Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Hadji Murad (original 1912; edition 2006)by Leo Tolstoy
Work InformationHadji Murat by Leo Tolstoy (1912)
Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.
�� You read, and you read, and you read. You read lots of different books, most of them good, some of them great. Then you decide to read some Tolstoy again, because it's been such a long time. So you dive in, and after a few lines you wonder why on earth anyone would read anything except Tolstoy... Every page steals your heart, every page breaks your heart (and how does Tolstoy create living, breathing people in just two sentences, how!?), and the sheer quality of the writing is such that you are gasping for air.
As with War & Peace or Anna Karenina, Tolstoy built Hadji Murad out of multiple plots, which he cycles between to cunning, highly contrastive effect. But because Hadji Murad is only 100 pages long, its structure is more obvious, even flashy. Ludwig Wittgenstein, of all people, admired it. It has the cold, distilled clarity of late work.,, Fit into its 100 pages is every viewpoint: Tolstoy fully characterizes and motivates everyone from Tsar Nicholas I (a useless letch) to individual soldiers—like Butler, a good man heartbreakingly addicted to gambling, or Avdeev, whose death opens up a startling sidelight on his peasant parents—to several of Murad’s disciples (notably shy Eldár, with his ram’s eyes) to Shamil himself... Tolstoy is a master of anticlimax. Apocalypse is not, as some terrorists have it, now. If his final novel presents a more balanced view of imperialist politics than even Heart of Darkness (with which it was contemporary), it is because Tolstoy knows there are no climaxes: conflicts like this one will drag on forever. Belongs to Publisher SeriesIs contained in
The story follows a separatist guerrilla Murat who falls out with his own commander and eventually sides with the Imperial Russian forces in hope of saving his family. Tolstoy collected material for this novel from events he witnessed while serving in the Caucasus, according to letters he wrote to his brother Sergei. No library descriptions found.
|
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)891.733Literature Literature of other languages Literature of east Indo-European and Celtic languages Russian and East Slavic languages Russian fiction 1800–1917LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |