Blog > What does Hadji Murat by Leo Tolstoy make me think of?
What does Hadji Murat by Leo Tolstoy make me think of?
Nature Life
I’ve just finished reading Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat, and what naturally comes to me after reading the final sentence
“And it is this death that was reminded to me by the crushed burdock in the middle of the ploughed field”
is a very clear sensation: the innocent unpredictability of death.
The novel is entirely driven by Hadji Murat’s mission to free his family, held hostage by Shamil. Yet his will, his love, his determination, his dream are suddenly extinguished by a violent, sudden and unexpected ending.
Not by chance, the scene of his death closes with nightingales resuming their song after the silence that followed the beheading. It is as if nature, indifferent and cyclical, simply continues its course without any real rupture.
Indeed, this tendency is highlighted again shortly before Murat’s death, when Nazarov begins to pursue him in an attempt to capture him, and the scene is described as follows:
“The sky was so clear, the air so fresh, the life forces resonated so joyfully in Nazarov’s soul as he, feeling himself one with the good and strong horse, flew along the flat road behind Hadji Murat, that it did not even occur to him that anything bad, sad, or terrible could happen.”
This story makes me think of the unconscious violence of nature as it is, and it brings me back vividly to a moment in my own life, years ago, when I collapsed due to a juvenile stroke. In that instant, believing I was dying, I felt that everything was a dream, including my greatest ambitions.
At the end of the book, we do not know what will become of his family, who quite literally disappear from the narrative along with him. And although Tolstoy wrote in the third person and would certainly have had the opportunity to tell us how his family’s fate unfolds, he chose instead to sweep them away together with him—erasing them from both the story and the reader’s expectations.
An immense story.
Other themes present in the text include the banality of power, the inadequacy of leaders, the egocentrism, and the vulgarity of the privileged classes.
