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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Hadji Murád, as in all his later writings, Tolstoy makes us feel how repugnant to him were the customary ways of the life we call “civilised,” with its selfishness and self-indulgence, its officialism, banquets, balls, and masquerades, and above all, with its complete lack of spiritual fervour. The manners and customs of the semi-savage tribesmen arouse no such abhorrence in him. The natural instinctive spontaneity of their conduct appeals to him; and throughout the tale he makes us feel that Hadji Murád could not possibly have acted otherwise than as he did, either when he deserted the Russians or when he returned to them, or when he slew his guards and tried once more to escape to the mountains. Hadji Murád held life cheap—his own as well as that of other people; but though he spilt much blood, he never arouses the antipathy we are made to feel for the pedantic, stupid cruelty of Nicholas I.

Especially attractive to Tolstoy is the religious fervour of self-abnegation, and the readiness for self-sacrifice in a great cause, which were so frequently shown by the mountaineers.

We are more closely akin to the men of other lands than we often realise; and lest someone reading this book should say to himself, “Yes, the Russians are so-and-so, but we are not as they …” it may be well to mention that the elder Vorontsóv’s mother was an Englishwoman, a Herbert of the Pembroke family. For that fact, and for much else, I am indebted to Mr. J. F. Baddeley, and especially for his version of the song of the blood-feud sung by Khanéfii, which I have borrowed.

The footnotes are not part of the original work, but belong to the translation.

Aylmer Maude.

Hadji Murád

I

I was returning home by the fields. It was midsummer; the hay harvest was over, and they were just beginning to reap the rye. At that season of the year there is a delightful variety of flowers—red, white, and pink scented tufty clover; milk-white ox-eye daisies with their bright yellow centers and pleasant spicy smell; yellow honey-scented rape blossoms; tall campanulas with white and lilac bells, tulip-shaped; creeping vetch; yellow, red, and pink scabious; plantains with faintly-scented, neatly-arranged purple, slightly pink-tinged blossoms; cornflowers, bright blue in the sunshine and when still young, but growing paler and redder towards evening or when growing old; and delicate quickly-withering almond-scented dodder flowers. I gathered a large nosegay of these different flowers, and was going home, when I noticed in a ditch, in full bloom, a beautiful thistle plant of the crimson kind, which in our neighborhood they call “Tartar” and carefully avoid when mowing—or, if they do happen to cut it down, throw out from among the grass for fear of pricking their hands. Thinking to pick this thistle and put it in the center of my nosegay, I climbed down into the ditch, and, after driving away a velvety bumblebee that had penetrated deep into one of the flowers and had there fallen sweetly asleep, I set to work to pluck the flower. But this proved a very difficult task. Not only did the stalk prick on every side—even through the handkerchief I wrapped round my hand—but it was so tough that I had to struggle with it for nearly five minutes, breaking the fibers one by one; and when I had at last plucked it, the stalk was all frayed and the flower itself no longer seemed so fresh and beautiful. Moreover, owing to a coarseness and stiffness, it did not seem in place among the delicate blossoms of my nosegay. I felt sorry to have vainly destroyed a flower that looked beautiful in its proper place, and I threw it away.

“But what energy and tenacity! With what determination it defended itself, and how dearly it sold its life!” thought I to myself, recollecting the effort it had cost me to pluck the flower. The way home led across black-earth fields that had just been ploughed up. I ascended the dusty path. The ploughed field belonged to a landed proprietor, and was so large that on both sides and before me to the top of the hill nothing was visible but evenly furrowed and moist earth. The land was well tilled, and nowhere was there a blade of grass or any kind of plant to be seen; it was all black. “Ah, what a destructive creature is man. … How many different plant-lives he destroys to support his own existence!” thought I, involuntarily looking around for some living thing in this lifeless black field. In front of me to the right of the road I saw some kind of little clump, and drawing nearer I found it was the same kind of thistle as that which I had vainly plucked and thrown away. This “Tartar” plant had three branches. One was broken and stuck out like the stump of a mutilated arm. Each of the other two bore a flower, once red but now blackened. One stalk was broken and half of it hung down with a soiled flower at its tip. The other, though also soiled with black mud, still stood erect. Evidently a cartwheel had passed over the plant, but it had risen again, and that was why, though erect, it stood twisted to one side, as if a piece of its body had been torn from it, its bowels drawn out, an arm torn off, and one of its eyes plucked out; and yet it stood firm and did not surrender to man, who had destroyed all its brothers around it. …

“What energy!” I thought. “Man has conquered everything, and destroyed millions of plants, yet this one won’t submit.” And I remembered a Caucasian episode of years ago, which I had partly seen myself, partly heard of from eyewitnesses, and in part imagined.

