Could Hadji Murad Be The Next President Of The Us?

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“Could Hadji Murad be the Next President of the United States?” Kayla Higgins 6/9/08 Instructor: Christopher Warren Hadji Murad was written by Tolstoy late in his life, at a time when he was very much preoccupied by ideas of religion and faith. Indeed, in 1894, just two years before he began writing Hadji Murad, he had published The Kingdom of God is Within You, his non-fiction masterwork of his meditations on Christianity. In addition, at the same time that he was working on Hadji Murad he completed his final novel Resurrection (published 1899), which is known for its criticism of the Orthodox Church. Therefore, as is pointed out by Henri Troyat in his biography of Tolstoy, “it is a strange thing that Tolstoy should have written this tale, devoid of all religious considerations, whose extraordinary beauty alone is enough to content the reader, at a time when his thoughts were increasingly bent on the propagation of his faith and books intended for mere entertainment seemed pointless and even harmful to him” (Troyat, 578). There seems to be a strong argument, however, contrary to this portrayal of Hadji Murad as a simple work of “beautiful” fiction, completely “devoid of all religious considerations.” As a matter of fact, the way that Tolstoy characterizes the hero of the story, Hadji Murad, in contrast to the way he portrays the most villanized character in the story, Nicholas, reveals a lot about Tolstoy’s religious beliefs. In addition, it seems that Tolstoy’s religious values overlap with many Kantian principles about what makes a good political leader. One of the sharpest contrasts Tolstoy makes between the character of Hadji Murad and the character of Nicholas is in their level of religious devotion. Nicholas absent-mindedly says his daily prayers as he cleans himself in the bathroom, “without attaching any kind of meaning to
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