The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories

INTRODUCTION

THERE MAY BE SUCH A THING as an “O. Henry story;” there may even be such a thing as a “Chekhov story;” but, as readers of this collection will discover, there is no such thing as a “Tolstoy story.” From the narrative simplicity of The Prisoner of the Caucasus to the psychopathological density of The Kreutzer Sonata, from the intense single focus of The Death of Ivan Ilyich to the kaleidoscopic multiplicity of The Forged Coupon, from the rustic immediacy of Master and Man to the complex (and still highly relevant) geopolitical reality of Hadji Murat, from the rough jottings of The Diary of a Madman to the limpid perfection of Alyosha the Pot, Tolstoy was constantly reinventing the art of fiction for himself.

The eleven stories in this collection were written, with one exception, after 1880—that is, in the last thirty years of Tolstoy’s long life (1828–1910). The one exception is The Prisoner of the Caucasus, which dates to 1872, the period between War and Peace and Anna Karenina, when Tolstoy busied himself with the education of the peasant children on his estate. Dissatisfied with the textbooks available, he decided to write his own, producing in the same year both an ABC and a reader which included, among other things, The Prisoner of the Caucasus and God Sees the Truth but Waits. Twenty-six years later, in his polemical treatise What Is Art?, laying down the principles for distinguishing between good and bad art in our time, he stated that there are only two kinds of good art: “(1) religious art, which conveys feelings coming from a religious consciousness of man’s position in the world with regard to God and his neighbor; and (2) universal art, which conveys the simplest everyday feelings of life, such as are accessible to everyone in the world.” In a note he added: “I rank my own artistic works on the side of bad art, except for the story God Sees the Truth, which wants to belong to the first kind, and The Prisoner of the Caucasus, which belongs to the second.” We have included The Prisoner here, first, on its own merits. It shows very well how Tolstoy, for all the constraints his pedagogical and polemical intentions placed upon him, never lost that “gift of concrete evocation” which the French scholar and translator Michel Aucouturier rightly calls “the secret of his art.” And, second, because it balances nicely with the last piece in the collection, also set in the Caucasus, the novella Hadji Murat, finished in 1904 and published posthumously in 1912.

The stories written for his school reader were Tolstoy’s first attempt, after the immense inclusiveness of War and Peace, to purge his art of what he came to regard as its artistic pretensions and superfluous detail. The same attempt was repeated time and again later in his life, testifying to the constant conflict within him between his innate artistic gift and the moral demands he made upon himself, the conflict, as he understood it, between beauty and the good. In his Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky repeats a story told him by his friend Sulerzhitsky about the elderly Tolstoy in Moscow which shows how alive that conflict remained:

Suler tells how he was once walking with Lev Nikolaevich in Tverskaya Street when Tolstoy noticed in the distance two soldiers of the Guards. The metal of their accoutrements shone in the sun; their spurs jingled; they kept step like one man; their faces, too, shone with the self-assurance of strength and youth. Tolstoy began to grumble at them: “What pompous stupidity! Like animals trained by the whip …”

But when the guardsmen came abreast with him, he stopped, followed them caressingly with his eyes, and said enthusiastically: “How handsome! Old Romans, eh, Lyovushka? Their strength and beauty! O Lord! How charming it is when man is handsome, how very charming.”

By 1873 Tolstoy had dropped his pedagogical efforts and plunged into work on a new novel, Anna Karenina, equally filled with “superfluous detail and artistic pretensions,” and equally limited to the lives of the Russian aristocracy, not in history now but in his own time and milieu. Here the conflicting claims of art and moral judgment strike a very difficult balance, and its precariousness is strongly felt. The novel marks a major turning point in Tolstoy’s life, the end of what might be called his idyllic period. D. S. Mirsky, in A History of Russian Literature, notes in Anna Karenina “the approach of a more tragic God than the blind and good life-God of War and Peace. The tragic atmosphere thickens as the story advances towards the end.” And it is not only the tragedy of Anna herself. By 1877, when he was writing the final chapters, both Tolstoy and his hero and likeness, Konstantin Levin, found themselves in a profound spiritual crisis. The novel “ends on a note of confused perplexity,” writes Mirsky; it “dies like a cry of anguish in the desert air.” The note is struck in Levin’s reflections once he has attained all he wanted in life, all that the younger Tolstoy thought a man needs for happiness—a good marriage, children, a flourishing estate. He is haunted by doubts: “What am I? And where am I? And why am I here?” These questions, which bring Levin close to suicide, find an answer in his reconciliation with the Church. Levin asks himself, “Can I believe in everything the Church confesses?” And decides, rather hastily, that “there was not a single belief of the Church that violated the main thing—faith in God, in the good, as the sole purpose of man.” “Serving the good instead of one’s needs” became Levin’s watchword, as it became Tolstoy’s. But for Tolstoy, at least, the reconciliation was an uneasy one, undermined by latent contradictions, and it did not last long.

