The Chechen Grievance: Tolstoy’s ‘Hadji Murad’ After Boston
The Chechen Grievance: Tolstoys Hadji Murad After Boston
Apr 21, 2013 4:45 AM EDT
As everyone followed the Boston manhunt for the Tsarnaev brothers, thoughts turned to Tolstoys final novel, Hadji Murad, about Chechen rebels fighting Russian imperialism. Benjamin Lytal checks in on the masters tale of anti-heroism and betrayal.
On Friday, while CNN was making constant reference to the Tsarnaev brothers' attempt "to go out in a blaze of glory," a micro-meme lit up social media: didn't Leo Tolstoy have a novel about Chechnyan rebels, called Hadji Murad? He does: it was his last, a thin book that everyone should read. While it offers few overt parallels to a case of 21st century terrorism, Tolstoy's novel sets the stage for the Chechen grievanceand tribal dysfunction. But what is more piercing, when Dzokhar Tsarnaev's image is haunting the public eye, is Tolstoy's insight into the dire symbiosis between heroic desires and boyish innocence.
Tolstoy would have been the first to reject an idea like "going out in a blaze of glory." In battle scenes he was a master of anticlimax: perhaps the best-remembered moment in all of War and Peace is young Nikolai Rostov's first cavalry charge: knocked from the saddle by a bullet the bewildered twenty-year-old turns tail: "They're not after me! They can't be after me! Why? They can't want to kill me! Me. Everybody loves me!'" Like, one suspects, many a hunted young man-boy, Nikolai is haunted by "all the love he had from his mother, from his family and his friends." He can't reconcile such a background with all the trouble he has gotten into.
Tolstoy was a complicated man, however. He understood glory, even in its shallowness. Maxim Gorky tells the story, in his priceless Recollections, of Tolstoy's reaction to two proud young cuirassiers, walking down the street in their shining armor. As they approached, he cursed them: "What magnificent idiocy! They're nothing but circus animals trained with a stick . . . " But as they passed, Tolstoy gazed on admiringly: "How beautiful they are! Ancient Romans, eh, Lyovushka?"
full article:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/21/the-chechen-greivance-tolstoy-s-hadji-murad-after-boston.html