References to Khadzhi-Murat and other short fiction are from Leo Tolstoy, Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (New York, 1967), hereafter GSW. References to drafts and texts not included in GSW are my translation from the jubilee edition of Tolstoi's works, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 90 vols. (Moscow, 1928-58), hereafter PSS. The PSS text differs slightly from the original Berlin edition (ed. Vladimir Chertkov) that Maude seems to have used, mainly in where the hero recalls his childhood, but since the variance does not alter the theme of silence, I have stuck with Maude throughout. (On the difference, see PSS, 35:630). My thanks to Harsha Ram and Melissa Frazier. Epigraph from Maksim Gor'kii, Sobranie sochinenii v vos'mi tomakh (Moscow, 1988), 3:230.

1. Kreutzer Sonata's “essay” on sexual mores violates the tendency to brevity somewhat.

2. See my “Stricken by Infection: Art and Adultery in Anna Karenina and Kreutzer Sonata,” Slavic Review 56 (Spring 1997): 15-36.

3. On the text's quality as a summa, see Palievskii, P. V., Literatura i teoriia, 2d ed. (Moscow, 1978), 7.Google Scholar

4. Dostoevskii seems concerned to resist this tendency at least somewhat and tries to make Alesha into a speaker, especially in the novel's concluding scene. But it is clear that this represents a challenge, rather than a natural outgrowth of a monk and a believer's tendencies.

5. The demand for the artist's originality is voiced repeatedly in What Is Art? The main discussion is at PSS, 30:149-50. The need for “the complete freedom of the artist from every kind of preconceived demand” (30:131) is discussed at 30:113, 116, 131.

6. Foravariety of possible readings of silence in literature and thought, see Hassan, Ihab, The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; Steiner, George, “Silence and the Poet,” in Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New York, 1967), 36–54 Google Scholar; Stout, Janis P., Strategies of Reticence: Silence and Meaning in the Works of Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Joan Didion (Charlottesville, 1990)Google Scholar; Toker, Leona, Eloquent Reticence: Withholding Information in Fictional Narrative (Lexington, 1993)Google Scholar; and MacKendrick, Karmen, Immemorial Silence (Albany, 2001).Google Scholar Certain types of silence in Tolstoi (but not Khadzhi-Murat) are considered by Paul Debreczeny, “The Device of Conspicuous Silence in Tolstoj, Čexov, and Faulkner,” in American Contributions to the Eighth International Congress ofSlavists, Zagreb and Ljubljana, September 3-9, 1978, volume 2, Literature, ed. Victor Terras (Columbus, 1978), 125-45, and Isenberg, Charles, Telling Silence: Russian Frame Narratives of Renunciation (Evanston, 1993)Google Scholar; the latter touches on frame narratives (Khadzhi-Murat is framed) as well.

7. For an alternate reading of causality in War and Peace, see Morson's, Gary Saul Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in “War and Peace” (Stanford, 1987).Google Scholar Morson at times approaches issues of language use related to those that interest me, though in substantially different ways. Morson's Tolstoi often sounds like a romantic poet writing history, a fascinating resonance given War and Peace's antiromantic basis.

8. Tolstoi's admiration of Gogol', specifically on Christian moral grounds, is in evidence at PSS, 54:125,64:107.

9. Michael A. Sells observes of the most intense examples of apophatic theology, with which Khadzhi-Murat shares key traits despite its very different goals, that when language itself stands at the heart of the problem, saying alone cannot say what needs to be said: “The refusal by apophatic writers to define the subject of discourse is neither a mystification nor the result of inability to use language clearly,” but rather derives from the crucial need to “perform … rather than assert” what they have grasped. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago, 1994), 8.

