Posted on 04/22/2013 11:00:00 PM PDT by cunning_fish
As everyone followed the Boston manhunt for the Tsarnaev brothers, thoughts turned to Tolstoy’s final novel, ‘Hadji Murad,’ about Chechen rebels fighting Russian imperialism. Benjamin Lytal checks in on the master’s tale of anti-heroism and betrayal.
On Friday, while CNN was making constant reference to the Tsarnaev brothers' attempt “to go out in a blaze of glory,” a micro-meme lit up social media: didn’t Leo Tolstoy have a novel about Chechnyan rebels, called Hadji Murad? He does: it was his last, a thin book that everyone should read. While it offers few overt parallels to a case of 21st-century terrorism, Tolstoy’s novel sets the stage for the Chechen grievance—and tribal dysfunction. But what is more piercing, when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s image is haunting the public eye, is Tolstoy’s insight into the dire symbiosis between heroic desires and boyish innocence.
Tolstoy would have been the first to reject an idea like "“going out in a blaze of glory.” In battle scenes he was a master of anticlimax: perhaps the best-remembered moment in all of War and Peace is young Nikolai Rostov’s first cavalry charge: knocked from the saddle by a bullet the bewildered 20-year-old turns tail: “They’re not after me! They can’t be after me! Why? They can’t want to kill me! Me. Everybody loves me!” Like, one suspects, many a hunted young man-boy, Nikolai is haunted by “all the love he had from his mother, from his family and his friends.” He can’t reconcile such a background with all the trouble he has gotten into.
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast.com ...
were they Muslims back then too?
AFAIK, Chechens has corverted to Islam circa 16th century. Earlier they were pagan worshiping penis (not kidding) and wolves.
Meanwhile the US is converting to their old faith
It must have been a forced conversion and how degrading.
Jeez, sounds like a conversation between Frasier and Niles!
LesterBallard66 1 day agoYeah, I'm sure that the people who thought these brothers were from Czechoslovakia will be reading Tolstoy.
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