The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories

Hadji Murat

I WAS RETURNING home through the fields. It was the very middle of summer. The meadows had been mowed, and they were just about to reap the rye.

There is a delightful assortment of flowers at that time of year: red, white, pink, fragrant, fluffy clover; impudent marguerites; milk-white “love-me-love-me-nots” with bright yellow centers and a fusty, spicy stink; yellow wild rape with its honey smell; tall-standing, tulip-shaped campanulas, lilac and white; creeping vetch; neat scabious, yellow, red, pink, and lilac; plantain with its faintly pink down and faintly perceptible, pleasant smell; cornflowers, bright blue in the sun and in youth, and pale blue and reddish in the evening and when old; and the tender, almond-scented, instantly wilting flowers of the bindweed.

I had gathered a big bouquet of various flowers and was walking home, when I noticed in a ditch, in full bloom, a wonderful crimson thistle of the kind which is known among us as a “Tartar” and is carefully mowed around, and, when accidentally mowed down, is removed from the hay by the mowers, so that it will not prick their hands. I took it into my head to pick this thistle and put it in the center of the bouquet. I got down into the ditch and, having chased away a hairy bumblebee that had stuck itself into the center of the flower and sweetly and lazily fallen asleep there, I set about picking the flower. But it was very difficult: not only was the stem prickly on all sides, even through the handkerchief I had wrapped around my hand, but it was so terribly tough that I struggled with it for some five minutes, tearing the fibers one by one. When I finally tore off the flower, the stem was all ragged, and the flower no longer seemed so fresh and beautiful. Besides, in its coarseness and gaudiness it did not fit in with the delicate flowers of the bouquet. I was sorry that I had vainly destroyed and thrown away a flower that had been beautiful in its place. “But what energy and life force,” I thought, remembering the effort it had cost me to tear off the flower. “How staunchly it defended itself, and how dearly it sold its life.”

The way home went across a fallow, just-plowed field of black earth. I walked up a gentle slope along a dusty, black-earth road. The plowed field was a landowner’s, a very large one, so that to both sides of the road and up the hill ahead nothing could be seen except the black, evenly furrowed, not yet scarified soil. The plowing had been well done; nowhere on the field was there a single plant or blade of grass to be seen—it was all black. “What a destructive, cruel being man is, how many living beings and plants he annihilates to maintain his own life,” I thought, involuntarily looking for something alive amidst this dead, black field. Ahead of me, to the right of the road, I spied a little bush. When I came closer, I recognized in this bush that same “Tartar” whose flower I had vainly picked and thrown away.

The “Tartar” bush consisted of three shoots. One had been broken off, and the remainder of the branch stuck out like a cut-off arm. On each of the other two there was a flower. These flowers had once been red, but now they were black. One stem was broken and half of it hung down, with the dirty flower at the end; the other, though all covered with black dirt, still stuck up. It was clear that the whole bush had been run over by a wheel, and afterwards had straightened up and therefore stood tilted, but stood all the same. As if a piece of its flesh had been ripped away, its guts turned inside out, an arm torn off, an eye blinded. But it still stands and does not surrender to man, who has annihilated all its brothers around it.

“What energy!” I thought. “Man has conquered everything, destroyed millions of plants, but this one still does not surrender.”

And I remembered an old story from the Caucasus, part of which I saw, part of which I heard from witnesses, and part of which I imagined to myself. The story, as it shaped itself in my memory and imagination, goes like this.

I

IT WAS the end of 1851.

On a cold November evening Hadji Murat rode into the hostile Chechen aoul of Makhket, filled with the fragrant smoke of kizyak.*

The strained chanting of the muezzin had just died down, and in the clear mountain air, saturated with the smell of kizyak smoke, one could hear distinctly, through the lowing of cows and the bleating of sheep dispersing among the saklyas, stuck tightly together like a honeycomb, the guttural sounds of arguing male voices and women’s and children’s voices coming from the spring below.

This Hadji Murat was Shamil’s¹ naïb, famous for his exploits, who never rode out otherwise than with his guidon and an escort of dozens of murids caracoling around him. Now, wrapped in a bashlyk and a burka, from under which a rifle stuck out, he rode with one murid, trying to be as little noticed as possible, warily peering with his quick, black eyes into the faces of the villagers he met on the way.

Coming to the center of the aoul, Hadji Murat did not ride along the street that led to the square, but turned to the left, into a narrow lane. Riding up to the second saklya in the lane, dug into the hillside, he stopped and looked around. There was no one on the porch in front of the saklya, but on the roof, behind the freshly whitewashed clay chimney, a man lay covered with a sheepskin coat. Hadji Murat touched the man lying on the roof lightly with the handle of his whip and clucked his tongue. An old man rose from under the sheepskin coat, in a nightcap and a shiny, tattered beshmet. The old man’s lashless eyes were red and moist, and he blinked in order to unstick them. Hadji Murat spoke the usual “Salaam aleikum,” and uncovered his face.

“Aleikum salaam,” said the old man, smiling with his toothless mouth, recognizing Hadji Murat, and, getting up on his skinny legs, he started putting his feet into the wooden-heeled shoes that stood by the chimney. Once shod, he unhurriedly put his arms into the sleeves of the wrinkled, raw sheepskin coat and climbed backwards down the ladder that leaned against the roof. While dressing and climbing down, the old man kept shaking his head on its thin, wrinkled, sunburned neck and constantly munched his toothless gums. Having reached the ground, he hospitably took hold of the bridle and right stirrup of Hadji Murat’s horse. But Hadji Murat’s nimble, strong murid quickly got off his horse and, moving the old man aside, replaced him.

Hadji Murat got off his horse and, limping slightly, went up to the porch. He was met by a boy of about fifteen, who quickly came out of the door and fixed his shining eyes, black as ripe currants, on the arrivals.

“Run to the mosque, call your father,” the old man ordered him, and, going ahead of Hadji Murat, he opened for him the light, creaking door of the saklya. As Hadji Murat went in, a slight, thin, middle-aged woman in a red beshmet over a yellow shirt and blue sharovary came from an inner door carrying pillows.

“Your coming bodes good fortune,” she said and, bending double, she began to arrange the pillows by the front wall for the guest to sit on.

“May your sons live long,” replied Hadji Murat, taking off his burka, rifle, and saber, and handing them to the old man.

The old man carefully hung the rifle and saber on nails next to the hung-up weapons of the master, between two large basins shining on the smoothly plastered and clean whitewashed wall.

Hadji Murat, straightening the pistol at his back, went to the pillows the woman had laid out and, wrapping the skirts of his cherkeska around him, sat down. The old man sat down on his bare heels facing him and, closing his eyes, raised his hands palms up. Hadji Murat did the same. Then the two of them, having recited a prayer, stroked their faces with their hands, bringing them together at the tip of the beard.

“Ne khabar?” Hadji Murat asked the old man—that is, “Any news?”

“Khobar yok”—“No news,” the old man replied, looking not at the face but at the chest of Hadji Murat with his red, lifeless eyes. “I live at the apiary, I’ve just come today to see my son. He knows.”

Hadji Murat understood that the old man did not want to tell what he knew and what Hadji Murat wanted to know, and nodding his head slightly, he asked nothing more.

“There’s no good news,” the old man began. “The only news is that the hares keep discussing how to drive away the eagles. And the eagles keep rending first one, then another. Last week the Russian dogs burned up the hay in Michitsky—tear their faces!” the old man croaked spitefully.

Hadji Murat’s murid came in and, stepping softly over the earthen floor with the big strides of his strong legs, he took off his burka, rifle, and saber, as Hadji Murat had done, and hung them on the same nails on which Hadji Murat’s weapons hung, leaving himself with only a dagger and a pistol.

“Who is he?” the old man asked Hadji Murat, pointing to the man who had come in.

“My murid. His name is Eldar,” said Hadji Murat.

“Very well,” said the old man, and he pointed Eldar to a place on the felt next to Hadji Murat.

Eldar sat down, crossing his legs, and silently fixed his beautiful sheep’s eyes on the face of the now talkative old man. The old man was telling how their brave lads had caught two Russian soldiers the week before: they had killed one and sent the other to Shamil in Vedeno. Hadji Murat listened distractedly, glancing at the door and giving ear to the sounds outside. Steps were heard on the porch in front of the saklya, the door creaked, and the master came in.

The master of the saklya, Sado, was a man of about forty, with a small beard, a long nose, and the same black eyes, though not as shining, as the fifteen-year-old boy, his son, who ran for him and together with his father came into the saklya and sat down by the door. Having taken off his wooden shoes by the door, the master pushed his old, shabby papakha to the back of his long-unshaven head, overgrowing with black hair, and at once squatted down facing Hadji Murat.

He closed his eyes just as the old man had, raised his hands palms up, recited a prayer, wiped his face with his hands, and only then began to talk. He said there was an order from Shamil to take Hadji Murat dead or alive, that Shamil’s envoys had left only yesterday, and that the people were afraid to disobey Shamil, and therefore he had to be careful.

“In my house,” said Sado, “no one will do anything to my kunak while I live. But what about in the field? We must think.”

Hadji Murat listened attentively and nodded his head approvingly. When Sado finished, he said:

“Very well. Now a man must be sent to the Russians with a letter. My murid will go, only he needs a guide.”

“I’ll send brother Bata,” said Sado. “Call Bata,” he turned to his son.

The boy, as if on springs, jumped up on his nimble legs and, swinging his arms, quickly left the saklya. Ten minutes later he came back with a deeply tanned, sinewy, short-legged Chechen man wearing a tattered yellow cherkeska with ragged cuffs and baggy black leggings. Hadji Murat greeted the new arrival and at once, also not wasting words, said briefly:

“Can you take my murid to the Russians?”

“It’s possible,” Bata said quickly, merrily. “Everything’s possible. No Chechen could get through better than me. Another man would go, promise everything, and do nothing. But I can do it.”

“Good,” said Hadji Murat. “You’ll get three for your trouble,” he said, holding up three fingers.

Bata nodded his head to indicate that he understood, but added that he did not value money, but was ready to serve Hadji Murat for the honor of it. Everyone in the mountains knew Hadji Murat, how he had beaten the Russian swine …

“Very well,” said Hadji Murat. “Rope is good when it’s long, speech when it’s short.”

“Then I’ll be silent,” said Bata.

“Where the Argun bends, across from the steep bank, there is a clearing in the forest, two haystacks stand there. You know it?”

“I do.”

“My three horsemen are waiting for me there,” said Hadji Murat.

“Aya!” said Bata, nodding his head.

“Ask for Khan Mahoma. Khan Mahoma knows what to do and what to say. Take him to the Russian chief, to Vorontsov, the prince.² Can you do that?”

“I’ll take him.”

“Take him and bring him back. Can you do that?”

“I can.”

“Take him, and return with him to the forest. I will be there, too.”

“I will do it all,” Bata said, stood up and, putting his hands to his chest, went out.

“Another man must be sent to Gekhi,” said Hadji Murat, when Bata had gone. “In Gekhi here is what must be done,” he began, taking hold of one of the cartridge bands on his cherkeska, but he dropped his hand at once and fell silent, seeing two women come into the saklya.

One was Sado’s wife, the same thin, middle-aged woman who had arranged the pillows. The other was a very young girl in red sharovary and a green beshmet, with a curtain of silver coins covering her whole breast. At the end of her black braid, not long but stiff, thick, which lay between the shoulder blades on her thin back, hung a silver rouble; the same black-currant eyes as her father and brother shone merrily on her young face, which was trying to look stern. She did not glance at the guests, but was obviously aware of their presence.

Sado’s wife carried a low, round table on which there were tea, dumplings, pancakes with butter, cheese, churek—a thinly rolled-out bread—and honey. The girl carried a basin, a kumgan, and a towel.

Sado and Hadji Murat were silent all the while the women, moving quietly in their soleless red chuviaki, were setting what they had brought before the guests. Eldar, his sheep’s eyes directed at his crossed legs, was immobile as a statue all the while the women were in the saklya. Only when they left and their soft steps had died away completely behind the door, did Eldar sigh with relief and Hadji Murat take out one of the cartridges of his cherkeska, remove the bullet that stopped it up, and, from under the bullet, a note rolled into a tube.

“To my son,” he said, pointing to the note.

“Where to reply?” asked Sado.

“To you, and you deliver it to me.”

“It will be done,” said Sado, and he put the note into a cartridge of his cherkeska. Then, taking the kumgan, he moved the basin towards Hadji Murat. Hadji Murat rolled up the sleeves of his beshmet on his muscular arms, white above the hands, and held them under the stream of cold, transparent water that Sado was pouring from the kumgan. Having wiped his hands on a clean, rough towel, Hadji Murat turned to the food. Eldar did the same. While the guests were eating, Sado sat facing them and thanked them several times for coming. The boy, sitting by the door, not taking his shining black eyes from Hadji Murat, was smiling, as if to confirm his father’s words by his smile.

Though Hadji Murat had eaten nothing for more than twenty-four hours, he ate only a little bread and cheese, and, taking a small knife from under his dagger, gathered up some honey and spread it on bread.

“Our honey is good. This year of all years the honey is both plentiful and good,” said the old man, obviously pleased that Hadji Murat was eating his honey.

“Thank you,” said Hadji Murat and drew back from the food.

Eldar would have liked to eat more, but, like his murshid, he moved away from the table and gave Hadji Murat the basin and the kumgan.

Sado knew that in receiving Hadji Murat he was risking his life, because after the quarrel between Shamil and Hadji Murat, it had been announced to all the inhabitants of Chechnya that, on pain of death, they were not to receive Hadji Murat. He knew that the inhabitants of the aoul might learn of Hadji Murat’s presence at any moment and might demand that he be handed over. But that not only did not trouble Sado, it even gladdened him. Sado considered it his duty to defend his guest—his kunak—even if it cost him his life, and he was glad in himself and proud of himself that he was acting as one should.

“While you are in my house and my head is on my shoulders, no one will do anything to you,” he repeated to Hadji Murat.

Hadji Murat looked attentively into his shining eyes and, understanding that this was true, said with a certain solemnity:

“May you be granted joy and life.”

Sado silently pressed his hand to his chest in a sign of gratitude for the kind words.

Having closed the shutters of the saklya and kindled the wood in the fireplace, Sado, in a particularly merry and excited state, left the guest room and went to the part of the saklya where his whole family lived. The women were not asleep yet and were talking about the dangerous guests who were spending the night in their guest room.

