The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Leo Tolstoy · a short novel · a first-person frame and twenty-five chapters · written 1896 to 1904, left unpublished at Tolstoy’s death, first printed in 1912 · scored on Tolstoy’s Russian, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Russian quoted only in its first sentence, with a plain English rendering beneath, and no published translation quoted
Mode
Historical short novel in a frame; heroic tale, imperial satire and elegy in one work
Mythos
The warrior hemmed in and fighting to the end; the hero between two kings, his family held hostage; the head carried as a trophy; the weed that will not yield to the plough
Phase
From a walk home in midsummer back to the winter of 1851, when Hadji Murat goes over to the Russians, to his death in the spring of 1852; then the field again
Presentation
Fiction; a first-person frame and twenty-five numbered chapters, each set at one seat of power or one place of the war, the frame closed in the last sentence
Register
From the soldiers’ talk at the picket and the officers’ banter to the viceroy’s society, Nicholas’s inner voice of vanity, an Avar life in recital and the official dispatch
Scale
One man and his few followers; the empire from tsar to private, the imamate under Shamil, a mountain aul and a Russian village
Governing Proposition
A man walking home through midsummer fields finds a thistle crushed by the plough and still standing, and it brings back a death in the Caucasus: Hadji Murat, an Avar and one of Shamil’s naibs, who went over to the Russians late in 1851 and was killed the next spring, after escaping, trying to reach the family Shamil held. The wager of the book is that the empire and the imamate are one machine of power seen from two sides, that a man of whole vitality is used by both and destroyed between them, and that a short book which sets one chapter at each seat of power, from the tsar’s study to a peasant’s hut, can show the whole of it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Я возвращался домой полями”
(I was returning home by the fields). The book opens in the first person, on a walk home in midsummer. At the edge of a ploughed field the narrator finds a thistle that the plough has crushed and broken, and it is still standing. He admires it because it will not yield, and it reminds him of a death in the Caucasus, long ago. The twenty-five numbered chapters that follow are that memory, and the last sentence of the book returns to the field: this was the death the thistle had brought to mind. The history is told as something a weed recalled, and the frame is not decoration. It says, before a word of the history, that this death belongs to the order the plough destroys.
Tolstoy wrote the book between 1896 and 1904, through many redactions, in the years of What Is Art? (1897), the treatise in which he renounced the kind of art this book is. He did not publish it. It lay among his papers at his death in 1910 and was printed in 1912 among his posthumous works; in Russia the censor cut the chapter on Nicholas I and other passages, and the complete text followed. It is scored as he left it at his last redaction, complete, the Nicholas chapter included, as the standard Russian collected editions print it. The many drafts are its history, not the work. It is a finished book its author never released, not an assembly by other hands.
Its ground is history. Hadji Murat, an Avar and one of Shamil’s naibs, went over to the Russians late in 1851 and was killed in the spring of 1852, after escaping, trying to reach his family, whom Shamil held. The book does not tell this as a life in sequence. It sets its chapters at the places where he is seen and weighed: a house in a mountain aul by night, a Russian picket, a fort, the viceroy’s Tiflis, the war minister’s and the tsar’s Petersburg, Shamil’s court, and a village in Russia that never sees him at all. At each seat he is what that seat sees, a piece to be used, bought or destroyed. Only the reader holds him whole.
Movement II
The first night is at Sado’s. Hadji Murat has broken with Shamil and is hidden in a mountain aul, in the house of a man who takes him in at his own risk. There are songs, and a boy of the house gazes at the guest. The book gives Hadji Murat his particulars here and keeps them to the end: the limp, the shaved head, the childlike smile, the prayers said at their hours. He is a man whose vitality is whole, and the book admires it without asking him to be innocent. It records his feuds, his killings and his calculation; what it admires is his life.
Below the mountains, at a Russian picket, soldiers talk through the night. One of them, Avdeev, went to the army in place of his married brother. He is hit, and dies. The book gives the common soldier’s war a chapter of its own and a death of its own, and gives them without heroics, in the soldiers’ own talk. It is the first of the seats from which Hadji Murat is not seen at all, and the war goes on there without him.
Hadji Murat comes over to the Russians and is received with courtesy, watched, and used. He tells his life to Loris-Melikov, and it is the longest recital in the book: exposition, told rather than dramatised, the one place where the form becomes a container. At the fort the officers play cards; in Tiflis the viceroy’s society goes to cards, a ball and the theatre, and its chapters make their point before they end. Through all of it there is one matter he cannot let go, his family in Shamil’s hands, and over it the Russians bargain with him as with a piece in their game.
