Hadji-Mourad

About “Hadji-Mourad”

This short novel by Leo Tolstoy fictionalizes the final days of Hadji Murád, an Avar separatist who fought against, and later with, Russia during the empire's annexation of Chechnya in the late 1840s. The narrator, reminded of Murád by a crushed thistle in a field, recounts how Murád, fleeing the imam Shamil who holds his family captive, is caught between the invading Russians and Shamil's vengeance.