II

THAT SAME NIGHT, at the frontier fortress of Vozdvizhenskoe, some ten miles from the aoul where Hadji Murat was spending the night, three soldiers and a corporal left the stronghold by the Chakhgirinsky gate. The soldiers were wearing sheepskin jackets and papakhas, with rolled-up greatcoats on their shoulders, and big boots above the knee, as soldiers in the Caucasus went around then. The soldiers, with muskets on their shoulders, first went along the road, then, having gone some five hundred paces, turned off and, their boots rustling over dry leaves, went some twenty paces to the right and stopped by a broken chinara, whose black trunk was visible even in the darkness. The listening post was usually sent to this chinara.

The bright stars that had seemed to race over the treetops while the soldiers walked through the forest now stopped, shining brightly between the bare branches of the trees.

“It’s dry—thanks be for that,” said Corporal Panov, taking his long musket with its bayonet from his shoulder and leaning it with a clank against the trunk of a tree. The three soldiers did the same.

“That’s it—I’ve lost it,” Panov grumbled crossly. “Either I forgot it, or it fell out on the way.”

“What are you looking for?” asked one of the soldiers in a lively, cheerful voice.

“My pipe. Devil knows what’s become of it!”

“Is the stem still there?” asked the lively voice.

“Yes, here it is.”

“Then why not right in the ground?”

“Ah, come on.”

“I’ll set it up in a flash.”

Smoking at a listening post was forbidden, but this was not really a listening post, but more of an advance patrol, which was sent out so that the mountaineers could not bring a cannon up surreptitiously, as they used to do, and fire at the stronghold, and Panov did not consider it necessary to deprive himself of smoking and therefore agreed to the cheerful soldier’s suggestion. The cheerful soldier took a knife from his pocket and began digging in the ground. Having dug out a little hole, he smoothed it all around, pressed the pipe stem into it, then filled the hole with tobacco, tamped it down, and the pipe was ready. The sulfur match flame lit up for a moment the high-cheekboned face of the soldier lying on his belly. There was a whistling in the stem, and Panov caught the pleasant smell of burning shag.

“All set up?” he said, getting to his feet.

“That it is.”

“Fine lad you are, Avdeev! A foxy fellow. Well, then?”

Avdeev rolled aside, giving his place to Panov and letting smoke out of his mouth.

Having had their smoke, the soldiers started a conversation among themselves.

“They say the company commander got into the cash box again. Seems he lost at cards,” one of the soldiers said in a lazy voice.

“He’ll pay it back,” said Panov.

“Sure, he’s a good officer,” Avdeev confirmed.

“Good, yes, good,” the one who had started the conversation went on gloomily, “but my advice is that the company should have a talk with him: if you’ve taken, tell us how much, and when you’ll pay it back.”

“That’s as the company decides,” said Panov, tearing himself away from the pipe.

“Sure thing—we’re all one big man,” Avdeev agreed.

“We’ve got to buy oats and get boots by spring, we need cash, and if he’s taken it …” the disgruntled man insisted.

“I said, it’s as the company wants,” repeated Panov. “It’s not the first time: he takes and pays it back.”

At that time in the Caucasus every company administered all its practical affairs through its own chosen people. They received cash from the treasury to the amount of six roubles fifty kopecks per man and supported themselves on it: planted cabbage, made hay, kept their own carts, pranced about on well-fed company horses. The company money was kept in a cash box, the key to which was kept by the company commander, and it often happened that the company commander borrowed from the company cash box. So it was now, and it was this that the soldiers were talking about. The gloomy soldier Nikitin wanted to demand an accounting from the commander, but Panov and Avdeev considered that there was no need for that.

After Panov, Nikitin also had a smoke and, spreading his greatcoat under him, sat leaning against a tree. The soldiers quieted down. Only the wind could be heard rustling in the treetops high above their heads. Suddenly the howling, shrieking, wailing, and laughing of jackals came through that ceaseless, quiet rustling.

“Hear how the cursed things pour it out!” said Avdeev.

“It’s you they’re laughing at, because your mug’s all askew,” said the high Ukrainian voice of the fourth soldier.

Again everything was quiet, only the wind rustled in the branches, now covering, now uncovering the stars.

“Say, Antonych,” the cheerful Avdeev suddenly asked Panov, “do you ever feel heartsick?”

“What do you mean, heartsick?” Panov answered reluctantly.

“I sometimes feel so heartsick, so heartsick, it’s like I don’t know what I may do to myself.”

“Ah, you!” said Panov.

“That time when I drank up the money, it was all from feeling heartsick. It came over me, just came over me. I thought: why don’t I get crocked?”

“Drink can make it worse.”

“And did. But how can you get away from it?”

“What are you heartsick for?”

“Me? For home.”

“So, it was a rich life there?”

“Not rich, but a right life. A good life.”

And Avdeev started telling what he had already told many times to the same Panov.

“I volunteered to go for my brother,” Avdeev told them. “He had four children! And they’d only just married me off. Mother started pleading. I think: what’s it to me? Maybe they’ll remember my kindness. I went to the master. Our master was nice, he said: ‘Good boy! Off you go!’ And so I went for my brother.”

“Well, that’s a good thing,” said Panov.

“But would you believe it, Antonych, I’m heartsick now. And I’m heartsick most of all because, I say, why did you go for your brother? He lives like a king now, I say, and you suffer. And the more I think, the worse it gets. Some kind of sin, surely.”

Avdeev fell silent.

“Maybe we’ll have another smoke?” asked Avdeev.

“Well, set it up, then!”

But the soldiers were not to have their smoke. Avdeev had just stood up and begun setting up the pipe, when they heard through the rustling of the wind the sound of footsteps coming down the road. Panov took his musket and shoved Nikitin with his foot. Nikitin got to his feet and picked up his greatcoat. The third man—Bondarenko—also stood up.

“And I had such a dream, brothers …”

Avdeev hissed at Bondarenko, and the soldiers froze, listening. The soft footsteps of people not shod in boots were coming near. The crunch of twigs and dry leaves could be heard more and more clearly in the darkness. Then talk was heard in that special guttural tongue spoken by the Chechens. The soldiers now not only heard but saw two shadows passing in the spaces between the trees. One shadow was shorter, the other taller. When the shadows came even with the soldiers, Panov, gun in hand, stepped out on the road with two of his comrades.

“Who goes there?” he called out.

“Peaceful Chechen,” said the shorter one. It was Bata. “Gun yok, saber yok,” he said, pointing to himself. “Want preenze.”

The taller one stood silently beside his comrade. He also wore no weapons.

“An emissary. That means—to the regimental commander,” Panov said, explaining to his comrades.

“Much want Preenze Vorontsov, want big business,” said Bata.

“All right, all right, we’ll take you,” said Panov. “Well, so take them, you and Bondarenko,” he turned to Avdeev, “and once you’ve handed them over to the officer of the day, come back. Watch out,” said Panov, “be careful, tell them to walk ahead of you. These shave-heads can be tricky.”

“And what about this?” said Avdeev, making a stabbing movement with his bayonet. “One little poke, and he’s out of steam.”

“What’s he good for if you stab him?” said Bondarenko. “Well, off with you!”

When the footsteps of the two soldiers and the emissaries died away, Panov and Nikitin went back to their place.

“Why the devil do they go around at night!” said Nikitin.

“Must mean they’ve got to,” said Panov. “It’s turning chilly,” he added and, unrolling his greatcoat, he put it on and sat down by the tree.

About two hours later Avdeev and Bondarenko came back.

“So you handed them over?” asked Panov.

“Yes. They’re not asleep yet at the regimental commander’s. We took them straight to him. And what nice lads these shave-heads are,” Avdeev went on. “By God! I got to talking with them.”

“You’d be sure to,” Nikitin said with displeasure.

“Really, they’re just like Russians. One’s married. ‘Marushka bar?’ I say. ‘Bar,’ he says. ‘Baranchuk bar?’ I say. ‘Bar.’ ‘Many?’ ‘A couple,’ he says. Such a nice talk we had! Nice lads.”

“Nice, yes,” said Nikitin, “just meet him face-to-face, he’ll spill your guts for you.”

“Should be dawn soon,” said Panov.

“Yes, the stars are already going out,” said Avdeev, sitting down.

And the soldiers became quiet again.

III

THE WINDOWS of the barracks and the soldiers’ houses had long been dark, but in one of the best houses of the fortress the windows were all still lit up. This house was occupied by the commander of the Kurinsky regiment, the son of the commander in chief, the imperial adjutant Prince Semyon Mikhailovich Vorontsov. Vorontsov lived with his wife, Marya Vassilievna, a famous Petersburg beauty, and lived in such luxury in the small Caucasian fortress as no one had ever lived there before. To Vorontsov, and especially to his wife, it seemed that they lived not only a modest life, but one filled with privation; but this life astonished the local people by its extraordinary luxury.

Now, at twelve midnight, in a large drawing room with a wall-to-wall carpet, with the heavy curtains drawn, at a card table lighted by four candles, the host and hostess sat with their guests and played cards. One of the players was the host himself, a long-faced, fair-haired colonel with an imperial adjutant’s insignia and aglets, Vorontsov; his partner was a graduate of Petersburg University, a disheveled young man of sullen appearance, recently invited by Princess Vorontsov as a tutor for her little son by her first marriage. Against them played two officers: one the broad-faced, red-cheeked company commander, Poltoratsky,³ transferred from the guards; the other a regimental adjutant, who sat very straight, with a cold expression on his handsome face. Princess Marya Vassilievna herself, an ample, big-eyed, dark-browed beauty, sat next to Poltoratsky, touching his legs with her crinoline and peeking at his cards. In her words, and in her glances, and in her smile, and in all the movements of her body, and in the scent that wafted from her, there was something that drove Poltoratsky to obliviousness of everything except the awareness of her proximity, and he made mistake after mistake, annoying his partner more and more.

“No, this is impossible! You’ve squandered your ace again!” said the adjutant, turning all red, when Poltoratsky discarded an ace.

Poltoratsky, as if waking up, gazed without understanding at the displeased adjutant with his kind, wide-set, dark eyes.

“Well, forgive him!” Marya Vassilievna said, smiling. “You see, I told you,” she said to Poltoratsky.

“But you said something else entirely,” Poltoratsky said, smiling.

“Did I really?” she said and also smiled. And this returned smile flustered and delighted Poltoratsky so terribly that he turned a deep red and, seizing the cards, began to shuffle them.

“It’s not your turn to shuffle,” the adjutant said sternly, and his white hand with its signet ring began dealing the cards as if he only wanted to get rid of them as quickly as possible.

The prince’s valet came into the drawing room and announced that the officer of the day was asking to see the prince.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” Vorontsov said, speaking Russian with an English accent. “Will you sit in for me, Marie?”

“Do you agree?” the princess asked, quickly and lightly rising to her full, tall height, rustling her silks, and smiling her radiant smile of a happy woman.

“I always agree to everything,” said the adjutant, very pleased that the princess, who was quite unable to play, would now be playing against him. Poltoratsky only spread his arms, smiling.

The rubber was nearing its end when the prince returned to the drawing room. He was especially cheerful and excited.

“Do you know what I propose?”

“Well?”

“That we drink some champagne.”

“I’m always ready for that,” said Poltoratsky.

“Say, that’s a very nice idea,” said the adjutant.

“Serve it, Vassily!” said the prince.

“Why did they send for you?” asked Marya Vassilievna.

“It was the officer of the day and another man.”

“Who? For what?” Marya Vassilievna asked hastily.

“I can’t tell you,” said Vorontsov, shrugging his shoulders.

“Can’t tell me?” Marya Vassilievna repeated. “We’ll see about that.”

Champagne was brought. The guests drank a glass and, having finished the game and settled accounts, began taking their leave.

“Is it your company that’s assigned to the forest tomorrow?” the prince asked Poltoratsky.

“Yes, mine. Why?”

“Then we’ll see each other tomorrow,” said the prince, smiling slightly.

“Very glad,” said Poltoratsky, without quite understanding what Vorontsov was telling him and preoccupied only with the fact that he was about to press Marya Vassilievna’s big white hand.

Marya Vassilievna, as always, not only pressed Poltoratsky’s hand firmly but even shook it hard. And, reminding him once more of his mistake in leading diamonds, she smiled at him, as it seemed to Poltoratsky, with a lovely, tender, and significant smile.

POLTORATSKY WENT HOME in that rapturous state which can be understood only by people like himself, who grew up and were educated in society, when, after months of isolated military life, they again meet a woman from their former circle. And, moreover, such a woman as Princess Vorontsov.

On reaching the little house where he lived with a comrade, he pushed the front door, but it was locked. He knocked. The door did not open. He became vexed and started beating on the locked door with his foot and his saber. Footsteps were heard behind the door, and Vavilo, Poltoratsky’s domestic serf, lifted the hook.

“What made you think of locking it!? Blockhead!”

“Ah, how can you, Alexei Vladimir…”

“Drunk again! I’ll show you how I can …”

Poltoratsky was about to hit Vavilo, but changed his mind.

“Well, devil take you. Light a candle.”

“This minute.”

Vavilo was indeed tipsy, and he had been drinking because he had been to a name-day party at the quartermaster’s. On coming home, he fell to thinking about his life in comparison with the life of Ivan Makeich, the quartermaster. Ivan Makeich had income, was married, and hoped for a full discharge in a year. As a boy, Vavilo had been “taken upstairs,” that is, to wait on his masters, and now he was already past forty, but was still not married and lived a campaign life with his desultory master. He was a good master, beat him little, but what sort of life was it! “He’s promised to give me my freedom when he returns from the Caucasus. But where am I to go with my freedom? It’s a dog’s life!” thought Vavilo. And he became so sleepy that, fearing lest someone come in and steal something, he hooked the door and fell asleep.

Poltoratsky went into the room where he slept with his comrade Tikhonov.

“Well, what, did you lose?” said Tikhonov, waking up.

“Oh, no, I won seventeen roubles, and we drank a bottle of Cliquot.”

“And looked at Marya Vassilievna?”

“And looked at Marya Vassilievna,” Poltoratsky repeated.

“It’ll be time to get up soon,” said Tikhonov, “and we must set out at six.”

“Vavilo,” cried Poltoratsky. “See that you wake me up properly at five in the morning.”

“How can I wake you up if you hit me?”

“I said wake me up. Do you hear?”