10. Cited in Evnin, F. I., “Poslednii shedevr Tolstogo,” in Tolstoi-khudozhnik: sbornik statei, ed. Blagoi, D. D. etal. (Moscow, 1961), 344-96, here 396.Google Scholar

11. Bloom, Harold, “Tolstoy and Heroism,” in The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages (New York, 1994), 336 Google Scholar; Bayley, John, Tolstoy and the Novel (New York, 1966), 192.Google Scholar The most helpful commentaries I have found to be A. P. Sergeenko, “Khadzhi-Murat“L'va Tolstogo: Istoriia sozdaniia povesti (Moscow, 1983), a later version of his commentary in PSS; V. A. Tunimanov, “'Istoriia-iskusstvo’ v povesti L. N. Tolstogo Khadzhi-Murat,” Russkaia literatura, 1984, no. 1:14-34; and two short pieces, the one by Bloom, and Donald Fanger, “Nazarov's Mother: Notes Towards an Interpretation of'Hadji Murat,'” in Joachim T. Baer, Norman W. Ingham, and Stanley J. Rabinowitz, eds., Mnemozina, studia litteraria russica in honorem Vsevolod Setchkarev (Munich, 1974), 95-104. Khadzhi-Murat is too problematic to have engendered a standard reading in criticism, but several views are widely shared: that its main message is the glorification of struggle (e.g. Sergeenko, Tunimanov, V. I. Shklovskii, Lev Tolstoi [Moscow, 1988]); that a key question is the hero's being caught “between two despots” (e.g. Evnin; Opul'skaia, L., “L. Tolstoi,” in Istoriia russkoi literatury, 10 vols. [Moscow: 1941-56], 9.2:600-5Google Scholar; Zhdanov, V. A., Poslednie knigi L. N. Tolstogo [Moscow, 1971])Google Scholar; and that the work lacks Tolstoi's usual interpretive excesses and is therefore something like art for art's sake (e.g. Bayley, Tunimanov, A. D. P. Briggs, “Hadji Murat: The Power of Understatement,” in Malcolm Jones, ed., New Essays on Tolstoy [Cambridge, Eng., 1978], 109-27). I will dispute all of these views, particularly the last, which at its worst unintentionally imputes a lack of artistry to the same earlier fiction that it obviously prefers and undervalues Khadzhi-Murat even while praising it.

Outside this small response, criticism has had a tendency to shy away from interpreting the work, for example Richard Gustafson in Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger (Princeton, 1986), who never discusses Khadzhi-Murat even in passing. A different though related tack is to treat Khadzhi-Murat by assimilating an interpretation to ideas provable from elsewhere in Tolstoi's oeuvre, as does Donna Orwin's “Nature and the Narrator in Chadži-Murat,” Russian Literature 28 (1990): 125-44, which uses other texts as guides to a small excerpt from the story, rather than reading the passage in its given context. Both approaches feed a critical silence that adds to the text's own.

12. The fullest inventory of Tolstoi's comments (mainly demeaning fiction-writing, but at moments confessing it to be irresistible) is, as with most things, given in Sergeenko, but Evnin has a convenient summary on 344. A typical example: “childishness and foolishness” (PSS, 73:262).

13. The degree of Tolstoi's admiration for his hero is suggested by a 1901 diary entry: “I dreamt of a type of old man that Chekhov has thought of before me. The old man was especially good in that he was almost a saint yet at the same time drank and swore. For the first time I realized the power a type acquires from shadows boldly overlaid. I'll do this with Khadzhi-Murat and Mar'ia Dmitrievna” (PSS, 54:97).

14. The work is “distanced from the drive for ethical self-perfection.” Palievskii, Literatura i teoriia, 10.

15. Controversy had raged over the motives for the real Khadzhi-Murat's defection— was his falling out with Shamil’ genuine or a sham? had he come over to spy on Russian fortifications?—but unlike all the others, this ambiguity Tolstoi will not tolerate, resolving it in the most flattering possible way for his hero. On the controversy, see Tunimanov, “Istoriia- iskusstvo,” 25.