The episode, as it has taken shape in my memory and imagination, was as follows.

It happened towards the end of 1851.

On a cold November evening Hadji Murád rode into Makhmet, a hostile Chechen aoul,2 that was filled with the scented smoke of burning kizyák,3 and that lay some fifteen miles from Russian territory. The strained chant of the muezzin had just ceased, and though the clear mountain air, impregnated with kizyák smoke, above the lowing of the cattle and the bleating of the sheep that were dispersing among the sáklyas4 (which were crowded together like the cells of honeycomb), could be clearly heard the guttural voices of disputing men, and sounds of women’s and children’s voices rising from near the fountain below.

This Hadji Murád was Shamil’s naïb,5 famous for his exploits, who used never to ride out without his banner, and was always accompanied by some dozens of murids, who caracoled and showed off before him. Now, with one murid only, wrapped in a hood and burka,6 from under which protruded a rifle, he rode, a fugitive, trying to attract as little attention as possible and peering with his quick black eyes into the faces of those he met on his way.

When he entered the aoul, Hadji Murád did not ride up the road leading to the open square, but turned to the left into a narrow side street; and on reaching the second sáklya, which was cut into the hillside, he stopped and looked round. There was no one under the penthouse in front; but on the roof of the sáklya itself, behind the freshly plastered clay chimney, lay a man covered with a sheepskin. Hadji Murád touched him with the handle of his leather-plaited whip, and clicked his tongue. An old man rose from under the sheepskin. He had on a greasy old beshmét7 and a nightcap. His moist red eyelids had no lashes, and he blinked to get them unstuck. Hadji Murád, repeating the customary “Selaam aleikum!” uncovered his face. “Aleikum, selaam!” said the old man, recognizing him, and smiling with his toothless mouth; and raising himself on his thin legs he began thrusting his feet into the wooden-heeled slippers that stood by the chimney. Then he leisurely slipped his arms into the sleeves of his crumpled sheepskin, and going to the ladder that leant against the roof, he descended backwards. While he dressed, and as he climbed down, he kept shaking his head on its thin, shrivelled sunburnt neck, and mumbling something with his toothless mouth. As soon as he reached the ground he hospitably seized Hadji Murád’s bridle and right stirrup; but the strong, active murid had quickly dismounted and, motioning the old man aside, took his place. Hadji Murád also dismounted and, walking with a slight limp, entered under the penthouse. A boy of fifteen, coming quickly out of the door, met him and wonderingly fixed his sparkling eyes, black as ripe sloes, on the new arrivals.

“Run to the mosque and call your father,” ordered the old man, as he hurried forward to open the thin, creaking door into the sáklya for Hadji Murád.

As Hadji Murád entered the outer door, a slight, spare, middle-aged woman in a yellow smock, red beshmét, and wide blue trousers came through an inner door carrying cushions.

“May thy coming bring happiness!” said she, and, bending nearly double, began arranging the cushions along the front wall for the guest to sit on.

“May thy sons live!” answered Hadji Murád, taking off his burka, his rifle, and his sword, and handing them to the old man, who carefully hung the rifle and sword on a nail beside the weapons of the master of the house, which were suspended between two large basins that glittered against the clean clay-plastered and carefully whitewashed wall.

Hadji Murád adjusted the pistol at his back, came up to the cushions and, wrapping his Circassian coat closer round him, sat down. The old man squatted on his bare heels beside him, closed his eyes, and lifted his hands palms upwards. Hadji Murád did the same; then after repeating a prayer they both stroked their faces, passing their hands downwards till the palms joined at the end of their beards.

“Ne habar?” (“Is there anything new?”) asked Hadji Murád, addressing the old man.

“Habar yok” (“Nothing new”), replied the old man, looking with his lifeless red eyes not at Hadji Murád’s face but at his breast. “I live at the apiary, and have only today come to see my son. … He knows.”

Hadji Murád, understanding that the old man did not wish to say what he knew and what Hadji Murád wanted to know, slightly nodded his head and asked no more questions.

“There is no good news,” said the old man. “The only news is that the hares keep discussing how to drive away the eagles; and the eagles tear first one and then another of them. The other day the Russian dogs burnt the hay in the Mitchit aoul. … May their faces be torn!” added he, hoarsely and angrily.

Hadji Murád’s murid entered the room, his strong legs striding softly over the earthen floor. Retaining only his dagger and pistol, he took off his burka, rifle, and sword as Hadji Murád had done, and hung them up on the same nails with his leader’s weapons.

“Who is he?” asked the old man, pointing to the newcomer.

“My murid. Eldár is his name,” said Hadji Murád.