.),” in Araboiazychnye dokumenty epokhi Shamilia, p. 160.
67 The imam’s letter of 1836 to Major-General Klüge von Klugenau began: “From Shamil, a needy writer who entrusts all his affairs to the mighty protection of Allah” See “Pis’mo Shamilia general-maioru Kliuki [von Klugenau] (23 iiulia [1836 g.]),” in Araboiazychnye dokumenty epokhi Shamilia, pp. 109–113. A shorter, but also less honorific saluation can be found in the letter of 1836 to Major-General Reut: “From Shamil, a poor slave of Allah, to General Reut.” See “Pis’mo Shamilia general-maioru Reutu (22 noiabria 1836 g.; datiruetsia po date polucheniia dokumenta),” in araboizychnye dokumenty epokhi Shamilia, pp. 114–115.
68 Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar, p. 50.
69 This version of events was repeated in the novella Hadji Murat.
70 Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar, pp. 226, 243, 396, fn. 8, 402. Gammer calculated Ghazi Muhammad’s age in 1842 as “seven or eight.” Idem., p. 402, fn. 52. This would have made Ghazi Muhammad thirteen or fourteen years old in 1848. However, al-Qarakhi listed Ghazi Muhammad’s age in 1850 as eighteen, which would have made the boy ten or eleven years old in 1842.
71 Al-Qarakhi, pp. 226–227/177–178.
72 Ibid., pp. 227/179.
73 Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar, p. 267.
74 W.E.D.Allen and Paul Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields. A History of the Wars on the Turco-Caucasian Border, 1828–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), pp. 60, 66.
75 Allen and Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields, p. 68.
76 Karl Marx, The Eastern Question: Letters Written in 1853–1856 Dealing with the Events of the Crimean War(London: 1897), p. 167.
77 Allen and Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields, pp. 95–100.
78 On Bariatinskii see A.L.Zisserman, Fel’dmarshal’ Kniaz’ Aleksandr Ivanovich Bariatinskii, 1815–1879, 3 vols. (Moscow: 1890) and Alfred J.Rieber, The Politics of Autocracy. Letters of Alexander II to Prince A.I Bariatinskii 1857–1864 (Paris, the Haague: Mouton, 1966).
79 Rieber, The Politics of Autocracy, p. 69.
80 For details on Shamil’s reception see Thomas M.Barrett, “The Remaking of the Lion of Daghestan: Shamil in Capitivity,” Russian Review, 53:3 (July 1994), pp. 353–366.
81 Barrett, “The Remaking of the Lion of Daghestan,” p. 356; Shamil’s letter may be found in Akty sobrannye Kavkazskoiu arkheogrqficheskoiu komissieiu (Tiflis, 1866–1904,) 12, p. 827.
82 Barrett, “The Remaking of the Lion of Daghestan,” p. 357.
83 It is ironic that Abd al-Qadir, after fourteen years of struggle against the French in Algeria in support of Islam (1832–1846), surrendered to them in 1846 somewhat like Shamil did to the Russians in 1859.
84 See Marius Canard, “Chamil et Abdelkader,” Annales de l’Institute d’Etudes Orientales de la Faculté des Lettres d’Alger, XIV (1956), pp. 231–256; reprinted in idem. Miscellanea Onentalia (London: Variorum Reprints, 1973). I wish to thank my colleague Paul M. Cobb for this reference.
85 Among these, especially valuable is the anthology Institut istorii, iazyka i literatury im. G.Tsadasy, Dvizhenie gortsev severo-vostochnogo Kavkaza v 20–50 gg. XIX veka. Sbornik dokumentov (Makhachkala: Dagestanskoe knizhnoe Izd-vo, 1959), which contains many proclamations and letters of Shamil. A more exhaustive primary source, mixing Russian and non-Russian documents, is Akty, sobrannye Kavkazskoiu arkheogrqficheskoiu komissieiu (Tiflis, 1866-1904), 12 vols.
86 See. G.Mallachikhan, “Predislovie,” Tri imama, Society for Central Asian Studies, Reprint Series no. 16 (London: 1989), p. 7.
