Hadji Murad Questions and Answers
Hadji Murad
What is the main conflict in Haji Murad?
Leo Tolstoy’s novella Hadji Murad highlights a personal dilemma that occurs within a wartime setting. Murad, the protagonist, is an Avar (or Chechen) man who decides the join the opposing, Russian...
Hadji Murad
What is Tolstoy's view on Russian imperialism?
Tolstoy completely opposed Russian imperialism. When Tsar Nicholas II supported European imperialism in China in 1902, Tolstoy referred to his monarch's action as "barbaric." Tolstoy admired the...
Hadji Murad
What is the mood of Hadji Murad?
Hadji Murad is unusual in Tolstoy's late work in the cool, detached tone taken by the narrator. The protagonist is the most sympathetic and admirable of the major characters, and his motive for...
Hadji Murad
Why does Hadji go over to the Russian side in Hadji Murad?
Hadji Murad has two principal reasons for joining the Russians. In the first place, the Avar leader, Imam Shamil, is holding his mother, wives, and children captive. Hadji hopes to set them free...
Hadji Murad
Who is "civilized" in Tolstoy's Hadji Murad?
The question of who is civilized is central to Tolstoy's short novel Hadji Murad which explores the notion of moral presumption and moral relativism in a number of ways. The notion of being...
Hadji Murad
Analyze the significance of Tolstoy’s reflection on “Tartar thistle” in terms of the conflict of the Caucasus...
In Tolstoy's parable that frames the story of Hadji Murat, the thistle symbolizes the indigenous people of the Caucasus. It persists through the attempts to stamp it out. Tolstoy, though he had...
Hadji Murad
Who is the charcter in the first two pages of Hadji Murad who is telling the story?
The opening section of this short novella, which describes a beautiful field of flowers and the meditations of the anonymous narrator as he sees one flower that has been trampled upon, but still...
Hadji Murad
How is Hadji Murad an excellent account of the differences between East and West?
This excellent novella is an account of the doomed mountain resistance leader, Hadji Murad, and his time in Russia associating with the Russian aristocracy. The difference in culture between the...
Hadji Murad
What does the narrator notice as he crosses the field in Hadji Murad?
The narrator prefaces this story by remarking on a crimson thistle he finds in a ditch while walking across a field one midsummer's day. This particular plant is often referred to as a Tartar. The...