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Contrast that subversive wit [Mark Twain] with a Nobel Prize-winning American author of the twentieth century [Saul Bellow] who could draw himself up and haughtily ask, "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?" As if there were no reply. Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus-unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.
Ralph Wiley, Dark Witness
Chechen rebel leader and former president Aslan Maskhadov was killed Tuesday after Russian security forces pinned him down in a bunker in northern Chechnya, a military spokesman said... Maskhadov was killed as Russian forces surrounded him and his comrades in the village of Tolstoy-Yurt, about 12 miles north of Grozny, the Chechen capital.
Peter Finn, "Separatist Leader in Chechnya Is Killed"
Introduction: Sympathy for Shamil
In a June 1903 conversation with S. N. Shul'gin, Tolstoy situated Hadji Murat, the hero of his great final novel, alongside Tsar Nicholas and Imam Shamil, leader of the Islamist resistance to Russian imperialism in the Caucasus:
I have taken up not just Hadji Murat and his tragic fate but also the extremely curious parallelism of the two main antagonists of that epoch-Shamil and Nicholas, who together seem to constitute the two poles of governmental absolutism-the Asiatic and the European. In particular, one trait in Nicholas is striking-he often contradicts himself without noticing it and he thinks himself always absolutely correct. That is evidently how people of his milieu raised him to think, the spirit around him overflowing with servile flattery. (Sanders 207)
"Two poles" suggests difference as well as similarity, particularly since Tolstoy emphasizes the Tsar's depravity. But most critics conflate Shamil and Nicholas, presenting Hadji Murat as a tragic hero caught between absolutist extremism on the Caucasian Islamist and on the Russian Orthodox sides. Harold Bloom calls him a neoHomeric hero who perishes between "two vicious despots" (341). As a "border figure," Gary Hamburg says, Hadji Murat gave Tolstoy the "'neutral' perspective on the mountain war he needed in order to condemn power politics on both sides," leaving Shamil in the position of "an Asiatic despot, an analog to Nicholas I" (Sanders 210, 211). Susan Layton contrasts the despotic Machiavellian scheming of the two with the "direct,...