ABSTRACT
Hadji Murad, a simply written tale of "the first horseman and hero of all Chechenia" who committed a base act and surrendered himself to the Russian Government, as Tolstoy had written to his brother Sergey from the Caucasus fifty years ago, is the last of his artistic works and one of the very few which has no particular biographical significance. The last decade of his life is most notable for the vigorous and prophetic protests which he made unceasingly against public scandals which it was clear to him, if persisted in, could only lead to disaster for the whole of the West. From the present moment of time many of these have so great a significance that it is rewarding to give them a brief study. "Perhaps it is because I am unwell," he once cried out to a friend, "but at moments to-day I am simply driven to despair by everything that is going on in the world: the new form of oath, the revolting proclamation about enlisting university students in the army, the Dreyfus affair, the situation in Serbia, the horrors of the diseases and deaths at the Auerbach quicksilver works ... I cannot make out how mankind can go on living like this, with the sight of all this horror around them." 78