“Yes, sir.”

Vavilo left, taking away the boots and clothes.

And Poltoratsky got into bed and, smiling, lit a cigarette and put out the candle. In the darkness he saw before him the smiling face of Marya Vassilievna.

AT THE VORONTSOVS’ they also did not go to asleep at once. When the guests left, Marya Vassilievna went up to her husband and, standing in front of him, said sternly:

“Eh bien, vous allez me dire ce que c’est?”

“Mais, ma chère …”

“Pas de ‘ma chère’! C’est un émissaire, n’est-ce pas?”

“Quand même je ne puis pas vous le dire.”

“Vous ne pouvez pas? Alors c’est moi qui vais vous le dire!”

“Vous?”*

“Hadji Murat? Yes?” said the princess, who had been hearing for several days already about the negotiations with Hadji Murat and supposed that Hadji Murat himself had come to see her husband.

Vorontsov could not deny it, but disappointed his wife in that it was not Hadji Murat himself, but only his emissary, who had announced that Hadji Murat would come over to him the next day at the place appointed for woodcutting.

Amidst the monotony of their life in the fortress, the Vorontsovs—husband and wife—were very glad of this event. Having talked about how pleased his father would be with this news, the husband and wife went to bed past two o’clock.

IV

AFTER THE THREE SLEEPLESS NIGHTS he had spent fleeing from the murids Shamil sent against him, Hadji Murat fell asleep as soon as Sado left the saklya, wishing him a good night. He slept without undressing, his head resting on his arm, the elbow sunk deep in the red down pillows his host had laid out for him. Not far from him, near the wall, slept Eldar. Eldar lay on his back, his strong young limbs spread wide, so that his high chest, with black cartridges on a white cherkeska, was higher than his freshly shaven blue head thrown back and fallen from the pillow. Pouting slightly like a child’s, his upper lip, barely covered with down, contracted and then relaxed as if sipping something. He slept as did Hadji Murat: dressed, with a pistol and dagger in his belt. In the fireplace of the saklya, the logs were burning down, and a night lamp shone faintly from a niche in the small stove.

In the middle of the night the door of the guest room creaked, and Hadji Murat instantly sat up and put his hand to his pistol. Sado came into the room, stepping softly over the earthen floor.

“What is it?” Hadji Murat asked briskly, as if he had never been asleep.

“We must think,” said Sado, squatting in front of Hadji Murat. “A woman on the roof saw you ride in,” he said, “and told her husband, and now the whole aoul knows. A neighbor just ran by and told my wife that the old men have gathered by the mosque and want to detain you.”

“We must go,” said Hadji Murat.

“The horses are ready,” Sado said and quickly left the room.

“Eldar,” Hadji Murat whispered, and Eldar, hearing his name and, above all, the voice of his murshid, jumped up on his strong legs, straightening his papakha. Hadji Murat put on his weapons over his burka. Eldar did the same. And the two men silently went out of the saklya onto the porch. The black-eyed boy brought the horses. At the clatter of hoofs on the beaten earth of the street, some head stuck out the door of a neighboring saklya, and, with a clatter of wooden shoes, someone went running up the hill towards the mosque.

There was no moon, but the stars shone brightly in the black sky, and the outlines of the roofs of saklyas could be seen in the darkness and, larger than the others, the edifice of the mosque with its minaret in the upper part of the aoul. A hum of voices came from the mosque.

Hadji Murat, quickly seizing his gun, put his foot into the narrow stirrup and, noiselessly, inconspicuously throwing his body over, inaudibly seated himself on the high cushion of the saddle.

“May God reward you!” he said, addressing his host, feeling for the other stirrup with a habitual movement of the right foot, and he lightly touched the boy who was holding the horse with his whip, as a sign that he should step aside. The boy stepped aside, and the horse, as if knowing himself what had to be done, set off at a brisk pace down the lane towards the main road. Eldar rode behind; Sado, in a fur coat, swinging his arms rapidly, almost ran after them, crossing from one side of the narrow street to the other. At the end, across the road, a moving shadow appeared, then another.

“Stop! Who goes there? Halt!” a voice cried, and several men barred the road.

Instead of stopping, Hadji Murat snatched the pistol from his belt and, putting on speed, aimed his horse straight at the men barring the road. The men standing in the road parted, and Hadji Murat, without looking back, set off down the road at a long amble. Eldar followed him at a long trot. Behind them two shots cracked, two bullets whistled by, hitting neither him nor Eldar. Hadji Murat went on riding at the same pace. Having gone some three hundred paces, he stopped the slightly panting horse and began to listen. Ahead, below, was the noise of swift water. Behind, in the aoul, came the roll call of the cocks. Above these sounds, voices and the tramp of approaching horses could be heard from behind Hadji Murat. Hadji Murat touched up his horse and rode on at the same steady pace.

Those riding behind galloped and soon caught up with Hadji Murat. They were some twenty mounted men. They were inhabitants of the aoul, who had decided to detain Hadji Murat, or at least to pretend that they wanted to detain him, so as to clear themselves before Shamil. When they came close enough to be seen in the darkness, Hadji Murat stopped, dropped the reins, and, unbuttoning the cover of his rifle with an accustomed movement of his left hand, drew it out with his right. Eldar did the same.

“What do you want?” cried Hadji Murat. “To take me? So, take me!” and he raised his rifle. The inhabitants of the aoul stopped.

Hadji Murat, holding the rifle in his hand, began to descend into the hollow. The riders, without coming closer, went after him. When Hadji Murat crossed to the other side of the hollow, the mounted men following him called out that he should listen to what they wanted to say. In response to that, Hadji Murat fired his rifle and sent his horse into a gallop. When he stopped, the pursuit behind him could no longer be heard; nor could the cocks be heard; only the murmur of water could be heard more clearly in the forest, and the occasional lament of an owl. The black wall of the forest was quite close. This was the same forest where his murids were waiting for him. Having ridden up close to it, Hadji Murat stopped and, drawing a quantity of air into his lungs, whistled and then fell silent, listening. After a moment, the same whistle was heard from the forest. Hadji Murat turned off the road and went into the forest. Having gone about a hundred paces, Hadji Murat saw a campfire between the trunks of the trees, the shadows of men sitting by it, and, half lit by the fire, a hobbled horse with a saddle.

One of the men sitting by the fire rose quickly and went to Hadji Murat, taking hold of his bridle and stirrup. It was the Avar⁴ Hanefi, Hadji Murat’s adopted brother, who managed his household.

“Put out the fire,” said Hadji Murat, getting off his horse. The men started scattering the campfire and stamping on the burning branches.

“Was Bata here?” asked Hadji Murat, going over to the spread-out burka.

“He was. He left long ago with Khan Mahoma.”

“What road did they take?”

“That one,” replied Hanefi, pointing the opposite way from that by which Hadji Murat had come.

“All right,” said Hadji Murat and, taking off his rifle, he began to load it. “We must be careful, they pursued me,” he said, addressing the man who was putting out the fire.

This was the Chechen Gamzalo. Gamzalo went to the burka, picked up a rifle lying there in its cover, and silently went to the edge of the clearing, to the place Hadji Murat had come from. Eldar, getting off his horse, took Hadji Murat’s horse and, pulling the heads of both up high, tied them to trees, then, like Gamzalo, stood at the other edge of the clearing, his rifle behind his shoulders. The campfire was extinguished, and the forest no longer seemed as dark as before, and stars still shone, though faintly, in the sky.

Looking at the stars, at the Pleiades already risen halfway up the sky, Hadji Murat calculated that it was already long past midnight and that it had long been time for the night’s prayer. He asked Hanefi for the kumgan that they always carried with them in their baggage, and, putting on his burka, went towards the water.

After taking off his shoes and performing the ablution, Hadji Murat stood barefoot on the burka, then squatted on his calves and, first stopping his ears with his fingers and closing his eyes, turned to the east and said his usual prayers.

Having finished his prayers, he went back to his place, where his saddlebags were, and, sitting on his burka, rested his hands on his knees, bowed his head, and fell to pondering.

Hadji Murat had always believed in his luck. When he undertook something, he was firmly convinced beforehand of success—and everything succeeded for him. That had been so, with rare exceptions, in the whole course of his stormy military life. So he hoped it would be now as well. He imagined himself, with the army Vorontsov would give him, going against Shamil and taking him prisoner, and avenging himself, and how the Russian tsar would reward him, and he again would rule not only Avaria, but also the whole of Chechnya, which would submit to him. With these thoughts he did not notice how he fell asleep.

He dreamed of how he and his brave men, singing and shouting “Hadji Murat is coming,” swoop down on Shamil and take him and his wives, and hear his wives weeping and wailing. He woke up. The song “La ilaha,”⁵ and the shouts of “Hadji Murat is coming,” and the weeping of Shamil’s wives—these were the howling, weeping, and laughter of the jackals, which woke him up. Hadji Murat raised his head, looked through the tree trunks at the sky already brightening in the east, and asked the murid sitting some distance from him about Khan Mahoma. Learning that Khan Mahoma had not come back yet, Hadji Murat lowered his head and at once dozed off again.

He was awakened by the merry voice of Khan Mahoma, coming back with Bata from his embassy. Khan Mahoma sat down at once by Hadji Murat and began telling about how the soldiers had met them and taken them to the prince himself, how the prince was glad and promised to meet them tomorrow where the Russians would be cutting wood, across the Michik, at the Shalinskoe clearing. Bata interrupted his comrade’s speech, putting in his own details.

Hadji Murat asked in detail about the precise words in which Vorontsov had responded to the proposal of Hadji Murat going over to the Russians. And Khan Mahoma and Bata said with one voice that the prince had promised to receive Hadji Murat as his guest and make it so that all would be well for him. Hadji Murat also asked about the road, and when Khan Mahoma assured him that he knew the road well and would bring him straight there, Hadji Murat took out some money and gave Bata the promised three roubles; and he told his own men to take his gold-inlaid arms and the papakha with a turban from the saddlebags, and to clean themselves up, so as to come to the Russians looking well. While the weapons, saddles, bridles, and horses were being cleaned, the stars grew pale, it became quite light, and a predawn breeze sprang up.

V

EARLY IN THE MORNING, while it was still dark, two companies with axes, under the command of Poltoratsky, went out seven miles from the Chakhgirinsky gate and, posting a line of riflemen, set about cutting wood as soon as it became light. By eight o’clock the mist, which had merged with the fragrant smoke of damp branches hissing and crackling on the bonfires, began to lift, and the woodcutters, who earlier, from five paces away, could not see but could only hear each other, began to see both the bonfires and the forest road choked with trees; the sun now appeared as a bright spot in the mist, now disappeared again. In a small clearing off the road, Poltoratsky, his subaltern Tikhonov, two officers of the third company, and Poltoratsky’s comrade from the Corps of Pages, Baron Freze, a former horse guard demoted to the ranks for dueling, were sitting on drums. Around the drums lay food wrappings, cigarette butts, and empty bottles. The officers had drunk vodka, eaten a bit, and were drinking porter. The drummer was uncorking the eighth bottle. Poltoratsky, though he had not had enough sleep, was in that special state of high spirits and kindly, carefree merriment, which he always felt among his soldiers and comrades where there might be danger.

The officers were having a lively conversation about the latest news, the death of General Sleptsov. No one saw in that death the most important moment of that life—its ending and returning to the source from which it had come—but saw only the gallantry of a dashing officer falling upon the mountaineers with his saber and desperately cutting them down.

Though everyone, especially officers who had been in action, could and did know that neither in the war then in the Caucasus nor anywhere else could there ever be that hand-to-hand cutting down with sabers which is always surmised and described (and if there is such hand-to-hand combat with sabers and bayonets, it is only those running away who are cut down and stabbed), this fiction of hand-to-hand combat was recognized by the officers and lent them that calm pride and gaiety with which they were sitting on the drums, some in dashing, others, on the contrary, in the most modest poses, smoking, drinking, and joking, not troubling about death, which, as it had Sleptsov, might overtake each of them at any moment. And indeed, as if to confirm their expectations, in the midst of their talk they heard, to the left of the road, the bracing, beautiful sound of a sharp, cracking rifle shot, and with a merry whistle a little bullet flew by somewhere in the foggy air and smacked into a tree. A few ponderously loud booms of the soldiers’ muskets answered the enemy shot.

“Aha!” Poltoratsky cried in a merry voice, “that’s from the line! Well, brother Kostya,” he turned to Freze, “here’s your chance. Go to your company. We’ll arrange a lovely battle for them! And put you up for a promotion.”

The demoted baron jumped to his feet and went at a quick pace to the smoky area where his company was. A small, dark bay Kabarda horse was brought to Poltoratsky, he mounted it, and, forming up his company, led it towards the line in the direction of the shooting. The line stood at the edge of the forest before the bare slope of a gully. The wind was blowing towards the forest, and not only the slope, but the far side of the gully was clearly visible.

As Poltoratsky rode up to the line, the sun emerged from the fog, and on the opposite side of the gully, by the sparse young forest that began there, some two hundred yards away, several horsemen could be seen. These Chechens were the ones who had pursued Hadji Murat and wanted to see his coming to the Russians. One of them shot at the line. Several soldiers from the line answered. The Chechens pulled back and the shooting stopped. But when Poltoratsky arrived with his company, he gave the order to fire, and as soon as the command was passed on, the merry, bracing crackle of muskets was heard all along the line, accompanied by prettily dispersing puffs of smoke. The soldiers, glad of a diversion, hurriedly reloaded and fired off round after round. The Chechens obviously took up the challenge and, leaping forward one after another, fired off several shots at the soldiers. One of their shots wounded a soldier. This soldier was that same Avdeev who had been at the listening post. When his comrades went over to him, he was lying facedown, holding the wound in his stomach with both hands and rocking rhythmically.

“I was just starting to load my musket, and I heard a thwack,” the soldier paired with him was saying. “I looked: he let his musket drop.”

Avdeev was from Poltoratsky’s company. Seeing a bunch of soldiers gathered, Poltoratsky rode up to them.

“What, brother, been hit?” he said. “Where?”

Avdeev did not reply.

“I was just starting to load, Your Honor,” the soldier paired with Avdeev began to say, “I heard a thwack, I looked—he let his musket drop.”

“Tsk, tsk,” Poltoratsky clucked his tongue. “Does it hurt, Avdeev?”

“It doesn’t hurt, but it won’t let me walk. I could use a drink, Your Honor.”

