"Smell them," he said. "They smell so good!"
That day she knew he was well again.
He began to write, "as though he were hurrying to do as much as he could before he died," said Sonya.
The end of 1902 and the year 1903 were a time of peace and hard labor for him. He did not set foot outside Yasnaya Polyana. He produced an anthology of the major moralists entitled Thoughts of the Wise Men, a few short stories including The False Coupon, two plays (The Light Shines in the Darkness and The Living Corpse) and an essay, Shakespeare, in which he settled the English dramatist's hash once and for all. "After reading, one after the other, the plays considered to be his most beautiful—King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Ilamlet and Macbeth—not only did I derive no pleasure from them, but I felt an overpowering repugnance, a boundless tedium, and I wondered whether it was I who was mad, to find empty and offensive these works that are held by all cultivated people to be the summit of perfection, or whether it was the cultivated people who were mad to attach such importance to Shakespeare's works." I Ie also wrote a few pages of reminiscences, at the request of Biryukov, who was diligently preparing his biography. And he continued to work on his novel Hadji Murad, the first draft of which dated from 1896; some passages were now in their fifth revision.
As always, he had embarked upon an enthusiastic period of pre-
liminary documentation for this book. His own recollections of military life at the Starogladkovskaya stanitsa and Fort Stary Yurt did not provide a broad enough basis for the adventures of the Circassian chieftain. He collected over eighty books on the subject—from Poltoratsky's Memoirs to those of Loris-Melikov, and including Vederevsky's book, Prisoner of Shamil—read them, took notes, squeezed the juice from them. He asked his friends to obtain information from the chief participants in the Caucasian campaign. His concern for authenticity went to the extent of trying to find out the color of the horses Hadji Murad and his escort rode on their last raid. At court, Alexandra moved mountains to satisfy his curiosity about the private life of Nicholas I. "I absolutely must find the key to him," he wrote on January 26, 1903. "That is why I am collecting information, reading everything that relates to his life and personality. Mostly what I need are details of his daily life, what are called the anecdotes of history: his intrigues at a masked ball, his relations with Nclidova, his wife's behavior toward him. ... Do not blame me, dear friend, for busying myself with such trivialities when I have one foot in the grave. These trivialities occupy my leisure time and give my mind a rest from the serious thoughts that fill it."
Hadji Murad is historically irrcproachablc, and yet its form is that of a pure fantasy. It is a strange thing that Tolstoy should have written this tale, devoid of all religious considerations, whose extraordinary beauty alone is enough to content the reader, at a time when his thoughts were increasingly bent on the propagation of his faith and books intended for mere entertainment seemed pointless and even harmful to him. With the seventy-year-old fatuousness that Kuprin had observed on the ship deck, it is almost as though, after paying philosophy its due, he wanted to prove to himself at the end of his career that the artist in him was not dead. Immediately, in recounting the adventures of Hadji Murad, the old man recovered the fresh, lusty love of life he had felt writing The Cossacks forty-five years before. But between his first and second Caucasian novels, the problem had gained in depth and the painting in dimension.
In The Cossacks, Tolstoy was studying the conscience of a young aristocrat attracted to the rough, free life of the mountaineers, wanting to become one of them and realizing that he was incapable of doing so. The main themes of Hadji Murad are the defeat and oppression of a free and proud people by the artificial Russian civilization, and the destruction of a man who tries to escape from his family, traditions and faith in order to satisfy his will to power. The action takes place around
1850. Hadji Murad, the hero, is a combination of bravery, integrity, cruelty, cunning and childlike candor. He is savagely opposed to colonization, but he so hates Shamil, the leader of the Moslem forces, that he decides to offer his services to the Russians in order to defeat him. He thinks that he will be allowed to govern the Caucasian tribes in the name of the "white tsar" in return for his treason. At first, the Russians welcome this unexpected and distinguished ally with open arms, and lavish favors and promises upon him. But when he fled from his own people, Hadji Murad had left his family at Shamfl's mercy. His one desire is to go back with an army and deliver his two wives and his son Yusuf, who are being held as hostages. The suspicious Russians are opposed to an operation in which they see no military or political advantage. As time passes, Hadji Murad feels himself more and more a prisoner. He is covered with honors, but is entangled in administrative machinery that hampers his every movement. Out of his native clement, he grows bored, feels stifled, loses his sense of justification, like the lovely thistle-flower wrenched from its stalk and trampled underfoot, with which Tolstoy opens the book. To return to his family and the unrestricted life that was his natural environment, he eludes his Russian guards and sets out on a wild chase from which he knows he has no hope of emerging alive.
Tolstoy does not even try to excuse this traitor and renegade. But he makes him worthy of our pity, and consequently closcr to us, by a mathematically precise analysis of his destruction by power. The thirst for power is a disease that corrodes the finest metal. Obsessed by his desire to supplant Shamil, Hadji Murad prepares the way for his own downfall. He is the victim of his own lust for power and of the people who possess it: Shamil on one side, and the tsar on the other. Allying himself with the former proves as disastrous for him as being the enemy of the latter. "It is not only Hadji Murad and his tragic end that interest me," Tolstoy said to Shulgin. "I am fascinated by the parallel between the two main figures pitted against each other: Shamil and Nicholas I. They represent the two poles of absolutism—Asiatic and European."
Of course, the despot with the greatest power also has the heaviest load on his conscience. To l>e tsar is to be, a priori, guilt)' before God and man. But, as portrayed by Tolstoy, Nicholas I is certainly more horrible than cither his predecessor, Alexander I, or his successors Alexander II, Alexander III and Nicholas II. His icy face hides such depths of evil and conceit that there seems to be no possibility' of communication between him and ordinary human beings. Intoxicated by the flattery of his court, he sees himself as a knight-errant in the modern world,