87 I.Kratchkovsky, “Daghestan et Yemen,” in Mélanges E.F.Gautier (Paris, 1937), pp. 288–296.
88 Canard, “Chamil et Abedlkader,” pp. 236–237.
89 A.M.Barabanov, “Vvedenie,” in ANSSSR, Institut Vostokovedeniia, Khronika Mukhammeda Takhira Al-Karakhi o Dagestanskikh voinakh v period Shamila (Moscow: ANSSSR, 1941), p. 11.
90 Al-Qarakhi, Khronika, p. 57/27.
91 Ibid., p. 201/155.
92 Ibid., p. 213/165.
93 Ibid., p. 222/174..
94 Ibid., pp. 223–224/175–176.
95 Al-Qarakhi was very clear about the link between Jamal al-Din’s return from captivity and the end of his work on the chronicle. Toward the end of the chapter “On the Return to the Imam of His Son Jamal al-Din,” al-Qarakhi wrote: “This is the end of what Muhammad Tahir gathered during his time with the imam…”, Khronika, p. 239/189.
96 Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar, p. 275.
97 Al-Qarakhi, pp. 239–240/189.
98 Ibid., p. 248/197.
99 Ibid., p. 248/196–197.
100 Ibid., p. 250/198.
101 The looting occurred in August 1859 just before the Russians’ final seige at Ghunib. Ibid., p. 249/198.
102 Ibid., pp. 251–254/199–203.
103 Ibid., p. 239/189.
104 Ibid., p. 315/256.
105 On Islamic notions of sainthood see Ernst, The Shambala Guide to Sufism, pp. 58–69.
106 Al-Qarakhi, pp. 108–110/71–73.
107 Ibid., pp. 155–156/115.
108 Ibid., pp. 53–56/24–28.
109 Ibid., p. 43/15.
110 Ibid., p. 86/52.
111 Ibid., pp. 94/59, 96/61.
112 Ibid., pp. 126–128/87–89. Note that the Prophet Muhammad also escaped death despite damage to his mantle.
113 Ibid., p. 206/158–159.
114 Ibid., p. 75/43. See also p. 89/54.
115 Ibid., pp. 108–109/72.
116 Ibid., pp. 246–247/195.
117 Ibid., p. 47/19–20.
118 Ibid., p. 181/137.
119 Ibid., pp. 194–195/149.
120 Ibid., pp. 114–115/76–77.
121 Ibid, p. 157/116.
122 Ibid., p. 51/23.
123 Ibid., pp. 49–50/21–22.
124 Ibid., p. 76/43–44.
125 Ibid., p. 96/61.
126 Ibid., p. 201/154; citation from Quran, 3:134.
127 Ibid., p. 213/165.
128 Ibid., p. 218/171
129 Ibid, p. 241/190.
130 Ibid., p. 249/197.
131 Ibid., p. 249–250/197–198.
132 Ibid., p. 185/140.
133 Ibid., pp. 254–255/203–204.
134 See his introductory remarks at the beginning of chapter 48, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
135 See A.L.Shapiro, Russkaia istoriogrqfiia s drevneishikh vremen do 1917 g.: uchebnoe posobie (Moscow: Assotsiatsiia “Rossiia”: Izd-vo “Kul’tura,” 1993).
136 For a lively analysis of Karamzin as historian, see Natan Iakovlevich Eidel’man, Poslednii letopisets (Moscow: Kniga, 1983).
137 For a splendid overview of Muslim historiography, s.v. Encyclopedia of Islam (2nd edition), article “Ta’rikh.” See also the classic F.Rosenthal, History of Muslim Historiography (Leiden, 1952); and T.Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (Cambridge, 1994).
138 See Jack A.Crabbs, Jr., The Writing of History in Nineteenth—Century Egypt. A Study in National Transformation (Cairo: The American University Press in Cairo, and Detroit: The Wayne State University Press, 1984), p. 39.
139 Although al-Jabarti remained a chronicler, Anouar Abdel-Malek has asserted that he was a “chronicler with a scholarly method striking in its rigor and richness of detail, and he was an observer-that is, an analyst of the European impact [on Egypt]. Anouar Abdel-Malek, Idéologie et renaissance nationale. L’Egypt moderne (Paris: Editions anthropos, 1969), p. 200. See also. Crabbs, The Writing of History in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, pp. 43–86. Al-Tahtawi himself probably translated twenty books from French into Arabic; see Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 71. According to Crabbs, al-Tahtawi and his pupils in the Cairo School of Languages “translated in all over 1,000 books into Turkish and Arabic.” Crabbs, The Writing of History in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, p. 72.
140 See Adeeb Khalid, “The Emergence of a Modern Central Asian Historical Consciousness,” in Thomas Sanders, ed., Historiography of Imperial Russia. The Profession and Writing of History in a Multi-National State (Armonk, New York and London, England: M.E.Sharpe, 1999), pp. 433–452, here 434–438.
141 A.M.Barabanov, “Vvedenie,” Khronika Mukhammeda Takhira al-Karakhi, pp. 9–10.
142 Ivan Nikolaevich Zakhar’in, Vstrechi i vospominaniia; iz literaturnago i voennago mira (St. Petersburg: Izd-vo M.V.Pirozhkova, 1903), p. 50; cited in Barabanov, “Vvedenie,” p. 10.
143 See Nikolai Fedorovich Dubrovin, Istoriia voiny i vladychestva russkikh na Kavkaze (St. Petersburg: V.Tip. Departamenta udelov, 1871).
144 For his earlier work, see A.P.Berzhe, Kratkii obzor gorskikh plemen na Kavkaze (Tiflis, 1858), reprinted (Nal’chik: Kabardino-Balkarskoe otd-nie Vseros. Fonda Kul’tury, 1992), and idem., Chechnia i chechentsy, reprinted (Groznyi: Kniga, 1991).
145 Barabanov, “Vvedenie,” p. 10.
146 Akty, sobrannye Kavkazskoiu arkheograficheskoiu kommisssieiu (Tiflis: Tip. Glavnago upravleniia namestnika Kavkazskogo, 1866–1904).
147 Barabanov, “Vvedenie,” p. 11.
148 Ibid., pp. 25–27.
149 Henri Troyat, Tolstoi, trans. Nancy Amphoux (New York: Harmony Books, 1967), p. 77.
150 L.N.Tolstoi, “Zapiski o Kavkaze. Poezdka v Mamakai-Iurt,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 90–i tomakh (Moscow, Leningrad, 1928–1958), 3, p. 215.
151 See Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire. Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 89–155.
152 “Zapiski o Kavkaze,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 3, pp. 215–216.
153 L.N.Tolstoi, “Dnevnik” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 46, p. 61, entry of June 11, 1851.
154 Ibid., p. 63, entry of June 11/12, 1851.
155 Ibid., pp. 64–65, entry of July 3, 1851.
156 See M.A.Ianzhul, 80 let boevoi i mirnoi zhizni 20–i art. brigady (Tiflis: 1886–1887), 2 vols.; quoted in Sergei Sergeevich Doroshenko, L.N.Tolstoi. Voin i patriot (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1966), p. 61.
157 “Dnevnik,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 46, p. 65.
158 “Nabeg. Rasskaz volontera (1852),” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 33, pp. 15–39, here 34.
159 Ibid., p. 35.
160 Ibid., pp. 221–223.
161 Ibid., pp. 222–223.
162 “Varianty iz rukopisnykh redaktsii ‘Nabega’,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 3, p. 228.
163 Doroshenko, Lev Tolstoi. Voin i patriot, pp. 78–79.
164 See Ianzhul, 80 let boevoi i mirnoi zhizn, 2, pp. 127–129; A.M.Zaionchkovskii, Vostochnaia voina 1853–1856 gg. v sviazi s sovremennoi ee politicheskoi obstanovki, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1913), 2.1, pp. 225–226.
