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Hadji Murat

Leo Tolstoy

Posthumous novella about the Avar leader Hadji Murat, a lieutenant of Imam Shamil who went over to the Russians in 1851 to save his family and died fighting when he tried to escape. Tolstoy wrote it between 1896 and 1904, returning to his Caucasian memories, and builds it as a portrait of two despotisms — Nicholas I's and Shamil's — between which the individual is crushed. Published in 1912.