Source extract: v35_005_118_Hadzhi_Murat.txt (PSS vol. 35, pp. 5–118; written 1896–1904).
Extracted with extract_tei.py --choice=reg --notes=auto. Russian below is copy-pasted
verbatim from that extract (pre-reform orthography resolved to modern); English is
working translation only, labelled (working English).
Structure: a first-person frame (unnumbered prologue + a one-line payoff at the very end) enclosing 25 numbered chapters (I–XXV). 26 structural units total.
Structural map
Frame (prologue, unnumbered). The narrator, walking home through summer fields, gathers a bouquet, tries to pick a crimson “Tatar” thistle (татарник/репей), and finds it almost impossible — the stem fights back. Later, crossing a ploughed black field, he sees a single crushed-but-still-standing thistle, run over by a cartwheel, and it recalls “a Caucasian story” he will now tell.
I. Late Nov 1851. Hadji Murat rides secretly into the non-peaceful Chechen aul Makhket with his murid Eldar; takes shelter with his kunak Sado; sends word (via Bata and Khan-Mahoma) to the Russian prince Vorontsov that he wants to come over. Shamil has ordered him taken dead or alive.
II. A Russian outpost picket (Panov, Avdeyev, Nikitin, Bondarenko) smokes and talks in the night forest; the scout Bata passes through to the Russian lines. Avdeyev tells why he went for a soldier in his brother’s place and confesses his homesickness.
III. The Vorontsov household: Prince Semyon Vorontsov, his wife Marya Vasilyevna, the officer Poltoratsky; cards, champagne; news that Hadji Murat will come out tomorrow.
IV. Warned by Sado that the aul knows, Hadji Murat flees at night under fire, rejoins his murids (Khanefi, Gamzalo, Khan-Mahoma) in the forest; dreams of triumph over Shamil.
V. Morning wood-cutting expedition under Poltoratsky. Skirmish with the Chechens who shadowed Hadji Murat; soldier Avdeyev is shot in the belly. Hadji Murat rides out and surrenders to Vorontsov.
VI. Vorontsov brings Hadji Murat home; Marya Vasilyevna and stepson Bulka charmed; the watch and dagger exchanged; friction with the local commander Meller-Zakomelsky over protocol, smoothed by Marya Vasilyevna.
VII. Avdeyev dies in hospital; his quiet death contrasted with the inflated official dispatch.
VIII. The Avdeyev family at home threshing; the letter and rouble that will never reach Petrukha; his wife Aksinya secretly relieved at his death.
IX. The elder Vorontsov (viceroy, Tiflis): the grand dinner; courtiers compete to flatter; the “vyruchka” (Dargo debacle) gaffe by the red-whiskered general; the courier’s news of Hadji Murat.
X. Hadji Murat’s first audience with the viceroy Vorontsov — the wordless mutual reading of distrust; the opera and the ball where half-naked women ask if he likes what he sees.
XI. Loris-Melikov takes down Hadji Murat’s life story; the murids’ quarters and characters (Gamzalo, Khan-Mahoma, Eldar, Khanefi). Hadji Murat’s narrative begins (the khans, Hamzat, hazavat).
XII. Hadji Murat pauses to pray; the watch from Vorontsov; the contrast among the murids continues.
XIII. Hadji Murat’s story continues: the killing of Hamzat in the mosque, his break with Shamil, the Klugenau letters, the leap off the cliff, his final defection.
XIV. Vorontsov’s long French letter to War Minister Chernyshov, framing the Hadji Murat affair.
XV. St Petersburg: Nicholas I. His night with the masked girl; his self-satisfied cruelty; the “running the gauntlet” sentence on the student; his orders to lay waste Chechnya; his self-deception about his own strategy.
XVI. Acting on Nicholas’s order, a January 1852 raid into Chechnya. Butler (newly arrived officer) experiences his first joyful taste of war; the column reaches and burns an aul.
XVII. The burned aul — rendered from the highlanders’ side: Sado’s wrecked sakla, his murdered son, the fouled fountain and mosque, the killed bees, the hatred that is “stronger than hatred.”
XVIII. Butler at the fort; Hadji Murat arrives to stay with commander Ivan Matveyevich; Marya Dmitriyevna (the major’s companion) and Butler are drawn to him.