In 1879, only a year after the publication of Anna Karenina, he began work on a book to which he gave the title A Confession. This was not a novel; it was a sustained and rhetorically powerful exposition of the spiritual crisis he had lived through and the “conversion” (his own term) it had brought about in him, a conversion to what he called “true Christianity” as opposed to “Church Christianity.” A Confession was the first, and the most personal and compelling, of the series of polemical works Tolstoy wrote over the next twenty years, culminating in What Is Art? (1898), in which he expounded his new religious views and their philosophical, social, and aesthetic consequences. These works made Tolstoy world famous, not as an artist but as a moral teacher; they led to what became known as “Tolstoyism,” an anti-State, anti-Church, egalitarian doctrine of the kingdom of God on earth, to be achieved by means of civil disobedience and non-violent resistance, which brought him adherents such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Romain Rolland, Mahatma Gandhi, and the founders of the kibbutz movement in Palestine, among many others. It also brought him some of his first English translators.

The stories collected here have a complex and ambiguous relation to Tolstoy’s moral teaching; some, like Hadji Murat, were even written, as he admitted, “in secret from himself” and contrary to his notions of “good art.” But they all have a direct relation to the crisis he describes so forcefully in A Confession:

My life stopped. I could breathe, eat, drink, sleep, and could not help breathing, eating, drinking, sleeping; but there was no life, because there were no desires whose satisfaction seemed reasonable to me … I could not even desire to know the truth, because I guessed what it consisted in. The truth was that life was an absurdity … The idea of suicide came to me as naturally as ideas for improving my life had come to me before. This idea was so tempting that I had to use tricks with myself so as not to carry it out at once.

• • •

My question, the one which brought me, at the age of fifty, to the verge of suicide, was the simplest of questions, the one that every man carries in the depths of himself, from the stupidest child to the wisest old man—the question without answering which life is impossible, as I indeed experienced. Here is that question: “What will come of what I do now, of what I will do tomorrow—what will come of my whole life?” Formulated differently, the question would be the following: “Why should I live, why desire anything, why do anything?” It can also be put like this: “Is there a meaning in my life that will not be annihilated by the death that inevitably awaits me?”

For all his ambition to change the world by his teaching, Tolstoy shows in his later stories how deeply troubled he remained by these questions which he tried repeatedly to answer for others. Late in life he remarked to Gorky: “If a man has learned to think, no matter what he may think about, he is always thinking of his own death. All philosophers were like that. And what truths can there be, if there is death?” It was this unappeasable anguish, and not the settled positions of his tracts, that nourished Tolstoy’s later artistic works, in which the conversions are not rational and collective but mystical, sudden, unique, and the “answers” are almost beyond the reach of words.

In 1882 the imperial censorship refused to allow publication of A Confession, which Tolstoy had finished in 1880, but it was already circulating in thousands of handwritten copies and was eventually printed in Geneva in 1884, through the efforts of Vladimir Chertkov, Tolstoy’s first and most active disciple. Chertkov, a wealthy young landowner and horse guards officer, met Tolstoy in 1883 and immediately fell under the influence of his new ideas. After A Confession, Tolstoy had begun to write moral tales intended for the people. The first was What Men Live By (1881), a parable set in realistic peasant circumstances, in which the archangel Michael, exiled temporarily by God, can only return to heaven once he has learned three things: what is given to man, what is not given to man, and what men live by. Some of the other stories have equally moralizing titles: Where Love Is, God Is; Evil Allures, but Good Endures; A Spark Neglected Burns the House; How Much Land Does a Man Need? In 1885, on Tolstoy’s initiative, Chertkov founded and financed a publishing house called The Mediator in order to make the stories available to the people in inexpensive illustrated editions.

