The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories

XV

THIS REPORT WAS SENT from Tiflis on 24 December. On New Year’s Eve, a sergeant major, having overdriven some dozen horses, and beaten some dozen coachmen until they bled, delivered it to Prince Chernyshov, then minister of war.

And on 1 January 1852, Chernyshov brought to the emperor Nicholas, among a number of other cases, this report from Vorontsov.

Chernyshov did not like Vorontsov—because of the universal respect in which he was held, and because of his enormous wealth, and because Vorontsov was a real aristocrat, while Chernyshov was, after all, a parvenu, and above all because of the emperor’s special inclination for Vorontsov. And therefore Chernyshov profited from every occasion to harm Vorontsov as much as he could. In the previous report about Caucasian affairs, Chernyshov had managed to provoke Nicholas’s displeasure with Vorontsov for the negligence of the commanders, owing to which the mountaineers had exterminated almost an entire small Caucasian detachment. Now he intended to present Vorontsov’s orders about Hadji Murat from an unfavorable side. He wanted to suggest to the sovereign that Vorontsov, who always, particularly to the detriment of the Russians, protected and even indulged the natives, had acted unwisely in keeping Hadji Murat in the Caucasus; that, in all probability, Hadji Murat had come over to us only in order to spy out our means of defense, and that it would therefore be better to send Hadji Murat to the center of Russia and make use of him only when his family could be rescued from the mountains and there could be assurance of his devotion.

But this plan of Chernyshov’s did not succeed, only because on that morning of 1 January, Nicholas was especially out of sorts and would not have accepted any suggestion from anyone merely out of contrariness; still less was he inclined to accept a suggestion from Chernyshov, whom he only tolerated, considering him for the time being an irreplaceable man, but, knowing of his efforts to destroy Zakhar Chernyshov during the trial of the Decembrists and his attempt to take possession of his fortune,¹⁶ he also considered him a great scoundrel. So that, thanks to Nicholas’s ill humor, Hadji Murat remained in the Caucasus, and his fate did not change, as it would have changed if Chernyshov had made his report at another time.

It was nine thirty when, in the haze of a twenty-degree frost, Chernyshov’s fat, bearded coachman, in a sky-blue velvet hat with sharp peaks, sitting on the box of a small sleigh of the same sort that the emperor drove about in, pulled up to the side entrance of the Winter Palace and gave a friendly nod to his comrade, Prince Dolgoruky’s coachman, who, having deposited his master, had already been standing for a long time by the porch of the palace, the reins tucked under his thickly padded behind, and rubbing his chilled hands.

Chernyshov was wearing an overcoat with a fluffy, silvery beaver collar and a three-cornered hat with cock’s feathers, which went with the uniform. Throwing back the bearskin rug, he carefully freed from the sleigh his chilled feet, on which there were no galoshes (he prided himself on knowing nothing of galoshes), and briskly, with a slight jingling of spurs, walked over the carpet to the door, respectfully opened ahead of him by the doorman. In the hall, having thrown off his overcoat into the arms of an old footman, Chernyshov went to the mirror and carefully removed his hat from his curled wig. Looking himself over in the mirror, he twirled his whiskers and forelock with a habitual movement of his old man’s hands, straightened his cross, aglets, and large, monogrammed epaulettes, and, stepping weakly on his badly obeying old man’s legs, began to climb the carpet of the shallow stairs.

Going past the obsequiously bowing footmen who stood by the door in gala livery, Chernyshov entered the anteroom. The officer of the day, a newly appointed imperial adjutant, in a shining new uniform, epaulettes, aglets, and with a ruddy face not yet marked by dissipation, with a little black mustache and the hair of his temples brushed towards the eyes, as the emperor brushed his, met him respectfully. Prince Vassily Dolgoruky, the assistant minister of war, with a bored expression on his dull face, adorned by the same side-whiskers, mustache, and brushed-up temples as Nicholas wore, rose to meet Chernyshov and greeted him.

“L’empereur?” Chernyshov addressed the imperial adjutant, directing his eyes questioningly at the door of the office.

“Sa majesté vient de rentrer,”* said the imperial adjutant, listening to the sound of his own voice with obvious pleasure, and, stepping softly and so smoothly that a full glass of water placed on his head would not have spilled, he went up to the noiselessly opening door and, his whole being expressing reverence for the place he was entering, disappeared through it.

Dolgoruky meanwhile opened his portfolio, checking the papers that were in it.

Chernyshov, frowning, strolled about, stretching his legs and going over all that he had to report to the emperor. Chernyshov was near the door of the office when it opened again and the imperial adjutant came out, still more radiant and respectful than before, and with a gesture invited the minister and his assistant to the sovereign.

The Winter Palace had long since been rebuilt after the fire, yet Nicholas still lived on its upper floor. The office in which he received the reports of ministers and high officials was a very high-ceilinged room with four large windows. A large portrait of the emperor Alexander I hung on the main wall. Between the windows stood two desks. Along the walls several chairs, in the middle of the room an enormous writing table, at the table Nicholas’s armchair and chairs for visitors.

Nicholas, in a black tunic without epaulettes, but with small shoulder straps, sat at the table, his enormous body tight-laced across the overgrown belly, and looked at the entering men with his immobile, lifeless gaze. His long, white face with its enormous, receding brow emerging from the slicked-down hair at his temples, artfully joined to the wig that covered his bald patch, was especially cold and immobile that day. His eyes, always dull, looked duller than usual; his compressed lips under the twirled mustaches, and his fat cheeks propped on his high collar, freshly shaven, with regular, sausage-shaped side-whiskers left on them, and his chin pressed into the collar, gave his face an expression of displeasure and even of wrath. The cause of this mood was fatigue. And the cause of the fatigue was that he had been at a masked ball the night before, and, strolling as usual in his horse guards helmet with a bird on its head, among the public who either pressed towards him or timidly avoided his enormous and self-assured figure, had again met that mask who, at the last masked ball, having aroused his old man’s sensuality by her whiteness, beautiful build, and tender voice, had hidden from him, promising to meet him at the next masked ball. At last night’s ball she had come up to him, and he had not let her go. He had led her to the box kept in readiness especially for that purpose, where he could remain alone with his lady. Having come silently to the door of the box, Nicholas looked around, his eyes searching for the usher, but he was not there. Nicholas frowned and pushed open the door of the box himself, allowing his lady to go in first.

“Il y a quelqu’un,”* the mask said, stopping. The box was indeed occupied. On a little velvet divan, close to each other, sat an uhlan officer and a young, pretty, blond, curly-haired woman in a domino, with her mask off. Seeing the drawn-up, towering, and wrathful figure of Nicholas, the blond woman hastily covered herself with the mask, and the uhlan officer, dumbfounded with terror, not getting up from the divan, stared at Nicholas with fixed eyes.

Accustomed though Nicholas was to the terror he aroused in people, that terror had always been pleasing to him, and he liked on occasion to astound the people thrown into terror, addressing them by contrast with affable words. And so he did now.

“Well, brother, you’re a bit younger than I,” he said to the officer numb with terror, “you might yield the place to me.”

The officer leaped up and, turning pale, then red, cowering, silently followed the mask out of the box, and Nicholas was left alone with his lady.

The mask turned out to be a pretty, innocent, twenty-year-old girl, the daughter of a Swedish governess. The girl told Nicholas how, when still a child, she had fallen in love with him from his portraits, had idolized him, and had resolved to win his attention at any cost. And now she had won it, and, as she said, she wanted nothing more. The girl was taken to the usual place for Nicholas’s meetings with women, and Nicholas spent more than an hour with her.

When he returned to his room that night and lay down on the narrow, hard bed, which he took pride in, and covered himself with his cloak, which he considered (and he said so) as famous as Napoleon’s hat, he could not fall asleep for a long time. He recalled now the frightened and rapturous expression of the girl’s white face, now the powerful, full shoulders of his usual mistress, Mme Nelidov, and drew comparisons between the one and the other. That debauchery was not a good thing in a married man did not even occur to him, and he would have been very surprised if anyone had condemned him for it. But, even though he was convinced that he had acted as he ought, he was left with some sort of unpleasant aftertaste, and, to stifle that feeling, he began thinking about something that always soothed him: about what a great man he was.

Even though he had fallen asleep late, he got up before eight o’clock, as always, and, having performed his usual toilette, having rubbed his big, well-fed body with ice and prayed to God, he recited the usual prayers he had been saying since childhood—the Hail Mary, the Creed, the Our Father—without ascribing any significance to the words he pronounced, and went out through the side entrance to the embankment, in an overcoat and a peaked cap.

Midway along the embankment, he met a student from the law school, as enormously tall as himself, in a uniform and hat. Seeing the uniform of the school, which he disliked for its freethinking, Nicholas frowned, but the tallness of the student, the zealous way he stood to attention and saluted with a deliberately thrust-out elbow, softened his displeasure.

“What is your name?” he asked.

“Polosatov, Your Imperial Majesty!”

“Fine fellow!”

The student went on standing with his hand to his hat. Nicholas stopped.

“Want to join the army?”

“No, sir, Your Imperial Majesty.”

“Blockhead!” and Nicholas, turning away, walked on and began loudly uttering the first words that came to him. “Koperwein, Koperwein,” he repeated several times the name of last night’s girl. “Nasty, nasty.” He was not thinking of what he was saying, but stifled his feeling by concentrating on the words. “Yes, what would Russia be without me?” he said to himself, again sensing the approach of the unpleasant feeling. “Yes, what would, not just Russia, but Europe be without me?” And he remembered his brother-in-law, the king of Prussia, and his weakness and stupidity, and shook his head.

Going back to the porch, he saw the carriage of Elena Pavlovna, with a handsome footman, driving up to the Saltykov entrance. Elena Pavlovna was for him the personification of those empty people who talked not only about science and poetry, but also about governing people, imagining that they could govern themselves better than he, Nicholas, governed them. He knew that, however much he quashed these people, they surfaced again and again. And he recalled his recently deceased brother, Mikhail Pavlovich. And a feeling of vexation and sadness came over him. He frowned gloomily and again began whispering the first words that came to him. He stopped whispering only when he entered the palace. Going into his apartments and smoothing his side-whiskers and the hair on his temples and the hairpiece on his bald patch before the mirror, he twirled his mustaches and went straight to the office where reports were received.

He received Chernyshov first. By Nicholas’s face, and mainly by his eyes, Chernyshov understood at once that he was especially out of sorts that day, and, knowing of his adventure the night before, he understood the cause of it. Having greeted Chernyshov coldly and invited him to be seated, Nicholas fixed his lifeless eyes on him.

The first business in Chernyshov’s report was a case of theft discovered among commissary officials; then there was the matter of a transfer of troops on the Prussian border; then the nomination for New Year awards of certain persons omitted from the first list; then there was the dispatch from Vorontsov about Hadji Murat’s coming over; and, finally, an unpleasant case of a student in the medical academy who had made an attempt on a professor’s life.

Nicholas, with silently compressed lips, stroked the sheets of paper with his big white hands, with a gold ring on one ring finger, and listened to the report about the theft, not taking his eyes from Chernyshov’s forehead and forelock.

Nicholas was convinced that everyone stole. He knew that the commissary officials now had to be punished and decided to send them all as soldiers, but he also knew that that would not prevent those who filled the vacated posts from doing the same thing. It was in the nature of officials to steal, and his duty was to punish them, and sick of it as he was, he conscientiously performed his duty.

“It seems there’s only one honest man in our Russia,” he said.

Chernyshov understood at once that this only man in Russia was Nicholas himself, and he smiled approvingly.

“Surely, that’s so, Your Majesty,” he said.

“Leave it, I’ll write my decision,” said Nicholas, taking the paper and placing it on the left side of the table.

After that, Chernyshov started reporting about awards and the troop transfer. Nicholas glanced through the list, crossed out several names, and then briefly and resolutely ordered the transfer of two divisions to the Prussian border.

Nicholas could never forgive the Prussian king for granting his people a constitution after the year forty-eight, and therefore, while expressing the most friendly feelings for his brother-in-law in letters and words, he considered it necessary to keep troops on the Prussian border just in case. These troops might also prove necessary so that, in case of a popular insurrection in Prussia (Nicholas saw a readiness for insurrection everywhere), they could be sent to defend his brother-in-law’s throne, as he had sent troops to defend Austria against the Hungarians. These troops on the border were also needed to give more weight and significance to his advice to the Prussian king.

“Yes, what would happen to Russia now, if it weren’t for me?” he thought again.

“Well, what else?” he said.

“A sergeant major from the Caucasus,” said Chernyshov, and he began to report what Vorontsov had written about Hadji Murat’s coming over.

“Really,” said Nicholas. “A good beginning.”

“Obviously the plan worked out by Your Majesty is beginning to bear fruit,” said Chernyshov.

This praise of his strategic abilities was especially pleasing to Nicholas, because, though he was proud of his strategic abilities, at the bottom of his heart he was aware that he had none. And now he wanted to hear more detailed praise of himself.

“How do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean that if we had long ago followed Your Majesty’s plan—moving forward gradually, though slowly, cutting down forests, destroying provisions—the Caucasus would have been subjugated long ago. Hadji Murat’s coming over I put down only to that. He realized that it was no longer possible for them to hold out.”

“True,” said Nicholas.

Despite the fact that the plan of a slow movement into enemy territory by means of cutting down forests and destroying provisions was the plan of Ermolov and Velyaminov, and the complete opposite of Nicholas’s plan, according to which it was necessary to take over Shamil’s residence at once and devastate that nest of robbers, and according to which the Dargo expedition of 1845 had been undertaken, at the cost of so many human lives—despite that, Nicholas also ascribed to himself the plan of slow movement, the progressive cutting down of forests, and the destruction of provisions. It would seem that, in order to believe that the plan of slow movement, the cutting down of forests, and the destruction of provisions was his plan, it would be necessary to conceal the fact that he had precisely insisted on the completely opposite military undertaking of the year forty-five. But he did not conceal it and was proud both of his plan of the expedition of the year forty-five and of the plan of slow movement forward, despite the fact that these two plans obviously contradicted each other. The constant, obvious flattery, contrary to all evidence, of the people around him had brought him to the point that he no longer saw his contradictions, no longer conformed his actions and words to reality, logic, or even simple common sense, but was fully convinced that all his orders, however senseless, unjust, and inconsistent with each other, became sensible, just, and consistent with each other only because he gave them.

Such, too, was his decision about the student of the medico-surgical academy, about whom Chernyshov began to report after the report on the Caucasus.

What had happened was that a young man who had twice failed his examinations was taking them for the third time, and when the examiner again did not pass him, the morbidly nervous student, seeing injustice in it, seized a penknife from the desk and, in something like a fit of frenzy, fell upon the professor and inflicted several insignificant wounds.

“What is his last name?” asked Nicholas.

“Bzhezovsky.”

“A Pole?”

“Of Polish origin and a Catholic,” replied Chernyshov.

Nicholas frowned.

He had done much evil to the Poles. To explain that evil he had to be convinced that all Poles were scoundrels. And Nicholas regarded them as such and hated them in proportion to the evil he had done them.

“Wait a little,” he said and, closing his eyes, he lowered his head.

Chernyshov knew, having heard it more than once from Nicholas, that whenever he had to decide some important question, he had only to concentrate for a few moments and inspiration would come to him, and the most correct decision would take shape by itself, as if some inner voice told him what had to be done. He now thought about how he could more fully satisfy that feeling of spite against the Poles that had been aroused in him by the story of this student, and his inner voice prompted him to the following decision. He took the report and wrote on its margin in his large hand: “Deserves the death penalty. But, thank God, we do not have the death penalty. And it is not for me to introduce it. Have him run the gauntlet of a thousand men twelve times. Nicholas”—he signed with his unnatural, enormous flourish.

Nicholas knew that twelve thousand rods was not only a certain, painful death, but also excessive cruelty, because five thousand strokes were enough to kill the strongest man. But it pleased him to be implacably cruel and pleased him to think that we had no death penalty.

Having written his decision about the student, he moved it over to Chernyshov.

“Here,” he said. “Read it.”

Chernyshov read it and, as a sign of respectful astonishment at the wisdom of the decision, inclined his head.

“And have all the students brought to the square, so that they can be present at the punishment,” Nicholas added.

“It will do them good. I’ll destroy this revolutionary spirit, I’ll tear it up by the roots,” he thought.

“Yes, Sire,” said Chernyshov and, after a pause, he straightened his forelock and went back to the Caucasian report.

“What, then, do you order me to write to Mikhail Semyonovich?”

“To adhere firmly to my system of laying waste to habitations, destroying provisions in Chechnya, and harrying them with raids,” said Nicholas.

“What are your orders about Hadji Murat?” asked Chernyshov.

“Why, Vorontsov writes that he wants to make use of him in the Caucasus.”

“Isn’t that risky?” said Chernyshov, avoiding Nicholas’s eyes. “I’m afraid Mikhail Semyonovich is too trusting.”

“And what would you think?” Nicholas asked sharply, noticing Chernyshov’s intention to present Vorontsov’s orders in a bad light.

“I would think it’s safer to send him to Russia.”

“You think so,” Nicholas said mockingly. “But I do not think so and agree with Vorontsov. Write that to him.”

“Yes, Sire,” said Chernyshov and, standing up, he began taking his leave.

Dolgoruky also took his leave. In the whole time of the report, he had said only a few words about the transfer of troops, in answer to Nicholas’s questions.

After Chernyshov, the governor general of the western provinces, Bibikov, was received, having come to take his leave. Approving of the measures Bibikov had taken against the rebellious peasants, who did not want to convert to Orthodoxy,¹⁷ he told him to try all the disobedient in military court. That meant sentencing them to run the gauntlet. Besides that, he ordered the editor of a newspaper to be sent as a soldier for publishing information about the reregistering of several thousand state peasants as crown peasants.

“I do this because I consider it necessary,” he said. “And I allow no discussion of it.”

Bibikov understood all the cruelty of the order about the Uniates and all the injustice of the transfer of state peasants, that is, the only free ones at that time, to the crown, that is, making them serfs of the tsar’s family. But it was impossible to object. To disagree with Nicholas’s orders meant to lose all that brilliant position which he now enjoyed, and which he had spent forty years acquiring. And therefore he humbly bowed his dark, graying head in a sign of submission and readiness to carry out the cruel, insane, and dishonest supreme will.

After dismissing Bibikov, Nicholas, with a consciousness of duty well done, stretched, glanced at the clock, and went to dress for his coming out. Having put on his uniform with epaulettes, decorations, and a sash, he went out to the reception halls, where more than a hundred men in uniform and women in low-cut fancy dresses, all standing in assigned places, waited tremblingly for his coming out.

With his lifeless gaze, with his thrust-out chest and his tight-laced belly protruding from the lacing above and below, he came out to these waiting people, and, feeling that all eyes were directed at him with trembling obsequiousness, he assumed a still more solemn air. When he met the eyes of familiar persons, remembering who was who, he stopped and said a few words, sometimes in Russian, sometimes in French, and, piercing them with his cold, lifeless gaze, listened to what they said to him.

Having received their felicitations, Nicholas went on to church.

God, through his servants, greeted and praised Nicholas, just as the secular people had done, and he, though he found it tedious, received those greetings and praises as his due. All this had to be so, because on him depended the welfare and happiness of the whole world, and though it wearied him, he still did not deny the world his assistance. When, at the end of the liturgy, the magnificent deacon, his long hair combed loose, proclaimed “Many Years,”¹⁸ and with beautiful voices the choristers all as one took up these words, Nicholas glanced behind him and noticed Mme Nelidov with her splendid shoulders, and decided the comparison with last night’s girl in her favor.

After the liturgy he went to the empress and spent several minutes in the family circle, joking with his children and wife. Then he went through the Hermitage to see the minister of court Volkonsky and, among other things, charged him with paying an annual pension out of special funds to the mother of last night’s girl. And from him he went for his usual promenade.

Dinner that day was in the Pompeian Hall. Besides the younger sons, Nicholas and Mikhail, there were also invited Baron Liven, Count Rzhevussky, Dolgoruky, the Prussian ambassador, and the Prussian king’s adjutant general.

While waiting for the empress and emperor to come out, an interesting conversation began between the Prussian ambassador and Baron Liven to do with the latest alarming news from Poland.

“La Pologne et le Caucase, ce sont les deux cautères de la Russie,” said Liven. “Il nous faut cent mille hommes à peu près dans chacun de ces deux pays.”*

The ambassador expressed feigned surprise that it was so.

“Vous dites la Pologne,”† he said.

“Oh, oui, c’était un coup de maître de Metternich de nous en avoir laissé l’embarras …” ‡

At this point in the conversation the empress came in with her shaking head and frozen smile, and Nicholas behind her.

At the table Nicholas told them about Hadji Murat’s coming over and said that the war in the Caucasus should end soon as the result of his order about restricting the mountaineers by cutting down the forests and his system of fortifications.

The ambassador, having exchanged fleeting glances with the Prussian adjutant general, with whom he had spoken that morning about Nicholas’s unfortunate weakness of considering himself a great strategist, highly praised this plan, which proved once again Nicholas’s great strategic abilities.

After dinner Nicholas went to the ballet, where hundreds of bare women marched about in tights. One especially caught his eye and, summoning the ballet master, Nicholas thanked him and ordered that he be given a diamond ring.

The next day, during Chernyshov’s report, Nicholas confirmed once more his instructions to Vorontsov, that now, since Hadji Murat had come over, they should intensify the harrying of Chechnya and hem it in with a cordon line.

Chernyshov wrote in that sense to Vorontsov, and the next day another sergeant major, overdriving the horses and beating the coachmen’s faces, galloped off to Tiflis.

XVI

IN FULFILMENT of these instructions from Nicholas, a raid into Chechnya was undertaken at once, in January 1852.

The detachment sent on the raid consisted of four infantry battalions, two hundred Cossacks, and eight guns. The column marched along the road. On both sides of the column, in an unbroken line, descending into and climbing out of the gullies, marched chasseurs in high boots, fur jackets, and papakhas, with muskets on their shoulders and cartridges in bandoliers. As always, the detachment moved through enemy territory keeping as silent as possible. Only the guns clanked now and then, jolting over ditches, or an artillery horse, not understanding the order for silence, snorted or neighed, or an angered commander yelled in a hoarse, restrained voice at his subordinates because the line was too strung out, or moved too close or too far from the column. Only once the silence was broken by a she-goat with a white belly and rump and a gray back and a similar billy goat with short, back-bent horns, who leaped from a small bramble patch between the line and the column. The beautiful, frightened animals, making big leaps and tucking up their front legs, came flying so close to the column that some of the soldiers ran after them with shouts and guffaws, intending to stick them with their bayonets, but the goats turned back, leaped through the line, and, pursued by several horsemen and the company dogs, sped off like birds into the mountains.

It was still winter, but the sun was beginning to climb higher, and by noon, when the detachment, which had set off early in the morning, had already gone some seven miles, it had warmed up so much that the men felt hot, and its rays were so bright that it was painful to look at the steel of the bayonets and the gleams that suddenly flashed on the bronze of the cannons like little suns.

Behind was the swift, clear river the detachment had just crossed, ahead were cultivated fields and meadows with shallow gullies, further ahead the mysterious, dark hills covered with forest, beyond the dark hills crags jutting up, and on the high horizon—eternally enchanting, eternally changing, playing in the light like diamonds—the snowy mountains.

At the head of the fifth company, in a black tunic, a papakha, and with a saber across his shoulder, marched the tall, handsome officer Butler, recently transferred from the guards, experiencing a vigorous feeling of the joy of life, and at the same time of the danger of death, and the desire for activity, and the consciousness of belonging to an enormous whole governed by a single will. Today Butler was going into action for the second time, and it was a joy to him to think that they were about to be fired at, and that he not only would not duck his head as a cannonball flew over or pay attention to the whistle of bullets, but would carry his head high, as he had done already, and look about at his comrades and soldiers with a smile in his eyes, and start talking in the most indifferent voice about something irrelevant.

The detachment turned off the good road and onto a little-used one, crossing a harvested cornfield, and was just approaching the forest, when—no one could see from where—a cannonball flew over with a sinister whistle and landed at the middle of the baggage train, by the road, in the cornfield, throwing up dirt.

“It’s beginning,” Butler said, smiling merrily, to a comrade walking next to him.

And indeed, after the cannonball, a dense crowd of Chechen horsemen with standards appeared from the forest. In the middle of the party was a large green standard, and the old sergeant major of the company, who was very long-sighted, informed the nearsighted Butler that it must be Shamil himself. The party descended the hill and appeared on the crest of the nearest gully to the right and began to descend into it. A little general in a warm black tunic and a papakha with a big white lambskin top rode up to Butler’s company on his ambler and ordered him to go to the right against the descending horsemen. Butler quickly led his company in the direction indicated, but before he had time to descend into the gully, he heard two cannon shots behind him, one after the other. He looked back: two clouds of blue-gray smoke rose above the two cannon and stretched out along the gully. The party, obviously not expecting artillery, went back. Butler’s company began to fire after the mountaineers, and the whole hollow became covered with powder smoke. Only above the hollow could the mountaineers be seen, hastily retreating and returning the fire of the pursuing Cossacks. The detachment went on after the mountaineers, and on the slope of a second gully an aoul appeared.

Butler and his company, following the Cossacks, came running into the aoul. There were no inhabitants. The soldiers had been ordered to burn grain, hay, and the saklyas themselves. Pungent smoke spread over the whole aoul, and in this smoke soldiers poked about, dragging out of the saklyas whatever they could find, and mainly catching and shooting the chickens that the mountaineers could not take with them. The officers sat down away from the smoke and had lunch and drank. The sergeant major brought them several honeycombs on a board. There was no sign of the Chechens. A little past noon came the order to retreat. The companies formed a column beyond the aoul, and Butler ended up in the rear guard. As soon as they set off, Chechens appeared and, riding after the detachment, escorted it with gunfire.