165 V.A.Poltoratskii, “Vospominaniia,” Istoricheskii vestnik, 1893, no. 6, 667–672, quoted in Doroshenko, L.N.Tolstoi. Voin i patriot, pp. 93–95.
166 L.N.Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 3, p. 60.
167 Doroshenko, L.N.Tolstoi. Voin i patriot, p. 97.
168 L.N.Tolstoi, “Pis’mo kniaziu A.I.Bariatinskomu,” July 15, 1853, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 59, pp. 237–238.
169 L.N.Tolstoi, “Pis’mo T.A.Egol’skoi,” late August 1853, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 59, p. 244.
170 The “exception” was his novella, “Kazaki” [“Cossacks”] (1863), which treated the Terek Cossacks as indigenous heroes. But this exception proved the rule: in reality, the Terek Cossacks were instruments of Russian conquest-frontier settlers, not truly indigenous to the Caucasus region.
171 “Dnevnik,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 46, pp. 82–86. Entry of August 10, 1851.
172 Ibid., p. 86, entry of August 22, 1851.
173 Ibid., p. 87, entry of August 22, 1851.
174 Ibid., pp. 89–90, entry of February 1, 1852.
175 L.N.Tolstoi, “Pis’mo T.A. Egol’skoi,” January 6, 1852, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 59, pp. 145–149, herep. 147.
176 Ibid., p. 148.
177 “Dnevnik,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 46, p. 162, entry of June 23, 1853.
178 Stepan Andreevich Bers, Vospominaniia o grafe L.N.Tolstom, (Smolensk, 1893), pp. 9–10. See also V.A.Poltoratskii, “Vospominaniia,” Istoricheski i vestnik, 1893, no. 6, pp. 672–678.
179 Tolstoi and his brother left the north Caucasus on October 25. After arriving in Tbilisi on November 1, Tolstoi remained in the city until January 7, 1852. See Doroshenko, L.N.Tolstoi. Voin i patriot, pp. 64–67.
180 Tolstoi, “Pis’mo grafu Sergeiu Nikolaevichu Tolstomu i Mari’e Mikhailovne Shishkinoi,” December 23, 1851, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 59, pp. 132–133.
181 See “Dnevnik,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 46, p. 96, entry of March 20, 1852.
182 “Dnevnik” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 46, p. 183, entry of October 23, 1853.
183 Ia.I.Kostenetskii, Zapiski ob Avarskoi ekspeditsii na Kavkaze v 1837 godu, 3 chasti (St. Petersburg, 1851).
184 “Dnevnik,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 46, p. 184, entry of October 24, 1853.
185 See “Primechaniia k dnevniku,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 46, p. 444, n. 1085.
186 Layton, Russian Literature and Empire, pp. 246–247.
187 L.N.Tolstoi, “Iasnopolianskaia shkola za noiabr’ i dekabr’ mesiatsy,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 8, p. 44.
188 L.N.Tolstoi, Ispoved’, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 23, p. 12.
189 L.N.Tolstoi, Anna Karenina. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 19, pp. 398–399.
190 “Dnevnik,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 48, pp. 187–189, entry of June 2, 1878.
191 N.N.Gusev, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi. Materialy k biografii s 1870 po 1881 god. (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo AN SSSR, 1963), p. 436.
192 “Pis’mo Nikolaiu Nikolaevichu Strakhovu,” January 27, 1878, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 62, p. 381.
193 “Dnevnik,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 48, pp. 69–70, entry of May 22, 1878.
194 L.N.Tolstoi, Ispoved, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 23, pp. 5, 55–56.
195 N.N.Gusev, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi. Materialy k biografii s 1870 po 1881 god, p. 436.
196 “Pis’mo N.N.Strakhovu,” October 19, 1877, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 62, pp. 345–346.
197 Ibid.
198 “Pis’mo A.A.Fetu, November 11/12, 1877, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 62. p. 349.