XIX. Shamil. His triumphal entry into Vedeno; his court and judgments; his summoning of Yusuf (Hadji Murat’s son) from the pit; his threat to blind the son and scatter the women; his harem (Aminet).
XX. Hadji Murat’s week at the fort; the songs (Khanefi’s blood-vengeance song); the gift of the burka to Marya Dmitriyevna; the Arslan-Khan assassination attempt on the porch, foiled by Hadji Murat.
XXI. Camp life under the new commander Baryatinsky; the farewell dinner (Kozlovsky’s broken speech); Butler gambles away his money.
XXII. Hadji Murat, back in Tiflis, fails to free his family; Vorontsov stalls; he is allowed to move to Nukha.
XXIII. In Nukha, the scouts bring bad news (his friends now refuse, fearing Shamil). Hadji Murat decides he must flee to the mountains to rescue or die for his family. The falcon parable.
XXIV. Butler’s decline (drink, debt); the night meeting with Marya Dmitriyevna; the arrival of Kamenev — bearing Hadji Murat’s severed head in a sack.
XXV. The flashback: Hadji Murat’s break for freedom with five murids, the killing of the Cossack escort, the swampy rice-field, the encirclement, the last stand, his death and decapitation; the nightingales resume. The frame closes: “It was this death that the crushed thistle reminded me of.”
Pivotal nodes
1. The thistle frame (prologue + payoff)
Verbatim Russian (prologue — picking the thistle):
Я набрал большой букет разных цветов и шел домой, когда заметил в канаве чудный малиновый, в полном цвету, репей того сорта, который у нас называется «татарином» и который старательно окашивают, а когда он нечаянно скошен, выкидывают из сена покосники, чтобы не колоть на него рук. [...] он был так страшно крепок, что я бился с ним минут пять, по одному разрывая волокна. [...] «Какая, однако, энергия и сила жизни, — подумал я, вспоминая те усилия, с которыми я отрывал цветок. — Как он усиленно защищал и дорого продал свою жизнь».
(working English): I had gathered a big bouquet of various flowers and was walking home when I noticed in the ditch a marvellous crimson thistle in full bloom, of the kind we call “Tatar,” which the mowers carefully cut around, and when one is accidentally mown they throw it out of the hay so as not to prick their hands on it. [...] it was so terribly strong that I struggled with it for some five minutes, tearing the fibres one by one. [...] “What energy and force of life, though,” I thought, recalling the effort with which I had torn the flower off. “How hard it defended itself, and how dearly it sold its life.”
Verbatim Russian (the crushed thistle in the field):
Видно было, что весь кустик был переехан колесом и уже после поднялся и потому стоял боком, но все-таки стоял. Точно вырвали у него кусок тела, вывернули внутренности, оторвали руку, выкололи глаз. Но он всё стоит и не сдается человеку, уничтожившему всех его братий кругом его.
«Экая энергия! — подумал я, — всё победил человек, миллионы трав уничтожил, а этот всё не сдается».
(working English): It was clear that the whole little bush had been run over by a wheel and had risen up afterwards, and so stood crookedly, but still stood. As if a piece of its body had been torn out, its insides turned out, an arm torn off, an eye gouged out. But it still stands and does not surrender to man, who has destroyed all its brothers around it. — “What energy!” I thought, “man has conquered everything, destroyed millions of plants, but this one still will not surrender.”
Verbatim Russian (the closing payoff, final line):
Вот эту-то смерть и напомнил мне раздавленный репей среди вспаханного поля.
(working English): It was this very death that the crushed thistle in the middle of the ploughed field reminded me of.
Chapter: Unnumbered frame (opening) and the last line after XXV. Significance: The thistle is the work’s controlling image: a life-force that “does not surrender” and “sells its life dearly,” explicitly equated with Hadji Murat’s death. The torn-arm / gouged-eye language pre-figures the mutilations of the war and of Hadji Murat’s own body and Yusuf’s threatened blinding.