When the detachment came out into the open, the mountaineers dropped behind. None of Butler’s men was wounded, and he went back in the most merry and cheerful spirits.

When the detachment, having waded back across the little river they had crossed that morning, stretched out over the cornfields and meadows, singers stepped forward by company and songs rang out. There was no wind, the air was fresh, clean, and so transparent that the snowy mountains, which were some seventy miles away, seemed very close, and when the singers fell silent, the measured tramp of feet and clank of guns could be heard, as a background against which the songs started and stopped. The song sung in Butler’s fifth company had been composed by a junker for the glory of the regiment and was sung to a dance tune with the refrain: “What can compare, what can compare, with the chasseurs, with the chasseurs!”

Butler rode beside his next in command, Major Petrov, with whom he lived, and could not rejoice enough at his decision to leave the guards and go to the Caucasus. The main reason for his transfer from the guards was that in Petersburg he had lost so much at cards that he had nothing left. He was afraid that he would not be able to keep from gambling if he stayed in the guards, and he had nothing to gamble with. Now it was all over. This was a different life, and such a fine, dashing one! He forgot now about his ruin and his unpaid debts. And the Caucasus, the war, the soldiers, the officers, the drunken and good-natured, brave Major Petrov—all this seemed so good to him that he sometimes could not believe he was not in Petersburg, not in smoke-filled rooms bending corners and punting, hating the banker and feeling an oppressive ache in his head, but here in this wonderful country, among the dashing Caucasians.

“What can compare, what can compare, with the chasseurs, with the chasseurs!” sang his singers. His horse went merrily in step with this music. The shaggy gray company dog Trezorka, like a commander, its tail curled up, ran ahead of Butler’s company with a preoccupied air. At heart Butler felt cheerful, calm, and merry. War presented itself to him only as a matter of subjecting himself to danger, to the possibility of death, and thereby earning awards, and the respect of his comrades here and of his friends in Russia. The other side of war—the death, the wounds of soldiers, officers, mountaineers—strange as it is to say, did not present itself to his imagination. Unconsciously, to preserve his poetic notion of war, he never even looked at the killed and wounded. And so it was now: we had three men killed and twelve wounded. He passed by a corpse lying on its back, and saw with only one eye the strange position of the waxen arm and the dark red spot on the head, and did not stop to look. The mountaineers presented themselves to him only as dzhigit horsemen from whom one had to defend oneself.

“So it goes, old boy,” the major said between songs. “Not like with you in Petersburg: dress right, dress left. We do our work and go home. Mashurka will serve us a pie, some nice cabbage soup. That’s life! Right? Now, lads, ‘As Dawn Was Breaking,’” he ordered his favorite song.

The major lived maritally with the daughter of a surgeon’s assistant, first known as Mashka, and then as Marya Dmitrievna. Marya Dmitrievna was a beautiful, fair-haired, thirty-year-old, childless woman, all covered with freckles. Whatever her past had been, she was now the major’s faithful companion, took care of him like a nurse, and the major needed it, because he often drank himself into oblivion.

When they reached the fortress, it was all as the major had foreseen. Marya Dmitrievna fed him and Butler and two other invited officers of the detachment a nourishing, tasty dinner, and the major ate and drank so much that he could not speak and went to his room to sleep. Butler, likewise tired, but pleased and slightly tipsy from too much chikhir, went to his room, and having barely managed to undress, put his hand under his handsome curly head, and fell fast asleep, without dreaming or waking up.

XVII

THE AOUL DEVASTATED by the raid was the one in which Hadji Murat had spent the night before his coming over to the Russians.

Sado, with whom Hadji Murat had stayed, was leaving for the mountains with his family when the Russians approached the aoul. When he came back to his aoul, he found his saklya destroyed: the roof had fallen in, the door and posts of the little gallery were burned down, and the inside was befouled. His son, the handsome boy with shining eyes who had looked rapturously at Hadji Murat, was brought dead to the mosque on a horse covered by a burka. He had been stabbed in the back with a bayonet. The fine-looking woman who had waited on Hadji Murat during his visit, now, in a smock torn in front, revealing her old, sagging breasts, and with her hair undone, stood over her son and clawed her face until it bled and wailed without ceasing. Sado took a pick and shovel and went with some relations to dig a grave for his son. The old grandfather sat by the wall of the destroyed saklya and, whittling a little stick, stared dully before him. He had just come back from his apiary. The two haystacks formerly there had been burned; the apricot and cherry trees he had planted and nursed were broken and scorched and, worst of all, the beehives had all been burned. The wailing of women could be heard in all the houses and on the square, where two more bodies had been brought. The small children wailed along with their mothers. Hungry cattle, who had nothing to eat, also bellowed. The older children did not play, but looked at their elders with frightened eyes.

The spring had been befouled, obviously on purpose, so that it was impossible to take water from it. The mosque was also befouled, and the mullah and his assistants were cleaning it up.

The old heads of households gathered on the square and, squatting down, discussed their situation. Of hatred for the Russians no one even spoke. The feeling that was experienced by all the Chechens, big and small, was stronger than hatred. It was not hatred, but a refusal to recognize these Russian dogs as human beings, and such loathing, disgust, and bewilderment before the absurd cruelty of these beings, that the wish to exterminate them, like the wish to exterminate rats, venomous spiders, and wolves, was as natural as the sense of self-preservation.

The inhabitants were faced with a choice: to stay where they were and restore with terrible effort all that had been established with such labor and had been so easily and senselessly destroyed, and to expect at any moment a repetition of the same, or, contrary to religious law and their loathing and contempt for them, to submit to the Russians.

The old men prayed and unanimously decided to send envoys to Shamil asking him for help, and at once set about restoring what had been destroyed.

XVIII

ON THE THIRD DAY after the raid, Butler, not very early in the morning, went out by the back door, intending to stroll and have a breath of air before morning tea, which he usually took together with Petrov. The sun had already come out from behind the mountains, and it hurt to look at the white daub cottages lit up by it on the right side of the street, but then, as always, it was cheering and soothing to look to the left, at the receding and rising black hills covered with forest, and at the opaque line of snowy mountains visible beyond the gorge, trying, as always, to simulate clouds.

Butler looked at these mountains, breathed with all his lungs, and rejoiced that he was alive, and that precisely he was alive, and in this beautiful world. He also rejoiced a little at having borne himself so well in action yesterday, both during the attack and, especially, during the retreat, when things got rather hot; rejoiced, too, remembering how, in the evening, on their return from the sortie, Masha, or Marya Dmitrievna, Petrov’s companion, had fed them and had been especially simple and nice with them all, but in particular, as he thought, had been affectionate to him. Marya Dmitrievna, with her thick braid, broad shoulders, high bosom, and the beaming smile of her kindly, freckled face, involuntarily attracted Butler, as a strong, young, unmarried man, and it even seemed to him that she desired him. But he reckoned that it would be a bad way to treat a kind, simple-hearted comrade, and he maintained a most simple, respectful attitude towards Marya Dmitrievna, and was glad of it in himself. He was just now thinking of that.

His thoughts were distracted when he heard in front of him the rapid beat of many horses’ hooves on the dusty road, as of several men galloping. He raised his head and saw at the end of the street a small group of horsemen approaching at a walk. Ahead of some twenty Cossacks, two men were riding: one in a white cherkeska and a tall papakha with a turban, the other an officer in the Russian service, dark, hook-nosed, in a blue cherkeska with an abundance of silver on his clothes and weapons. Under the horseman in the turban was a handsome light-maned chestnut stallion with a small head and beautiful eyes; under the officer was a tall, showy Karabakh horse. Butler, a horse fancier, at once appraised the vigorous strength of the first horse and stopped to find out who these people were. The officer addressed Butler:

“This army commander house?” he asked, betraying his non-Russian origin both by his ungrammatical speech and by his pronunciation, and pointing his whip at Ivan Matveevich’s house.

“The very one,” said Butler. “And who’s that?” he asked, coming closer to the officer and indicating the man in the turban with his eyes.

“That Hadji Murat. Come here, stay with army commander,” said the officer.

Butler knew about Hadji Murat and his coming over to the Russians, but he had never expected to see him here in this little stronghold.

Hadji Murat was looking at him amicably.

“Greetings, koshkoldy,” he said the Tartar greeting he had learned.

“Saubul,” replied Hadji Murat, nodding his head. He rode up to Butler and gave him his hand, from two fingers of which hung a whip.

“The commander?” he asked.

“No, the commander’s here, I’ll go and call him,” said Butler, addressing the officer and going up the steps and pushing at the door.

But the door of the “main entrance,” as Marya Dmitrievna called it, was locked. Butler knocked, but, receiving no answer, went around to the back door. Having called his orderly and received no answer, and not finding either of his two orderlies, he went to the kitchen. Marya Dmitrievna, flushed, a kerchief on her head and her sleeves rolled up on her plump white arms, was cutting rolled-out dough, as white as her arms, into pieces for little pies.

“Where are the orderlies?” asked Butler.

“Getting drunk somewhere,” said Marya Dmitrievna. “What do you want?”

“To open the door. You’ve got a whole crowd of mountaineers in front of your house. Hadji Murat has come.”

“Tell me another one,” said Marya Dmitrievna, smiling.

“I’m not joking. It’s true. They’re standing by the porch.”

“Can it be?” said Marya Dmitrievna.

“Why should I make it up? Go and look, they’re standing by the porch.”

“That’s a surprise,” said Marya Dmitrievna, rolling down her sleeves and feeling with her hand for the pins in her thick braid. “Then I’ll go and wake up Ivan Matveevich,” she said.

“No, I’ll go myself. And you, Bondarenko, go and open the door,” said Butler.

“Well, that’s good enough,” said Marya Dmitrievna, and she went back to what she was doing.

On learning that Hadji Murat had come to him, Ivan Matveevich, who had already heard that Hadji Murat was in the Grozny fortress, was not surprised by it in the least, but got up, rolled a cigarette, lit it, and began to dress, clearing his throat loudly and grumbling at the superiors who had sent “this devil” to him. Having dressed, he asked his orderly for “medicine.” And the orderly, knowing that “medicine” meant vodka, brought it to him.

“There’s nothing worse than mixing,” he grumbled, drinking up the vodka and taking a bite of black bread. “I drank chikhir yesterday, so today I’ve got a headache. Well, now I’m ready,” he finished and went to the drawing room, where Butler had already brought Hadji Murat and the officer who accompanied him.

The officer escorting Hadji Murat handed Ivan Matveevich the order of the commander of the left flank to receive Hadji Murat, to allow him to have communications with the mountaineers through scouts, but by no means to let him leave the fortress otherwise than with a Cossack escort.

After reading the paper, Ivan Matveevich looked intently at Hadji Murat and again began to scrutinize the paper. Having shifted his eyes from the paper to his guest several times like that, he finally rested his eyes on Hadji Murat and said:

“Yakshi, bek-yakshi. Let him stay. But tell him I’ve been ordered not to let him leave. And orders are sacred. And we’ll put him up—what do you think, Butler—shall we put him up in the office?”

Before Butler had time to reply, Marya Dmitrievna, who had come from the kitchen and was standing in the doorway, addressed Ivan Matveevich:

“Why in the office? Put him up here. We’ll give him the guest room and the storeroom. At least we can keep an eye on him,” she said and, glancing at Hadji Murat and meeting his eyes, she hastily turned away.

“You know, I think Marya Dmitrievna is right,” said Butler.

“Well, well, off with you, women have no business here,” Ivan Matveevich said, frowning.

Throughout the conversation, Hadji Murat sat, his hand tucked behind the hilt of his dagger, smiling somewhat scornfully. He said it made no difference to him where he lived. One thing that he needed and that the sardar had permitted him was to have contacts with the mountaineers, and therefore he wished that they be allowed to come to him. Ivan Matveevich said that that would be done, and asked Butler to entertain the guests until they were brought a bite to eat and their rooms were prepared, while he went to the office to write out the necessary papers and give the necessary orders.

Hadji Murat’s relations with his new acquaintances were at once defined very clearly. From their first acquaintance Hadji Murat felt loathing and contempt for Ivan Matveevich and always treated him haughtily. To Marya Dmitrievna, who prepared and brought his food, he took a special liking. He liked her simplicity, and the special beauty of a nationality foreign to him, and the attraction she felt to him, which she transmitted to him unconsciously. He tried not to look at her, not to speak with her, but his eyes involuntarily turned to her and followed her movements.

With Butler he became friendly at once, from their first acquaintance, and talked with him much and eagerly, questioning him about his life and telling him about his own and passing on the news brought to him by the scouts about the situation of his family, and even consulting with him about what to do.

The news conveyed to him by the scouts was not good. During the four days he had spent in the fortress, they had come to him twice, and both times the news had been bad.

