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Fate and Control in Stefan Zweig’s The Fowler Snared (Sommernovellette)

The Fowler Snared is a short story by the German-language writer Stefan Zweig. Though it is short, it nonetheless reflects a lot of the key preoccupations of the German “Novelle” form while putting its own spin on them. There is a tension in this short tale between our desire for power and control, and our ability to achieve that same control. As in a work of tragic drama the characters of The Fowler Snared discover that there are forces – luck, fate, whatever – that act upon them even as they try to give order to their own world.

A photo showing Stefan Zweig, a handsome young man with glasses dressed formally. — Stefan Zweig, Austrian and Jewish German writer. The photo shows him at about the age he was when he wrote *The Fowler Snared*.

Zweig’s story, taking place on the banks of Lake Como in Northern Italy and detailing something akin to a failed romance, is typical of the highly cosmopolitan writer that Zweig was. Indeed, its setting and language reminded me somewhat of the opening of Henry James’s Daisy Miller, another work from a transnational talent. Born in Vienna 1881 to a family of wealthy but nonreligious Jews, Zweig was a pacifist and internationalist. Following Hitler’s rise to power in Germany Zweig fled first to the UK, then the United States, and finally Brazil. There, overwhelmed by Hitler’s early successes in the Second World War, he and his wife jointly committed suicide in 1942.

The Fowler Snared is from 1906 and contains none of that fear or anxiety about the world that Zweig’s later works, such as The Royal Game/Chess Story/Schachnovelle do, even though the story does acknowledge some of the darker sides of human character. But anyway, to the story.

Introduction: Plot and Form in The Fowler Snared

What’s in a story? I’ve spoken about the Novelle form in my piece on Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller”, and also in my thoughts on Theodor Storm’s “Aquis Submersus”. Generally we have a frame narrative, a small cast of characters, leitmotifs or recurring symbols, and a moment of crisis around the middle or else a twist. The Fowler Snared has all of these. The story begins in Cadenabbia, a place of “white villas” and “dark trees” on the banks of Lake Como. A place that is full of potential romance. But already something is slightly off, because it is August, and the narrator finds his hotel almost empty – those people looking for crowds, for adventure, would have been better off coming in the spring.

But still there are guests. The narrator singles one out, an elderly gentleman, and approaches him in search of a story. “Why, I wondered, did he not go away to some seaside resort?” the narrator asks himself. In approaching him the narrator makes us aware of the artificiality of stories, the way that they often need to be constructed out of forced experience that may often prove unrewarding. The man, however, rewards the narrator’s curiosity with a story just as he had hoped.

The Old Man’s Story: Experience and Memory

The old man, who had “never had either a fixed occupation or a fixed place of abode”, is always described in pairs of adjectives to indicate his lack of stable existence. The narrator remarks that with the end of his life his accumulated experiences would be scattered and lost. “I have no interest in memories. Experience is experienced once for all; then it is over and done with” is the man’s reply, but he agrees to tell his story all the same. And here, as we enter the second narrative layer, we first encounter the tension that will be the man’s undoing – the tension between what he says and what, ultimately, he does.

The Old Man’s Story: The Girl

A year ago the old man was staying at the same hotel, and there he came to be aware of certain guests – a family of Germans. He is intrigued by the youngest of them, a plain girl of about sixteen or seventeen. He sits watching her, unable to work out why he finds her interesting. He admits to himself that she is nothing more than a teenager, “gazing dreamily across the lake”. And already there comes a natural impulse for control – he begins to imagine her personality, where he can only see her outward appearance. “She must be dreaming”, he thinks, of romantic tales.

A photo of Lake Como, where A Fowler Snared is set. — A photo of Lake Como, looking lovely. Resorts are always useful in the literature of this period. They let characters relax and forget a little the social rules that would bind them otherwise, thanks to the fact that all acquaintances here are by default fleeting and temporary. Chekhov’s “Lady With a Little Dog” is another classic resort-town romance. Photo by Stan Shebs CC BY-SA

And so he decides to create such a tale for her and be the author of her own story – “I made up my mind to find her a lover”. He writes her a love letter without signing it, leaves it for her to find the next morning. He does not consider the risk – he has a low opinion of women and thinks the girl is much too meek and quiet to tell anybody about the letter. There is certainly a sense that the man is living out a masculine power fantasy by controlling her.