2. Nicholas I — the satirical court portrait (gauntlet sentence, self-deception)
Verbatim Russian (the “skvoz stroy” / gauntlet resolution on the student):
Он взял доклад и на поле его написал своим крупным почерком: «Заслуживает смертной казни. Но, слава Богу, смертной казни у нас нет. И не мне вводить ее. Провести 12 раз скрозь тысячу человек. Николай», подписал он с своим неестественным, огромным росчерком.
Николай знал, что двенадцать тысяч шпицрутенов была не только верная, мучительная смерть, но излишняя жестокость, так как достаточно было пяти тысяч ударов, чтобы убить самого сильного человека. Но ему приятно было быть неумолимо жестоким, и приятно было думать, что у нас нет смертной казни.
(working English): He took the report and wrote on its margin in his large hand: “Deserves the death penalty. But, thank God, we have no death penalty. And it is not for me to introduce it. Have him run twelve times through a thousand men. Nicholas,” he signed with his unnatural, enormous flourish. — Nicholas knew that twelve thousand strokes of the rod were not only certain, agonizing death but excessive cruelty, since five thousand blows were enough to kill the strongest man. But it pleased him to be implacably cruel, and it pleased him to think that we have no death penalty.
Verbatim Russian (the self-deception about his own strategy):
Постоянная, явная, противная очевидности лесть окружающих его людей довела его до того, что он не видел уже своих противоречий, не сообразовал уже свои поступки и слова с действительностью, с логикой или даже с простым здравым смыслом, а вполне был уверен, что все его распоряжения, как бы они ни были бессмысленны, несправедливы и несогласны между собою, становились и осмысленны, и справедливы, и согласны между собой только потому, что он их делал.
(working English): The constant, blatant flattery, contrary to all evidence, of the people around him had brought him to the point where he no longer saw his own contradictions, no longer matched his acts and words to reality, to logic, or even to plain common sense, but was fully convinced that all his orders, however senseless, unjust, and mutually contradictory they might be, became sensible, just, and consistent simply because he made them.
Verbatim Russian (his order on Chechnya — the war policy):
— Твердо держаться моей системы разорения жилищ, уничтожения продовольствия в Чечне и тревожить их набегами, — сказал Николай.
(working English): “Hold firmly to my system of laying waste their dwellings, destroying provisions in Chechnya, and harassing them with raids,” said Nicholas.
Chapter: XV. Significance: The political centre of the novella. Nicholas’s vanity, lust, self-mythologizing (“what would Russia be without me”), and the casual sadism of the gauntlet sentence are drawn as the ultimate source of the raid in XVI–XVII. The “thank God, we have no death penalty” gloss exposes the hypocrisy of state cruelty performed as virtue.
3. Shamil — the parallel portrait of the imam (Yusuf in the pit; the threat)
Verbatim Russian (Shamil’s studied appearance of greatness):
Вообще на имаме не было ничего блестящего, золотого или серебряного, и высокая, прямая, могучая фигура его, в одежде без украшений, окруженная мюридами с золотыми и серебряными украшениями на одежде и оружии, производила то самое впечатление величия, которое он желал и умел производить в народе. Бледное, окаймленное подстриженной рыжей бородой лицо его с постоянно сощуренными маленькими глазами было, как каменное, совершенно неподвижно.
(working English): In general there was nothing shining, gold or silver, on the imam, and his tall, erect, powerful figure, in unadorned dress, surrounded by murids with gold and silver ornaments on their clothes and weapons, produced exactly that impression of grandeur which he wished and knew how to produce upon the people. His pale face, framed by a trimmed red beard, with its perpetually narrowed little eyes, was like stone, perfectly motionless.
Verbatim Russian (the threat delivered to Yusuf, his son):
— Так напиши отцу, что если он выйдет назад ко мне теперь, до Байрама, я прощу его, и все будет по-старому. Если же нет и он останется у русских, то, — Шамиль грозно нахмурился, — я отдам твою бабку, твою мать по аулам, а тебе отрублю голову.
[...]
— Напиши, что я пожалел тебя и не убью, а выколю глаза, как я делаю всем изменникам. Иди.
(working English): “So write to your father that if he comes back over to me now, before Bayram, I will forgive him, and all will be as before. But if not, and he stays with the Russians, then” — Shamil frowned menacingly — “I will give your grandmother and your mother out to the auls, and I will cut off your head.” [...] “Write that I had pity on you and will not kill you, but will gouge out your eyes, as I do to all traitors. Go.”