They found some vodka, that is, the alcohol the soldiers used to drink in the Caucasus, and Panov, frowning sternly, offered it to Avdeev in the bottle cap. Avdeev began to drink, but pushed the cap away at once with his hand.

“My soul won’t take it,” he said. “You drink it.”

Panov finished the alcohol. Avdeev again tried to get up and again sat down. They spread out a greatcoat and laid Avdeev on it.

“Your Honor, the colonel’s coming,” the sergeant major said to Poltoratsky.

“Well, all right, you see to it,” said Poltoratsky and, brandishing his whip, he rode at a long trot to meet Vorontsov.

Vorontsov was riding his English thoroughbred bay stallion, accompanied by the regimental adjutant, a Cossack, and a Chechen interpreter.

“What’s going on here?” he asked Poltoratsky.

“A party of them came and attacked the line,” Poltoratsky answered him.

“Well, well, so you started it all.”

“Not me, Prince,” said Poltoratsky, smiling. “They were spoiling for it.”

“I heard a soldier’s been wounded?”

“Yes, very sad. A good soldier.”

“Seriously?”

“Seems so—in the stomach.”

“And do you know where I’m going?” asked Vorontsov.

“No, I don’t.”

“You really can’t guess?”

“No.”

“Hadji Murat has come over and is going to meet us right now.”

“It can’t be!”

“Yesterday an emissary came from him,” said Vorontsov, barely suppressing a smile of joy. “He’s supposed to be waiting for me right now at the Shalinskoe clearing. Post your riflemen as far as the clearing and then come to me.”

“Yes, sir,” said Poltoratsky, putting his hand to his papakha, and he rode to his company. He himself led the line along the right side and ordered the sergeant major to do the same on the left side. Meanwhile four soldiers carried the wounded man to the fortress.

Poltoratsky was already on his way back to Vorontsov when he saw some horsemen overtaking him from behind. Poltoratsky stopped and waited for them.

At the head of them all, on a white-maned horse, in a white cherkeska, in a papakha with a turban, and with gold-inlaid arms, rode a man of imposing appearance. This man was Hadji Murat. He rode up to Poltoratsky and said something to him in Tartar. Poltoratsky raised his eyebrows, spread his arms in a sign that he did not understand, and smiled. Hadji Murat answered his smile with a smile, and that smile struck Poltoratsky by its childlike good nature. Poltoratsky had never expected this fearsome mountaineer to be like that. He had expected to see a gloomy, dry, alien man, and before him was a most simple man, who smiled such a kindly smile that he seemed not alien, but a long-familiar friend. Only one thing was peculiar about him: this was his wide-set eyes, which looked attentively, keenly, and calmly into the eyes of other people.

Hadji Murat’s suite consisted of four men. In that suite was Khan Mahoma, the one who had gone to Vorontsov the night before. He was a red-cheeked, round-faced man with bright, black, lidless eyes, radiant with an expression of the joy of life. There was also a stocky, hairy man with joined eyebrows. This was the Tavlin Hanefi, who managed all of Hadji Murat’s belongings. He was leading a spare horse with tightly packed saddlebags. Two men especially stood out among the suite: one young, slender as a woman in the waist and broad in the shoulders, with a barely sprouting blond beard, a handsome man with sheep’s eyes—this was Eldar; and the other, blind in one eye, with no eyebrows or lashes, with a trimmed red beard and a scar across his nose and face—the Chechen Gamzalo.

Poltoratsky pointed out Vorontsov for Hadji Murat as he appeared down the road. Hadji Murat headed towards him and, coming close, put his right hand to his chest, said something in Tartar, and stopped. The Chechen interpreter translated:

“‘I surrender myself,’ he says, ‘to the will of the Russian tsar. I wish to serve him,’ he says. ‘I have long wished it,’ he says. ‘Shamil would not let me.’”

Having heard out the interpreter, Vorontsov offered his suede-gloved hand to Hadji Murat. Hadji Murat looked at this hand, paused for a second, but then pressed it firmly and said something more, looking now at the interpreter, now at Vorontsov.

“He says he did not want to come over to anyone but you, because you are the sardar’s son. He respects you firmly.”

Vorontsov nodded as a sign that he thanked him. Hadji Murat said something more, pointing to his suite.

“He says these people, his murids, will serve the Russians just as he will.”

Vorontsov turned to look and nodded to them, too.

The merry, black-eyed, lidless Khan Mahoma, nodding in the same way, said something to Vorontsov that must have been funny, because the hairy Avar bared his bright white teeth in a smile. The red-haired Gamzalo only flashed his one red eye for an instant at Vorontsov and again fixed it on his horse’s ears.

As Vorontsov and Hadji Murat, accompanied by the suite, rode back to the fortress, the soldiers taken from the line, gathering in a bunch, made their observations:

“He’s been the ruin of so many souls, curse him, and now just think how they’ll oblige him,” said one.

“And what else? He was Shammel’s top lootnant. Now, I bet …”

“He’s a brave dzhigit, there’s no denying.”

“And the redhead, the redhead, now—looks sideways, like a beast.”

“Ugh! Must be a real dog.”

They all took special notice of the redhead.

WHERE THE WOODCUTTING was going on, the soldiers who were closer to the road ran out to have a look. An officer yelled at them, but Vorontsov told him to stop.

“Let them look at their old acquaintance. Do you know who this is?” Vorontsov asked a soldier standing closer by, articulating the words slowly with his English accent.

“No, Your Excellency.”

“Hadji Murat—heard of him?”

“How could I not, Your Excellency, we beat him many times.”

“Well, well, and you got it from him, too.”

“That we did, Your Excellency,” the soldier replied, pleased that he had managed to talk with his commander.

Hadji Murat understood that they were talking about him, and a merry smile lit up in his eyes. Vorontsov returned to the fortress in the most cheerful spirits.

VI

VORONTSOV WAS very pleased that he, precisely he, had managed to lure out and receive the chief, the most powerful enemy of Russia, after Shamil. There was only one unpleasant thing: the commander of the army in Vozdvizhenskoe was General Meller-Zakomelsky, and in fact the whole affair should have been conducted through him. But Vorontsov had done everything himself, without reporting to him, which might lead to unpleasantness. And this thought poisoned Vorontsov’s pleasure a little.

On reaching his house, Vorontsov entrusted the murids to the regimental adjutant and led Hadji Murat into the house himself.

Princess Marya Vassilievna, dressed up, smiling, together with her son, a handsome, curly-headed, six-year-old boy, met Hadji Murat in the drawing room, and Hadji Murat, pressing his hands to his chest, said somewhat solemnly, through the interpreter who accompanied him, that he considered himself the prince’s kunak, since the prince had received him into his house, and a kunak’s whole family was as sacred for a kunak as he himself. Marya Vassilievna liked both the appearance and the manners of Hadji Murat. That he blushed when she gave him her big white hand disposed her still more in his favor. She invited him to sit down and, having asked him whether he drank coffee, ordered it served. However, Hadji Murat declined coffee when it was served to him. He had a little understanding of Russian, but could not speak it, and, when he did not understand, he smiled, and Marya Vassilievna liked his smile, just as Poltoratsky had. And Marya Vassilievna’s curly-headed, sharp-eyed little son, whom she called Bulka, standing by his mother, did not take his eyes from Hadji Murat, whom he had heard of as an extraordinary warrior.

Leaving Hadji Murat with his wife, Vorontsov went to his office to make arrangements for informing his superiors about Hadji Murat’s coming over. Having written a report to the commander of the left flank, General Kozlovsky, in Grozny, and a letter to his father, Vorontsov hurried home, fearing his wife’s displeasure at having a strange, frightening man foisted on her, who had to be treated so that he was neither offended nor overly encouraged. But his fear was needless. Hadji Murat was sitting in an armchair holding Bulka, Vorontsov’s stepson, on his knee, and, inclining his head, was listening attentively to what the interpreter was saying to him, conveying the words of the laughing Marya Vassilievna. Marya Vassilievna was telling him that if he were to give every kunak whatever thing of his the kunak praised, he would soon be going around like Adam …

When the prince came in, Hadji Murat took Bulka, who was surprised and offended by it, from his knee, and stood up, immediately changing the playful expression on his face to a stern and serious one. He sat down only when Vorontsov sat down. Continuing the conversation, he replied to Marya Vassilievna’s words by saying that it was their law, that whatever a kunak likes must be given to the kunak.

“Your son—my kunak,” he said in Russian, stroking the curly head of Bulka, who again climbed on his knee.

“He’s charming, your brigand,” Marya Vassilievna said to her husband in French. “Bulka admired his dagger, and he gave it to him.”

Bulka showed his stepfather the dagger.

“C’est un objet de prix,” said Marya Vassilievna.

“Il faudra trouver l’occasion pour lui faire cadeau,”* said Vorontsov.

Hadji Murat sat with lowered eyes and, stroking the boy’s curly head, repeated:

“Dzhigit, dzhigit.”

“A beautiful dagger, beautiful,” said Vorontsov, half drawing the sharp steel dagger with a groove down the middle. “Thank you.”

“Ask him whether I can be of service to him,” Vorontsov said to the interpreter.

The interpreter translated, and Hadji Murat replied at once that he did not need anything, but asked that he now be taken to a place where he could pray. Vorontsov called a valet and told him to carry out Hadji Murat’s wish.

As soon as Hadji Murat was left alone in the room he was taken to, his face changed: the expression of pleasure and of alternating affection and solemnity vanished, and a preoccupied expression appeared.

The reception Vorontsov had given him was far better than he had expected. But the better that reception was, the less Hadji Murat trusted Vorontsov and his officers. He feared everything: that he would be seized, put in chains, and sent to Siberia, or simply killed; and therefore he was on his guard.

Eldar came, and he asked him where the murids were quartered, where the horses were, and whether their weapons had been taken from them.

Eldar reported that the horses were in the prince’s stable, the men had been quartered in a shed, their weapons had remained with them, and the interpreter had treated them to food and tea.

Perplexed, Hadji Murat shook his head and, having undressed, stood in prayer. When he finished, he ordered his silver dagger brought to him and, dressed and girded, sat crosslegged on the divan, waiting for what would happen.

At four o’clock he was called to the prince’s for dinner.

Hadji Murat ate nothing at dinner except pilaf, which he served himself from the same place on the dish from which Marya Vassilievna had taken for herself.

“He’s afraid we may poison him,” Marya Vassilievna said to her husband. “He took from where I did.” And she at once addressed Hadji Murat through the interpreter, asking when he would now pray again. Hadji Murat held up five fingers and pointed to the sun.

“Soon, in other words.”

Vorontsov took out his Breguet⁶ and pressed the release. The watch struck four and one quarter. Hadji Murat was obviously surprised by this chiming, and he asked to hear it chime again and to look at the watch.

“Voilà l’occasion. Donnez-lui la montre,”* Marya Vassilievna said to her husband.

Vorontsov at once offered Hadji Murat the watch. Hadji Murat put his hand to his chest and took the watch. He pressed the release several times, listened, and shook his head approvingly.

After dinner Meller-Zakomelsky’s adjutant was announced to the prince.

The adjutant informed the prince that when the general learned of Hadji Murat’s coming over, he was very displeased that it had not been reported to him, and he requested that Hadji Murat be brought to him immediately. Vorontsov said that the general’s order would be carried out, and, informing Hadji Murat through the interpreter of the general’s request, asked him to go with him to Meller.

Marya Vassilievna, learning why the adjutant had come, understood at once that there might be trouble between her husband and the general, and, despite all her husband’s protests, made ready to go to the general with her husband and Hadji Murat.

“Vous feriez beaucoup mieux de rester; c’est mon affaire, mais pas la vôtre.”

“Vous ne pouvez pas m’empêcher d’aller voir madame la générale.”*

“You could do it some other time.”

“I want to do it now.”

There was no help for it. Vorontsov agreed, and all three of them went.

When they came in, Meller, with glum courtesy, conducted Marya Vassilievna to his wife, and told the adjutant to take Hadji Murat to the reception room and not let him go anywhere until he was ordered to.

“If you please,” he said to Vorontsov, opening the door of his study and allowing the prince to go in ahead of him.

On entering the study, he stopped before the prince and, without inviting him to sit down, said:

“I am the military commander here, and therefore all negotiations with the enemy must be conducted through me. Why did you not inform me of Hadji Murat’s coming over?”

“An emissary came to see me and announced Hadji Murat’s wish to give himself up to me,” Vorontsov replied, turning pale with agitation, expecting a rude outburst from the wrathful general and at the same time becoming infected by his wrath.

“I ask you, why did you not report it to me?”

“I intended to, Baron, but …”

“I am not ‘Baron’ to you, I am ‘Your Excellency.’”

And here the baron’s long-restrained irritation suddenly burst out. He voiced all that for a long time had been seething in his soul.

“I have not served my sovereign for twenty-seven years in order to have men who began their service yesterday, availing themselves of their family connections, make arrangements under my very nose about things that do not concern them.”

“Your Excellency! I beg you not to speak unfairly,” Vorontsov interrupted him.

“I am speaking fairly and will not allow …” the general spoke even more irritably.

Just then Marya Vassilievna came in, rustling her skirts, followed by a rather small, modest lady, Meller-Zakomelsky’s wife.

“Well, enough, Baron. Simon didn’t mean to cause any unpleasantness,” Marya Vassilievna began.

“I was not speaking of that, Princess …”

“Well, you know, we’d better just drop it. You know: a bad spat is better than a good quarrel. Oh, what am I saying! …” She laughed.

And the irate general gave in to the bewitching smile of the beauty. A smile flashed under his mustache.

“I admit I was wrong,” said Vorontsov, “but …”

“Well, I got a bit heated myself,” said Meller, and he offered the prince his hand.

Peace was established, and it was decided to leave Hadji Murat with Meller temporarily and then send him to the commander of the left flank.

Hadji Murat was sitting in the next room, and though he did not understand what they were saying, he understood what he needed to understand: that the argument was about him, that his coming over from Shamil was a matter of great importance for the Russians, and that therefore, if only they did not exile or kill him, he could demand much from them. Besides that, he understood that Meller-Zakomelsky, though he was superior in rank, did not have the significance that Vorontsov, his subordinate, had, and that Vorontsov was important, while Meller-Zakomelsky was not; and therefore, when Meller-Zakomelsky summoned Hadji Murat and began to question him, Hadji Murat bore himself proudly and solemnly, saying that he had come from the mountains to serve the white tsar, and that he would give an accounting of everything only to his sardar, that is, commander in chief, Prince Vorontsov, in Tiflis.

VII

THE WOUNDED AVDEEV WAS CARRIED to the hospital, housed in a small building with a plank roof at the exit from the fortress, and put on one of the empty beds in the common ward. There were four patients in the ward: one thrashing in typhoid fever; another pale, with blue under his eyes, sick with the ague, waiting for a paroxysm and yawning constantly; and another two wounded in a raid some three weeks earlier—one in the hand (he was walking about), the other in the shoulder (he was sitting on the bed). All of them, except for the one with typhoid, surrounded the new arrival and questioned those who brought him.

“Sometimes they shoot like spilling peas and nothing happens, but here they fired maybe five shots in all,” one of the bearers was telling them.

“His time had come!”

“Oh,” Avdeev grunted loudly, struggling against the pain, when they began to put him on the bed. Once he was laid out, he frowned and did not groan any more, but only kept moving his feet. He held his wound with his hands and stared straight ahead fixedly.

A doctor came and ordered the wounded man turned over to see whether the bullet had come out the other side.

“What’s this?” the doctor asked, pointing to the crisscrossed white scars on his back and behind.

“That’s an old thing, Your Honor,” Avdeev said, groaning.

These were the traces of his punishment for the money he drank up.

Avdeev was turned back over, and the doctor picked in his stomach with the probe for a long time and found the bullet, but could remove it. Having bandaged the wound and pasted a sticking plaster over it, the doctor left. All through the picking in the wound and the bandaging of it, Avdeev lay with clenched teeth and closed eyes. When the doctor left, he opened his eyes and looked around him in surprise. His eyes were directed at the patients and the orderly, but it was as if he did not see them, but saw something else that surprised him very much.

Avdeev’s comrades came—Panov and Seryogin. Avdeev went on lying in the same way, gazing straight ahead in surprise. For a long time he could not recognize his comrades, though his eyes were looking straight at them.

“Don’t you want to have somebody write home, Pyotr?” said Panov.

Avdeev did not answer, though he was looking at Panov’s face.

“I said, don’t you want to have somebody write home?” Panov asked again, touching his cold, broad-boned hand.

It was as if Avdeev came to.

“Ah, Antonych has come!”

“Yes, here I am. Don’t you want to have somebody write home? Seryogin will write for you.”

“Seryogin,” said Avdeev, shifting his gaze with difficulty to Seryogin, “will you write? … Write this, then: ‘Your son, Petrukha, wishes you long life.’ I envied my brother. I told you today. But now I’m glad. I mean, let him live on and on. God grant it, I’m glad. Write that.”

Having said that, he fell silent for a long time, his eyes fixed on Panov.

“Well, and did you find your pipe?” he suddenly asked.

Panov shook his head and did not answer.

“Your pipe, your pipe, I’m saying, did you find it?” Avdeev repeated.

“It was in my bag.”

“So there. Well, and now give me a candle, I’ll be dying,” said Avdeev.

Just then Poltoratsky came to visit his soldier.

“What, brother, is it bad?” he said.

Avdeev closed his eyes and shook his head negatively. His high-cheekboned face was pale and stern. He said nothing in reply and only repeated again, addressing Panov:

“Give me a candle. I’ll be dying.”

They put a candle in his hand, but his fingers would not bend, so they stuck it between his fingers and held it there. Poltoratsky left, and five minutes after he left, the orderly put his ear to Avdeev’s heart and said it was all over.

In the report sent to Tiflis, Avdeev’s death was described in the following way: “On November 23rd two companies of the Kurinsky regiment went out of the fortress to cut wood. In the middle of the day, a considerable body of mountaineers suddenly attacked the woodcutters. The picket line began to drop back, and at that moment the second company fell upon the mountaineers with bayonets and overcame them. Two privates were lightly wounded in the action and one was killed. The mountaineers lost around a hundred men killed and wounded.”

VIII

ON THE SAME DAY that Petrukha Avdeev was dying in the Vozdvizhenskoe hospital, his old father, the wife of his brother, for whom he had gone as a soldier, and the older brother’s daughter, a girl of marriageable age, were threshing oats on the frozen threshing floor. Deep snow had fallen the day before, and towards morning it had become freezing cold. The old man woke up at the third cockcrow and, seeing bright moonlight in the frosted window, got down from the stove,⁷ put on his boots, his winter coat, his hat, and went to the threshing floor. After working there for some two hours, the old man went back to the cottage and woke up his son and the women. When the women and the girl came to the threshing floor, it had been cleared, a wooden shovel was stuck into the dry white snow and next to it a besom, twigs up, and the oat sheaves were laid out in two rows, ears to ears, in a long line across the clean floor. They sorted out the flails and began to beat in a measured rhythm of three strokes. The old man beat hard with his heavy flail, breaking up the straw, the girl beat steadily from above, the daughter-in-law knocked it aside.

The moon set, and it began to grow light; and they were already finishing the line when the elder son, Akim, in a short coat and hat, came out to the workers.

“What are you loafing about for?” the father shouted at him, interrupting the threshing and leaning on his flail.

“Somebody’s got to tend to the horses.”

“Tend to the horses,” the father mimicked him. “The old woman’ll tend to them. Take a flail. You’ve grown too fat. Drunkard!”

“Wasn’t your drink, was it?” the son grumbled.

“What’s that?” the old man asked menacingly, frowning and skipping a stroke.

The son silently took a flail, and the work went on with four flails: trap, tra-ta-tap, trap, tra-ta-tap … trap! The old man’s heavy flail struck every fourth time.

“Just look at the nape on him, like some real, good squire. And I can’t keep my pants up,” the old man said, skipping a stroke and swinging the flail in the air so as not to lose the rhythm.

The line was finished, and the women started removing the straw with rakes.

“Petrukha’s a fool to have gone for you. They’d have beaten the nonsense out of you in the army, and at home he was worth five the likes of you.”

“Well, enough, father,” the daughter-in-law said, throwing aside the broken sheaf binders.

“Yes, feed the five of you and there’s not even one man’s work from you. Petrukha used to work like two men by himself, not like …”

Down the beaten path from the yard, creaking over the snow in new bast shoes with tightly wrapped woolen footcloths under them, came the old woman. The men were raking the unwinnowed grain into a pile, the women and the girl were sweeping up.

“The headman came by. Everybody’s got to go and transport bricks for the master,” said the old woman. “I’ve made breakfast. Come along now.”

“All right. Hitch up the roan and go,” the old man said to Akim. “And see that I don’t have to answer for you like the other day. Mind you of Petrukha.”

“When he was at home, you yelled at him,” Akim now snarled at his father, “but he’s not, so you nag me.”

“Means you deserve it,” his mother said just as crossly. “You can’t take Petrukha’s place.”

“Well, all right!” said the son.

“Oh, yes, all right. You drank up the flour, and now you say ‘all right.’”

“Don’t open old wounds,” said the daughter-in-law, and they all laid down their flails and went to the house.

The friction between the father and the son had begun long ago, almost from the time when Pyotr was sent as a soldier. Even then the old man already sensed that he had exchanged a hawk for a cuckoo bird. True, according to the law, as the old man understood it, the childless son had to go in place of the family man. Akim had four children, Pyotr had none, but Pyotr was the same kind of worker as his father: skillful, keenwitted, strong, enduring, and, above all, industrious. He was always working. When he passed by people at work, just as his father used to do, he at once offered to help—to go a row or two with the scythe, or to load a cart, or to fell a tree, or to chop wood. The old man was sorry about him, but there was nothing to be done. Soldiering was like death. A soldier was a cut-off limb, and to remember him—to chafe your soul—was useless. Only rarely did the old man remember him, like today, in order to needle the elder son. But the mother often remembered her younger son, and for two years now she had been asking the old man to send Petrukha some money. But the old man kept silent.

The Avdeevs’ farmstead was rich, and the old man had a bit of cash tucked away, but he would not venture to touch what he had saved for anything. Now, when the old woman heard him mention the younger son, she decided to ask him again to send their son at least one little rouble once the oats were sold. And so she did. Left alone with the old man once the younger people went to work for the master, she persuaded him to send one rouble of the oat money to Petrukha. So that, when the piles had been winnowed and twelve quarters of oats had been poured on sheets of burlap in three sledges, and the sheets had been neatly pinned with wooden pins, she gave her old man a letter written in her words by the village clerk, and the old man promised that in town he would put a rouble into the letter and send it.

The old man, dressed in a new fur coat and a kaftan, and in clean white woolen leggings, took the letter, put it in his pouch, and, having prayed to God, got into the front sledge and went to town. His grandson rode in the rear sledge. In town the old man told the innkeeper to read him the letter and listened to it attentively and approvingly.

In her letter Petrukha’s mother sent, first, her blessing, second, greetings from them all, the news of his godfather’s death, and at the end the news that Aksinya (Pyotr’s wife) “did not want to live with us and went off on her own. We hear that she lives a good and honorable life.” There was mention of the present, the rouble, and added to that, word for word, was what the rueful old woman, with tears in her eyes, had told the clerk to write straight from her heart:

“And so, dear little child of mine, my little dove Petrushenka, I’ve wept my eyes out grieving over you. My beloved little sun, why did you leave me …” At this point the old woman had begun to wail and weep, and said:

“Leave it like that.”

It remained like that in the letter, but Petrukha was not fated to receive either the news that his wife had left home, or the rouble, or his mother’s last words. The letter and the money came back with the news that Petrukha had been killed in the war, “defending the tsar, the fatherland, and the Orthodox faith.” So wrote the army scribe.

The old woman, on receiving this news, wailed for as long as she had time, and then got back to work. On the first Sunday she went to church and handed out little pieces of communion bread “to the good people in memory of the servant of God Pyotr.”

The soldier’s wife Aksinya also wailed on learning of the death of her “beloved husband” with whom she had “lived only one little year.” She pitied both her husband and all her own ruined life. And in her wailing she mentioned “Pyotr Mikhailovich’s light brown curls, and his love, and her wretched life with the orphan Vanka,” and bitterly reproached “Petrusha for pitying his brother and not pitying wretched her, a wanderer among strangers.”

But deep in her heart Aksinya was glad of Pyotr’s death. She was pregnant again by the salesclerk she lived with, and now no one could reproach her anymore, and the salesclerk could marry her, as he had said he would when he was persuading her to love him.

IX

MIKHAIL SEMYONOVICH VORONTSOV,⁸ brought up in England, the son of the Russian ambassador, was a man of European education rare at that time among highly placed Russian officials, ambitious, mild and gentle in his dealings with his inferiors, and a subtle courtier in his relations with his superiors. He could not understand life without power and obedience. He had all the highest ranks and decorations and was considered a skillful military man, even as the vanquisher of Napoleon at Craonne.⁹ In the year 1851 he was over seventy, but he was still quite fresh, moved briskly, and above all was in full possession of all the adroitness of a fine and pleasant intelligence, directed at the maintaining of his power and the strengthening and spreading of his popularity. He possessed great wealth—both his own and that of his wife, Countess Branitsky—and received an enormous maintenance in his quality as vicegerent, and spent the greater part of his means on the construction of a palace and garden on the southern coast of the Crimea.

On the evening of 7 December 1851, a courier’s troika drove up to his palace in Tiflis. A weary officer, all black with dust, bringing news from General Kozlovsky that Hadji Murat had come over to the Russians, stretching his legs, walked past the sentries onto the wide porch of the vicegerent’s palace. It was six o’clock in the evening, and Vorontsov was about to go to dinner when the courier’s arrival was announced to him. Vorontsov received the courier without delay and was therefore several minutes late for dinner. When he entered the dining room, the dinner guests, some thirty of them, sitting around Princess Elizaveta Ksaverievna or standing in groups by the windows, rose and turned their faces towards him. Vorontsov was in his usual black military tunic without epaulettes, with narrow shoulder straps and a white cross on his neck. His clean-shaven, foxy face smiled pleasantly, and his eyes narrowed as he looked over the whole gathering.

Having entered the dining room with soft, hurrying steps, he apologized to the ladies for being late, greeted the men, and went up to the Georgian princess Manana Orbeliani, a full-bodied, tall, forty-five-year-old beauty of the Oriental type, and gave her his arm to lead her to the table. Princess Elizaveta Ksaverievna herself took the arm of a visiting reddish-haired general with bristling mustaches. The Georgian prince gave his arm to Countess Choiseul, the princess’s friend. Doctor Andreevsky, the adjutants, and others, some with, some without ladies, followed the three couples. Footmen in kaftans, stockings, and shoes pulled out and pushed back the chairs, seating them; the head waiter solemnly ladled steaming soup from a silver tureen.

Vorontsov sat at the middle of the long table. Across from him sat his wife, with the general. To his right was his lady, the beautiful Orbeliani; to his left, a slender, dark-haired, red-cheeked young Georgian princess in glittering jewelry, who never stopped smiling.

“Excellentes, chère amie,” Vorontsov replied to the princess’s question of what news he had received from the courier. “Simon a eu de la chance.”*

And he began to tell, so that all those sitting at the table could hear, the astounding news—for him alone it was not entirely news, because the negotiations had long been going on—that the famous Hadji Murat, the bravest of Shamil’s lieutenants, had come over to the Russians and would be brought to Tiflis today or tomorrow.

All the dinner guests, even the young men, adjutants and clerks, who sat at the far ends of the table and had been quietly laughing about something just before, became silent and listened.

“And you, General, have you met this Hadji Murat?” the princess asked her neighbor, the red-haired general with bristling mustaches, when the prince finished speaking.

“More than once, Princess.”

And the general told how, in the year forty-three, after the mountaineers had taken Gergebil, Hadji Murat had happened upon General Passek’s detachment, and how he had killed Colonel Zolotukhin almost before their eyes.

Vorontsov listened to the general with an agreeable smile, obviously pleased that the general was talking. But suddenly Vorontsov’s face assumed a distracted and glum expression.

The talkative general began to tell about where he had met Hadji Murat the second time.

“It was he,” the general was saying, “kindly remember, Your Excellency, who set up an ambush on the rescue during the biscuit expedition.”

“Where?” Vorontsov asked, narrowing his eyes.