His first letter is a success and he writes another, and another. The “sport” and “game” of his “imaginary passion” brings him an immense pleasure. But it also brings the girl pleasure. She “seemed to dance as she walked”, and her previous plainness disappears now that she pays attention to her appearance. For the moment all is well, “the marionette danced, and I pulled the strings skilfully”. But our control over the world is not so permanent as the old man might have hoped.

The Old Man’s Story: Control’s Failure

There are two mistakes, two things that the old man doesn’t anticipate. In his letters, to avoid the possibility that the girl might realise it is him who is writing them, he now suggests that he comes from another resort each morning to look at her. The girl begins to sit watching the steamer. And one morning, a “handsome young fellow arrives”. Their eyes meet, and although they do not know each other they both succumb to the illusion that they were destined to meet. For the old man, this comes as a shock. “He had almost caught up with her, and I was feeling in my alarm that the edifice I had been building was about to be shattered”. At the final moment, however, the girl’s mother arrives and the two are unable to meet. But this has already revealed the fragility of the man’s overall control.

The next morning the second instance of the man’s inability to control fate is revealed. He comes across the girl in “disorder”. “The charming restlessness had been replaced by an incomprehensible misery”. He only understands when he sees that the family’s table is not laid – they have left the resort. She has been unable to meet her imagined lover. Not only that, but the man’s manipulation, which at first had brought her pleasure, is now the cause of her despair. The moral aspect of the story grows harder to avoid.

Two Moments of Conflict

The old man’s story ends. But as the narrator points out, this is not a good story. The novella form itself demands neatness, a tying up that is absent here. “A story needs an ending”, he says. And so he himself takes a more active role again, asking questions and leading the conversation. He says how he imagines the story ends: the old man was incapable of feigning passion like that forever. In the end, the passion became real. He came back to the same place a year later, hoping to find the girl and declare his love.

And here the man interrupts him with a denial that is as good as a confession. A novella often has a moment of crisis as its high point. This crisis, where the old man’s secret is revealed, is two-parted. There is of course the revelation of his secret, but more importantly there is also his failure. The girl is not here. He returned, “wooing fortune’s favour only to find fortune pitiless”. In a sense, the crisis has already taken place before the story begins. And that makes its impact, the sense of the old man’s powerlessness before fate, all the greater. He tried to control the girl, only to find another force, a more powerful force, controlling him. It is a pleasant irony and gives a nice symmetry to the story.

Stories and the Language of Control

I read The Fowler Snared in an English translation by Eden and Cedar Paul, and the translation seems to be a fine one. It didn’t get in the way of the story, and most importantly it was clear, letting the uncertainties of Zweig’s own dialogues and descriptions come to the forefront. For after all, alongside the controlling impulse of the man himself towards the girl, the act of speaking and telling a story is also one that involves giving order and control to something that is essentially boundless and untransferable – personal experience.

First, we have story itself. It is created when the narrator approaches the old man at the beginning of The Fowler Snared, then is given an ending when the narrator pressures the old man to explain his return to the resort. Even the old man himself is aware of the ways that stories are constructed. “The old fellows… would rather talk of their successes than of their failures”. He makes us aware of the inevitable gap between what we hear and what could be said. He was comfortable ending the story without acknowledging that although he had successfully manipulated the girl, he had failed to meet her this time. In the same way, it’s hard to avoid considering that the girl herself never gets a chance to speak in The Fowler Snared. Language and form control her throughout. Even the letter itself is language, weaponised as a tool for power.

Stories are a way of controlling the past. The old man, so long as he himself is speaking, is calm. But when the narrator guesses his secret, he is forced to shout over him and deny the truth. Once he has taken control again, to finish the story, he once again tries to control what we as readers learn. He quotes Balzac to describe his predicament, distancing himself by means of literature from his reality. But ultimately we are left with the knowledge that language is a double-edged sword. The very language he uses to avoid his fate is the language that got him into it. The passionate letters lead to his own ruin just as much as they lead to the girl’s.

Conclusion

I really liked The Fowler Snared. Though it is short, I felt that the way it combined its form and content was interesting. As with many novellas it presents the conflict between order and disorder, but here it shows how we humans are responsible for creating both sides of that coin, first building up systems of control, and then watching as they collapse. Really though, I liked it because it was clearly written, short enough to get through in an evening, and will be good for answering essays on. What more could I possibly want?

For more writers of this period, there’s Hofmannsthal, Trakl, and Sandor Marai to consider.

Georg Trakl and the Poetry of Spiritual Twilight (Translations)

I came to the Austrian German poet Trakl depressed and didn’t leave any happier. His short oeuvre, written in the final years before the first world war, is not for the faint of heart. There is very little joy to be found here, and what beauty there is in his poems is tainted by an overwhelming sense of decay. But what Trakl does offer, above and beyond his despair and endless talk of decline, is a unique view of the world, and a unique language of symbols for appreciating it. Each of his poems is a mysterious mood-piece, filled with images whose interpretations are never definite. Rilke’s view, that reading Trakl is like being “an outsider pressed against panes of glass”, looking into a space of experience which “like the space in a mirror, cannot be entered”, hits the mark.

Georg Trakl. Intensely sad, his poems reflect a sensibility that felt deeply the spiritual turbulence of his age. A turbulence that continues into our own and leaves his poetry mysterious and fresh even now.

Trakl is a strange poet, but he is also one whose work is tragically beautiful, and I hope to show that in these few translations below. His concerns seem perfect for our own age. The empty spiritual gulf left by religion’s decline, the feeling of foreboding as the world enters a new era without any ballast or sense that we are prepared for its challenges, and even the loss of a deep understanding of and connection to the natural world – all these are just as relevant now as they were as the First World War erupted. To face Trakl’s dark world is to be given a way of visualising the darkness of our own. So let’s begin.

The Poems

Trakl’s poems are made up of short and simple sentences, that are nonetheless often hard to understand. There’s a lot of ambiguity due to the syntax and punctuation, and whenever I’ve met something unclear, I’ve aimed to convey that same uncertainty in the English. After all, I’m trying to translate a mood and an atmosphere, not a technical document. If I have managed that, then I can be happy with how these have turned out. Following the poems is a bit about Trakl’s life and a conclusion.

Song of a Captive Blackbird (DE)
 
Dark breath in green twigs.
Blue blossoms float around the face
Of the lonely one, his golden step
Dying under the olive tree.
The night is filled with the fluttering of drunk wings.
So quietly bleeds out humility,
Dew, which slowly drips from the blossoming thorn.
The mercy of shining arms
Embraces a breaking heart.

A painting showing a night time landscape. Munch's early and middle work reflects a similar sensibility to that of Trakl. — This painting (Starry Night), by Edvard Munch, strikes me as a good representation of my feeling as I read the final two stanzas of “Spiritual Twilight.” Munch was working at about the same time as Trakl and I feel like both of them are often similar in tone and image.

 Spiritual Twilight (DE)

 Silence encounters at the forest’s hem
 Its dark quarry.
 On the hill the evening wind ends quietly,
  
 The blackbird’s cries are stilled,
 And the soft flutes of autumn
 Go silent in their pipes.
  
 On a black cloud
 You sail, drunk on the poppy,
 The ponds of the night,
  
 The stars in the heavens.
 The sister’s lunar voice is always calling
 Through the spirit’s night.

The Sun (DE)

Daily comes the yellow sun across the hill.
The forest, the dark beast, man – hunter or shepherd – 
All are beautiful.
  