199 See the letter to Strakhov of November 11/12, 1877: “Please, be so kind as to think about and render advice on the first part of Nikolai Pavlovich’s reign and particularly on the war of 1828–1829.” Strakhov sent N.Luk’ianovich’s Opisanie turetskoi voiny 1828 i 1829 godov, 4 vols. (St. Petersburg: 1843–1847) and Paul Lacroix, Histoire de la vie et du règne de Nicolas I, empereur de Russie. See “Pis’mo N.N.Strakhovu,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 62, p. 349.
200 “Pis’mo Petru Nikolaevichu Svistunovu,” March 14, 1878,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 62, p. 394. Svistunov, himself a Decembrist, was supposed to pass the inquiry to Beliaev, a Decembrist who did twelve years at hard labor in Siberia before being sent to the Caucasus in 1839. P.S.Bobrishchev-Pushkin and A.P.Bariatinskii were also Decembrists. The former had translated Pascal’s Pensées; in May 1878 Tolstoi considered finding a publisher for this translation but dropped the plan. Gusev, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi. Materialy po biografii s 1870 po 1881 god, p. 495.
201 Gusev, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi. Materialy po biografii s 1870 po 1881 god, p. 493.
202 On Odoevskii see N.Ia.Eidel’man, Byt’ mozhet za khrebtom Kavkaza, pp. 217–278.
203 S.v. Encydopedia of Islam (2nd edition), articles “Bab,” “Babis,” “Baha’is.”
204 “Pis’mo O.S.Lebedevy Levu Nikolaevichu Tolstomu,” August 1, 1894, in Aleksandr Iosifovich Shifman, Lev Tolstoi i Vostok (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Vostochnoi Literatury, 1960), pp. 405–409.
205 “Pis’mo O.S.Lebedevy Levu Nikolaevichu Tolstomu,” August 18, 1894, in Shifman, Lev Tostoi i Vostok, p. 410.
206 “Pis’mo Ol’ge Sergeevne Lebedevoi,” September 4, 1894, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 67, p. 215.
207 “Pis’mo Ol’ge Serveevne Lebedevoi,” September 22, 1894, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 67, pp. 223–224.
208 Friedrich Carl Andreas, Die Babi’s in Persien. Ihre Geschichte und Lehre quellen mässig und nach eigener dargestellt (Leipzig, 1896).
209 “Pis’mo Isabelle Arkad’evne Grinevskoi,” October 22, 1903, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 74, 207–208.
210 “Pis’mo Ippolitu Dreifusu,” April 18, 1904, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 75, pp. 77–78.
211 See “Varianty k ‘Khadzi Muratu,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 35, pp. 284–307.
212 “Pis’mo Valdimiru Vasil’evich Stasovu,” letter of December 27, 1896, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 69, p. 226.
213 See A.L.Zisserman, Dvadtsat’ piat’ let na Kavkaze (1842–1867), 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1879–1884). V A.Poltoratskii, “Vospominaniia,” serialized in Istoricheskii vestnik, 1893.
214 “Pis’mo Vladimiru Vasil’evich Stasovu,” January 4, 1897, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 70, p. 11
215 Sbornik materialov dlia opisaniia mestnostei i plemen Kavkaza, 20 vols. (Tiflis: Tip. Kantseliarii glavnonachal’stvuiushchago grazhdanskoi chasti na Kavkaze, 1893–1895).
216 Akty, sobrannye Kavkazskoiu arkheogrqfeskoiu kommissieiu (Tiflis: 1866–1904), 12 vols.
217 “Khadzhi-Murat. “Istoriia pisaniia,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 35, pp. 593–594.
218 Ibid., pp. 601,608.
219 Arkhiv kniazia Vorontsova, 40 vols. (Moscow: Tip. A.I.Mamontova, 1870–1895).
220 P.A.Bulanzhe, “Kak L.N.Tolstoi pisal ‘Khadzhi-Murata,” Russkaia mysl’, 1913, no. 6, pp. 79–80.
221 See “Pis’mo Velikomu Kniaziu Nikolaiu Mikhailovichu,” letter of August 20, 1902, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 73, pp. 281–282.
222 “Pis’mo V.V.Stasovu,” August 10, 1902, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 73, p. 276.
223 “Pis’mo Velikomu Kniaziu Nikolaiu Mikhailovichu,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 73, p. 282.