The thing was that what the brave general referred to as the “rescue” was that action during the unfortunate Dargo campaign, in which an entire detachment, with its commander, Prince Vorontsov, would indeed have perished, if fresh troops had not come to their rescue. It was known to everyone that the entire Dargo campaign, under Vorontsov’s command, in which the Russians suffered great losses in killed and wounded and several cannon, was a shameful event, and therefore if anyone did talk about that campaign in front of Vorontsov, it was only in the sense in which Vorontsov had written his report to the tsar, that is, that it had been a brilliant exploit of the Russian army. But the word “rescue” pointed directly to the fact that it had been, not a brilliant exploit, but a mistake that had destroyed many men. Everyone understood that, and some pretended that they had not caught the meaning of the general’s words, others waited fearfully for what would happen next; a few smiled and exchanged glances.

Only the red-haired general with the bristling mustaches noticed nothing and, carried away by his story, calmly replied:

“On the rescue, Your Excellency.”

And once launched upon his favorite theme, the general told in detail how “this Hadji Murat had so deftly cut the detachment in two that, if it hadn’t been for the ‘rescue’”—he seemed to repeat the word “rescue” with a special fondness—“we’d all have stayed there, because …”

The general did not manage to finish, because Manana Orbeliani, realizing what was the matter, interrupted the general’s speech, asking him about the comforts of his accomodations in Tiflis. The general was surprised, looked around at them all and at his adjutant at the end of the table, who was looking at him with a fixed and meaningful gaze—and suddenly understood. Without answering the princess, he frowned, fell silent, and hurriedly started eating, without chewing, the delicacy that lay on his plate, incomprehensible in look and even in taste.

Everyone felt awkward, but the awkwardness of the situation was remedied by the Georgian prince, very stupid, but a remarkably subtle and skillful flatterer and courtier, who was sitting on the other side of Princess Vorontsov. As if he had not noticed anything, he began telling in a loud voice about Hadji Murat’s abduction of the widow of Akhmet Khan of Mekhtulin.

“He came into the village at night, seized what he wanted, and rode off with his entire party.”

“Why did he want precisely that woman?” asked the princess.

“He was her husband’s enemy, pursued him, but was never able to confront the khan before his death, so he took revenge on the widow.”

The princess translated this into French for her old friend, Countess Choiseul, who was sitting next to the Georgian prince.

“Quelle horreur!”* said the countess, closing her eyes and shaking her head.

“Oh, no,” Vorontsov said, smiling, “I was told that he treated his prisoner with chivalrous respect and then released her.”

“Yes, for a ransom.”

“Well, of course, but even so he acted nobly.”

The prince’s words set the tone for the further stories told about Hadji Murat. The courtiers understood that the more importance they ascribed to Hadji Murat, the more pleased Prince Vorontsov would be.

“Amazing boldness the man has. A remarkable man.”

“Why, in the year forty-nine he burst into Temir Khan Shura in broad daylight and looted the shops.”

An Armenian man sitting at the end of the table, who had been in Temir Khan Shura at the time, told in detail about this exploit of Hadji Murat’s.

Generally, the whole dinner passed in telling stories about Hadji Murat. They all vied with each other in praising his courage, intelligence, magnanimity. Someone told how he had ordered twenty-six prisoners killed; but to this there was the usual objection:

“No help for it! À la guerre comme à la guerre.”*

“He’s a great man.”

“If he’d been born in Europe, he might have been a new Napoleon,” said the stupid Georgian prince with the gift for flattery.

He knew that every mention of Napoleon, for the victory over whom Vorontsov wore a white cross on his neck, was pleasing to the prince.

“Well, maybe not Napoleon, but a dashing cavalry general—yes,” said Vorontsov.

“If not Napoleon, then Murat.”¹⁰

“And his name is Hadji Murat.”

“Hadji Murat has come over, now it’s the end of Shamil,” someone said.

“They feel that now” (this “now” meant under Vorontsov) “they won’t hold out,” said someone else.

“Tout cela est grâce à vous,”† said Manana Orbeliani.

Prince Vorontsov tried to keep down the waves of flattery that were already beginning to inundate him. But it was pleasant for him, and he escorted his lady to the drawing room in the best of spirits.

After dinner, when coffee was served in the drawing room, the prince was especially amiable with everyone and, going up to the general with red, bristling mustaches, tried to show him that he had not noticed his awkwardness.

Having made the round of all his guests, the prince sat down to cards. He played only the old-fashioned game of ombre. The prince’s partners were the Georgian prince, then the Armenian general, who had learned to play ombre from the prince’s valet, and the fourth—famous for his power—Dr. Andreevsky.

Placing a gold snuffbox with a portrait of Alexander I beside him, Vorontsov cracked the deck of satiny cards and was about to deal them when his valet, the Italian Giovanni, came in with a letter on a silver salver.

“Another courier, Your Excellency.”

Vorontsov put down the cards and, apologizing, unsealed the letter and began to read.

The letter was from his son. He described Hadji Murat’s coming over and his own confrontation with Meller-Zakomelsky.

The princess came over and asked what their son wrote.

“The same thing. Il a eu quelques désagréments avec le commandant de la place. Simon a eu tort.* But all is well that ends well,” he said in English, and, turning to his respectfully waiting partners, he asked them to take their cards.

When the first hand had been dealt, Vorontsov opened the snuffbox and did what he always did when he was in especially good spirits: he took a pinch of French tobacco with his old man’s wrinkled white hand, put it to his nose, and snuffed it in.

X

WHEN HADJI MURAT PRESENTED himself to Vorontsov the next day, the prince’s anteroom was full of people. There was yesterday’s general with the bristling mustaches, in full-dress uniform and decorations, come to take his leave; there was a regimental commander who was threatened with court action for abuses to do with regimental provisions; there was a rich Armenian, patronized by Dr. Andreevsky, who held the monopoly on vodka and was now soliciting for the renewal of his contract; there, all in black, was the widow of an officer who had been killed, come to ask for a pension or for child support from the state treasury; there was a ruined Georgian prince in magnificent Georgian dress, soliciting for some abandoned Church property; there was a district police commissioner with a big packet containing plans for a new way of subjugating the Caucasus; there was a khan who came only so as to be able to tell them at home that he had called upon the prince.

They all waited their turn and one after another were shown into the prince’s office by a handsome, fair-haired young adjutant.

When Hadji Murat, at a brisk stride, limping slightly, came into the anteroom, all eyes turned to him, and from various sides he heard his name spoken in a whisper.

Hadji Murat was dressed in a long white cherkeska over a brown beshmet with fine silver piping on its collar. On his legs there were black leggings and on his feet matching chuviaki that fitted them like a glove, on his shaven head a papakha with a turban—the same for which, on the denunciation of Akhmet Khan, he had been arrested by General Klügenau,¹¹ and which had been the reason for his going over to Shamil. Hadji Murat walked in, stepping briskly over the parquet of the anteroom, his whole slender body swaying from the slight lameness of one leg, which was shorter than the other. His wide-set eyes looked calmly before him and seemed not to notice anyone.

The handsome adjutant, having greeted him, asked Hadji Murat to sit down while he announced him to the prince. But Hadji Murat declined to sit down and, putting his hand behind his dagger and advancing one foot, went on standing, scornfully looking around at those present.

The interpreter, Prince Tarkhanov, came up to Hadji Murat and began speaking to him. Hadji Murat replied reluctantly, curtly. A Kumyk prince, who had a complaint against a police commissioner, came out of the office, and after him the adjutant called Hadji Murat, led him to the door of the office, and showed him in.

Vorontsov received Hadji Murat standing by the edge of his desk. The old white face of the commander in chief was not smiling, as the day before, but rather stern and solemn.

On entering the big room, with its enormous desk and big windows with green jalousies, Hadji Murat put his small, sunburnt hands to the place on his chest where the edges of his white cherkeska overlapped and, unhurriedly, clearly, and respectfully, in the Kumyk dialect, which he spoke well, lowering his eyes, said:

“I place myself under the great tsar’s high protection and your own. I promise to serve the white tsar faithfully, to the last drop of my blood, and I hope to be of use in the war with Shamil, my enemy and yours.”

Having listened to the interpreter, Vorontsov glanced at Hadji Murat, and Hadji Murat glanced into Vorontsov’s face.

The eyes of these two men, as they met, said much to each other that could not be expressed in words and that certainly was not what the interpreter was saying. They spoke the whole truth about each other directly, without words. Vorontsov’s eyes said that he did not believe a single word of all that Hadji Murat had said, that he knew he was the enemy of all things Russian, would always remain so, and was submitting now only because he had been forced to do so. And Hadji Murat understood that and all the same assured him of his fidelity. Hadji Murat’s eyes said that this old man ought to be thinking about death, and not about war, but though he was old, he was cunning, and one had to be careful with him. And Vorontsov understood that and all the same said to Hadji Murat what he considered necessary for the success of the war.

“Tell him,” Vorontsov said to the interpreter (he spoke informally to the young officer), “that our sovereign is as merciful as he is mighty, and probably, at my request, will pardon him and take him into his service. Did you tell him?” he asked, looking at Hadji Murat. “Tell him that, until I receive the merciful decision of my ruler, I take it upon myself to receive him and make his stay with us agreeable.”

Hadji Murat once more put his hands to the middle of his chest and began to say something animatedly.

He said, as conveyed by the interpreter, that formerly, when he ruled Avaria, in the year thirty-nine, he served the Russians faithfully and would never have betrayed them if it had not been for his enemy Akhmet Khan, who wanted to ruin him and slandered him before General Klügenau.

“I know, I know,” said Vorontsov (though if he had known, he had long forgotten it all). “I know,” he said, sitting down and pointing Hadji Murat to the divan that stood by the wall. But Hadji Murat did not sit down, shrugging his strong shoulders as a sign that he would not venture to sit in the presence of such an important man.

“Akhmet Khan and Shamil are both my enemies,” he went on, turning to the interpreter. “Tell the prince: Akhmet Khan died, I could not be revenged on him, but Shamil is still alive, and I will not die before I have repaid him,” he said, frowning and tightly clenching his jaws.

“Yes, yes,” Vorontsov said calmly. “But how does he want to repay Shamil?” he said to the interpreter. “And tell him that he may sit down.”

Hadji Murat again declined to sit down and, to the question conveyed to him, replied that he had come over to the Russians in order to help them to destroy Shamil.

“Fine, fine,” said Vorontsov. “But precisely what does he want to do? Sit down, sit down …”

Hadji Murat sat down and said that, if they would only send him to the Lezghian line and give him an army, he guaranteed that he would raise the whole of Daghestan, and Shamil would be unable to hold out.

“That’s fine. That’s possible,” said Vorontsov. “I’ll think about it.”

The interpreter conveyed Vorontsov’s words to Hadji Murat. Hadji Murat fell to thinking.

“Tell the sardar,” he said further, “that my family is in my enemy’s hands; and as long as my family is in the mountains, my hands are tied and I cannot serve him. He will kill my wife, kill my mother, kill my children, if I go against him directly. Let the prince only rescue my family, exchange them for prisoners, and then I will either die or destroy Shamil.”

“Fine, fine,” said Vorontsov. “We’ll think about that. And now let him go to the chief of staff and explain to him in detail his situation, his intentions and wishes.”

So ended Hadji Murat’s first meeting with Vorontsov.

In the evening of that same day, in the new theater decorated in Oriental taste, an Italian opera was playing. Vorontsov was in his box, and in the parterre appeared the conspicuous figure of the lame Hadji Murat in his turban. He came in with Vorontsov’s adjutant, Loris-Melikov,¹² who had been attached to him, and took a seat in the front row. With Oriental, Muslim dignity, not only with no expression of surprise, but with an air of indifference, having sat through the first act, Hadji Murat stood up and, calmly looking around at the spectators, went out, drawing the attention of all the spectators to himself.

The next day was Monday, the habitual soirée at the Vorontsovs’. In the big, brightly lit hall an orchestra, hidden in the winter garden, was playing. Young and not-so-young women, in dresses baring their necks, their arms, and almost their breasts, turned in the arms of men in bright uniforms. By the mountains of snacks, valets in red tailcoats, stockings, and shoes, poured champagne and went about offering sweets to the ladies. The wife of the “sardar,” also just as half-bared, despite her no longer young years, walked among the guests, smiling affably, and, through the interpreter, said a few amiable words to Hadji Murat, who, with the same indifference as the day before in the theater, was looking the guests over. After the hostess, other bared women came up to Hadji Murat, and all of them, unashamed, stood before him and, smiling, asked one and the same thing: how did he like what he saw. Vorontsov himself, in gold epaulettes and aglets, with the white cross on his neck and a ribbon, came up to him and asked the same thing, obviously convinced, like all the questioners, that Hadji Murat could not help liking all he saw. And Hadji Murat gave Vorontsov the same answer he gave them all: that his people did not have it—without saying whether it was good or bad that they did not have it.

Hadji Murat tried to talk with Vorontsov even here, at the ball, about the matter of ransoming his family, but Vorontsov, pretending that he had not heard his words, walked away from him. Loris-Melikov said later to Hadji Murat that this was not the place to talk business.

When it struck eleven and Hadji Murat verified the time on his watch, given to him by Marya Vassilievna, he asked Loris-Melikov whether he could leave. Loris-Melikov said he could, but it would be better to stay. In spite of that, Hadji Murat did not stay and drove off in the phaeton put at his disposal to the quarters assigned to him.

XI

ON THE FIFTH DAY of Hadji Murat’s stay in Tiflis, Loris-Melikov, the vicegerent’s adjutant, came to him on orders from the commander in chief.

“My head and my hands are glad to serve the sardar,” said Hadji Murat with his usual diplomatic expression, bowing his head and putting his hands to his chest. “Order me,” he said, glancing amiably into Loris-Melikov’s eyes.

Loris-Melikov sat in an armchair that stood by the table. Hadji Murat seated himself on a low divan facing him and, his hands propped on his knees, bowed his head and began listening attentively to what Loris-Melikov said to him. Loris-Melikov, who spoke Tartar fluently, said that the prince, though he knew Hadji Murat’s past, wished to learn his whole story from him.

“You tell it to me,” said Loris-Melikov, “and I will write it down, then translate it into Russian, and the prince will send it to the sovereign.”

Hadji Murat paused (he not only never interrupted anyone’s speech, but always waited to see if his interlocutor was going to say something more), then raised his head, shook back his papakha, and smiled that special childlike smile that had already captivated Marya Vassilievna.

“That is possible,” he said, obviously flattered by the thought that his story would be read by the sovereign.