Reddish rises the fish in the green pond.
Under the round heavens
The fisherman quietly rows in his blue boat.
  
Slowly ripens the grape, the grain.
When the day silently ends,
A good and an evil is prepared.
  
When the world becomes night,
The wanderer quietly lifts his heavy eyes;
The sun breaks out of a gloomy chasm.

The Sun, also by Munch, shows a sun. — The Sun, also by Munch. I wonder if, had Trakl lived to grow older, he too would have found way of looking at and representing the world that moved beyond fear and anxiety.

In Spring (DE)
Softly sank from dark steps the snow;
In the shadow of the tree
The lovers raise their rosy lids.
  
Star and night always follow
The dark calls of the mariners;
And the oars beat softly in time.
  
Soon on the ruined wall blooms
The violet;
The temples of the lonely one silently grow green.

Autumn Homecoming (DE)

Remembrance, a buried hope,
Preserves this brown wood frame,
Where dahlias hang above -
An ever stiller homecoming;
The ruined garden, the dark reflection
Of childhood years,
So that from blue lids the tears plunge
Unstoppably.
Now swim the glassy minutes
Of gloom
Over and into the night.

Who was Trakl? Biography and its Absence

Georg Trakl was born in 1887 and died towards the end of 1914, likely by his own hand. He was born in Salzburg to a family of not great financial means, but all the same this is where he was most happy. His relations with his sister Grete, herself a musical prodigy, may well have been incestuous. In his poems Trakl often writes about the “sister”, but it’s difficult to know what to make of that. What is more clear is that Trakl developed a drug addiction that he supported through becoming a pharmacist. Once war broke out Trakl joined the Austro-Hungarian army as a medical officer on the Eastern Front. By this point his mood was extremely unstable and the experience of the battle of Grodek, though it led to perhaps is most famous poem, also led to Trakl’s final breakdown and probable suicide of a cocaine overdose.

Yet all of this is almost irrelevant in the poems. As is clear above, Trakl hides himself from view. The experience of reading his work is rather like floating through a deep fog. There is nothing so solid as an “I”, even a lyrical “I”, to hold on to. The places of his life certainly make their appearances, including Grodek itself, but always more as symbols and maps of an internal world than as real settings, at least it seems that way to me.

The lovely German edition of Trakl’s work from Reclam which I’ve been reading also includes many of his letters. But these, too, are not of much use for understanding his poems. We can hear Trakl’s own voice, always in pain, and always suffering. It only caused me to feel a terrible and futile desire to help the poor man, but the poems remained – perhaps thankfully – impenetrable. “I was terribly sick for a few days, I think from a mourning that cannot be put into words”. Shortly before he dies he writes “I feel like I’ve already almost passed over into the beyond”. What I like about him so much is that his sensibility really does seem to belong to another world, no matter how much suffering seems to be involved.

Conclusion – Religion and the Poppy

Probably my favourite pieces here are the first two. The image of the blackbird, of the innocent forced to suffer its way through the world, lies at the heart of Trakl’s whole project, and the bird’s short and brutal poem strikes me as being particularly beautiful. But it also contains within it a rare hint at redemption. Trakl’s religious inclinations are, as with so much else about him, not entirely clear. But for me at least, this poem has a spiritual angle to it: the suggestion that for all our suffering there may lurk at the end of the tunnel a kind of salvation. It’s not unlike Dostoevsky, in its way.

As for “Spiritual Twilight”, I love its tone and sense of mystery. For me it really conveys that world of abstract rumination we fall into somewhere in the depths of our despair. It is a weightless poem, just as we, in our thoughts, are weightless too. But one day we must open our eyes. And that is where the challenge lies.

The last word on all this should go to Trakl himself. This is how he describes himself, towards the end of his life: “Too little love, too little justice and mercy, and always too little love; too much hardness, pride, and all sorts of transgressions – this is me. I am certain that I only refrain from evil out of cowardice and weakness and in doing so shame even that part of me.”

