I am re-reading a story of Tolstoy's and wanted to share how good it is. The following discussion exemplifies, in my opinion, one of the most positive reviews ever given to a work of fiction (I say this not as a comment on my reviewing skills but on the quality of the praise others have given to the work). Tolstoy is generally considered to have written one of - if not the greatest - novel in literature ('Anna Karenina'). Truth be told, I haven't read 'Anna Karenina' or 'War and Peace' but am familiar with most of his stories and novellas. 'Hadji Murat' or 'Hadji Murad' is Tolstoy's last fictional work and one of his greatest. Both Wittgenstein and the Russian writer Isaac Babel (1894-1940) revered it. Of the story, Babel wrote poetically:
Here the electric charge went from the earth, through the hands, straight to the paper, with no insulation at all, quite mercilessly stripping off all outer layers with a sense of truth.
Literary critic Harold Bloom speaks no less glowingly:
One hesitates to value 'Hadji Murad' over all of Tolstoy's other achievements in the short novel, a genre in which he excelled, and which includes works as remarkable as 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich', 'Master and Man', 'The Devil', 'The Cossacks', 'The Kreutzer Sonata', and 'Father Sergius'. Still, not even the first two in that listing haunt me as 'Hadji Murad' has since I first read it more than forty years ago. It is my personal touchstone for the sublime of prose fiction, to me the best story in the world, or at least the best that I have ever read.
One more anecdote: My Russian literature professor at Princeton, Caryl Emerson, after advising me to read this story, said that if you can read the ending of the story without tears in your eyes than your heart must be made of stone. All this praise about a story that's barely more than 100 pages long. So get the book today, give yourself a couple of hours and read it straight-through.