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Title: Hadji Murad by Leo Tolstoy, Aylmer Maude, Azar Nafisi ISBN: 0-8129-6711-9 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 08 July, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.55 (11 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: "War? War, indeed!...Cutthroats and nothing else!" HM, 118
Comment: Tolstoy's brilliant but quiet and cold-eyed satire of war-makers, both Russian and Chechen, from the lordly heights of the Tsar's Winter Palace to the scattered villages of Muslim fighters at the Caucasian edge of empire, and all players between. A "war story," yes, but in a league with For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Naked and the Dead, The Things They Carried, all of which it surpasses I think. Hard to convey the power of this little book. Much is in the structure: 25 chapters in 125 pages, the action alternating between the Russian and the Chechen sides, and from one place to another within each side, this alternation itself effecting a kind of commentary on the plot. (The brief, parallel glimpses of the Russian and Chechen homefronts in chapters 8 and 17, which show how differently, but how horribly in both cases, the war is brought home, are especially keen.) Also a meditation on the nature of true heroism, and on what it means to live one's life with a true awareness of death, of which attitude the title character, Hadji Murad, becomes the doomed and blessed embodiment. Perhaps not (pace Bloom) the greatest single narrative in the Western canon, but Perfect, in its own formidable terms.
Rating: 5
Summary: perhaps Harold Bloom got a little bit carried away
Comment: Like most everyone who's read his terrific book The Western Canon, it was Harold Bloom who sent
me scurrying to find Hadji Murad. We, all of us, take a stab at War and Peace and Anna Karenina,
and many schools assign the shorter Death of Ivan Ilych as required reading. But not many of us
venture beyond these narrowly circumscribed borders. Heck, the thousands of pages required just to
finish his major works seems like all we should be required to stand. But then came Bloom's soaring
endorsement of this minor work, and suddenly it was back into the breech.
Now, I confess, though I did like the novella and found it much easier reading, perhaps only because
shorter, than his other books. But I can't fathom Bloom's statement that :
It is my personal touchstone for the sublime of prose fiction, to me the best story in the world, or
at least the best that I have ever read.
Bloom seems particularly taken by the character of Hadji Murad, his heroic qualities, and by the
"growth" he displays over the course of the tale. Indeed, he is likable in a roguish way, but he's also
utterly unreliable and ultimately foolish. These are not heroic qualities in my book.
He's unreliable in the sense that his allegiances switch back and forth between the Russians and the
Chechens whenever changing circumstances make the one side or the other more personally
convenient. Absent is the kind of consistent political philosophy or moral matrix that makes for a
great hero. And he's foolish in that he rides off to near certain death in a futile effort to rescue his
family. Though appealingly sentimental, this is the suicidal gesture of an unserious person. What
good does adding his death to theirs do anyone?
Tolstoy does an impressive job of detailing many of the layers of the society of the time and of
presenting both sides in the conflict. He is generous with the Chechens, whom, as a Russian, he might
be expected to treat ill, and ungentle with the Tsar, who he might be expected to spare. Hadji Murad,
even if he does not rise to the level of archetypal hero, is nonetheless someone we root for and who we
are genuinely sorry to see meet tragedy. All of this is more than enough to recommend the book,
without being enough to call it the greatest piece of prose in the history of man.
GRADE : A-
Rating: 5
Summary: Courageous Warrior
Comment: The action takes place in the middle of the 19th century. Then, as now, the Russian army was engaged in a major, and exhausting, offensive in the Caucasus, in the area now known as Chechnya. The hero, Hadji Murad is a Chechen war lord and freedom fighter, who wants to liberate his people from oppression by the Russians. But he first needs to defeat Imam Shamil a Chechen leader, who controls a part of the country, and has imprisoned Hadji Murad's wife and son. In the attempt to do this, he enlists the support of the Russians by defecting to them. Murad informs the Russians that he won't be able to assist them unless he gets their support in getting his family safely back from Shamils grip. Who are (naturally) suspicious of him, but willing to use him as a way of extending their control of the area. Some of them incline to do so, but others fear he might be just spying on them. The action drags on, with no resolution arrived at, until Murad makes his final dash.
The narrators eye become a film camera, meticulously recording the movement of characters, creating the terrain capturing sounds and images in motion, coaxing the reader into following each move around each bend. The world Tolstoy describes has an air of brilliancy about it. He has the ability to portray the most mundane scenes and ordinary gestures as if they have just been discovered by him. In the text Hadji Murad moves from Chechen village to the Russian military posts, from ballroom and houses to the woods and open fields, all the scenes arise magically.
On the while it was a fun read and very descriptive in details.
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Title: The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy ISBN: 0679431314 Publisher: Everyman's Library Pub. Date: 01 April, 1994 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Sebastopol Sketches by Leo Tolstoy ISBN: 0140444688 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 July, 1986 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Taras Bulba by Nikolai Gogol, Peter Constantine, Robert D. Kaplan ISBN: 0679642552 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Gospel in Brief by Leo Tolstoy, Isabel Hapgood, F. A., III Flowers, Isabel Florence Hapgood, F. A. Flowers ISBN: 0803294328 Publisher: University of Nebraska Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1997 List Price(USD): $8.94 |
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Title: Caucasus: Mountain Men and Holy Wars by Nicholas Griffin ISBN: 0312308531 Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books Pub. Date: 01 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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