Review: Hadji Murat by Leo Tolstoy
Hadji Murat
by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Hugh Aplin
Hesperus, £6.99
Had history not intervened, you would now be reading here an approving review of Seamus Heaney's latest collection of essays, Finders Keepers (Faber, £12.99). But four books with some bearing on the current situation have landed on the doormat, and they seem rather more urgent and germane. It is as much the duty of books pages as it is of any other section in this newspaper to react against the miserably inept, disgraceful and indeed highly counter-productive propaganda being put out by our own side.
For such, unarguably, it is, particularly when set against a work like Tariq Ali's The Clash of Fundamentalisms (Verso, £10), a broad overview of Islamic history and theology, whose new paperback edition begins with an analysis of al-Jazeera's rise to prominence as the only news authority that the Arab world can trust, and, by the by, a swingeing attack on those who used to be on the left but have since aligned themselves vehemently behind the most alarmingly hawkish, or even corrupt placemen of the Bush administration. The chances of this fascinating, highly readable book being read by anyone currently prosecuting the war on the coalition side are virtually nil, but one can hope. For a rigorous and non-partisan analysis of Iraq's recent history, you could hardly do better than pick up Dilip Hiro's Iraq: A Report from the Inside (Granta, £8.99), which traces the path of its relationships with the west and its neighbours. The book ends with a prophecy that has since been proved correct: we should not expect Iraqi soldiers or civilians to welcome invading forces as "liberators", let alone allies.
On a more personal level, Nuha Al-Radi's Baghdad Diaries 1991-2002 (Saqi, £9.95) has been reissued and expanded. Al-Radi, a sculptor and artist, experienced the same bombardment and sanctions as anyone else in Baghdad during the last Gulf war; those who wish to see what that experience is like should look here.
But the best of the lot is the oldest, and the one set geographically farthest away from Iraq. Hadji Murat was Tolstoy's last substantial work: yet he knew, as he completed it, that it would never be published in his lifetime. It is a work based on the facts of the life and death of the eponymous Chechen separatist guerrilla, who terrorised the Russian army in the mid-19th century but surrendered himself to the tsar's forces after falling out with his own commander.
Two things are particularly striking about this story. The first is Tolstoy's admiration for the man. This is actually a matter of historical record: Hadji Murat was not only courageous and resourceful, but honourable and decent, and Tolstoy does not stint in his praise or affection. Against him is set the vanity, pomposity, lechery and ignorance of Tsar Nicholas I. After sleeping with a young girl at a masquerade, the tsar is described by Tolstoy thus: "But despite the fact that he was certain he had behaved as he should, a certain unpleasant aftertaste remained with him and, in order to stifle this feeling, he began thinking about the thing that always reassured him: what a great man he was." Incidentally, Nicholas II, his great-grandson, was very fond of the book, for all the good it did him.
The most striking thing about the story is, as the blurb quite justifiably puts it, its "incredible resonance with current affairs". The Chechens here are Muslims, and their asceticism and piety are strongly contrasted with the moral flabbiness of the Russians; yet, for all that, the way that Tolstoy and even his semi-fictionalised compatriots deal with the Chechens contrasts strongly, and not to our favour, with the way our own modern adversaries are so childishly demonised. Of course, Russian policy was just as brutal then as anyone else's is now; and one might profitably reflect on the effect the troops' raids on civilian villages have in chapter 17. It is a chilling warning that echoes loud and clear down the years. Literature, as Pound said, is news that stays news. I can't at the moment think of a better illustration of this than Hadji Murat .
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