As with War & Peace or Anna Karenina, Tolstoy built Hadji Murad out of multiple plots, which he cycles between to cunning, highly contrastive effect. But because Hadji Murad is only 100 pages long, its structure is more obvious, even flashy. Ludwig Wittgenstein, of all people, admired it. It has the cold, distilled clarity of late work.,, Fit into its 100 pages is every viewpoint: Tolstoy fully characterizes and motivates everyone from Tsar Nicholas I (a useless letch) to individual soldiers—like Butler, a good man heartbreakingly addicted to gambling, or Avdeev, whose death opens up a startling sidelight on his peasant parents—to several of Murad’s disciples (notably shy Eldár, with his ram’s eyes) to Shamil himself...

Tolstoy is a master of anticlimax. Apocalypse is not, as some terrorists have it, now. If his final novel presents a more balanced view of imperialist politics than even Heart of Darkness (with which it was contemporary), it is because Tolstoy knows there are no climaxes: conflicts like this one will drag on forever.