XIX

SOON AFTER Hadji Murat came over to the Russians, his family was brought to the aoul of Vedeno and was kept there under watch, waiting for Shamil’s decision. The women—old Patimat and Hadji Murat’s two wives—and their five small children lived under guard in the saklya of the lieutenant Ibrahim Rashid, but Hadji Murat’s son, the eighteen-year-old boy Yusuf, sat in prison, that is, in a hole more than seven feet deep, together with four criminals awaiting, like him, the deciding of their fate.

The decision did not come, because Shamil was away. He was on campaign against the Russians.

On 6 January 1852, Shamil was returning home to Vedeno after a battle with the Russians in which, according to the opinion of the Russians, he had been crushed and had fled to Vedeno, while according to his own opinion and that of all the murids, he had been victorious and had routed the Russians. In this battle—something that happened very rarely—he himself had fired his rifle and, snatching out his saber, had sent his horse straight at the Russians, but the murids accompanying him had held him back. Two of them had been killed right beside Shamil.

It was midday when Shamil, surrounded by the party of murids, caracoling around him, firing off their rifles and pistols, and ceaselessly singing “La ilaha il Allah,” rode up to his place of residence.

All the people of the large aoul of Vedeno were standing in the street and on the roofs to meet their ruler, and in a sign of festivity also fired off their muskets and pistols. Shamil rode on a white Arabian stallion, who merrily tugged at the reins as they neared home. The horse’s attire was of the most simple, without gold or silver ornaments: a finely worked red leather bridle with a groove down the middle, cup-shaped metal stirrups, and a red blanket showing from under the saddle. The imam was wearing a fur-lined brown broadcloth coat, with black fur showing at the collar and cuffs, tightly girded around his slender and long body by a black belt with a dagger hung from it. On his head was a tall papakha with a flat top and a black tassel, wrapped with a white turban, the end of which hung down behind his neck. On his feet were soft green chuviaki, on his calves tight black leggings trimmed with simple cord.

In general there was nothing on the imam that glittered, gold or silver, and his tall, straight, powerful figure, in unadorned clothes, surrounded by murids with gold and silver ornaments on their clothes and weapons, produced that very impression of grandeur that he wanted and knew how to produce in people. His pale face, framed by a trimmed red beard, with its constantly narrowed little eyes, was perfectly immobile, like stone. As he rode through the aoul, he felt thousands of eyes directed at him, but his eyes did not look at anyone. The wives of Hadji Murat and their children, together with all the inhabitants of the saklya, also came out to the gallery to watch the imam’s entrance. Only old Patimat, Hadji Murat’s mother, did not come out, but remained sitting as she had been sitting, with disheveled gray hair, on the floor of the saklya, clasping her thin knees with her long arms, and, blinking her jet-black eyes, watched the burning-down logs in the fireplace. She, like her son, had always hated Shamil, now more than ever, and she did not want to see him.

Neither did Hadji Murat’s son see the triumphal entry of Shamil. He only heard the singing and shooting from his dark, stinking hole, and suffered as only young people full of life suffer deprived of freedom. Sitting in the stinking hole and seeing all the same unfortunate, dirty, exhausted people imprisoned with him, for the most part hating each other, he was passionately envious of those who, enjoying air, light, freedom, were now caracoling on spirited horses around the ruler, shooting and singing as one: “La ilaha il Allah.”

Having passed through the aoul, Shamil rode into a big courtyard, adjoining an inner one in which Shamil’s seraglio was located. Two armed Lezghians met Shamil by the open gates of the first courtyard. This courtyard was filled with people. There were some who had come from distant places on their own business, there were petitioners, there were those summoned by Shamil himself for trial and sentencing. At Shamil’s entry, all those who were in the courtyard rose and respectfully greeted the imam, putting their hands to their chests. Some knelt and stayed that way all the while Shamil was riding across the courtyard from the one, outside, gate to the other, inner one. Though Shamil recognized among those waiting many persons who were displeasing to him and many tedious petitioners demanding to be attended to, he rode past them with the same unchanging, stony face, and, riding into the inner courtyard, dismounted at the gallery of his lodgings, to the left of the gate.

After the strain of the campaign, not so much physical as spiritual, because Shamil, despite the public recognition of his campaign as victorious, knew that his campaign had been a failure, that many Chechen aouls had been burned and laid waste, and the changeable, light-minded Chechen people were wavering, and some of them, nearest to the Russians, were now ready to go over to them—all this was difficult, measures had to be taken against it, yet at that moment Shamil did not want to do anything, did not want to think about anything. He now wanted only one thing: rest and the delight of the familial caresses of his favorite among his wives, Aminet, the eighteen-year-old, dark-eyed, swift-footed Kist.

But not only was it impossible even to think now of seeing Aminet, who was right there behind the fence in the inner courtyard that separated the wives’ lodgings from the men’s (Shamil was even sure that now, as he was getting off his horse, Aminet and the other wives were watching through a chink in the fence), not only was it impossible even to go to her, but it was impossible simply to lie down on his featherbed to rest from his weariness. It was necessary before all to perform the midday namaz, for which he now had not the slightest inclination, but which it was not only impossible for him not to fulfill in his position as religious leader of his people, but which for him was as necessary as daily food. And so he performed the ablution and the prayer. On finishing the prayer, he summoned those who were waiting for him.

The first to come in was his father-in-law and teacher, a tall, gray-haired, seemly-looking old man with a beard white as snow and a ruddy red face, Jemal ed-Din, who, after saying a prayer, began asking Shamil questions about the events of the campaign and telling him what had happened in the mountains during his absence.

Among all sorts of events—killings in blood feuds, thefts of cattle, accusations of the non-observance of the tariqat: smoking tobacco, drinking wine—Jemal ed-Din told him that Hadji Murat had sent men to take his family out to the Russians, but it had been discovered, and the family had been brought to Vedeno, where it was kept under watch, awaiting the imam’s decision. The old men had gathered here in the kunak room to discuss all these matters, and Jemal ed-Din advised Shamil to allow it today, because they had already been waiting three days for him.

Having eaten dinner in his own room, brought to him by Zaidet, his sharp-nosed, dark, unpleasant-looking and unloved but eldest wife, Shamil went to the kunak room.

The six men who made up his council, old men with white, gray, or red beards, with or without turbans, in tall papakhas and new beshmets and cherkeskas, girded by belts with daggers, rose to meet him. Shamil was a head taller than all of them. They all lifted their hands palms up, as he did, and, closing their eyes, recited a prayer, then wiped their faces with their hands, bringing them down along their beards and joining them together. On finishing that, they all sat down, Shamil in the center on a higher pillow, and began the discussion of all the matters before them.

The cases of persons accused of crimes were decided according to the shariat: two men were sentenced to have a hand cut off for theft, another to have his head cut off for murder, and three were pardoned. Then they went on to the chief matter: considering the measures to be taken against Chechens going over to the Russians. To oppose these defections, Jemal ed-Din had drawn up the following proclamation:

“I wish you eternal peace with God Almighty. I hear that the Russians cajole you and call you to submission. Do not believe them and do not submit, but endure. If you are not rewarded for it in this life, you will be rewarded in the life to come. Remember what happened before, when your weapons were taken away. If God had not brought you to reason then, in 1840, you would now be soldiers and carry bayonets instead of daggers, and your wives would be going about without sharovary and would be dishonored. Judge the future by the past. It is better to die in enmity with the Russians than to live with infidels. Endure, and I will come to you with the Koran and the saber and lead you against the Russians. But now I strictly order you to have not only no intention, but even no thought of submitting to the Russians.”

Shamil approved this proclamation and, having signed it, decided to have it sent out.

After these matters, the matter of Hadji Murat was also discussed. This matter was very important for Shamil. Though he did not want to admit it, he knew that if Hadji Murat, with his agility, boldness, and courage, had been with him, what had now happened in Chechnya would not have happened. To make peace with Hadji Murat and avail himself of his services again would be a good thing; if that was impossible, it was still impossible to allow him to aid the Russians. And therefore, in any case, it was necessary to make him come back and, once back, to kill him. The means for that was either to send a man to Tiflis who would kill him there, or to make him come here and here put an end to him. There was one means for doing that—his family, and above all his son, whom Shamil knew Hadji Murat loved passionately. And therefore it was necessary to act through the son.

When the councillors had discussed it, Shamil closed his eyes and fell silent.

The councillors knew that this meant he was now listening to the voice of the Prophet speaking to him, prescribing what should be done. After a solemn five-minute silence, Shamil opened his eyes, narrowed them more than usual, and said:

“Bring Hadji Murat’s son to me.”

“He’s here,” said Jemal ed-Din.

And indeed Yusuf, Hadji Murat’s son, thin, pale, ragged, and stinking, but still handsome in face and body, with the same jet-black eyes as his grandmother Patimat, was already standing at the gate of the outer courtyard waiting to be summoned.

Yusuf did not share his father’s feeling for Shamil. He did not know the whole past, or else he did, but, not having lived it, he did not understand why his father was so stubbornly hostile to Shamil. To him, who wanted only one thing—to go on with that easy, dissipated life he had led in Khunzakh as the naïb’s son—it seemed totally unnecessary to be hostile to Shamil. In resistance and opposition to his father, he especially admired Shamil and felt the ecstatic veneration for him so widespread in the mountains. With a special feeling of trembling awe of the imam, he now entered the kunak room and, stopping in the doorway, met Shamil’s intent, narrowed gaze. He stood there for some time, then went up to Shamil and kissed his big white hand with its long fingers.

“You are Hadji Murat’s son?”

“Yes, imam.”

“Do you know what he has done?”

“I do, imam, and I am sorry for it.”

“Do you know how to write?”

“I was preparing to be a mullah.”

“Then write to your father that if he comes back to me now, before bairam, I will forgive him and everything will be as before. If he does not and stays with the Russians, then”—Shamil frowned terribly—“I will hand your grandmother and your mother over to the aouls, and cut your head off.”

Not a muscle twitched in Yusuf’s face; he bowed his head as a sign that he had understood Shamil’s words.

“Write that and give it to my messenger.”

Shamil fell silent and looked at Yusuf for a long time.

“Write that I have had pity on you and will not kill you, but will put your eyes out, as I do with all traitors. Go.”

Yusuf seemed calm in Shamil’s presence, but once he was led out of the kunak room, he fell upon the man who was leading him and, snatching his dagger from its scabbard, tried to kill himself with it, but was seized by the arms, bound, and taken back to the hole.

THAT EVENING, when the evening prayers were over and dusk was falling, Shamil put on his white fur coat and went outside the fence to the part of the courtyard where his wives were quartered, and headed for Aminet’s room. But Aminet was not there. She was with the older wives. Then Shamil, trying to go unnoticed, stood behind the door of the room, waiting for her. But Aminet was cross with Shamil, because he had given some silk not to her but to Zaidet. She saw how he came out and went to her room, looking for her, and purposely did not go there. She stood for a long time at the door of Zaidet’s room and, laughing quietly, watched the white figure going in and out of her room. Having waited for her in vain, Shamil went back to his quarters when it was already time for the midnight prayers.

XX

HADJI MURAT HAD BEEN LIVING for a week in Ivan Matveevich’s house in the fortress. Though Marya Dmitrievna quarreled with the shaggy Hanefi (Hadji Murat had taken only two men with him: Hanefi and Eldar) and chucked him out of the kitchen once, for which he nearly put a knife in her, she obviously had special feelings of respect and sympathy for Hadji Murat. She no longer served him dinner, having handed that task over to Eldar, but she profited from every chance to see him and please him. She also took the liveliest interest in the negotiations about his family, knew how many wives and children he had, how old they were, and each time a scout came, asked whomever she could about the results of the negotiations.

Butler became very friendly with Hadji Murat during that week. Sometimes Hadji Murat came to his room, sometimes Butler went to him. Sometimes they conversed through an interpreter, sometimes by their own means—signs and, above all, smiles. Hadji Murat obviously came to love Butler. That was clear from Eldar’s attitude toward Butler. When Butler came to Hadji Murat’s room, Eldar met him, joyfully baring his gleaming teeth, and rushed to give him pillows to sit on and took off his saber, if he was wearing it.

Butler also made the acquaintance of and became close with shaggy Hanefi, Hadji Murat’s sworn brother. Hanefi knew many mountaineer songs and sang them well. Hadji Murat, to please Butler, would send for Hanefi and order him to sing, naming the songs he considered good. Hanefi had a high tenor voice, and sang with extraordinary distinctness and expression. Hadji Murat especially liked one song, and Butler was struck by its solemn, sad melody. Butler asked the interpreter to tell over its content and wrote it down.

The song had to do with a blood feud—the very one that had existed between Hanefi and Hadji Murat.

It went like this:

“The earth will dry on my grave, and you will forget me, my mother! The graveyard will overgrow with the grass of the graves, and the grass will stifle your grief, my old father. The tears will dry in my sister’s eyes, and the grief will fly from her heart.

“But you will not forget me, my older brother, as long as you have not avenged my death. And you will not forget me, my second brother, as long as you’re not lying here beside me.

