Most of “Hadji Murat” takes place outside of Russia, in the North Caucasus and Georgia, places where Russia isn’t unilaterally right. It’s where Tolstoy, having escaped the smoke-filled rooms of St. Petersburg, first became a writer. Looking at “Hadji Murat” from Tbilisi, I found its stereoscopic quality extending to “Anna Karenina,” which also became less fixed, more provisional, in my mind—almost as if Anna’s fate, like the meaning of the novel itself, could, and would, keep changing.
One evening in Tbilisi, at a restaurant around the corner from where Tolstoy had lived, I met the filmmaker Salomé Jashi. I had been captivated by her 2021 film, “Taming the Garden,” about a project orchestrated by Georgia’s former Prime Minister, the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, to uproot hundreds of trees from across the country, for relocation at a privately funded “dendrological park” on the Black Sea.
Jashi doesn’t appear in the film, which has no narration. Instead, the camera silently follows the workers who carry out the extraction with giant machines. Locals, having exchanged their rights to the trees for unheard-of sums, contemplate the ravaged earth, the stumps and severed limbs of other trees that had to be cut down to make way for the trucks. They weep, cross themselves, laugh, shoot cell-phone videos. Some seem to be auditioning different emotions, to see which one fits.
Jashi told me that, as a child, during the 1992-93 war in Abkhazia—a partially recognized Russian-backed state, which Georgia views as a historic part of its territory—she used to write patriotic poems, and dreamed of devoting her life to her country. She speaks Russian, but as a teen-ager she stopped reading Russian books. To this day, she has never read a novel by Dostoyevsky; not, she told me, on principle, but because she didn’t want to read books in Russian, and why read Dostoyevsky in translation?
As I topped off our wine—we were splitting a bottle—I found myself recalling the unforgettable shots in Jashi’s film of massive trees in transit. One bounces sedately down a country road on the back of a flatbed truck; another glides along the Black Sea on a barge. The image of the sailing tree, its leaves ruffled by the breeze, was almost too outlandish to process, more like a metaphor than like anything actually existing in the world. In it, I seemed to see the spectral presence of Ivanishvili, whom many suspect of steering the country behind the scenes. I saw Robinson Crusoe’s island, unmoored and floating toward the horizon. I saw the thistle Tolstoy yanked out of the earth, now bigger than he was. And I saw the great Russian novels themselves, their roots newly visible, their branches stretching to the sky. ♦
The New Yorker · by Elif Batuman · January 23, 2023