Verbatim Russian (the same “inner voice” device as Nicholas — power as divine):
Советники знали, что это значило то, что он слушает теперь говорящий ему голос пророка, указывающий то, что должно быть сделано. После пятиминутного торжественного молчания Шамиль открыл глаза, еще более прищурил их и сказал: — Приведите ко мне сына Хаджи-Мурата.
(working English): The councillors knew this meant that he was now listening to the voice of the prophet speaking to him, indicating what must be done. After five minutes of solemn silence Shamil opened his eyes, narrowed them still more, and said: “Bring me Hadji Murat’s son.”
Chapter: XIX. Significance: Shamil is built deliberately as Nicholas’s mirror — the same staged grandeur, the same self-attributed divine sanction (the “inner voice” / “voice of the prophet”), the same casual cruelty (gouging eyes, scattering women). The gouged-eye threat echoes the thistle’s “выкололи глаз.” Power on both sides of the war is drawn in identical ink.
4. The aul-burning / raid (from the highlanders’ side)
Verbatim Russian (the wreckage, the killed child, the bees):
Вернувшись в свой аул, Садо нашел свою саклю разрушенной: крыша была провалена, и дверь и столбы галлерейки сожжены, и внутренность огажена. Сын же его, тот красивый, с блестящими глазами мальчик, который восторженно смотрел на Хаджи-Мурата, был привезен мертвым к мечети на покрытой буркой лошади. Он был проткнут штыком в спину. [...] Бывшие там два стожка сена были сожжены; были поломаны и обожжены посаженные стариком и выхоженные абрикосовые и вишневые деревья и, главное, сожжены все ульи с пчелами.
(working English): Returning to his aul, Sado found his sakla destroyed: the roof caved in, the door and the gallery posts burned, and the interior fouled. And his son, that handsome, bright-eyed boy who had gazed in rapture at Hadji Murat, was brought dead to the mosque on a horse covered with a burka. He had been run through the back with a bayonet. [...] The two stacks of hay that had been there were burned; the apricot and cherry trees the old man had planted and tended were broken and scorched, and, above all, all the beehives with their bees were burned.
Verbatim Russian (the fouled fountain and mosque; the feeling beyond hatred):
Фонтан был загажен, очевидно нарочно, так что воды нельзя было брать из него. Так же была загажена и мечеть, и мулла с муталимами очищал ее. [...] Чувство, которое испытывали все чеченцы, от мала до велика, было сильнее ненависти. Это была не ненависть, а непризнание этих русских собак людьми и такое отвращение, гадливость и недоумение перед нелепой жестокостью этих существ, что желание истребления их, как желание истребления крыс, ядовитых пауков и волков, было таким же естественным чувством, как чувство самосохранения.
(working English): The fountain had been fouled, evidently on purpose, so that water could not be taken from it. The mosque too had been fouled, and the mullah with the pupils was cleaning it. [...] The feeling all the Chechens experienced, from small to great, was stronger than hatred. It was not hatred, but a refusal to recognize these Russian dogs as human beings, and such revulsion, disgust, and bewilderment before the senseless cruelty of these creatures, that the desire to exterminate them — like the desire to exterminate rats, venomous spiders, and wolves — was as natural a feeling as self-preservation.
Chapter: XVII. Significance: Tolstoy renders the consequence of Nicholas’s “system” not as Russian heroics but from inside the destroyed village. The desecration (deliberate fouling of well and mosque), the bayoneted child, the burned bees, and the resulting feeling “stronger than hatred” make the raid the moral indictment that the whole political frame (XV–XVI) builds toward.
5. Hadji Murat’s death (the last stand, the severed head)
Verbatim Russian (the dying remembrance / will of the body):
И все эти воспоминания пробегали в его воображении, не вызывая в нем никакого чувства: ни жалости, ни злобы, ни какого-либо желания. Всё это казалось так ничтожно в сравнении с тем, что начиналось и уже началось для него. А между тем его сильное тело продолжало делать начатое.