“Tell it to me,” Loris-Melikov said to him informally (in Tartar there is no formal address), “right from the beginning, and don’t hurry.” And he took a notebook from his pocket.

“That is possible, only there is much, very much to tell. Many things happened,” said Hadji Murat.

“If you don’t manage in one day, you can finish the next,” said Loris-Melikov.

“Begin from the beginning?”

“Yes, from the very beginning: where you were born, where you lived.”

Hadji Murat lowered his head and sat like that for a long time; then he picked up a little stick that lay by the divan, took from under his dagger with its gold-mounted ivory hilt a razor-sharp steel knife and began to whittle the stick with it and at the same time to tell his story:

“Write: Born in Tselmes, a small aoul, the size of an ass’s head, as we say in the mountains,” he began. “Not far from us, a couple of shots away, was Khunzakh, where the khans lived. And our family was close to them. My mother nursed the eldest khan, Abununtsal Khan, which is why I became close to the khans. There were three khans: Abununtsal Khan, the foster brother of my brother Osman, Umma Khan, my sworn brother, and Bulatch Khan, the youngest, the one Shamil threw from the cliff. But of that later. I was about fifteen years old when the murids started going around the aouls. They struck the stones with wooden sabers and cried: ‘Muslims, ghazavat!’ All the Chechens went over to the murids, and the Avars began to go over. I lived in the palace then. I was like a brother to the khans: I did as I liked and became rich. I had horses, and weapons, and I had money. I lived for my own pleasure, not thinking about anything. And I lived like that till the time when Kazi Mullah was killed and Hamzat stood in his place.¹³ Hamzat sent envoys to the khans to tell them that, if they did not take up the ghazavat, he would lay waste to Khunzakh. This needed thought. The khans were afraid of the Russians, afraid to take up the ghazavat, and the khansha sent me with her son, the second one, Umma Khan, to Tiflis, to ask the chief Russian commander for help against Hamzat. The chief commander was Rosen, the baron. He did not receive me or Umma Khan. He sent to tell us he would help and did nothing. Only his officers began coming to us and playing cards with Umma Khan. They got him drunk and took him to bad places, and he lost all he had to them at cards. He was strong as a bull in body, and brave as a lion, but his soul was weak as water. He would have gambled away his last horses and weapons, if I hadn’t taken him away. After Tiflis my thinking changed, and I began to persuade the khansha and the young khans to take up the ghazavat.”

“Why did your thinking change?” asked Loris-Melikov. “You didn’t like the Russians?”

Hadji Murat paused.

“No, I didn’t,” he said resolutely and closed his eyes. “And there was something else that made me want to take up the ghazavat.”

“What was that?”

“Near Tselmes the khan and I ran into three murids: two got away, but the third I killed with my pistol. When I went up to him to take his weapons, he was still alive. He looked at me. ‘You have killed me,’ he said. ‘That is well with me. But you are a Muslim, and young and strong. Take up the ghazavat. God orders it.’”

“Well, and did you take it up?”

“I didn’t, but I started thinking,” said Hadji Murat, and he went on with his story. “When Hamzat approached Khunzakh, we sent some old men and told them to say that we were ready to take up the ghazavat, if only he would send a learned man to explain how we were to keep it. Hamzat ordered the old men’s mustaches shaved, their nostrils pierced, and flat cakes hung from their noses, and sent them back. The old men said that Hamzat was ready to send a sheikh to teach us the ghazavat, but only if the khansha sent her youngest son to him as an amanat. The khansha trusted Hamzat and sent Bulatch Khan to him. Hamzat received Bulatch Khan well, and sent to us to invite the older brothers, too. He told the messenger to say that he wanted to serve the khans just as his father had served their father. The khansha was a weak woman, foolish and bold, as all women are when they live by their own will. She was afraid to send both her sons, and sent only Umma Khan. I went with him. The murids rode out a mile ahead to meet us, and sang, and fired their guns, and caracoled around us. And when we rode up, Hamzat came out of his tent, went to the stirrup of Umma Khan, and received him as befits a khan. He said: ‘I have done no harm to your house and do not want to. Only do not kill me and do not hinder me from bringing people over to the ghazavat. And I will serve you with my whole army as my father served your father. Let me live in your house. I will help you with my advice, and you do what you want.’ Umma Khan was dull of speech. He did not know what to say, and was silent. Then I said, if it was so, let Hamzat go to Khunzakh. The khansha and the khan would receive him with honor. But they did not let me finish, and here for the first time I encountered Shamil. He was right there by the imam. ‘It was not you who were asked, but the khan,’ he said to me. I fell silent, and Hamzat took Umma Khan to the tent. Then Hamzat called me and told me to go to Khunzakh with his envoys. I went. The envoys started persuading the khansha to let the oldest khan go to Hamzat as well. I saw the treachery and told the khansha not to send her son. But a woman has as much sense in her head as there are hairs on an egg. She trusted them and told her son to go. Abununtsal did not want to. Then she said, ‘It’s clear you’re afraid.’ Like a bee, she knew where to sting him most painfully. Abununtsal flared up, did not speak any more with her, and ordered his horse saddled. I went with him. Hamzat met us still better than Umma Khan. He himself rode out two shots’ distance down the hill. After him rode horsemen with standards, singing ‘La ilaha il Allah,’ shooting off their guns, and caracoling. When we came to the camp, Hamzat led the khan into the tent. And I stayed with the horses. I was at the foot of the hill when shooting began in Hamzat’s tent. I ran to the tent. Umma Khan lay face down in a pool of blood, and Abununtsal was fighting with the murids. Half his face had been cut off and hung down. He held it with one hand and held a dagger in the other, with which he cut down everyone who came near him. In front of me he cut down Hamzat’s brother and turned against another man, but here the murids started shooting at him and he fell.”

Hadji Murat stopped, his tanned face turned reddish brown, and his eyes became bloodshot.

“Fear came over me, and I ran away.”

“Really?” said Loris-Melikov. “I thought you were never afraid of anything.”

“Never afterwards. Since then I always remembered that shame, and when I remembered it, I was no longer afraid of anything.”

XII

“ENOUGH FOR NOW. I must pray,” said Hadji Murat, and he took Vorontsov’s Breguet from the inside breast pocket of his cherkeska, carefully pressed the release, and, inclining his head to one side and repressing a childlike smile, listened. The watch rang twelve and a quarter.

“Kunak Vorontsov peshkesh,” he said, smiling. “A good man.”

“Yes, a good man,” said Loris-Melikov. “And a good watch. You go and pray, then, and I’ll wait.”

“Yakshi, good,” said Hadji Murat, and he went to the bedroom.

Left alone, Loris-Melikov wrote down in his notebook the main things from what Hadji Murat had told him, then lit a cigarette and began pacing up and down the room. Coming to the door opposite the bedroom, Loris-Melikov heard the animated voices of people speaking about something rapidly in Tartar. He realized that these were Hadji Murat’s murids and, opening the door, went in.

In the room there was that special sour, leathery smell that mountaineers usually have. On the floor, on a burka by the window, sat one-eyed, red-haired Gamzalo, in a ragged, greasy beshmet, plaiting a bridle. He was saying something heatedly in his hoarse voice, but when Loris-Melikov came in, he fell silent at once and, paying no attention to him, went on with what he was doing. Facing him stood the merry Khan Mahoma, baring his white teeth and flashing his black, lashless eyes, and repeating one and the same thing. The handsome Eldar, the sleeves rolled up on his strong arms, was rubbing the girth of a saddle that hung from a nail. Hanefi, the chief worker and household manager, was not in the room. He was in the kitchen cooking dinner.

“What were you arguing about?” Loris-Melikov asked Khan Mahoma, having greeted him.

“He keeps praising Shamil,” said Khan Mahoma, giving Loris his hand. “He says Shamil is a great man. A scholar, and a holy man, and a dzhigit.”

“But how is it that he left him and keeps praising him?”

“He left him, and he praises him,” said Khan Mahoma, baring his teeth and flashing his eyes.

“And do you, too, regard him as a holy man?” asked Loris-Melikov.

“If he weren’t a holy man, people wouldn’t listen to him,” said Gamzalo.

“The holy man was not Shamil, but Mansur,”¹⁴ said Khan Mahoma. “That was a real holy man. When he was imam, all the people were different. He went around the aouls, and the people came out to him, kissed the skirts of his cherkeska, and repented of their sins, and swore not to do bad things. The old men said: Back then all the people lived like holy men—didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t miss prayers, forgave each other’s offenses, even blood offenses. Back then, if they found money or things, they tied them to poles and set them up on the roads. Back then God granted the people success in all things, and it wasn’t like now,” said Khan Mahoma.

“Now, too, they don’t drink or smoke in the mountains,” said Gamzalo.

“Your Shamil is a lamoroi,” said Khan Mahoma, winking at Loris-Melikov.

“Lamoroi” was a contemptuous name for the mountaineers.

“A lamoroi is a mountaineer. It’s in the mountains that eagles live,” replied Gamzalo.

“Good boy! A neat cut,” said Khan Mahoma, baring his teeth, glad of his opponent’s neat reply.

Seeing the silver cigarette case in Loris-Melikov’s hand, he asked for a cigarette. And when Loris-Melikov said that they were forbidden to smoke, he winked one eye, nodding his head towards Hadji Murat’s bedroom, and said that he could as long as nobody saw it. And he at once began to smoke, not inhaling and putting his red lips together awkwardly as he blew the smoke out.

“That’s not good,” Gamzalo said sternly, and he left the room. Khan Mahoma winked at him, too, and, while smoking, began questioning Loris-Melikov about where it was best to buy a silk beshmet and a white papakha.

“What, have you got so much money?”

“Enough,” Khan Mahoma replied, winking.

“Ask him where he got his money,” said Eldar, turning his handsome, smiling head to Loris.

“I won it,” Khan Mahoma said quickly, and he told how, the day before, strolling about Tiflis, he had come upon a bunch of men, Russian orderlies and Armenians, playing at pitch-and-toss. The stake was big: three gold coins and many silver ones. Khan Mahoma understood at once what the game involved, and, clinking the coppers he had in his pocket, entered the circle and said he staked for all that was there.

“How could you do that? Did you have it on you?” asked Loris-Melikov.

“All I had was twelve kopecks,” said Khan Mahoma, baring his teeth.

“Well, but if you’d lost?”

“There’s this.”

And Khan Mahoma pointed to his pistol.

“What, you’d give it to them?”

“Why give it to them? I’d have run away, and if anybody had tried to stop me, I’d have killed him. And that’s that.”

“And, what, you won?”

“Aya, I gathered it all up and left.”

Loris-Melikov fully understood Khan Mahoma and Eldar. Khan Mahoma was a merrymaker, a carouser, who did not know what to do with his surplus of life, always cheerful, light-minded, playing with his own and other people’s lives, who from that playing with life had now come over to the Russians and from that playing might in just the same way go back to Shamil tomorrow. Eldar was also fully understandable: this was a man fully devoted to his murshid, calm, strong, and firm. The only one Loris-Melikov did not understand was the red-haired Gamzalo. Loris-Melikov saw that this man was not only devoted to Shamil, but felt an insuperable loathing, scorn, disgust, and hatred for all Russians; and therefore Loris-Melikov could not understand why he had come over to the Russians. The thought sometimes occurred to Loris-Melikov, and it was shared by certain of the authorities, that Hadji Murat’s coming over and his stories of enmity with Shamil were a deception, that he had come over only so as to spy out the weak spots of the Russians and, fleeing to the mountains again, to direct his forces to where the Russians were weak. And Gamzalo, with his whole being, confirmed that supposition. “The other two, and Hadji Murat himself,” thought Loris-Melikov, “are able to conceal their intentions, but this one gives himself away by his unconcealed hatred.”

Loris-Melikov tried to talk to him. He asked whether it was boring for him here. But, without leaving off his work, giving Loris-Melikov a sidelong glance with his one eye, he produced a hoarse and abrupt growl:

“No, it’s not.”

And he answered all other questions in the same way.

While Loris-Melikov was in the nukers’ room, Hadji Murat’s fourth murid came in, the Avar Hanefi, with his hairy face and neck and shaggy, protruding chest, as if overgrown with fur. He was an unreflecting, stalwart worker, always absorbed in what he was doing and, like Eldar, obeyed his master without argument.

When he came into the nukers’ room to get rice, Loris-Melikov stopped him and asked where he was from and how long he had been with Hadji Murat.

“Five years,” Hanefi replied to Loris-Melikov’s question. “We’re from the same aoul. My father killed his uncle, and they wanted to kill me,” he said, looking calmly from under his joined eyebrows into Loris-Melikov’s face. “Then I asked to be received as a brother.”

“What does it mean, to be received as a brother?”

“I didn’t shave my head or cut my fingernails for two months, and I came to them. They let me see Patimat, his mother. Patimat gave me her breast, and I became his brother.”

In the next room the voice of Hadji Murat was heard. Eldar at once recognized his master’s call and, wiping his hands, went hastily, with big strides, to the drawing room.

“He’s calling you,” he said, coming back. And, having given one more cigarette to the merry Khan Mahoma, Loris-Melikov went to the drawing room.

XIII

WHEN LORIS-MELIKOV CAME into the drawing room, Hadji Murat met him with a cheerful face.

“So, shall we go on?” he said, seating himself on the divan.

“Yes, certainly,” said Loris-Melikov. “And I went to see your nukers and talked with them. One is a merry fellow,” he added.

“Yes, Khan Mahoma is an easygoing man,” said Hadji Murat.

“And I liked the young, handsome one.”

“Ah, Eldar. That one’s young, but firm, made of iron.”

They fell silent.

“So I’ll speak further?”

“Yes, yes.”

“I told you how the khans were killed. Well, they killed them, and Hamzat rode to Khunzakh and sat in the khans’ palace,” Hadji Murat began. “There remained the mother, the khansha. Hamzat summoned her. She began to reprimand him. He winked to his murid Aselder, and he struck her from behind and killed her.”

“Why should he kill her?” asked Loris-Melikov.