224 Khadzhi-Murat, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 35, p. 79.
225 Ibid., p. 81.
226 “Pis’mo Ivanu Iosiforichu Korganovu,” letter of December 25, 1903, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 73, p. 353.
227 “Pis’mo Anne Avesalomonovne Korganoi,” letter of January 8, 1903, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 74, p. 10.
228 Pis’mo Il’iu Petrovichu Nakashidze, letter of December 20, 1902, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 73, pp. 346–347.
229 “Pis’mo Vladimiru Vasil’evichu Stasova,” letter of December 20, 1902, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 73, p. 348.
230 “Pis’mo Aleksandre Andreevne Tolstoi,” letter of January 26, 1903, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 74, p. 24.
231 “Pis’mo Velikomu Kniaziu Nikolaiu Mikhailovichu,” letter of April 1, 1903, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 74, p. 94.
232 “Pis’mo Sergeiu Nikolaevichu Tolstomu,” May 18, 1903, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 74, p. 128.
233 “Pis’mo Marii Lvov’ne Obolenskoi,” letter of June 3, 1903, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 74, p. 137.
234 “Pis’mo Pavlu Ivanovichu Biriukovu,” letter of June 3, 1903, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 74, p. 140. He made the same point in a letter to Vladimir Grigor’evich Chertkov: “I’m writing something in H[adji] M[urat] about Nik[olai] Pavl[ovich], a separate chapter that, even if it will be disproportionately long compared with the whole, fascinates me [chrezvychaino privlekaet menia].” “Pis’mo Vladimiru Grigor’evichu Chertkovu,” June 11, 1903, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 88, p. 298.
235 “…I am reading about Nik[olai] Pavl[ovich], who interests me very much, and I am correcting H[adji] M[urat] so as not to touch it again…,” “Pis’mo Vladimiru Grigor’evichu Chertkovu,” letter of June 30, 1903, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 88, pp. 300–301.
236 “Dnevnik,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 54, p. 178, entry of June 18, 1903.
237 See “Khadzhi-Murat. Istoriia pisaniia,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 35, p. 627.
238 S.N.Shul’gin, “Iz vospominanii o gr. L.N.Tolstom,” in L.N.Tolstoi v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Gos. Izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1955), II, pp. 162–163.
239 Layton, Russian Literature and Empire, pp. 274–277.
240 For the latter see “Pis’mo Nikolaiu II,” letter of January 16, 1902, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 7 3, pp. 184–191.
241 See “Pis’mo Vladimiru Grigor’evichu Chertkovu,” letter of October 11, 1902, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 88, pp. 277–278.
242 Dubrovin’s Istoriia voiny i vladichestva russkikh na Kavkaze, 6 vols. (St. Petersburg 1871–1888) did not extend beyond 1827; thus, Dubrovin did not incorporate al-Qarakhi in his narrative. In January 1896, Tolstoi received from V.V.Stasov a list of books on the Caucasus containing Dubrovin’s history Tolstoi struck Dubrovin from the list as irrelevant to his Caucasian tale. See “Khadzhi-Murat. Istoriia pisaniia,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 35, p. 588.
243 Akty, sobrannye Kavkazskoiu arkheogrqficheskoi kommissieiu, 12 vols. (Tiflis: 1866–1904).
244 See Nikolai Nikolaevich Gusev, Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva L’va Nikolaevicha Tolstogo. 1891–1910 (Moscow, 1958–1960), 2. p. 261. There is another, less probable version of this encounter with Hadji Murat’s head. According to A.P.Sergeenko, the author of the Hadji Murat commentary in Tolstoi’s Complete Works, Rusanov showed Tolstoi an oval mask whose curving brow and shape recalled the Avar hero. See “Khadzhi-Murat. Istoriia pisaniia,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 35, p. 592. More recent scholarship has sided with Gusev. See Lidiia Dmitrievna Opul’skaia, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi. Matenaly k biografii s 1892 po 1899 god (Moscow: Nasledie, 1998), p. 269.