These stories were meant to embody simple Christian moral principles in the simplest style possible, but in fact they cost Tolstoy a great deal of work. Thirty-seven manuscript versions of What Men Live By were found among his papers. He was, in a sense, relearning his craft. Like The Prisoner of the Caucasus, the popular tales occupy a middle position between his earlier expansive and inclusive realism and the later stories collected here. They were experimental, the work on them dominated by questions of form. That may seem surprising in the light of Tolstoy’s obsession with truth and scant respect for formalists and formalism in the arts (“You’re an inventor,” he once said to Gorky, meaning it as a criticism). But he was always concerned with form and formal innovation, though never for its own sake. There is a revealing comment in his diary for 20 January 1890: “Strange thing this concern with perfection of form. It is not in vain. Not in vain when the content is good.—If Gogol had written his comedy [The Inspector General] summarily, weakly, it would not have been read by a millionth of those who have now read it. One must sharpen an artistic work so that it penetrates. And sharpening it means making it artistically perfect …” Mirsky comments in his History: “It is quite wrong to affirm that in any literary sense the change that overcame Tolstoy about 1880 was a fall. He remained forever, not only the supreme writer, but the supreme craftsman of Russian letters.”

Tolstoy’s later ideal, the model of “universal ancient art” by which he proposed to measure all narratives, including his own, was the story of Joseph from the book of Genesis. In What Is Art? he explains why:

In the narrative of Joseph there was no need to describe in detail, as is done nowadays, Joseph’s blood-stained clothes, Jacob’s dwelling and clothes, and the pose and attire of Potiphar’s wife when, straightening a bracelet on her left arm, she said, “Come to me,” and so on, because the feeling contained in this story is so strong that all details except the most necessary—for instance, that Joseph went into the next room to weep—all details are superfluous and would only hinder the conveying of the feeling, and therefore this story is accessible to all people, it touches people of all nations, ranks, ages, has come down to our time, and will live on for thousands of years. But take the details from the best novels of our time and what will remain?

Yet Tolstoy was unable to achieve that ideal even in the plainest of his later stories. On the contrary, everywhere in them we find the most precisely observed details of time and place, a concentration on the particular, on sights and smells, on the gestures and intonations of characters—on all that was so specific to Tolstoy’s genius, to his extraordinary sensual memory and gift of concrete realization. If that were taken away, there would indeed remain a core of universal human experience—Tolstoy was not interested in the topical issues of his time and almost never wrote about them—but there would not be that poetry of reality which characterized his artistic works from the very beginning and reached perhaps its highest point in his last major work, Hadji Murat.

In What Is Art? Tolstoy discards “the all-confusing concept of beauty” and defines art as “that human activity which consists in one man’s consciously conveying to others, by certain external signs, the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them.” The metaphor of infection has a quality of physical closeness, even of impingement, about it: infection does not require the consent of the infected. But art is also the creation of an image held up for contemplation, and contemplation implies distance and the freedom of the contemplator. The formal qualities of the work create the distance necessary for contemplation. In The Kreutzer Sonata, a story that dramatizes an attempt at “infection” in Tolstoy’s sense, distance is created by the narrator, a fellow passenger on the train, a curious but passive listener, who throws the would-be infector, Pozdnyshev, into high relief. And it is the vivid, contradictory, pathetic figure of Pozdnyshev that Tolstoy finally holds up to us (and to himself) as a sign.