“Hot you are, bullet, and it’s death you bear, but have you not been my faithful slave? Black, black earth, you will cover me, but did I not trample you with my horse? Cold you are, death, but I was your master. The earth will take my body, but heaven will receive my soul.”

Hadji Murat always listened to this song with closed eyes, and when it ended on a drawn-out, dying-away note, always said in Russian:

“Good song, wise song.”

The special, energetic poetry of the mountaineers’ life caught Butler up still more with the arrival of Hadji Murat and his closeness with him and his murids. He acquired a beshmet, a cherkeska, leggings, and it seemed to him that he was himself a mountaineer and was living the same life as these people.

On the day of Hadji Murat’s departure, Ivan Matveevich gathered several officers to see him off. Some of the officers were sitting at the tea table, where Marya Dmitrievna was serving tea, some at another table, with vodka, chikhir, and snacks, when Hadji Murat, dressed for the road and armed, stepping softly and quickly, came limping into the room.

They all stood up and shook hands with him one by one. Ivan Matveevich invited him to sit on the divan, but he thanked him and sat on a chair by the window. The silence that fell when he came in obviously did not embarrass him in the least. He looked around attentively at all the faces and rested his indifferent gaze on the table with the samovar and snacks. The sprightly officer Petrokovsky, who was seeing Hadji Murat for the first time, asked him through the interpreter whether he liked Tiflis.

“Aya,” he said.

“He says ‘Yes,’” replied the interpreter.

“What did he like?”

Hadji Murat said something in reply.

“He liked the theater most of all.”

“Well, and did he like the ball at the commander in chief’s?”

Hadji Murat frowned.

“Every people has its own customs. Our women do not dress that way,” he said, glancing at Marya Dmitrievna.

“So he didn’t like it?”

“We have a proverb,” he said to the interpreter. “The dog treated the ass to meat, the ass treated the dog to hay—and both went hungry.” He smiled. “Every people finds its own customs good.”

The conversation went no further. Some of the officers began to take tea, some to eat. Hadji Murat took the offered glass of tea and placed it in front of him.

“What else? Cream? A roll?” said Marya Dmitrievna, offering them to him.

Hadji Murat inclined his head.

“Well, good-bye, then!” said Butler, touching his knee. “When will we see each other?”

“Good-bye! Good-bye!” Hadji Murat said in Russian, smiling. “Kunak bulur. You strong kunak. Time—aida—go,” he said, tossing his head as if in the direction in which he had to go.

In the doorway of the room Eldar appeared with something big and white over his shoulder and a saber in his hand. Hadji Murat beckoned to him, and Eldar went over to Hadji Murat with his long strides and handed him the white burka and the saber. Hadji Murat stood up and took the burka and, throwing it over his arm, offered it to Marya Dmitrievna, saying something to the interpreter. The interpreter said:

“He says you praised the burka, so take it.”

“What for?” said Marya Dmitrievna, blushing.

“It must be so. Adat so,” said Hadji Murat.

“Well, thank you,” said Marya Dmitrievna, taking the burka. “God grant you rescue your son. Ulan yakshi,” she added. “Translate for him that I wish him the rescue of his family.”

Hadji Murat glanced at Marya Dmitrievna and nodded his head approvingly. Then he took the saber from Eldar’s hands and gave it to Ivan Matveevich. Ivan Matveevich took the saber and said to the interpreter:

“Tell him to take my brown gelding, I have nothing else to give him in return.”

Hadji Murat waved his hand before his face, indicating that he needed nothing and would not take it, and then, pointing to the mountains and then to his heart, went to the door. They all followed after him. The officers who stayed inside drew the saber, examined its blade, and decided that it was a real Gurda.¹⁹

Butler went out to the porch along with Hadji Murat. But here something happened that no one expected and that might have ended with Hadji Murat’s death, had it not been for his quick wits, resoluteness, and agility.

The inhabitants of the Kumyk aoul of Tash-Kichu, who had great respect for Hadji Murat and had come to the fortress many times just to look at the famous naïb, had sent envoys to Hadji Murat three days before his departure inviting him to their mosque on Friday. But the Kumyk princes, who lived in Tash-Kichu and hated Hadji Murat and had a blood feud with him, learned of it and announced to the people that they would not allow Hadji Murat into the mosque. The people became agitated, and a fight took place between them and the princes’ adherents. The Russian authorities pacified the mountaineers and sent word to Hadji Murat that he should not come to the mosque. Hadji Murat did not go, and everyone thought the matter ended with that.

But at the very moment of Hadji Murat’s departure, when he came out to the porch and the horses were standing ready, the Kumyk prince Arslan Khan, whom Butler and Ivan Matveevich knew, rode up to Ivan Matveevich’s house.

Seeing Hadji Murat, he snatched a pistol from his belt and aimed it at him. But before Arslan Khan had time to fire, Hadji Murat, despite his lameness, like a cat, suddenly rushed at him from the porch. Arslan Khan fired and missed. Hadji Murat, running up to him, seized the bridle of his horse with one hand, snatched out his dagger with the other, and shouted something in Tartar.

Butler and Eldar simultaneously ran up to the enemies and seized them by the arms. Ivan Matveevich also came out at the sound of the shot.

“What’s the meaning of this, Arslan, starting such nastiness at my house!” he said, having learned what it was about. “It’s not good, brother. Have your way when it’s far away, but don’t start slaughtering people on my doorstep.”

Arslan Khan, a small man with black mustaches, all pale and trembling, got off his horse, gave Hadji Murat a spiteful look, and went inside with Ivan Matveevich. Hadji Murat returned to the horses, breathing heavily and smiling.

“Why did he want to kill him?” Butler asked through the interpreter.

“He says such is our law,” the interpreter transmitted the words of Hadji Murat. “Arslan has to take revenge on him for blood. That’s why he wanted to kill him.”

“Well, and what if he overtakes him on the way?” asked Butler.

Hadji Murat smiled.

“If he kills me, it means Allah wants it so. Well, good-bye,” he said again in Russian and, taking his horse by the withers, he ran his eyes over all those who had come to see him off and his affectionate gaze met that of Marya Dmitrievna.

“Good-bye, dear leddy,” he said, addressing her. “Thanking you.”

“God grant, God grant you rescue your family,” Marya Dmitrievna repeated.

He did not understand her words, but did understand her sympathy for him and nodded his head to her.

“See that you don’t forget your kunak,” said Butler.

“Tell him I am his faithful friend, I will never forget him,” he replied through the interpreter and, despite his crooked leg, as soon as he touched the stirrup, he quickly and lightly swung his body up onto the high saddle and, straightening his saber, feeling with a habitual gesture for his pistol, acquiring that especially proud, martial look with which a mountaineer sits his horse, he rode away from Ivan Matveevich’s house. Hanefi and Eldar also got on their horses and, amicably taking leave of the hosts and officers, went off at a trot after their murshid.

As always, talk sprang up about the departing one.

“Brave fellow!”

“He rushed like a wolf at Arslan Khan, his face was completely changed.”

“And he’ll play us for fools. Must be a great rogue,” said Petrokovsky.

“God grant us more such Russian rogues,” Marya Dmitrievna suddenly mixed in vexedly. “He lived a week with us; we saw nothing but good from him,” she said. “Courteous, wise, just.”

“How did you find all that out?”

“I just did.”

“Fell for him, eh?” said Ivan Matveevich, coming in. “No denying it.”

“Well, so I fell for him. What is it to you? Only why run him down, if he’s a good man? He’s a Tartar, but he’s good.”

“True, Marya Dmitrievna,” said Butler. “Good girl for defending him.”

XXI

THE LIFE of the inhabitants of the advance fortresses on the Chechen line went on as before. There were two alerts after that, when platoons ran out and Cossacks and militia went galloping, but both times the mountaineers could not be caught. They escaped, and once in Vozdvizhenskoe they killed a Cossack and made off with eight Cossack horses that were being watered. There were no raids since that last time when the aoul was laid waste. But a major expedition into Greater Chechnya was expected as a consequence of the appointment of a new commander of the left flank, Prince Baryatinsky.

Prince Baryatinsky, a friend of the heir to the throne, the former commander of the Kabardinsky regiment, now, as chief of the entire left flank, immediately upon his arrival in Grozny assembled a detachment to continue carrying out the directives of the sovereign, of which Chernyshov had written to Vorontsov. The detachment assembled in Voz-dvizhenskoe set off from there to occupy a position in the direction of Kurinskoe. The troops made camp there and were cutting down the forest.

Young Vorontsov lived in a magnificent cloth tent, and his wife, Marya Vassilievna, would come to the camp and often spent the night. Baryatinsky’s relations with Marya Vassilievna were no secret from anyone, and therefore the non-court officers and soldiers abused her crudely, because, owing to her presence in the camp, they were sent on night patrol. The mountaineers ordinarily brought up guns and sent cannon-balls into the camp. For the most part these cannonballs missed, and therefore in ordinary times no measures were taken against this fire; but to keep the mountaineers from bringing up guns and frightening Marya Vassilievna, patrols were sent out. To go on patrol every night so that a lady would not be frightened was insulting and disgusting, and Marya Vassilievna was berated in indecent terms by the soldiers and the officers not received in high society.

Butler also came to this detachment on leave from his fortress, in order to meet his messmates from the Corps of Pages,²⁰ who were gathered there, and his regiment mates serving in the Kurinsky regiment and as adjutants and orderly officers at headquarters. At first his visit was very merry. He stayed in Poltoratsky’s tent and found many acquaintances there who welcomed him joyfully. He also went to see Vorontsov, whom he knew slightly, because at some point he had served in the same regiment with him. Vorontsov received him very affably, introduced him to Prince Baryatinsky, and invited him to the farewell dinner he was giving for General Kozlovsky, who had been commander of the left flank before Baryatinsky.

The dinner was magnificent. Six tents had been brought and placed side by side. Along the entire length of them there was a covered table, set with dinnerware and bottles. Everything was reminiscent of the life of the guards in Petersburg. At two o’clock they sat down at table. At the middle of the table sat Kozlovsky on one side and Baryatinsky on the other. On either side of Kozlovsky sat the Vorontsovs: the husband to his right, the wife to his left. All down both sides of the table sat the officers of the Kabardinsky and Kurinsky regiments. Butler and Poltoratsky sat next to each other, both chatting away merrily and drinking with the officers next to them. When it came to the roast and the orderlies started pouring glasses of champagne, Poltoratsky, with genuine alarm and regret, said to Butler:

“Our ‘like’ is going to disgrace himself.”

“How so?”

“He’s got to make a speech. And how can he?”

“Yes, brother, it’s not the same as scaling barricades under a hail of bullets. And with a lady beside him at that, and all these court gentlemen. Really, he’s a pity to see,” the officers said among themselves.

But now the solemn moment had come. Baryatinsky stood up and, raising his glass, addressed a short speech to Kozlovsky. When Baryatinsky finished, Kozlovsky stood up and in a rather firm voice began:

“By the supreme will of His Majesty I am leaving you, I am parting from you, gentlemen officers,” he said. “But always consider me, like, with you … Gentlemen, you are familiar, like, with the truth: one man doesn’t make an army. Therefore, all the rewards that I have, like, received for my service, all the great bounties, like, showered upon me by the sovereign emperor, like, all my position and, like, my good name—all, decidedly all, like …” (here his voice trembled) “I, like, owe only to you, only to you, my dear friends!” And his wrinkled face wrinkled still more. He sobbed and tears welled up in his eyes. “From the bottom of my heart, I offer you, like, my sincere, heartfelt gratitude …”

Kozlovsky could not speak any further and, rising, began to embrace the officers who came up to him. Everyone was moved. The princess covered her face with her handkerchief. Prince Semyon Mikhailovich, his mouth twisted, was blinking his eyes. Many of the officers also became tearful. Butler, who knew Kozlovsky very little, could not hold back his tears. He was extremely pleased with it all. Then toasts began for Baryatinsky, for Vorontsov, for the officers, for the soldiers, and the guests left the dinner drunk both with wine and with the martial raptures to which they were so especially inclined.

The weather was wonderful, sunny, still, the air fresh and invigorating. From all sides came the crackle of bonfires, the sounds of singing. It seemed as though everyone was celebrating something. Butler, in the most happy, tenderhearted state of mind, went to Poltoratsky. At Poltoratsky’s some officers had gathered, a card table had been set up, and an adjutant had started a bank of a hundred roubles. Butler twice left the tent clutching his purse in his trouser pocket, but he finally could not control himself and, despite the word he had given himself and his brothers not to gamble, he started to punt.

And before an hour had gone by, Butler, all red, in a sweat, smeared with chalk, sat, both elbows propped on the table, and wrote under the cards creased for corners or transports²¹ the amounts of his bets. He had lost so much that he was afraid to count up what was scored against him. He knew without counting that, putting in all the salary he could draw in advance, plus the price of his horse, he still could not cover the debt he had run up to the unknown adjutant. He would have gone on playing, but the adjutant, with a stern face, laid down his cards with his clean, white hands and began to count up Butler’s chalk-written column. Butler abashedly begged his pardon because he could not pay at once all that he had lost, and said that he would have it sent from home, and, as he said it, he noticed that they all felt sorry for him, and that all of them, even Poltoratsky, avoided his eyes. This was his last evening. He need only not to have gambled, but to have gone to Vorontsov’s, where he had been invited, “and all would be well,” he thought. And now it was not only not well, it was terrible.