Movement III
The book climbs to the tsar by single chapters, and it also goes down, to a peasant hut in Russia that has never heard of Hadji Murat. Avdeev’s village sent one son to the army so that the married brother could stay and work the land. The news of his death reaches them, and his wife is relieved. The book does not judge her. It shows what the empire costs its own peasants, in a household it has already taken a man from, and it shows it in a chapter no plot requires and the argument cannot spare.
In the mountains a Russian column raids Sado’s aul, the house where Hadji Murat spent the first night. The fountain is fouled and the mosque defiled, and the boy who had gazed at the guest is dead, killed with a bayonet. The book does not comment. The elders come together and sit in silence, and what the raid has made in them is something colder than hatred: a refusal to count the raiders as men at all. It is the dreadful sublime in a plain register, and the disclosure is made by the action, as the book makes all of its disclosures.
Avdeev’s village and Sado’s aul are one field seen from two sides. Each has given up a son to the war; each is a household the war has entered. The construction is sure: the boy planted on the first night is paid in the raid, and Avdeev’s death at the picket is answered by his village. Against the empire’s raids the book weighs Hadji Murat’s own violence more lightly, and that is its one lean in a justice otherwise level. But it does not hide what he has done. It shows the two sides of the field, and what the plough does to both.
Movement IV
In Petersburg the war minister brings his report to Nicholas I. The emperor’s inner voice is vanity throughout: he remembers a girl he seduced at a masquerade, admires himself, and, reading a report on a student, writes on it a sentence of the gauntlet. Nicholas is drawn with a heavier hand than anyone else in the book, the one figure seen wholly from outside and with contempt, and the seduction and the vanity are pressed past what the book’s argument needs. It is the chapter the censor cut, and the reigning emperor of 1912 was this man’s great-grandson.
Across the mountains Shamil sits in his own court, with Hadji Murat’s son in his hands as a hostage, and he threatens the boy. The two chapters mirror each other. Shamil’s threat against the son and Nicholas’s sentence on the student are one act in two courts, and the form makes the equation the book argues: the empire and the imamate are one machine of power, and the man of whole vitality who serves first one and then the other is used by both. He serves each in turn, and each counts him by his use.
The chapter on Nicholas is satire, and it strains against the book’s otherwise level justice. It is also required. Take it away and Shamil stands alone as the despot, and the book becomes a tale of a mountaineer betrayed by his own side. With it, the law that governs the whole is seen working at the top: power, from the tsar’s study to the imam’s, turns living men into instruments. The emperor’s vanity is the plough’s side of that law. The thistle in the field of the frame is the other.
Movement V
Hadji Murat escapes from the Russians at dawn with his few men, trying to reach his family. The escape carries terror, and it ends in a last stand. Hemmed in, the men make a breastwork of their dead horses and dig in behind it. They sing the death song. Wounded, Hadji Murat is flooded by memories, and then he rises with his dagger and goes at his enemies. It is the epic hero’s oldest death, the warrior hemmed in and fighting to the end, and the book gives it in its plainest sentences.
During the firing the nightingales had fallen silent. After his death they sing again. His head is cut off and carried round the forts as a trophy, as heroes’ bodies were in the old epics, and men who knew him look at it. The death is met as a thing the empire displays and lived as a thing a man suffers, and the book holds both. The last stand is its summit; the first night, the raid and the escape are its other rises, and between them lie the level stretches of Tiflis, the ministry and the cards, ironic by design.