16. GSW, 571.

17. Ibid., 581.

18. Ibid., 582 (ellipsis in original).

19. Ibid., 554.

20. Ibid., 614; 642. Khadzhi-Murat speaks expansively only in his autobiography (though, as if to palliate its length, Tolstoi emphasizes how much the hero leaves out), and in conversation—noted in passing but never actually shown—with Butler, with whom “he talked much and willingly” (634), though not as much as one thinks at first, since we later learn that “sometimes they conversed by the help of the interpreter, and sometimes they got on as best they could with signs and especially with smiles” (640).

21. Ibid., 644.

22. PSS, 19:41 (Anna Karenina).

23. GSW, 591. The quotation in its full, suggestive superfluity reads: “When the first round had been dealt Vorontsov did what he was in the habit of doing when he was in a particularly pleasant mood: with his white, wrinkled old hand he took a pinch of French snuff, carried it to his nose, and released it.“

24. This silence is more powerful than the egalitarian “naturalistic refusal to select the important” to which Debreczeny likens the silence in Tolstoi's “Polikushka.” Debreczeny, “Device of Conspicuous Silence,” 135.

25. On the obvious iliusoriness of the underlying plot, see Fanger's facetious summary of it. Fanger, “Nazarov's Mother,” 98.

26. Evnin, “Poslednii shedevr Tolstogo,” 354. For the same reason I do not agree with James Woodward's echoing claim that the “theme of the doomed but unyielding” Khadzhi Murat is “tragic, but limited” and comes into true significance only via an elaboration of “the social pyramid” and a broader context. Woodward, , “Tolstoy's ‘Hadji Murat': The Evolution of Its Theme and Structure,” Modern Language Review 68 (1973): 872, 873.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27. Akhmet-Khan is the son of the Akhmet-Khan mentioned earlier, about whom we at least know a little.

28. This is the reading of the ur-plot of the novel in Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass., 1971).

29. The smudged mirror image is common in Sufism. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying, 63.

30. GSW, 596.

31. Ibid., 597.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid., 573. From the drafts: “Out of this life story Loris-Melikov recorded only what had to do with war” (PSS, 35:379).

34. PSS, 35:526.

35. Ibid., 32:3-4.

36. GSW, 302.

37. PSS, 53:188.

38. This is not the “epic scope” Soviet critics harp on (e.g. Evnin, “Poslednii shedevr Tolstogo,” 365); it figures a fracture in the tellability of the world.

39. GSW, 628.

40. Ibid., 629.

41. Ibid., 628-9.

42. Ibid., 629.

43. Fanger, “Nazarov's Mother,” 98.

44. CSW, 646.

45. In fairness to Ortega y Gasset and Fanger, the proposal was to make each thing the center of the universe and at the same time capture (Ortega's words) the “reflections of and connections with the things that surround it.” Fanger, “Nazarov's Mother,” 98. Fanger cites Ortega because he feels Khadzhi-Murat meets this additional proviso as well; I find Ortega appropriate because, perhaps unintentionally, his words underscore the near impossibility I think Tolstoi sees of satisfying both conditions simultaneously.

46. GSW, 604. This approach to pedagogy is implicit in the development of the story over time. The author's greatest struggle in die drafts is to explain how Khadzhi-Murat acquired his wisdom. Tolstoi has his hero learn from his grandfather, he has a dying man convert him to Muridism, he has him deeply ponder theology, then he makes Russian military atrocities the formative influence, then it is a sheikh (a spiritual master, not unlike a Russian starets or elder), then he makes Khadzhi-Murat recoil at his own liking for luxury as a favorite of the khans. In the end, he deletes all but a few minor phrases from these alternate paths to understanding—a mundane writer's choice, except that the silence eats away at what in previous fictions has always been the crucial question.