I hope, having read a few of his poems, you have a sense that for all the mercy and love he did not receive himself, he was more than willing to give plenty of it out to those who needed it in his work. The strange thing is, for all his despair, I find myself feeling less alone for reading in his company. And that’s why I think he’s a fantastic poet.

What did you think?

Death and Dignity: Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat

Introduction and Background

Hadji Murat was one of the last works of literature that the aging Leo Tolstoy wrote, but you wouldn’t get that impression reading it. Absent is that preaching tone that marks much of Tolstoy’s work from around the time he finished Anna Karenina until his death. Instead we have a tale that is almost Classical in its grandeur, stakes, and larger-than-life characters. It takes place in the Caucasus in the years 1851-1852, at a point where the Russian subjugation of the native peoples – Chechens, Avars, and many others – was in full swing. The natives, under the Imam Shamil, are waging a brutal guerrilla war against Tsar Nicholas I’s Russian forces. Chief among the guerrilla leaders was one Hadji Murat, but when the story begins, he has decided to switch sides and join his hated Russian enemies. Shamil no longer trusts him and has imprisoned his family. He had little choice.

A painting of Hadji Murat, showing him against a mountain backdrop and with many daggers at his waist. — Hadji Murat, an Avar warlord, was given the nickname the “Red Devil” by the Russians he fought against. But Tolstoy’s novel aims to reveal that in spite of that, he was not so different from his enemies after all.

Against the backdrop of war, it is the personal that stands out. Hadji Murat, like War and Peace before it, shows the messy truth that lies behind maps and military manoeuvres. It shows the suffering, the heroism, and the dignity of ordinary people. Harold Bloom once called it “the best story in the world”. I’m not sure I would go that far, but it’s certainly among the best I’ve ever read.

Translations from the Russian are my own.

Characters over Plot – the Structure of Hadji Murat

One of the first things you notice reading Hadji Murat is that for a story with its hero in its title, the man himself isn’t the only prominent person here. Instead, Tolstoy makes sure to give us so many names and faces, and indeed places, that we’d be forgiven for thinking we’re reading something as long as War and Peace or Anna Karenina. Hadji Murat is a short book, but one of its unique strengths is that it acts like a long one. Even though most of the characters are only involved for a few pages, they are treated as though they could be there for longer. Whether this is a local officer, a cook, or somebody’s wife, we never know what role they’ll have to play.

And this makes us pay attention. Tolstoy’s strategy, it seems to me, has two important effects. The uncertainty surrounding the later involvement of characters means we have to consider carefully all of them in turn, instead of skipping hastily over those who other writers might mark (unintentionally) as having no further role to play. It all reflects an attitude that sees human dignity as more important than anything else, even concision and consistency. And that’s nothing to complain about, both because Tolstoy’s characters are drawn so well, and because the message of respect and human dignity is so important, especially in our times, when the statistical value of people seems more important than the idea that behind every number is a living, breathing person with their own hopes and dreams.

Violence and Death

The second important effect, very much related to the first, is that Tolstoy’s care for characters makes the underlying anti-war message in Hadji-Murat all the more powerful. In stories the main characters sometimes die, usually at the end, and any decent author can make such a death have weight for their readers. But Tolstoy’s careful portrayal of his minor characters means that even their deaths leave a mark.

One death that particularly affected me was the death of a simple soldier, Avdeev. He is introduced as one soldier among a small group, heading out for a quick smoke beyond the walls of their outpost. He doesn’t take a major part in their conversation, and we would likely forget him without a second thought. Tolstoy does not let us. When the soldiers fight a battle with the natives later on, one of them is wounded. “It was none other than that Avdeev who had been out smoking earlier”.

The wounded man is suddenly given a history not because Tolstoy has delved into his dying thoughts, but because he has connected a dying man with the life he had innocently led earlier, a life we ourselves had scarcely noticed. Avdeev’s life is banal, but it is life all the same, and that life has been robbed from him, and Tolstoy, rightly, wants us to be outraged. In dying he has achieved nothing. No grandeur nor glory surrounds him. He hadn’t even managed to load his rifle before he was hit. And as his comrades gather round him, the overwhelming impression is one of the pointlessness of his end, of the stupidity of it. “What, mate, does it feel bad?” One of them asks him. And then Avdeev dies.