Then the frame closes, in one sentence. The book returns to the ploughed field and the thistle, crushed and broken and still upright, and names the death it recalled. The history of a war of 1851 and 1852 has been told as a memory occasioned by a weed, and the book’s last claim is in that turn: that this death belongs to the natural order which the plough destroys, and which goes on standing until it is cut down. Later wars in the same mountains have made the book read as more pertinent, not less.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the work for structure, and on the Russian in part. The subtractive test finds little. Each vantage carries a part of the argument the others cannot: the picket gives the common soldier’s war and Avdeev’s death; Avdeev’s village gives what the empire costs its own peasants, his wife’s relief at the news included; Nicholas and Shamil must both stand, because the book’s claim is that the two despots are one. The frame must stand, since without the thistle the death is an anecdote of the Caucasian War. Three places bite: the life Hadji Murat tells Loris-Melikov is long exposition by recital; the Tiflis chapters of cards, ball and theatre make their point before they end; and the Nicholas chapter presses the seduction and the vanity past what the parallel with Shamil requires.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the empire and the imamate are one machine of power seen from two sides, and a man of whole vitality is used by both and destroyed between them. The action makes it, not comment. A Russian column raids Sado’s aul, fouls the fountain, defiles the mosque, and kills with a bayonet the boy who had gazed at Hadji Murat on the first night; the elders sit in silence, and what the raid has made in them is colder than hatred, a refusal to count the raiders as men. Held off the top because the case against Nicholas is partly made by satire rather than found, and because Hadji Murat’s own killings, which the book records, are weighed more lightly than the empire’s.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Height near the top, and frequent for the book’s length. The summit is the last stand: Hadji Murat and his few men dug in behind their dead horses, the death song, the memories that flood the wounded man, his rising with the dagger, and the nightingales, silent during the firing, singing again after he dies. The raid on the aul is the dreadful sublime in a plain register; the first night at Sado’s, with its songs and the boy’s eyes, carries beauty; the escape at dawn carries terror; the thistle, broken and still upright in a ploughed field, is grandeur in a weed. Held below the higher reaches by the level stretches the design requires, Tiflis society, the war ministry and the cards at the fort, whose register is irony by intent.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Myth built, and the frame is the build. The thistle crushed by the plough and still standing is not an image laid over the story but its shape: a living thing in a field that civilisation has turned, admired because it will not yield, and remembered as the death that follows. The last stand is the epic hero’s oldest death, the warrior hemmed in and fighting to the end, his head cut off and carried round the forts as a trophy. The hero who serves two kings in turn, his family held as hostages, is as old. The particular holds throughout: the limp, the childlike smile, the prayers at their hours, the bargaining over his family. Held off the top because the archetype is carried by the hero and the frame more than by the panorama, whose Petersburg and Tiflis chapters work by satire.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The inheritance is double. The Russian Caucasus tale, from Pushkin’s The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1822) through Marlinsky’s Ammalat-Bek to Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, had made the mountaineer a figure of romance; this book turns the theme into an anatomy of empire, in which the exotic is plain and the Russians are the raiders. And Tolstoy’s own panorama, the manner of War and Peace, is compressed into a short book that climbs by single chapters to the tsar and comes down again to a peasant hut. The stake was real: a work of the art its author had renounced in What Is Art?, kept back through eight years of writing, which drew the reigning emperor’s great-grandfather as a vain seducer who sentences a man to the gauntlet. Held below the top because the realist means are Tolstoy’s own and proven; the turn is in use and compression, not in form.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. Told as a life in sequence, Hadji Murat would be a hero of romance; told as it is, a chapter at each seat of power, he becomes what each seat sees, a piece to be used, bought or destroyed, and only the reader holds him whole. The two despots stand in chapters that mirror each other, so the form makes the equation the book argues. The frame makes the history a memory occasioned by a weed, which is the book’s claim that this death belongs to the natural order the plough destroys. Held below the top because the life told to Loris-Melikov sits in the structure as recital rather than as form.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over a century since publication, real but narrower than for Tolstoy’s long novels. The book has been read as his late return to art against his own doctrine; as an anti-imperial work and, in the scholarship on Russian literature and empire, as a turning point in the Caucasus theme; as an ethic of vitality at odds with his teaching of non-resistance; and, during the Chechen wars of the 1990s, as a book about the present. Harold Bloom’s praise in The Western Canon (1994) renewed its reading in English. Its questions stay open: whether it admires Hadji Murat’s violence or only his life; whether the Nicholas chapter is its truth or its flaw; what the narrator of the frame owes the history he remembers. Held a step down because a short book’s yield is concentrated.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The field is Russian prose of the nineteenth century, which the book closes, though it reached print in 1912. The force is high: it remade the Caucasus theme of Russian literature from romance into an anatomy of empire, and showed that the panorama of a whole society, from emperor to a peasant mother, could be held in a short book by placing one chapter at each seat of power. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is reach, narrower and delayed: posthumous, first printed cut, and overshadowed by War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the book redirected less than its force warranted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it holds a place in the later Russian literature of the Caucasus, it was read anew as a book of the present during the Chechen wars, and its standing among writers in English has risen since Bloom.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The text survives whole, in Tolstoy’s manuscripts and the complete editions; the censor’s cuts in the first Russian printing were a loss later made good, and the lack of an edition authorised in his lifetime costs little, since the last redaction is the text read. Presence is continuous since 1912, in the Russian and Soviet collected editions and in translation from the Maudes’ of that year onward, as the chief of the late works rather than at the centre of the culture where the long novels stand. The surface is fixed to a war of 1851 and 1852, but that war is the matter, and later wars in the same mountains have made it read as more pertinent, not less.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on Tolstoy’s Russian as far as it is known here; the sound of the sentence is neither credited nor charged. The command is of plain exactness: short declarative sentences, the physical particular set where it carries the meaning, the limp, the shaved head, the dead horses made a breastwork. The registers are wide for a short book and kept apart: the soldiers’ talk at the picket, the officers’ banter, the viceroy’s society, Nicholas’s inner voice of vanity, the Avar life in recital, the official dispatch. Construction is sure: the boy at Sado’s planted on the first night and paid in the raid, Avdeev’s death answered by his village, the frame closed in one sentence. Charged: Nicholas is drawn with a heavier hand than anyone else, the recited life is exposition the book does not dramatise, and the text never had its author’s last revision for the press.