Even The Prisoner of the Caucasus, a story meant for peasant schoolchildren, is more self-consciously literary than it seems. It is a deliberately anti-romantic retelling of Alexander Pushkin’s romantic poem of the same title, written in 1822. Pushkin tells the story of a world-weary, Byronic Russian officer taken prisoner by the Caucasian mountaineers. When a beautiful Circassian girl falls in love with him, he is too jaded to respond. In the end she helps him to escape and then throws herself into a mountain torrent and drowns. Tolstoy’s hero is a sturdy, practical fellow with the rather crude, physiological name of Zhilin, which comes from the word for sinew. His fat fellow prisoner is Kostylin, whose name comes from the word for crutch. The Circassian beauty is turned into the thirteen-year-old Dina, who likes Zhilin because he makes dolls for her. The polemic of this near parody has little to do with educating peasant children and much to do with Tolstoy’s own literary stance and temperament.

The second piece in the collection, The Diary of a Madman, also borrows its title from an earlier literary work, Nikolai Gogol’s hallucinatory tale of the petty clerk Mr. Poprishchin. But they have only the title in common. In fact, Tolstoy first called his story The Diary of a Non-madman, to mark his distance from Gogol and assert the actual sanity of his self-declared madman. The theme and the experience behind it were of profound significance for him. The first draft dates to 1884. He returned to it a number of times between 1887 and 1903, but left it unfinished. The fragment, which Mirsky considered “the most genuinely mystical” of Tolstoy’s writings, recounts a crisis close to the one described in A Confession, but closer still to something that actually happened to Tolstoy in 1869, when he, like his hero, was cheerfully traveling to Penza to buy an estate and stopped for the night in Arzamas. Tolstoy wrote to his wife on 4 September 1869: “The day before yesterday I spent the night in Arzamas, and an extraordinary thing happened to me. At two o’clock in the morning, a strange anxiety, a fear, a terror such as I have never before experienced came over me. I’ll tell you the details later, but never have I known such painful sensations …” In the story, Tolstoy develops that one incident and attempts to find a resolution for its metaphysical anguish. There was an even earlier experience, however, that was a prelude to the night in Arzamas and the crisis of A Confession. This was the death of his brother Nikolai in the southern French town of Hyères, where he was being treated for tuberculosis. In September 1860 Tolstoy visited him and in a letter described his death and burial as “the most painful impression of my life.” The confrontation with the mystery of death became a central theme of his later work.

Rumination on the same themes, places, and even moments over long stretches of time is typical of Tolstoy. The presence of the Caucasus in his work is a good example of it. He first went to the Caucasus as a volunteer in 1851, to join Nikolai, who was on active duty there. He happened to be in Tiflis in December of that same year when the Avar chief Hadji Murat came over to the Russians, an act he condemned at the time as base. In 1853 he wrote his first story about the war in the Caucasus, The Raid, describing the destruction of a Chechen village by the Russian army; in 1855 he described another Russian tactic against the mountaineers in The Woodfelling. From 1852 to 1862, he worked at his novel The Cossacks, portraying the failed attempt of a self-conscious young Russian officer to enter into the unreflecting, natural life of the Cossacks who manned the line of fortresses against the Chechens in the mountains. In 1872 he returned to the same setting in The Prisoner of the Caucasus. And, finally, in 1896 he began work on Hadji Murat, which, incidentally, contains another version of the raid that formed the subject of his first story (the earlier version had been somewhat cut by the censors).

The Devil (1889), a story of sexual obsession, also had roots in Tolstoy’s past: the relations of his hero Irtenev with the peasant woman Stepanida are based on Tolstoy’s own relations, described in detail in his diary, with a married peasant woman on his estate, in the years prior to his marriage in 1862. Similarly, the brief story After the Ball, written in 1903, was based on an incident that had occurred with Tolstoy himself when he was living in Kazan in the 1840s. So, too, the blizzard in Master and Man (1895) is a variant of The Snowstorm, written in 1856.

Tolstoy’s religious ambitions, which came to dominate his public life after 1880, were also not the result of his “conversion,” but had long been brewing in him. As early as March 1855, he wrote in his diary:

Yesterday a conversation on the divine and faith led me to a great, an immense thought, to the realization of which I feel capable of devoting my life.—This thought is to found a new religion corresponding to the evolution of humanity, a religion of Christ, but stripped of faith and mysteries, a practical religion which promises no future blessedness, but grants blessedness on earth … To act consciously for the union of men with the help of religion, that is the basis of a thought which, I hope, will sustain me.