Having taken leave of his comrades and acquaintances, he went home and, on arriving, immediately went to sleep and slept for eighteen hours straight, as one usually sleeps after losing. From the fact that he asked her for fifty kopecks to tip the Cossack who accompanied him, and from his sad looks and curt replies, Marya Dmitrievna understood that he had lost, and lit into Ivan Matveevich for letting him go.

The next day Butler woke up past eleven and, remembering his situation, wanted to sink back into the oblivion from which he had just emerged, but it was impossible. He had to take measures to pay the four hundred and seventy roubles he owed to the stranger. One of these measures consisted in writing a letter to his brother, confessing his sin and begging him to send him five hundred roubles for this last time, against the mill that still remained their common possession. Then he wrote to a stingy female relation of his, asking her to let him have the same five hundred roubles at any interest she liked. Then he went to Ivan Matveevich and, knowing that he, or rather Marya Dmitrievna, had money, asked him to loan him five hundred roubles.

“I would,” said Ivan Matveevich, “I would at once, but Mashka won’t let me. These women, devil knows, they’re so stingy. But you’ve got to get out of it, you’ve got to, devil take it. What about that devil, the sutler?”

But there was no point even in trying to borrow from the sutler. So Butler’s salvation could come only from his brother or from the stingy female relation.

XXII

HAVING FAILED to achieve his goal in Chechnya, Hadji Murat returned to Tiflis and went to Vorontsov every day and, when he was received, begged him to gather the captive mountaineers and exchange them for his family. He said again that without that his hands were tied and he could not serve the Russians as he would like to and destroy Shamil. Vorontsov vaguely promised to do what he could, but kept putting it off, saying that he would decide the matter when General Argutinsky came to Tiflis and he could discuss it with him. Then Hadji Murat started asking Vorontsov to allow him to go and live for a time in Nukha, a small town in Transcaucasia, where he supposed it would be easier for him to carry on negotiations about his family with Shamil and with people devoted to him. Besides that, in Nukha, a Muslim town, there was a mosque, where it would be much easier for him to observe the prayers dictated by Muslim law. Vorontsov wrote to Petersburg about it, and meanwhile nevertheless gave Hadji Murat permission to move to Nukha.

For Vorontsov, for the Petersburg authorities, as for the majority of Russian people who knew the story of Hadji Murat, this story represented either a fortunate turn in the Caucasian war or simply an interesting occurrence; but for Hadji Murat it was, especially in recent days, a terrible turn in his life. He had fled from the mountains partly to save himself, partly out of hatred for Shamil, and, difficult as that flight had been, he had achieved his goal, and at first rejoiced in his success and actually considered plans for attacking Shamil. But it turned out that bringing his family over, which he had thought would be easy to arrange, proved more difficult than he had thought. Shamil had seized his family and was holding them captive, promising to hand the women over to the aouls and to kill or blind his son. Now Hadji Murat was moving to Nukha with the intention of trying, through his adherents in Daghestan, to wrest his family from Shamil by cunning or by force. The last scout who visited him in Nukha told him that some Avars devoted to him were planning to steal his family and come over to the Russians with them, but that the people prepared to do that were too few, and that they did not dare to do it in the place of the family’s confinement, in Vedeno, but would do it only in case the family was transferred from Vedeno to some other place. Then they promised to do it on the way. Hadji Murat told him to tell his friends that he promised three thousand roubles for the rescue of his family.

In Nukha Hadji Murat was given a small five-room house not far from the mosque and the khan’s palace. In the same house lived the officers attached to him, and his interpreter and his nukers. Hadji Murat’s life passed in waiting for and receiving scouts from the mountains and in the horseback rides he was allowed to take in the neighborhood of Nukha.

Returning from his ride on 8 April, Hadji Murat learned that in his absence an official had arrived from Tiflis. Despite all his desire to learn what the official had brought, Hadji Murat, before going to the room where a police commissioner and the official were waiting for him, went to his own room and recited the midday prayer. When he finished the prayer, he came out to the other room, which served him as a drawing room and a reception room. The official from Tiflis, the fat little state councillor Kirillov, conveyed to Hadji Murat the wish of Vorontsov that he come to Tiflis by the twelfth for a meeting with Argutinsky.

“Yakshi,” Hadji Murat said angrily.

He did not like the official Kirillov.

“Have you brought the money?”

“I have,” said Kirillov.

“It is for two weeks now,” said Hadji Murat, and he held up ten fingers and then four. “Give it to me.”

“You’ll get it at once,” said the official, taking a purse from his traveling bag. “What does he need money for?” he said in Russian to the commissioner, supposing that Hadji Murat would not understand, but Hadji Murat understood and glanced angrily at Kirillov. Taking out the money, Kirillov, wishing to strike up a conversation so as to have something to convey to Prince Vorontsov on his return, asked him through the interpreter whether he was bored here. Hadji Murat gave a contemptuous sidelong glance at the fat little man in civilian dress and with no weapons and did not reply. The interpreter repeated the question.

“Tell him I do not want to talk to him. Let him give me the money.”

And, having said that, Hadji Murat again sat down at the table, ready to count the money.

When Kirillov had taken out the gold pieces and divided them into seven stacks of ten pieces each (Hadji Murat received five gold pieces a day), he moved them towards Hadji Murat. Hadji Murat swept the gold pieces into the sleeve of his cherkeska, stood up, and quite unexpectedly slapped the state councillor on his bald pate and started out of the room. The state councillor jumped up and told the interpreter to tell Hadji Murat that he dare not do that, because he held the rank of a colonel. The commissioner confirmed the same. But Hadji Murat nodded his head in a sign that he knew it, and walked out of the room.

“What can you do with him?” said the commissioner. “He’ll stick a dagger in you and that’s that. You can’t talk with these devils. I can see he’s getting frantic.”

As soon as dusk fell, two scouts came from the mountains, bound up to the eyes in their bashlyks. The commissioner led them inside to Hadji Murat. One of the scouts was a beefy, dark Tavlin, the other a thin old man. The news they brought did not gladden Hadji Murat. His friends who had undertaken to rescue his family now refused outright, fearing Shamil, who threatened the most frightful punishments for those who should help Hadji Murat. Having listened to the scouts’ story, Hadji Murat rested his hands on his crossed legs and, lowering his head in its papakha, remained silent for a long time. Hadji Murat was thinking, and thinking decisively. He knew that he was now thinking for the last time, and that a decision was necessary. Hadji Murat raised his head and, picking up two gold pieces, gave one to each of the scouts and said:

“Go.”

“What will the answer be?”

“The answer will be as God grants. Go.”

The scouts rose and left, and Hadji Murat went on sitting on the carpet, his elbows propped on his knees. He sat like that for a long time, thinking.

“What to do? Trust Shamil and return to him?” thought Hadji Murat. “He’s a fox—he’ll deceive me. Even if he doesn’t deceive me, to submit to the red-headed deceiver is impossible. It is impossible because now, after I’ve been with the Russians, he will never trust me,” thought Hadji Murat.

And he remembered a Tavlinian tale about a falcon who was caught, lived with people, and then returned to his mountains to his own kind. He returned, but in jesses, and on the jesses there were little bells. And the falcons did not accept him. “Fly away,” they said, “to where they put silver bells on you. We have no bells or jesses.” The falcon did not want to leave his native land and stayed. But the other falcons did not accept him and pecked him to death.

“And so they will peck me to death,” thought Hadji Murat.

“Stay here? Subjugate the Caucasus for the Russian tsar, earn glory, rank, wealth?”

“It’s possible,” he thought, recalling his meetings with Vorontsov and the old prince’s flattering words.

“But I must decide at once, otherwise he will destroy my family.”

All night Hadji Murat lay awake and thought.

XXIII

BY THE MIDDLE of the night his decision was formed. He decided that he must flee to the mountains and break into Vedeno with his faithful Avars, and either die or rescue his family. Whether he would bring his family back to the Russians or flee with them to Khunzakh and fight Shamil—Hadji Murat did not decide. He knew only that right now he must flee from the Russians to the mountains. And he at once began to carry out his decision. He took his black quilted beshmet from under his pillow and went to his nukers’ quarters. They lived across the hall. As soon as he went out to the hall, the door to which was open, he was enveloped in the dewy freshness of the moonlit night, and his ears were struck by the whistling and trilling of several nightingales at once from the garden adjoining the house.

Hadji Murat crossed the hall and opened the door of his nukers’ room. There was no light in this room, only the young moon in its first quarter shone through the window. A table and two chairs stood to one side, and all four nukers lay on rugs and burkas on the floor. Hanefi slept outside with the horses. Gamzalo, hearing the creak of the door, sat up, turned to look at Hadji Murat, and, recognizing him, lay down again. Eldar, who lay next to him, jumped up and began putting on his beshmet, waiting for orders. Kurban and Khan Mahoma went on sleeping. Hadji Murat put his beshmet on the table, and something solid in the beshmet struck the boards of the table. It was the gold pieces sewn into it.

“Sew these in, too,” said Hadji Murat, handing Eldar the gold pieces he had received that day.

Eldar took the gold pieces and, going to a brighter spot, drew the small knife from under his dagger, and at once began to unstitch the lining of the beshmet. Gamzalo raised himself and sat with his legs crossed.

“And you, Gamzalo, tell our brave lads to look over their rifles and pistols and prepare cartridges. We’ll have a long ride tomorrow,” said Hadji Murat.

“We’ve got powder, we’ve got bullets. Everything will be ready,” said Gamzalo, and he growled something incomprehensible.

Gamzalo understood why Hadji Murat had ordered the guns loaded. From the very beginning, and more and more strongly as time went on, he had been wishing for one thing: to kill, to cut down as many Russian dogs as he could and flee to the mountains. And now he saw that Hadji Murat wanted the same thing, and he was content.

When Hadji Murat left, Gamzalo woke up his comrades, and all four spent the whole night examining their rifles, pistols, priming, flints, changing the bad ones, pouring fresh powder in the pans, plugging cartridge pockets with measured charges of powder and bullets wrapped in oiled rags, sharpening sabers and daggers and greasing the blades with tallow.

Before daybreak Hadji Murat went out to the hall again to fetch water for his ablutions. In the hall the pre-dawn trilling of the nightingales could be heard, still louder and more rapid than during the night. In the nukers’ room could be heard the measured hiss and whistle of steel against stone as daggers were sharpened. Hadji Murat dipped some water from the tub and had already gone back to his door when he heard in the murids’ room, besides the sound of sharpening, also the high, thin voice of Hanefi singing a song he knew. He stopped and began to listen.

The song told of how the dzhigit Hamzat and his brave lads stole a herd of white horses from the Russian side. How the Russian prince then overtook him beyond the Terek and surrounded him with his army big as a forest. Then it sang of how Hamzat slaughtered all the horses and hid with his brave lads behind the bloody mound of dead horses and fought as long as there were bullets in their guns and daggers at their belts and blood in their veins. But before he died, Hamzat saw birds in the sky and shouted to them: “You birds of the air, fly to our homes, tell our sisters and mothers and the white-skinned maidens that we all died for the ghazavat. Tell them that our bodies will not lie in graves, but ravenous wolves will rend them and gnaw our bones, and black ravens will peck out our eyes.”

With these words the song ended, and to these last words, sung to a mournful tune, was joined the cheerful voice of the merry Khan Mahoma, who cried out at the very end of the song, “La ilaha il Allah”—and gave a piercing shriek. Then everything became still, and again only the trilling and whistling of the nightingales in the garden could be heard and from behind the door the measured hiss and occasional whistle of steel rapidly sliding over stone.

Hadji Murat was so deep in thought that he did not notice he had tipped the jug and water was spilling from it. He shook his head at himself and went into his room.

Having completed his morning ablutions, Hadji Murat looked over his weapons and sat on his bed. He had nothing more to do. In order to ride out, he had to ask permission from the police commissioner. But it was still dark outside and the commissioner was still asleep.

Hanefi’s song reminded him of another song, one that his mother had made up. This song told about something that had actually happened—it had happened when Hadji Murat was just born, but his mother had told him about it.

The song went like this:

“Your Damascus dagger tore my white breast, yet I put it to my little sun, my boy, I washed him in my hot blood, and the wound healed without herbs and roots, I did not fear death, nor will my dzhigit boy.”

The words of this song were addressed to Hadji Murat’s father, and the meaning of it was that, when Hadji Murat was born, the khan’s wife also gave birth to her next son, Umma Khan, and she summoned Hadji Murat’s mother, who had nursed her elder son, Abununtsal, to come to her as a nurse. But Patimat did not want to leave this son and said she would not go. Hadji Murat’s father became angry and ordered her to go. When she refused again, he struck her with a dagger and would have killed her, if she had not been taken away. So she did not give him up and nursed him, and made up a song about it.