Score: 9.1 / 10
One law governs the whole: power, from the tsar’s study to the imam’s, turns living men into instruments, and life holds out against it until it is cut down. Take the two most distant elements: Nicholas in Petersburg, remembering a girl he seduced at a masquerade and writing a sentence of the gauntlet on a report, and the thistle in the ploughed field of the frame. They obey the same law: the emperor’s vanity is the plough’s side of it, the weed the other. Shamil’s threat against the hostage son and Nicholas’s sentence on the student are one act in two courts; Avdeev’s village and Sado’s aul are one field seen from two sides. The range runs from imperial satire to lyric elegy, and it is held. Charged: the satire strains the book’s otherwise level justice, so that Nicholas alone is drawn from outside and with contempt.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on what a short novel holds, and it holds more than its length should allow. Consciousness, in Hadji Murat and his dying memories. The family: his mother, his wives, his son held hostage, and Avdeev’s household. Labour and the peasant economy, in the village that sent one son to the army in place of his married brother. The state at every rank, tsar, war minister, viceroy, colonel, subaltern and private, and its rival, Shamil’s imamate. War and history, in the winter raids of the Caucasian War. Religion, in Islamic prayer and Shamil’s authority, the Orthodox world more thinly. The natural order, in the thistle and the nightingales. Each is a place where the one law is seen working. Held a step down by depth: most orders are given a chapter, and Russian society and the sacred are sketched rather than inhabited.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment at 9.2, then The Made at 9.1. A disclosure made by the action and not by comment, that the empire and the imamate are one machine of power and that a man of whole vitality is used by both and destroyed between them; and a plain, exact making, its registers kept apart and its construction sure, from the boy planted on the first night to the frame closed in one sentence.
Limiting Dimension
Pressure on Tradition at 8.5, held by reach: posthumous, first printed cut, and overshadowed by War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the book redirected less than its force warranted. Next above it, The Encompassed at 8.6, for orders given a chapter each, with Russian society and the sacred sketched rather than inhabited; then The Swerve and The Bottomless Well at 8.7, for a turn made in use and compression with proven means, and a short book’s concentrated yield. The sound of the Russian sentence is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.1, The Living Form at 9.0, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 9.2, The Imperishable at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 8.9 and The Swerve at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, and Pressure on Tradition meets it exactly at 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.5, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.6. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.9.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Lev Tolstoy’s Хаджи-Мурат (Khadzhi-Murat), written from 1896 to 1904 through many redactions, left unpublished at his death in 1910, and first printed in 1912 among his posthumous works, with the chapter on Nicholas I and other passages cut by the censor in Russia. It is scored as the text Tolstoy left at his last redaction of 1904, complete, the Nicholas chapter included, as printed in the standard Russian collected editions: a first-person frame and twenty-five numbered chapters. It is a finished work its author never released, not an assembly by other hands; the earlier drafts are context only, and are neither credited nor charged. Every score is judged on the book in Tolstoy’s Russian, which is not in hand. Russian is quoted on this page only in the first sentence, whose words are certain, and beneath it stands a plain English rendering in parentheses, made for this page and not taken from any published translation. Translation · Aylmer and Louise Maude’s (1912), plain and close to the sense, is the version best known to this reading and was used for sense, with Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s (2009) known less well. Neither is in hand, neither is quoted, and no translation’s shortfall is charged to the book. The frame, the order of vantages in outline, the principal scenes and figures are judged in full; the sound and rhythm of Tolstoy’s Russian are beyond this reading, and are neither credited nor charged. Names follow the usual English forms. Chapters are not cited by number. Facts that could not be verified, among them the dates of the uncut printings, the length of the book, Tolstoy’s letter of 1851 on the defection, the number of redactions, the exact order of the chapters and the place of each episode among them, the official report of the skirmish in which Avdeev is hit, the form of Shamil’s threat against the son, the book’s own words for what the raid leaves in the elders, and the record of Babel’s admiration, are not given.