“What else could he do: he got his front legs over, the hind legs had to follow. The whole brood had to be finished off. And that’s what they did. Shamil killed the youngest by throwing him from a cliff. All the Avars submitted to Hamzat, only my brother and I did not want to submit. We had to have his blood for the khans. We pretended to submit, but we thought only of how to have his blood. We took counsel with our grandfather and decided to wait for a moment when he left the palace and kill him from ambush. Someone overheard us, told Hamzat, and he summoned our grandfather and said: ‘Watch out, if it’s true your grandsons are plotting evil against me, you’ll hang beside them from the same gallows. I am doing God’s work, I cannot be prevented. Go and remember what I have said.’ Grandfather came home and told us. Then we decided not to wait, to do the deed on the first day of the feast in the mosque. Our comrades refused—only my brother and I were left. We each took two pistols, put on our burkas, and went to the mosque. Hamzat came in with thirty murids. They were all holding drawn sabers. Beside Hamzat walked Aselder, his favorite murid—the same one who cut off the khansha’s head. Seeing us, he shouted for us to take off our burkas, and came towards me. I had a dagger in my hand, and I killed him and rushed for Hamzat. But my brother Osman had already shot him. Hamzat was still alive and rushed at my brother with a dagger, but I finished him off in the head. There were about thirty murids and the two of us. They killed my brother Osman, but I fought them off, jumped out the window, and escaped. When the people learned that Hamzat had been killed, they all rose up, and the murids fled, and those who didn’t were killed.”

Hadji Murat paused and took a deep breath.

“That was all very well,” he went on, “then it all went bad. Shamil stood in place of Hamzat. He sent envoys to me to tell me to go with him against the Russians; if I refused, he threatened to lay waste to Khunzakh and kill me. I said I wouldn’t go to him and wouldn’t let him come to me.”

“Why didn’t you go to him?” asked Loris-Melikov.

Hadji Murat frowned and did not answer at once.

“It was impossible. There was the blood of my brother Osman and of Abununtsal Khan upon Shamil. I didn’t go to him. Rosen, the general, sent me an officer’s rank and told me to be the commander of Avaria. All would have been well, but earlier Rosen had appointed over Avaria, first, the khan of Kazikumykh, Mahomet Mirza, and then Akhmet Khan. That one hated me. He wanted to marry his son to the khansha’s daughter Saltanet. She was not given to him, and he thought it was my fault. He hated me and sent his nukers to kill me, but I escaped from them. Then he spoke against me to General Klügenau, said that I wouldn’t let the Avars give firewood to the soldiers. He also told him that I had put on the turban—this one,” said Hadji Murat, pointing to the turban over his papakha, “and that it meant I had gone over to Shamil. The general did not believe him and ordered him not to touch me. But when the general left for Tiflis, Akhmet Khan did it his way: he had me seized by a company of soldiers, put me in chains, and tied me to a cannon. They kept me like that for six days. On the seventh day they untied me and led me to Temir Khan Shura. I was led by forty soldiers with loaded muskets. My hands were bound, and they had orders to kill me if I tried to escape. I knew that. When we began to approach a place near Moksokh where the path was narrow and to the right there was a steep drop of about a hundred yards, I moved to the right of the soldier, to the edge of the cliff. The soldier wanted to stop me, but I jumped from the cliff and dragged the soldier with me. The soldier was battered to death, but I stayed alive. Ribs, head, arms, legs—everything was broken. I tried to crawl but couldn’t. My head whirled around and I fell asleep. I woke up soaked in blood. A shepherd saw me. He called people, they took me to the aoul. Ribs and head healed, the leg healed, too, only it came out short.”

And Hadji Murat stretched out his crooked leg.

“It serves me, and that’s good enough,” he said. “People found out and started coming to me. I recovered, moved to Tselmes. The Avars again invited me to rule over them,” Hadji Murat said with calm, assured pride. “And I agreed.”

Hadji Murat stood up quickly. And, taking a portfolio from a saddlebag, he drew two yellowed letters from it and handed them to Loris-Melikov. The letters were from General Klügenau. Loris-Melikov read them over. The first letter contained the following:

“Ensign Hadji Murat! You served under me—I was satisfied with you and considered you a good man. Recently Major General Akhmet Khan informed me that you are a traitor, that you have put on the turban, that you have contacts with Shamil, that you have taught the people not to listen to the Russian authorities. I ordered you arrested and delivered to me. You escaped—I do not know whether that is for better or worse, because I do not know whether you are guilty or not. Now listen to me. If your conscience is clear with regard to the great tsar, if you are not guilty of anything, come to me. Do not fear anyone—I am your defender. The khan will not do anything to you; he is my subordinate, and you have nothing to fear.”

Klügenau wrote further that he had always kept his word and was just, and again admonished Hadji Murat to come over to him.

When Loris-Melikov finished the first letter, Hadji Murat took out the other letter, but before handing it to Loris-Melikov, he told him how he had answered the first letter.

“I wrote to him that I wore the turban, not for Shamil, but for the salvation of my soul, that I could not and would not go over to Shamil, because through him my father and my brothers and relations had been killed, but that neither could I come over to the Russians, because they had dishonored me. In Khunzakh, when I was bound, a certain scoundrel——ed on me. And I cannot come over to you until that man has been killed. And above all I fear the deceitful Akhmet Khan. Then the general sent me this letter,” said Hadji Murat, handing Loris-Melikov another yellowed piece of paper.

“I thank you for having answered my letter,” read Loris-Melikov. “You write that you are not afraid to return, but that a dishonor inflicted on you by a certain giaour forbids it; but I assure you that Russian law is just, and before your own eyes you will see the punishment of the man who dared to insult you—I have already ordered it investigated. Listen, Hadji Murat. I have the right to be displeased with you, because you do not trust me and my honor, but I forgive you, knowing the mistrustful character of mountaineers in general. If you have a clean conscience, if you actually wear the turban for the salvation of your soul, then you are right and can boldly look me and the Russian government in the eye; and the one who dishonored you will be punished, I assure you; your property will be returned, and you will see and learn what Russian law is. The more so as Russians look at everything differently; in their eyes you are not harmed because some blackguard has dishonored you. I myself have allowed the Ghimrians to wear the turban, and I look upon their actions as fitting; consequently, I repeat, you have nothing to fear. Come to me with the man I am sending to you now; he is faithful to me, he is not a slave of your enemies, but a friend of the one who enjoys the special attention of the government.”

Klügenau again went on to persuade Hadji Murat to come over.

“I didn’t trust it,” said Hadji Murat, when Loris-Melikov had finished the letter, “and I didn’t go to Klügenau. Above all, I had to revenge myself on Akhmet Khan, and I could not do it through the Russians. Just then Akhmet Khan surrounded Tselmes and wanted to capture or kill me. I had very few men, and I was unable to fight him off. And just then a messenger came from Shamil with a letter. He promised to help me fight off Akhmet Khan and kill him, and to give me the whole of Avaria to rule over. I thought for a long time and went over to Shamil. And since then I have never ceased making war on the Russians.”

Here Hadji Murat told about all his military exploits. There were a great many of them, and Loris-Melikov partly knew them. All his campaigns and raids were striking in the extraordinary swiftness of his movements and the boldness of his attacks, which were always crowned with success.

“There has never been any friendship between me and Shamil,” Hadji Murat said, finishing his story, “but he feared me, and I was necessary to him. But here it so happened that I was asked who would be imam after Shamil. I said that he would be imam whose saber was sharp. This was told to Shamil, and he wanted to get rid of me. He sent me to Tabasaran. I went and took a thousand sheep and three hundred horses. But he said I had not done the right thing, and he replaced me as naïb and told me to send him all the money. I sent him a thousand pieces of gold. He sent his murids and took everything I possessed. He demanded that I come to him; I knew he wanted to kill me and did not go. He sent men to take me. I fought them off and came over to Vorontsov. Only I did not take my family. My mother, and my wife, and my son are with him. Tell the sardar: as long as my family is there, I can do nothing.”

“I’ll tell him,” said Loris-Melikov.

“Push for it, try hard. What’s mine is yours, only help me with the prince. I’m bound, and the end of the rope is in Shamil’s hands.”

With those words Hadji Murat finished his account to Loris-Melikov.

XIV

ON THE TWENTIETH of December Vorontsov wrote the following to the minister of war, Chernyshov. The letter was in French.¹⁵

“I did not write to you with the last post, my dear prince, wishing first to decide what we were going to do with Hadji Murat, and feeling myself not quite well for two or three days. In my last letter I informed you of Hadji Murat’s arrival here: he came to Tiflis on the 8th; the next day I made his acquaintance, and for eight or nine days I talked with him and thought over what he might do for us later on, and especially what we are to do with him now, because he is greatly concerned about the fate of his family, and says, with all the tokens of sincerity, that as long as his family is in the hands of Shamil, he is paralyzed and unable to serve us and prove his gratitude for the friendly reception and the pardon we have granted him. The uncertainty in which he finds himself regarding the persons dear to him causes a state of feverishness in him, and the persons appointed by me to live with him here assure me that he does not sleep at night, hardly eats anything, prays constantly, and only requests permission to go riding with several Cossacks—the sole diversion and exercise possible for him, made necessary by a habit of many years. Every day he comes to me to find out if I have had any news of his family and asking me to order the gathering of all available prisoners from our various lines, so as to offer them to Shamil in exchange, to which he would add some money. There are people who will give him money for that. He keeps repeating to me: ‘Save my family and then give me the chance to serve you’ (best of all on the Lezghian line, in his opinion), ‘and if, before the month is out, I do not render you a great service, punish me as you consider necessary.’

“I answered him that all this seems perfectly fair to me, and that many persons could be found among us who would not believe him if his family remained in the mountains, and not with us in the quality of a pledge; that I will do everything possible to gather the prisoners on our borders, and that, having no right, according to our regulations, to give him money for a ransom, in addition to what he will raise himself, I might find other means of helping him. After that I told him frankly my opinion that Shamil would in no case yield his family up to him, that he might declare it to him directly, promise him a full pardon and his former duties, threaten, if he did not return, to kill his mother, wife, and six children. I asked him if he could tell me frankly what he would do if he were to receive such a declaration from Shamil. Hadji Murat raised his eyes and hands to heaven and said that everything was in the hands of God, but that he would never give himself into the hands of his enemy, because he was fully convinced that Shamil would not forgive him and that he would not remain alive for long. For what concerns the extermination of his family, he did not think Shamil would act so light-mindedly: first, so as not to make him an enemy still more desperate and dangerous; and second, there is in Daghestan a multitude of persons, even very influential ones, who would talk him out of it. Finally, he repeated to me several times that, whatever the will of God was for the future, he was now taken up only with the thought of ransoming his family; that he beseeched me in the name of God to help him and to allow him to return to the environs of Chechnya, where, through the mediation and with the permission of our commanders, he could have contacts with his family, constant news of their actual situation and of means for freeing them; that many persons and even some naïbs in that part of enemy territory were more or less bound to him; that among all that populace already subjugated by the Russians or neutral, it would be easy for him, with our help, to have contacts very useful for achieving the goal that pursues him day and night, and the attainment of which would set him at ease and enable him to act for our benefit and earn our trust. He asks to be sent back to the Grozny fortress with an escort of twenty or thirty brave Cossacks, who would serve him as a defense against his enemies and us as a pledge of the truth of the intentions he has stated.

“You will understand, my dear prince, that for me this is all very perplexing, because, whatever I do, a great responsibility rests on me. It would be highly imprudent to trust him fully; but if we wanted to deprive him of all means of escape, we would have to lock him up, and that, in my opinion, would be both unjust and impolitic. Such a measure, news of which would quickly spread all over Daghestan, would be very damaging for us there, taking away the desire of all those (and they are many) who are prepared to go against Shamil more or less openly and who take such interest in the position with us of the bravest and most enterprising of the imam’s lieutenants, who saw himself forced to give himself into our hands. The moment we treat Hadji Murat as a prisoner, the whole favorable effect of his betrayal of Shamil will be lost for us.

“Therefore I think that I could not act otherwise than I have acted, feeling, however, that I may be blamed for a great mistake, should Hadji Murat decide to escape again. In the service, and in such intricate affairs, it is difficult, not to say impossible, to follow a single straight path, without risk of being mistaken and without taking responsibility upon oneself; but once the path seems straight, one must follow it—come what may.

“I beg you, dear prince, to present it for the consideration of his majesty the sovereign emperor, and I will be happy if our august ruler deigns to approve of my action. All that I have written to you above, I have also written to Generals Zavadovsky and Kozlovsky, Kozlovsky being in direct contact with Hadji Murat, whom I have warned that without the latter’s approval he is not to do anything or go anywhere. I told him that it will be even better for us if he rides out with our escort, otherwise Shamil will start trumpeting that we keep Hadji Murat locked up; but at the same time I made him promise that he would never go to Vozdvizhenskoe, because my son, to whom he first surrendered and whom he considers his kunak (friend), is not the commander of the place, and it could cause misunderstandings. Anyhow, Vozdvizhenskoe is too close to a numerous hostile populace, while for the relations he wishes to have with trusted persons, the Grozny fortress is convenient in all respects.

“Besides the twenty picked Cossacks, who, at his own request, will not move a step away from him, I have sent the cavalry captain Loris-Melikov, a worthy, excellent, and very intelligent officer, who speaks Tartar, knows Hadji Murat well, and also seems to be fully trusted by him. During the ten days which Hadji Murat spent here, incidentally, he lived in the same house as Lieutenant Colonel Prince Tarkhanov, commander of the Shushinskoe district, who was here on army business; he is a truly worthy man, and I trust him completely. He also gained the trust of Hadji Murat, and through him, since he speaks Tartar excellently, we discussed the most delicate and secret matters.

“I consulted with Tarkhanov concerning Hadji Murat, and he agreed with me completely that I had either to act as I have or to lock Hadji Murat in prison and guard him with all possible strict measures—because if we once treat him badly, he will not be easy to hold—or else he has to be removed from the territory altogether. But these last two measures would not only annul all the advantages that proceed for us from the quarrel between Hadji Murat and Shamil, but would also inevitably bring to a halt any developing murmur and possible insurrection of the mountaineers against Shamil’s power. Prince Tarkhanov told me that he himself was convinced of Hadji Murat’s truthfulness, and that Hadji Murat had no doubt that Shamil would never forgive him and would order him executed, despite the promised forgiveness. If there was one thing that might worry Tarkhanov in his relations with Hadji Murat, it is his attachment to his religion, and he does not conceal that Shamil could influence him from that side. But, as I have already said above, he would never convince Hadji Murat that he would not take his life either now or sometime after his return.

“That, my dear prince, is all that I wished to tell you concerning this episode in our local affairs.”