There could be no clearer statement of the program he developed during the last decades of his life. Mirsky rightly observes:

From the very beginning we cannot fail to discern in him an obstinate search for a rational meaning to life; a confidence in the powers of common sense and his own reason; contempt for modern civilization with its “artificial” multiplication of needs; a deeply rooted irreverence for all the functions and conventions of State and Society; a sovereign disregard for accepted opinions and scientific and literary “good form;” and a pronounced tendency to teach.

Of the eleven stories in this collection, only four were published in Tolstoy’s lifetime: The Prisoner of the Caucasus, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Kreutzer Sonata, and Master and Man. The others first appeared in the volumes of his posthumous writings edited and published by Vladimir Chertkov in 1911–12. Some of the stories were finished relatively quickly (After the Ball and Alyosha the Pot each in a single day); some, like Father Sergius, The Forged Coupon, and Hadji Murat, he worked at for many years. His reluctance to publish had several reasons: disputes between his wife and Chertkov over the rights to his work; concerns about the censorship (The Kreutzer Sonata, written in 1887–89, was published in 1891 only after Tolstoy’s wife personally petitioned the emperor); and a feeling of guilt for concerning himself with art at all (after finishing Master and Man, one of his most perfect stories, he wrote in his diary: “I am ashamed to have wasted my time on such stuff”).

The Death of Ivan Ilyich was the first work Tolstoy published after the crisis described in A Confession. Written between 1884 and 1886, at the same time as his stories for the people, it shows clearly both a continuity with his earlier work and the artistic changes that resulted from his “conversion.” The power of concrete evocation is the same, but there is a new brevity, rapidity, and concentration on essentials, an increased formality of construction underscoring the main idea, and a cast of characters not drawn from Tolstoy’s own social milieu. The protagonists of Tolstoy’s earlier works were more or less openly autobiographical: Nikolenka Irtenev in the early trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, Olenin in The Cossacks, Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace, Levin in Anna Karenina. They were self-conscious men, seekers of truth, concerned with their own inner development. The protagonist of The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a banal and totally unreflecting man, a state functionary, and, worst of all for Tolstoy, a judge. The germ of the story came from the sudden death in 1881, at the age of forty-five, of a certain Ivan Ilyich Mechnikov, a prosecutor in the city of Tula, about eight miles from Tolstoy’s estate. He had visited Tolstoy once, and in fact Tolstoy had found him an unusual man. In the story, however, he makes him “most ordinary,” heaps him with scorn and irony, and then, through a simple but powerful inversion from outside to inside, brings him to an extraordinary transformation. The story ends where it began, but with everything changed. In The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche, the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov wrote: “The Death of Ivan Ilyich, as an artistic creation, is one of the most precious gems of Tolstoy’s work. It is a question mark so black and strong that it shines through the new and radiant colors of that preaching by which Tolstoy wished to make us forget his former doubts.”

Master and Man, written ten years later, and with an entirely different cast of characters, this time drawn from village merchant and peasant life, is a variation on the theme of The Death of Ivan Ilyich. It is reminiscent of the popular stories in its setting, but is told with a gripping physical intensity and, in Mirsky’s words, “with a sustained beauty of construction” that makes it one of Tolstoy’s masterpieces. He isolates the merchant Brekhunov, as he does Ivan Ilyich, in the most extreme human situation, and, rightly, never explains the change that comes over him as he struggles to save his servant’s life. “That’s how we are,” he says to himself in his usual businesslike way, and suddenly bursts into tears of joy.

Pozdnyshev in The Kreutzer Sonata and Irtenev in The Devil are also examples of Tolstoy’s testing by extremes, but in their case the testing leads not to “light,” but to the most terrible human darkness. The Kreutzer Sonata caused more of a public outcry than anything else Tolstoy wrote, owing to its frank treatment of sex. Tolstoy was accused of attacking the institution of marriage and corrupting the youth. (Incidentally, the United States Post Office, with an unusual show of erudition, refused to handle by mail any publication containing a translation of the story or excerpts from it.) Tolstoy’s sympathizers, on the other hand, tried to separate him completely from the character of Pozdnyshev. In a diary entry in 1890, before the publication of the story, but after it had spread in manuscript, Tolstoy jotted down this response: “They think he is some sort of special man, and, according to them, there is nothing at all like that in me. Can they really find nothing?” The struggle Tolstoy portrays in The Kreutzer Sonata and in The Devil is not against institutions and conventions, but against sensual seduction and the resulting loss of personal freedom. And he links art and especially music with sexuality as forces of seduction. He himself was strongly subject to all of them.