But still Tolstoy does not leave him alone. The eighth chapter of Hadji Murat takes us to his home, where his family are hard at work. Avdeev, the virtuous youth, had volunteered to be conscripted in place of his brother, who had children of his own to look after, while Avdeev had only his wife. The family go around doing their simple tasks like threshing oats and bantering, and it’s painful to watch. They do not know that Avdeev is dead. The brother he has left behind is no good at the work and the family scold him for it. And though they all try to forget about Avdeev, to save themselves the worry, they think of him all the time – he was a good worker and they want to send him a letter and money.

The whole chapter is pointless. A modern editor, probably, would cut it. It does not advance the plot an inch. But its pointlessness is its very strength. The stupidity of the chapter within Hadji Murat reflects the stupidity of war and death itself, suddenly removing human joy and life. When at the end of the chapter the family finally hears that Avdeev has died, “protecting the Tsar, the motherland, and the Orthodox faith”, we feel disgusted. It’s a lie that provides no consolation for these lives. And it’s easy to understand, at this point, why his mother wails.

A photo of the mountains and forests of the Caucasus — The landscapes of the Caucasus are breathtaking, but for the Russians they also held a dangerous enemy. Photo from Peretz Partensky of San Francisco CC BY-SA

Authority

The message to Avdeev’s family connects the theme of pointless war-time death with its – in Tolstoy’s view – main cause: misguided authority. People are moved around, killed, and suffer, all because of people who are not affected by their decisions. And so they fail to appreciate them. If they did, Tolstoy would no doubt say, then there would be no more war. Hadji Murat, having lost Shamil’s trust and joined the Russians, finds himself trapped between two tyrants. Both Shamil and Nicholas I receive a chapter’s inspection by Tolstoy’s pen, and neither comes out particularly well. Shamil knows he is fighting a losing battle but refuses to surrender or find a compromise that would result in reduced bloodshed. Instead, he allows his men to believe they are winning against the Russians after all. But Shamil’s treatment is nothing next to Nicholas’s.

Hadji Murat is not a funny book, but the chapter detailing a moment in the life of Nicholas I’s is simultaneously tragic and hilarious. We find him receiving a report on the “capture” of Hadji Murat by the Russians. Tolstoy emphasises the contingency of Hadji Murat’s fate here. If Nicholas hadn’t been in a “bad mood” when he received the report, perhaps history might have been completely different. Nicholas, however, was. He is a petty womaniser, chasing after a married woman at a party, refusing to acknowledge any moral authority except his own, looking at the world through “lifeless eyes” (Tolstoy repeats the description three or four times in just as many pages). He is cruel and stupid. When worried, he begins “to think about what always calmed him: how great he was.” If he had no power, he would be funny, but he does, and the implications are terrifying.

Culture and Blood

Avdeev’s death is not the only one that is sprung on us. The first chapter of Hadji Murat details its eponymous hero’s arrival into a mountain village, where he is offered shelter by a friend. Once again, we are introduced to characters who we would otherwise forget. But Tolstoy, as the book draws towards its closing chapters, returns our attention to them. The Russians, chasing Shamil’s army, torch the village to the ground, kill the animals, and destroy the land. We see them come back from their shelter in the mountains to find their world in ruins.

“Nobody spoke about hatred towards the Russians. What they all felt, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hatred. It was not hatred, but an unwillingness even to acknowledge these Russian dogs as people.”

