In the Library
Hadji Murat
Leo Tolstoy, 1912
- Form
- Form Novella
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 3.5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Aylmer Maude (1912)
- Chapters
- Chapters 25
- Length
- Length 47k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
With what determination it defended itself, and how dearly it sold its life!
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
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Mikhail Lermontov
Lermontov's Pechorin rides through the same Caucasus forts and mountain villages, where Russian officers and highland tribesmen meet with the same wary fascination.
£1.99
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
Another short book in which an empire's story about itself collapses on contact with the place it is busy taking, told by a narrator who cannot quite say what he saw.
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About the book
A thistle, crushed flat by a cartwheel in a ploughed field, still standing. That is where Tolstoy begins, and he tells you plainly it made him remember a man. The man is an Avar chieftain, the most feared fighter in the Caucasus, who walks into the Russian camp because his own imam has taken his family hostage, and finds himself a guest of the empire that has spent thirty years trying to kill him. He is polite at dinner. He is measured with the officers. And every hour he is calculating, because the moment his sons are dead or freed he will have to choose a side, and both sides will destroy him. Tolstoy wrote this last, in secret, an old man returning to the war of his youth, and he gave the Tsar and the imam the same face. Read the opening page and you already know how it ends, and it will still take the breath out of you.