(working English): And all these memories ran through his imagination without arousing in him any feeling — neither pity, nor malice, nor any desire. It all seemed so insignificant in comparison with that which was beginning, and had already begun, for him. And meanwhile his strong body continued to do what it had begun.
Verbatim Russian (the final rising and fall — the thistle simile made literal):
Сначала поднялась окровавленная, без папахи, бритая голова, потом поднялось туловище, и, ухватившись за дерево, он поднялся весь. Он так казался страшен, что подбегавшие остановились. Но вдруг он дрогнул, отшатнулся от дерева и со всего роста, как подкошенный репей, упал на лицо и уже не двигался.
(working English): First the bloodied, capless, shaven head rose, then the trunk rose, and, gripping a tree, he raised himself up fully. He seemed so terrible that those running up stopped. But suddenly he shuddered, lurched away from the tree, and fell face down at his full height, like a thistle that has been mown down, and moved no more.
Verbatim Russian (the decapitation; nightingales resume):
Гаджи-Ага, наступив ногой на спину тела, с двух ударов отсек голову и осторожно, чтобы не запачкать в кровь чувяки, откатил ее ногою. Алая кровь хлынула из артерий шеи и черная из головы и залила траву.
[...]
Соловьи, смолкнувшие во время стрельбы, опять защелкали, сперва один близко и потом другие на дальнем конце.
(working English): Gadzhi-Aga, setting his foot on the back of the body, with two blows severed the head and carefully, so as not to soil his shoes with blood, rolled it away with his foot. Scarlet blood gushed from the arteries of the neck and black blood from the head, and flooded the grass. [...] The nightingales, which had fallen silent during the shooting, began to trill again, at first one close by and then others at the far end.
Chapter: XXV. Significance: The novella’s climax and the explicit redemption of the frame: the simile “как подкошенный репей” (“like a mown-down thistle”) seals the equation set up in the prologue. The indifferent nightingales resuming, and the killer’s care not to soil his shoes, place the violence inside an unbroken natural and human ordinariness. The severed head links forward (it is what Kamenev displays in XXIV) and back (the thistle’s torn body in the prologue).
Themes
- Mirrored despotism: Nicholas ‖ Shamil. The two rulers are built in identical strokes — staged grandeur, a self-attributed divine/inner voice that sanctions every order, casual cruelty (the gauntlet sentence; the gouged eyes), and flatterers who confirm them. Empire and theocracy are shown as the same machine.
- Life-force / vitality (the thistle). The crushed-but-standing thistle “that will not surrender” frames the whole and is made literal in Hadji Murat’s death (“как подкошенный репей”). Tenacity, not victory, is the value.
- The brutality of empire / colonial war. Nicholas’s abstract “system of laying waste dwellings and destroying provisions” becomes, two chapters later, a bayoneted child, a fouled well and mosque, and burned bees — cause and effect placed in plain sight.
- Honour, betrayal, divided loyalty. Hadji Murat is caught between Shamil (who holds his mother, wife, and son) and the Russians (who distrust and stall). The falcon parable in XXIII names his trap: returned to the mountains with the bells of captivity still on him, his own would peck him to death; the rope’s end is “in Shamil’s hand.”
- The highlanders’ world from inside. Chapters I, XVII, XIX and the songs (Khanefi’s blood-vengeance song; Hadji Murat’s mother’s song) render Caucasian life, hospitality (kunak/adat), faith, and grief from within, not as exotic backdrop — the destroyed aul is felt from its own people.
- Sensuous late prose vs. the moral-art doctrine (marquee note). This is among Tolstoy’s most sensory fiction, written during/after What Is Art? (1897–98), where he argued art must be moral, universal, and “infectious.” The text repeatedly does pure aesthetic/sensory work with no overt moral tag: the catalogue of summer flowers in the prologue; the nightingales of Nukha that bracket the death (XXIII–XXV); the snow-mountains that “pretend to be clouds” (XVI, XVIII); the moonlit road with the halo of light around Butler’s shadow (XXIV); the close physical description of Hadji Murat’s body, the murids, the horses. The “infectiousness” doctrine is arguably satisfied — the reader is made to feel — but the means are sensuous beauty, not didactic statement; the moral judgment is carried structurally (Nicholas → raid → severed head) rather than asserted.