Tolstoy fought in Chechnya as a young man. We have several short stories and the novel The Cossacks to show for it. But in Hadji Murat his attention goes beyond the Russians to their enemies. I cannot say if Tolstoy accurately portrays the Chechens, but I can say without a doubt that he portrays them with respect. By contrast, he has little love for the Russian army, with the pettiness of its commanders and brutality among much of its rank and file. Their tactics, of destroying the native forests and burning all they can, puts Hadji Murat next to Heart of Darkness as being a powerful Western critique of our own imperialism. Unfortunately, even now, I find most Russians expressing opinions about their southernly neighbours (now successfully “pacified” and “integrated”) that show they still haven’t learned the lessons Tolstoy was trying to teach them a hundred years ago.

We may have our differences, but we aren’t so different.

An Epic Figure – who was Hadji Murat?

No review of Hadji Murat could be complete without the man himself. But like Nostromo in Conrad’s novel of the same name, the figure of Hadji Murat is hard to pin down. While in Conrad’s work we rarely get a glimpse within Nostromo’s mind, Tolstoy freely tells us what Hadji Murat is thinking. But all the same, there is a tension in the story between rumour and official reports, and what Hadji Murat is actually like as a person. Legendary warlord Hadji Murat, we discover early on, is a human being. His main motivation in life is not some epic hatred of the Russians but simply protecting his own family – a universal concern.

The Russians he meets cannot believe that. They are always trying to work out how he’s planning to betray them. The Russians have a kind of mythic view of Hadji Murat that scarcely corresponds to reality. He’s never been scared, so one rumour goes. But when, in Tbilisi (then Tiflis), he recounts his life’s story to a Russian scribe, we find he has been scared like any other person, if only once. He has one leg short than the other – he’s no monstrous figure. But the Russians almost don’t want to see him like that. When they meet him they aren’t concerned with his personality. At public events in Tbilisi they only ask him one and the same question – “how do you find it here?”. It’s as if they only want to go home and say they’ve met the legendary warlord, rather than actually get to know him.

A painting illustrating Hadji Murat's time in the high society world of Tbilisi. He stands off to one side while various women fawn over him. — An illustration from an early edition of *Hadji Murat*. The man himself is on the right. Speaking little Russian and unwilling to conform to the arbitrary rules and customs of Russian high society, his first appearance draws plenty of attention.

And what is he really like? A heroic figure, yes, but not only. He scarcely fights during the book. Instead, he’s full of life, with a “child-like” smile – exactly the sort of person who shouldn’t need to die. When he is given a Breguet pocket watch with a minute repeater function he spends hours listening to its chimes. He is also devout, constantly making time to pray and perform his ablutions. In short, he is a good man. If he is once described as like a caged beast, it is not because he’s an animal in Tolstoy’s eyes but rather because he is a victim of the Russian bureaucratic machine, which gradually dehumanises everyone. For Tolstoy the answer to the question “who is to blame” is obvious: the leaders, surrounded by sycophants and insulated from the pain their actions cause. Alas, not much has changed.

Conclusion

I had read Hadji Murat once before now, but then I barely understood a thing. My Russian wasn’t good enough, and I wasn’t willing to read slowly enough to compensate for it. This time I was better prepared. Tolstoy’s story demands slow and careful reading, though it is short, because otherwise we run the risk of denying the characters their own dignity. And there are so many exciting people here that I was spoiled for choice when it came to writing this review. Alongside Avdeev and Nicholas I, another one I was particularly struck by was the character of Butler, a young man who loses everything (and then some) at cards after striking up a friendship with Hadji Murat. Even though his role in the overall book is not great, his short story is so perfectly written that I would gladly have read an entire book that carried on his tale.

That, perhaps, is Tolstoy’s ultimate gift. He not only creates characters who are so real that the best of them live inside us, but he also creates characters who are so interesting that they make us realise that everyone around us has their own personal dignity, and everyone deserves attention and respect. Whether man or woman, Chechen or Russian, everyone has their own story, and the world would be better if only we stopped to listen.

For more Tolstoy, I made a translation of a late and fragmentary short story of his here. If you want to know about the spiritual changes that came over Tolstoy after Anna Karenina was finished, and why they spoil his writing, check out this essay of mine.