47. Most sensitive to the nullification of Tolstoi's normal value system is Edmund Heier: “None of the Tolstoyan precepts is extolled in Hadji Mural. There is no … illustration of Tolstoy's teaching…. Hadji Murat is void of… exemplary characters embodying his ethical views.” The only strongly dissenting view is advanced by Susan Layton, who sees a consistent condemnation of upper-class Russian mores. Heier, “Hadji Murat in the Light of Tolstoy's Moral and Aesthetic Theories,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 21 (1979): 326; Layton, , Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge, Eng., 1994), e.g. 273-74.Google Scholar

48. “Today I corrected Nikolai Pavlovich in Khadzhi-Murat and abandoned it. If there's time [before dying], I'll write separately about Nikolai” (PSS, 55:16). It is revealing of the state of criticism that the universally panned chapter on Nicholas is by far the most discussed.

49. GSW, 561.

50. Turner, C. J. G., A Karenina Companion (Waterloo, 1993), 51.Google Scholar

51. Briggs, “Hadji Murat: The Power of Understatement,” 117.

52. GSW, 654.

53. PSS, 1:95.

54. GSW, 569.

55. PSS, 1:95.

56. To the assumption that a good Muslim ought to believe in an afterlife, it must be objected that the same reasoning did not apply to the Christian Tolstoi, hence we cannot presuppose it does to his hero. Khadzhi-Murat owes much of its power to its framing of the dilemmas of late modern spirituality, where God is dead in the Nietzschean sense of having lost his self-evidency (however little this harmonizes with Tolstoi's more optimistic official theology) and those articles of faith which survive require renewed proofs. Khadzhi-Murat's views on an afterlife, like all his religious views, are not made explicit, but one cannot help be struck by the number of moments which resolved this indeterminacy in the drafts—all deleted by Tolstoi in the end. Religious faith is not openly discussed in Khadzhi-Murat (except in Vorontsov's letter to Chernyshev, a historical original incorporated by Tolstoi in toto, which treats religion as a strategic and military question). Tolstoi has obviously safeguarded his hero's secrecy on such matters intentionally, by having him pray constantly, but always out of sight; by keeping him out of conversation on the topic; and by otherwise sketching for us a man of stalwart individualism in everything he thinks and does.

57. Christian, R. F., Tolstoy: A Critical Introduction (London, 1969), 245.Google Scholar

58. GSW, 666.

59. Ibid.

60. Myshkovskaia, L., Rabota Tolstogo nad proizvedeniem: Sozdanie “Khadzhi-Murata” (Moscow, 1931), 42.Google Scholar

61. PSS, 35:496.

62. GSW, 667.

63. Ibid.

64. PSS, 35:307.

65. Ibid., 35:499.

66. Ibid., 35:500 and 501.

67. Maude wrongly has him performing ablutions only; Tolstoi has sovershil namaz, “did his namaz,” the standard Arabic word for prayer used throughout the Muslim world (PSS, 35:114).

68. Though he perceives the hero's laconicism, Tunimanov misses the boat, ascribing it to “a personality alien to reflection and resignation,” which acts but does not contemplate. Briggs repeats the analysis, seeing in the hero “a splendid wild animal” who, as such, is naturally depicted “in action and negotiation, not in reflection.” Yet John F. Baddeley, the historian of the Caucasus, makes explicit the passionate interiority Tolstoi clearly has in mind, noting that his family's “possible fate troubled him to such an extent that he spent whole nights in prayer and became quite ill.” Tunimanov, “Istoriia-iskusstvo,” 28; Briggs, “Hadji Murat: The Power of Understatement,” 112; Baddeley, , The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus (London, 1908), 441.Google Scholar

69. GSW, 668.

70. Ibid.

71. The silence farouche of social indignation is Debreczeny's topic.

72. On awareness as opposed to inattention, sleep, and stupefaction, I have benefitted from Stephen Boykewich's unpublished manuscript, “This World Is Not a Joke: Propaganda for Consciousness in Tolstoy's Hadji Murad.“

73. On Wittgenstein's admiration of the story, see Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Cambridge Letters: Correspondence with Russell, Keynes, Moore, Ramsey, and Sraffa, ed. McGuinness, Brian and von Wright, G. H. (Oxford, 1995), 20 Google Scholar; Malcolm, Norman, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1984), 95, 97.Google Scholar