Hadji Murat remembered that his mother, as she laid him to sleep beside her under a fur coat on the roof of the saklya, sang this song to him, and he asked her to show him the place on her side where the scar of the wound was left. He saw his mother before him as if alive—not wrinkled, gray-haired, and gap-toothed as he had left her now, but young, beautiful, and so strong that, when he was five years old and already heavy, she had carried him over the mountains to his grandfather in a basket on her back.

And he remembered, too, his grandfather, wrinkled, with a little gray beard, a silversmith, as he chased silver with his sinewy hands and made his grandson recite prayers. He remembered a spring at the foot of a hill where he used to go to fetch water with his mother, clinging to her sharovary. He remembered a skinny dog who used to lick his face, and especially the smell and taste of smoke and sour milk, when he followed his mother to the shed, where she milked the cow and baked the milk. He remembered how his mother shaved his head for the first time and how surprised he was to see his round, bluish little head in the gleaming copper basin that hung on the wall.

And, remembering himself as little, he also remembered his beloved son Yusuf, whose head he himself had shaved for the first time. Now this Yusuf was already a handsome young dzhigit. He remembered his son as he was the last time he saw him. That was the day he rode out of Tselmes. His son brought him his horse and asked permission to accompany him. He was dressed and armed, and held his own horse by the bridle. Yusuf’s ruddy, handsome young face and his whole tall, slender figure (he was taller than his father) breathed the courage of youth and the joy of life. His broad shoulders, despite his age, his broad, youthful hips and long, slender body, his long, strong arms, and the strength, suppleness, agility of all his movements were a joy to see, and his father always admired his son.

“You’d better stay. You’re alone in the house now. Take care of your mother and your grandmother,” Hadji Murat said.

And Hadji Murat remembered the expression of bravado and pride with which Yusuf, blushing with pleasure, said that, as long as he lived, no one would harm his mother and grandmother. Yusuf mounted his horse all the same and rode with his father as far as the brook. At the brook he turned back, and since then Hadji Murat had not seen his wife, his mother, or his son.

And this was the son that Shamil wanted to blind! Of what would be done to his wife and mother he did not even want to think.

These thoughts so agitated Hadji Murat that he could not go on sitting there. He jumped up and, limping, went quickly to the door and, opening it, called Eldar. The sun had not yet risen, but it was quite light. The nightingales were still singing.

“Go and tell the commissioner that I want to go for a ride, and saddle the horses,” he said.

XXIV

BUTLER’S ONLY CONSOLATION at that time was the poetry of military life, to which he gave himself not only on duty, but in private life as well. Dressed in Circassian costume, he went caracoling on horseback and twice lay in ambush with Bogdanovich, though they did not catch or kill anyone either time. This boldness and his friendship with the notoriously brave Bogdanovich seemed to Butler to be something pleasant and important. He had paid his debt by borrowing the money from a Jew at enormous interest—that is, he had only deferred and avoided the unresolved situation. He tried not to think about his situation and, besides the poetry of martial life, sought oblivion in wine. He drank more and more, and morally became weaker and weaker from day to day. He no longer played the handsome Joseph in relation to Marya Dmitrievna,²² but, on the contrary, began courting her crudely, but, to his surprise, met with a decided rebuff, which shamed him greatly.

At the end of April, a detachment came to the fortress, destined by Baryatinsky for a new movement across the whole of Chechnya, which was considered impassable. There were two companies of the Kabardinsky regiment, and these companies, according to an established custom of the Caucasus, were received as guests by the companies stationed in Kurinskoe. The soldiers were dispersed among the barracks and were treated not only to a supper of kasha and beef, but also to vodka, and the officers were lodged with officers and, as was done, the local officers treated the newcomers.

The regalement ended with drinking and singing, and Ivan Matveevich, very drunk, no longer red but pale gray, sat astride a chair and, snatching out his saber, cut down his imaginary enemies, and cursed, then guffawed, then embraced people, then sang his favorite song: “Shamil rose up in years gone by, too-ra-lee, too-ra-lye, in years gone by.”

Butler was there. He tried to see the poetry of martial life in it, but deep in his heart he felt sorry for Ivan Matveevich, but to stop him was in no way possible. And Butler, the drink having gone to his head, quietly left and went home.

A full moon shone upon the white houses and the stones of the road. It was so bright that every little stone, straw, and bit of dung could be seen on the road. Nearing the house, Butler met Marya Dmitrievna in a kerchief that covered her head and shoulders. After the rebuff Marya Dmitrievna had given him, Butler, slightly ashamed, had avoided meeting her. Now, with the moonlight and after the wine he had drunk, Butler was glad of this meeting and again wanted to be tender with her.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To see how my old man’s doing,” she replied amicably. She had rejected his courtship quite sincerely and decisively, but had found it unpleasant that he had shunned her all the time recently.

“Why go looking for him—he’ll come.”

“Will he?”

“If he doesn’t, they’ll bring him.”

“Right, and that’s not good,” said Marya Dmitrievna. “So I shouldn’t go?”

“No, you shouldn’t. Better let’s go home.”

Marya Dmitrievna turned and walked back home beside Butler. The moon shone so brightly that their shadows, moving along the road, had a moving halo around the heads. Butler looked at this halo around his head and was getting ready to tell her that he still liked her just as much, but he did not know how to begin. She was waiting for what he would say. Thus, in silence, they had already come quite close to home when some horsemen came riding around the corner. It was an officer with an escort.

“Who is God sending us now?” Marya Dmitrievna said and stepped aside.

The moon shone behind the rider, so that Marya Dmitrievna recognized him only when he had come almost even with them. It was the officer Kamenev, who had served formerly with Ivan Matveevich, and therefore Marya Dmitrievna knew him.

“Pyotr Nikolaevich, is that you?” Marya Dmitrievna addressed him.

“Himself,” said Kamenev. “Ah, Butler! Greetings! You’re not asleep yet? Strolling with Marya Dmitrievna? Watch out, you’ll get it from Ivan Matveevich. Where is he?”

“Just listen,” said Marya Dmitrievna, pointing in the direction from which the sounds of a tulumbas and songs were coming. “They’re carousing.”

“What, your people?”

“No, there are some from Khasav Yurt, they’re living it up.”

“Ah, that’s good. I’ll still have time. I only need to see him for a minute.”

“What, on business?” asked Butler.

“Minor business.”

“Good or bad?”

“That depends! For us it’s good, but for somebody else it’s rather nasty.” And Kamenev laughed.

Just then the walkers and Kamenev reached Ivan Matveevich’s house.

“Chikhirev!” Kamenev called to a Cossack. “Come here.”

A Don Cossack moved away from the others and rode up to them. He was wearing an ordinary Don Cossack uniform, boots, a greatcoat, and had saddlebags behind his saddle.

“Well, take the thing out,” said Kamenev, getting off his horse.

The Cossack also got off his horse and took a sack with something in it from his saddlebag. Kamenev took the sack from the Cossack’s hands and put his hand into it.

“So, shall I show you our news? You won’t be frightened?” he turned to Marya Dmitrievna.

“What’s there to be afraid of?” said Marya Dmitrievna.

“Here it is,” said Kamenev, taking out a human head and holding it up in the moonlight. “Recognize him?”

It was a head, shaved, with large projections of the skull over the eyes and a trimmed black beard and clipped mustache, with one eye open and the other half closed, the shaved skull split but not all the way through, the bloody nose clotted with black blood. The neck was wrapped in a bloody towel. Despite all the wounds to the head, the blue lips were formed into a kindly, childlike expression.

Marya Dmitrievna looked and, without saying a word, turned and went quickly into the house.

Butler could not take his eyes from the terrible head. It was the head of the same Hadji Murat with whom he had so recently spent evenings in such friendly conversation.

“How can it be? Who killed him? Where?” he asked.

“He tried to bolt and got caught,” said Kamenev, and he handed the head back to the Cossack and went into the house with Butler.

“And he died a brave man,” said Kamenev.

“But how did it all happen?”

“Just wait a little. Ivan Matveevich will come, and I’ll tell you all about it in detail. That’s why I’ve been sent. I carry it around to all the fortresses and aouls and display it.”

They sent for Ivan Matveevich, and he came home drunk, with two officers just as badly drunk, and started embracing Kamenev.

“I’ve come to see you,” said Kamenev. “I’ve brought the head of Hadji Murat.”

“You’re joking! Killed?”

“Yes, he tried to escape.”

“I told you he’d play us for fools. So where is it? This head? Show me.”

They called for the Cossack, and he brought in the sack with the head. The head was taken out, and Ivan Matveevich looked at it for a long time with drunken eyes.

“He was a fine fellow all the same,” he said. “Let me kiss him.”

“Yes, true, he was quite a daredevil,” said one of the officers.

When they had all examined the head, it was handed back to the Cossack. The Cossack put the head into the sack, trying to lower it to the floor so that it would not bump too hard.

“And you, Kamenev, what do you tell people when you show it?” asked one of the officers.

“No, let me kiss him. He gave me a saber,” cried Ivan Matveevich.

Butler went out to the porch. Marya Dmitrievna was sitting on the second step. She glanced at Butler and at once turned away angrily.

“What’s the matter, Marya Dmitrievna?” asked Butler.

“You’re all butchers. I can’t bear it. Real butchers,” she said, getting up.

“The same could happen to anyone,” said Butler, not knowing what to say. “That’s war.”

“War!” cried Marya Dmitrievna. “What war? You’re butchers, that’s all. A dead body should be put in the ground, and they just jeer. Real butchers,” she repeated and stepped off the porch and went into the house through the back door.

Butler went back to the drawing room and asked Kamenev to tell in detail how the whole thing happened.

And Kamenev told them.

It happened like this.

XXV

HADJI MURAT WAS ALLOWED to go riding in the vicinity of town, but only with a Cossack escort. There were some fifty Cossacks in Nukha, of whom some ten were attached to the superior officers, while the rest, if they were to be sent out ten at a time, as had been ordered, had to be detailed every other day. And therefore on the first day they sent ten Cossacks, and then decided to send five, asking Hadji Murat not to take all his nukers with him, but on 25 April Hadji Murat went out riding with all five of them. As Hadji Murat was mounting his horse, the commander noticed that all five nukers were about to go with him, and told him that he was not allowed to take them all, but Hadji Murat seemed not to hear, touched up his horse, and the commander did not insist. With the Cossacks there was a corporal with a bowl haircut, holder of a St. George’s Cross, a young, ruddy, healthy, brown-haired lad named Nazarov. He was the eldest son of a poor family of Old Believers,²³ had grown up without a father, and supported his old mother, three sisters, and two brothers.

“Watch out, Nazarov, don’t let them go too far!” cried the commander.

“Yes, sir, Your Honor,” replied Nazarov and, rising in his stirrups and grasping the rifle at his back, he sent his good, big, hook-nosed sorrel gelding into a trot. Four Cossacks rode after him: Ferapontov, tall, skinny, a first-rate thief and double-dealer—the one who had sold powder to Gamzalo; Ignatov, serving out his term, no longer young, a robust peasant proud of his strength; Mishkin, a weakly youngster whom everyone made fun of; and Petrakov, young, fair-haired, his mother’s only son, always cheerful and affectionate.

There was mist in the morning, but by breakfast time the weather cleared, and the sun glistened on the just-opening leaves, and on the young, virginal grass, and on the sprouting grain, and on the ripples of the swift river, which could be glimpsed to the left of the road.

Hadji Murat rode at a walk. The Cossacks and his nukers followed him without dropping back. They rode at a walk down the road outside the fortress. They met women with baskets on their heads, soldiers on wagons, and creaking carts drawn by buffaloes. After riding for about a mile and a half, Hadji Murat touched up his white Kabarda stallion; it went into a canter, so that his nukers had to switch to a long trot. The Cossacks did the same.

“Eh, he’s got a good horse under him,” said Ferapontov. “If only we weren’t at peace, I’d unseat him.”

“Yes, brother, three hundred roubles were offered for that horse in Tiflis.”

“But I’ll outrace him on mine,” said Nazarov.

“Outrace him, ha!” said Ferapontov.

Hadji Murat kept increasing his pace.

“Hey, kunak, that’s not allowed. Slow down!” cried Nazarov, going after Hadji Murat.

Hadji Murat looked back and, saying nothing, went on riding without diminishing his pace.

“Watch out, they’re up to something, the devils,” said Ignatov. “Look at ’em whipping along!”

They rode like that for about half a mile in the direction of the mountains.

“I said it’s not allowed,” Nazarov cried again.

Hadji Murat did not reply and did not look back, but only increased his pace and from a canter went into a gallop.

“Oh, no, you won’t get away!” cried Nazarov, stung to the quick.

He whipped up his big sorrel gelding and, rising in the stirrups and leaning forward, sent him at full speed after Hadji Murat.