Father Sergius, begun in June 1890 and worked on over the next eight years, presents another kind of testing, though it has some relation to the sexual stories. It tells about a young prince who abandons society to become a monk and hermit; what is tested in his life is pride—the pride of an aristocrat enrolled in the elite Cadet Corps, the pride of intellectual and military ambition, but also the pride that seeks spiritual perfection, the pride of self-conscious humility. Lev Shestov sees Father Sergius as a reflection of Tolstoy in his later years—famous, attracting visitors and disciples from all over the world, but aware in himself of his own “unworthiness.” It is a story of repeated departures, which ironically keep bringing the old monk back to where the young guards officer began. In a striking way, it anticipates Tolstoy’s final departure in November 1910, leaving his estate, his family, and the “Tolstoyans” in search of solitude. After a frustrated visit to the monastery of Optino, he fell gravely ill at the railroad station of Astapovo and died in the station-master’s house.

Father Sergius is a good example of Tolstoy’s later manner, with its quick tempo and concentration on essentials. In his Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky records a moment that reveals the “secret” artistic pleasure Tolstoy took in writing it:

One evening, in the twilight, half closing his eyes and moving his brows, he read a variant of the scene in Father Sergius where the woman goes to seduce the hermit: he read it through to the end, and then, raising his head and shutting his eyes, he said distinctly: “The old man wrote it well.”

It came out with such sincerity, his pleasure in its beauty was so sincere, that I shall never forget the delight it gave me at the time … My heart stopped beating for a moment, and then everything around me seemed to become fresh and revivified.

The perfect foil for characters like Pozdnyshev and Father Sergius is the hero of the little story Alyosha the Pot, a simple and obedient young peasant, a sort of holy fool, who lives and dies with a purity and inner peace that forever eluded Tolstoy and most of his characters. In his diary for 28 February 1905, Tolstoy noted with characteristic dismissiveness: “Wrote Alyosha, very bad. Gave it up.” When the symbolist poet Alexander Blok read the story on its first publication in 1911, he noted in his diary: “One of the greatest works of genius I have read—Tolstoy’s Alyosha the Pot.” Mirsky agrees with Blok, calling the story “a masterpiece of rare perfection.” There actually was a servant in Tolstoy’s household nicknamed Alyosha the Pot, who worked as a helper to the cook and the yard porter. Tolstoy’s sister-in-law, Tatyana Kuzminskaya, confessed in her memoirs that she remembered him only as an ugly halfwit.

Unlike the other stories collected here, The Forged Coupon does not concentrate on a single protagonist, but presents a whole series of characters—merchants, radical students, peasants, policemen, monks, sectarians, even the Russian royal family—all linked without knowing it by the consequences of a single petty crime. It is a perfect parable, circular in structure, which goes more and more deeply into evil until it reaches a turning point and doubles back into more and more good. The structure is intentionally abstract, but the abstraction is countered by a wealth of minute particulars, and the main characters—Stepan Pelageyushkin, Marya Semyonovna, the thief Vassily—have a remarkably vivid presence. It is all told in a brisk, matter-of-fact, sometimes unexpectedly humorous tone that heightens the drama of the events, as in the description of Vassily’s prison break, narrated in brief, breathless phrases—one of the best escape scenes in literature.

In his diary for 19 July 1896, Tolstoy noted that, as he was crossing the plowed fields that day, he came upon a crimson Tartar thistle that had been broken down by the plow. “It made me think of Hadji Murat. I want to write. It defends its life to the end, alone in the midst of the whole field, no matter how, it defends it.” The novella begins and ends with that same encounter. Tolstoy worked on it from 1896 to 1904, with the express wish that it not be published in his lifetime. It testifies, as Michel Aucouturier has written, to “that which is most spontaneous and most obstinate in him,” his irrepressible need for artistic creation. The symbol of the Tartar thistle thus acquires a more personal, unspoken meaning.