The sky was so clear, the air so fresh, the forces of life played so joyfully in Nazarov’s soul as he merged into one with his good, strong horse and flew along the level road after Hadji Murat, that the possibility of anything bad or sad or terrible never entered his head. He rejoiced that with every stride he was gaining on Hadji Murat and coming closer to him. Hadji Murat figured from the hoofbeats of the Cossack’s big horse, coming ever closer to him, that he would shortly overtake him, and, putting his right hand to his pistol, with his left he began to rein in his excited Kabarda, who could hear the hoofbeats of a horse behind him.

“It’s not allowed, I said!” cried Nazarov, coming almost even with Hadji Murat and reaching out his hand to seize the horse’s bridle. But before he could seize it, a shot rang out.

“What are you doing?” Nazarov cried, clutching his chest. “Strike them down, lads,” he said and, reeling, fell onto his saddlebow.

But the mountaineers seized their weapons before the Cossacks and shot them with their pistols and slashed them with their sabers. Nazarov was hanging on the neck of his frightened horse, which carried him in circles around his comrades. Ignatov’s horse fell under him, crushing his leg. Two of the mountaineers, drawing their sabers without dismounting, slashed at his head and arms. Petrakov made a dash for his comrade, but at once two shots, one in the back, the other in the side, seared him, and he tumbled from his horse like a sack.

Mishkin wheeled his horse around and galloped off to the fortress. Hanefi and Khan Mahoma rushed after Mishkin, but he was already far away and the mountaineers could not catch him.

Seeing that they could not catch the Cossack, Hanefi and Khan Mahoma went back to their own people. Gamzalo, having finished off Ignatov with his dagger, also put it into Nazarov, after pulling him from his horse. Khan Mahoma was taking pouches of shot from the dead men. Hanefi wanted to take Nazarov’s horse, but Hadji Murat shouted that he should not and set off down the road. His murids galloped after him, driving away Petrakov’s horse, who came running after them. They were already two miles from Nukha, in the midst of the rice fields, when a shot rang out from the tower sounding the alarm.

Petrakov lay on his back with his stomach slit open, and his young face was turned to the sky, and he blubbered like a fish as he was dying.

“O LORD, saints alive, what have they done!” cried the commander of the fortress, clutching his head, when he heard about Hadji Murat’s escape. “My head will roll! They let him slip, the brigands!” he cried, hearing Mishkin’s report.

The alarm was given everywhere, and not only were all the available Cossacks sent after the fugitives, but they gathered all the militia that could be gathered from the peaceful aouls. A thousand-rouble reward was offered to the one who would bring in Hadji Murat dead or alive. And two hours after Hadji Murat and his comrades galloped away from the Cossacks, more than two hundred mounted men galloped after the police commissioner to seek out and capture the fugitives.

Having ridden several miles along the high road, Hadji Murat reined in his heavily breathing white horse, who had gone gray with sweat, and stopped. To the right of the road the saklyas and minaret of the aoul of Belardzhik could be seen, to the left were fields, and at the end of them a river was visible. Though the way to the mountains was to the right, Hadji Murat turned in the opposite direction, to the left, reckoning that the pursuit would rush after him precisely to the right. Whereas he, leaving the road and crossing the Alazan, would come out on the high road, where no one would expect him, and would go down it to the forest, and then, crossing the river again, would make his way through the forest to the mountains. Having decided that, he turned to the left. But it proved impossible to reach the river. The rice field they had to ride through, as was always done in the spring, had just been flooded with water and had turned into a bog, into which the horses sank over their pasterns. Hadji Murat and his nukers turned right, left, thinking to find a drier place, but the field they had happened upon was all evenly flooded and now soaked with water. With the sound of corks popping, the horses pulled their sinking feet from the oozy mud and stopped after every few steps, breathing heavily.

They struggled like that for so long that dusk began to fall, but they still had not reached the river. To the left there was a little island of bushes coming into leaf, and Hadji Murat decided to ride into these bushes and stay there till night, giving a rest to the exhausted horses.

Having entered the bushes, Hadji Murat and his nukers dismounted and, after hobbling the horses, left them to feed, and themselves ate some bread and cheese that they had taken with them. The young moon, which shone at first, went down behind the mountains, and the night was dark. In Nukha there were especially many nightingales. There were two in these bushes. While Hadji Murat and his men made noise, entering the bushes, the nightingales fell silent. But when the men became quiet, they again began to trill and call to each other. Hadji Murat, his ear alert to the sounds of the night, involuntarily listened to them.

And their whistling reminded him of that song about Hamzat, which he had listened to the night before when he went out for water. At any moment now he could be in the same situation as Hamzat. It occurred to him that it even would be so, and his soul suddenly became serious. He spread out his burka and performed his namaz. He had only just finished when he heard sounds approaching the bushes. These were the sounds of a large number of horses’ feet splashing through the bog. The quickeyed Khan Mahoma, having run out alone to the edge of the bushes, spotted in the darkness the black shadows of men on horseback and on foot approaching the bushes. Hanefi saw a similar crowd on the other side. It was Karganov,²⁴ the district military commander, with his militia.

“So we shall fight like Hamzat,” thought Hadji Murat.

After the alarm was given, Karganov, with a company of militia and Cossacks, had rushed in pursuit of Hadji Murat, but had not found him or any trace of him anywhere. Karganov was already returning home without hope when, towards evening, he met an old Tartar. Karganov asked the old man if he had seen six horsemen. The old man answered that he had. He had seen six horsemen circle about in the rice field and enter the bushes where he used to gather firewood. Karganov, taking the old man along, turned back and, convinced at the sight of the hobbled horses that Hadji Murat was there, surrounded the bushes during the night and waited for morning to take Hadji Murat dead or alive.

Realizing that he was surrounded, Hadji Murat spotted an old ditch among the bushes and decided to position himself in it and fight for as long as he had shot and strength. He said this to his comrades and told them to make a mound along the ditch. And the nukers set to work at once cutting branches and digging up the earth with their daggers, making an embankment. Hadji Murat worked with them.

As soon as it became light, the company commander rode up close to the bushes and called out:

“Hey! Hadji Murat! Surrender! There are many of us and few of you!”

In reply to that a puff of smoke appeared from the ditch, a rifle cracked, and a bullet struck the militiaman’s horse, who shied under him and began to fall. Following that came a crackle of rifle fire from the militiamen standing at the edge of the bushes, and their bullets, whistling and droning, knocked off leaves and branches and struck the mound, but did not hit the people sitting behind it. Only Gamzalo’s horse, who had strayed, was hurt by them. He was wounded in the head. He did not fall, but snapped his hobble and, crashing through the bushes, rushed to the other horses and, pressing himself against them, drenched the young grass with blood. Hadji Murat and his men fired only when one of the militiamen stepped out, and they rarely missed their aim. Three of the militiamen were wounded, and the militiamen not only did not venture to rush Hadji Murat and his men, but retreated further and further from them and fired only from a distance, at random.

It went on like that for more than an hour. The sun had risen half the height of a tree, and Hadji Murat was already thinking of mounting up and trying to get through to the river, when he heard the shouts of a large party that had just arrived. This was Ghadji Aga of Mekhtuli with his men. There were about two hundred of them. Ghadji Aga had once been Hadji Murat’s kunak and had lived with him in the mountains, but then had gone over to the Russians. With him was Akhmet Khan, the son of Hadji Murat’s enemy. Ghadji Aga, like Karganov, began by shouting to Hadji Murat to surrender, but, like the first time, Hadji Murat replied with a shot.

“Sabers out, lads!” cried Ghadji Aga, snatching out his own, and a hundred voices were heard as men rushed shrieking into the bushes.

The militiamen ran into the bushes, but from behind the mound several shots cracked out one after the other. Three men fell, and the attackers stopped and also started firing from the edge of the bushes. They fired and at the same time gradually approached the mound, running from bush to bush. Some managed to make it, some fell under the bullets of Hadji Murat and his men. Hadji Murat never missed, and Gamzalo also rarely wasted a shot and shrieked joyfully each time he saw his bullet hit home. Kurban was sitting on the edge of the ditch, singing “La ilaha il Allah” and firing unhurriedly, but rarely hitting anything. Eldar was trembling all over from impatience to rush at the enemies with his dagger and fired frequently and at random, constantly turning to look at Hadji Murat and thrusting himself up from behind the mound. The shaggy Hanefi, his sleeves rolled up, performed the duties of a servant here, too. He loaded the guns that Hadji Murat and Kurban passed to him, taking bullets wrapped in oiled rags and carefully ramming them home with an iron ramrod, and pouring dry powder into the pans from a flask. Khan Mahoma did not sit in the ditch like the others, but kept running between the ditch and the horses, driving them to a safer place, and constantly shrieked and fired freehand without a prop. He was the first to be wounded. A bullet hit him in the neck, and he sat down, spitting blood and cursing. Then Hadji Murat was wounded. A bullet pierced his shoulder. Hadji Murat pulled some cotton wool from his beshmet, stopped the wound with it, and went on firing.

“Let’s rush them with our sabers,” Eldar said for the third time.

He thrust himself up from behind the mound, ready to rush at his enemies, but just then a bullet hit him, and he reeled and fell backwards onto Hadji Murat’s leg. Hadji Murat glanced at him. The beautiful sheep’s eyes looked at Hadji Murat intently and gravely. The mouth, its upper lip pouting like a child’s, twitched without opening. Hadji Murat freed his leg from under him and went on aiming. Hanefi bent over the slain Eldar and quickly began taking the unused cartridges from his cherkeska. Kurban, singing all the while, slowly loaded and took aim.

The enemy, running from bush to bush with whoops and shrieks, was moving closer and closer. Another bullet hit Hadji Murat in the left side. He lay back in the ditch and, tearing another wad of cotton wool from his beshmet, stopped the wound. This wound in the side was fatal, and he felt that he was dying. Memories and images replaced one another with extraordinary swiftness in his imagination. Now he saw before him the mighty Abununtsal Khan, holding in place his severed, hanging cheek as he rushed at the enemy with a dagger in his hand; now he saw the weak, bloodless old Vorontsov, with his sly, white face, and heard his soft voice; now he saw his son Yusuf, now his wife Sofiat, now the pale face, red beard, and narrowed eyes of his enemy Shamil.

And all these memories ran through his imagination without calling up any feeling in him: no pity, no anger, no desire of any sort. It all seemed so insignificant compared with what was beginning and had already begun for him. But meanwhile his strong body went on doing what had been started. He gathered his last strength, rose up from behind the mound, and fired his pistol at a man running towards him and hit him. The man fell. Then he got out of the hole altogether and, limping badly, walked straight ahead with his dagger to meet his enemies. Several shots rang out, he staggered and fell. Several militiamen, with a triumphant shriek, rushed to the fallen body. But what had seemed to them a dead body suddenly stirred. First the bloodied, shaven head, without a papakha, rose, then the body rose, and then, catching hold of a tree, he rose up entirely. He looked so terrible that the men running at him stopped. But he suddenly shuddered, staggered away from the tree, and, like a mowed-down thistle, fell full length on his face and no longer moved.

He no longer moved, but he still felt. When Ghadji Aga, who was the first to run up to him, struck him on the head with his big dagger, it seemed to him that he had been hit with a hammer, and he could not understand who was doing it and why. That was his last conscious connection with his body. After that he no longer felt anything, and his enemies trampled and hacked at what no longer had anything in common with him. Ghadji Aga, placing his foot on the back of the body, cut the head off with two strokes, and carefully, so as not to stain his chuviaki with blood, rolled it aside with his foot. Bright red blood gushed from the neck arteries and black blood from the head, flowing over the grass.

Karganov, and Ghadji Aga, and Akhmet Khan, and all the militiamen, like hunters over a slain animal, gathered over the bodies of Hadji Murat and his men (Hanefi, Kurban, and Gamzalo had been bound) and, standing there in the bushes amid the powder smoke, talked merrily, exulting in their victory.

The nightingales, who had fallen silent during the shooting, again started trilling, first one close by and then others further off.

THIS WAS the death I was reminded of by the crushed thistle in the midst of the plowed field.

1896–1904

* See glossary of Caucasian mountaineer words following text.

* “Well, are you going to tell me what it is?” “But, my dear …” “No ‘my dear’! It’s an emissary, isn’t it?” “Even so I can’t tell you.” “You can’t? Then it’s I who will tell you!” “You?”

* “It’s a valuable thing.” “We ’ll have to find the occasion to make him a gift.”

* “Here’s the occasion. Give him the watch.”

* “You would do much better to stay here; this is my affair, not yours.” “You can’t stop me from going to see the general’s wife.”

* Excellent, my dear friend… Simon has been lucky.

* How horrible!

* War is war.

† All that is thanks to you.

* He had some unpleasantness with the local commandant. Simon was in the wrong.

* His Majesty has just returned.

* There’s somebody here.

* Poland and the Caucasus are the two running sores of Russia … We need about a hundred thousand men in each of the two countries.

† Poland, you say.

‡ Oh, yes, it was a masterstroke of Metternich’s to have left us the inconvenience of it …