But even before the encounter with the thistle, the events of 1851 were stirring in him. On 29 May 1895 he mentioned in his diary that he was reading and enjoying the memoirs of General V. A. Poltoratsky, published in the Historical Messenger in 1893. Poltoratsky began his military career in the Caucasus and was a witness to some of the events described in the novella. Tolstoy not only drew from his memoirs, but included him as a character. M. T. Loris-Melikov, who later became minister of the interior, also appears as a character. Tolstoy took long passages from the transcripts of his conversations with the Avar chief, who told him his life story. He also made use of General F. K. Klügenau’s journals and his letters to Hadji Murat, and in chapter XIV he transcribed the whole of Prince M. S. Vorontsov’s letter to the minister of war Chernyshov, which he translated from the French. Documentary evidence was as important to him in writing Hadji Murat as it had been in writing War and Peace. As late as 1903, he asked his cousin Alexandra Alexeevna, who had been a lady-in-waiting at court, for details about Nicholas I, though his final portrait of the emperor is far less flattering than the one she gave him.

Tolstoy likened the technique of his narrative to “the English toy called a peepshow—behind the glass now one thing shows itself, now another. That’s how the man Hadji Murat must be shown: the husband, the fanatic …” (diary for 21 March 1898). Not only Hadji Murat, but all the characters and events of the novella are shown in brief flashes, taking us from the clay-walled houses of a Chechen village, to a frontline fortress, to the regional capital at Tiflis, to the imperial palace in Petersburg, and back again; portraying Russians, Tartars, Cossacks, peasants, foot soldiers, officers, statesmen, Russian princesses, Tartar wives, the imam Shamil, the emperor Nicholas I. The story of the peasant conscript Avdeev illustrates the technique in miniature. We are introduced to him in the second chapter; in the fifth he is badly wounded in a chance skirmish; in the seventh he dies; in the eighth Tolstoy goes back to Avdeev’s native village, to his parents, family squabbles, his drunken brother, his unfaithful wife. No more is heard of Avdeev; he and his familly are quite irrelevant to the main story; but like the social comedy of the scenes in Tiflis and Petersburg, like the village scenes among the mountaineers, they go to make up the world of the novella. The composition is as inclusive as in War and Peace, if not more so, but rendered with an economy of means that is the final perfection of Tolstoy’s art.

Few things written about the two centuries of struggle in Chechnya are as telling as the page and a half of chapter XVII, the briefest in the novella, a terse, unrhetorical inventory of the results of a Russian raid on a mountain village. Nowhere in Tolstoy’s polemical writings is there a more powerful condemnation of the senseless violence of war. Moral judgment is not pronounced in the novella; it is implicit in the sequence of events, and in the figure of Hadji Murat, with whom Tolstoy identifies himself. He is present even where he is absent, as in the scenes in Petersburg, or in Shamil’s stronghold, or in the carousing of Russian officers in the fortress. He is the immanent measure of human dignity in the novella.

Hadji Murat is a new kind of hero for Tolstoy. He is not a self-conscious seeker after the meaning of life; he is not a converted sinner to whom the light is revealed in extremis; he is not sensually enslaved, but also not a holy fool or innocent. And he has no fear of death. As a military leader, he first betrays the Chechens, then the Russians; he kills without hesitation or remorse. Yet he is also not a savage: he carefully performs his ritual duties as a Muslim, he shares unquestioningly in the traditional culture of his people, and he is fiercely loyal to what is most dear to him. He is a warrior and a natural man, who, in the words of the great chorus from Sophocles’ Antigone, finds himself “pathless on all paths.” The equity of Tolstoy’s portrayal of his fate lends it a transcendent beauty, set off by the indifferent singing of the nightingales. This final scene, deliberately placed out of sequence, casts its light over the whole novella, and over the whole of Tolstoy’s work.

RICHARD PEVEAR