Hadji Murat

Hadji Murat reflects Leo Tolstoy’s anti-war sentiments, showcasing his advocacy for pacifism through depictions of the atrocities of war and the legacy of conflict. The lives and deaths of his minor characters, like Sado and Avdeev, though seemingly insignificant to the larger plot, reveal the lingering effects of war's cruelty.

The Russian soldier Avdeev's death underscores the dichotomy between the impersonal abstraction of a wartime casualty statistic and the profound, intimate grief experienced by his family. Avdeev dies during the Russian campaign to conquer the Caucasus region. A report to Tiflis describes this loss impersonally:

On November 23rd two companies of the Kurinsky regiment went out of the fortress to cut wood. In the middle of the day, a considerable body of mountaineers suddenly attacked the woodcutters […] Two privates were lightly wounded in action and one was killed. The mountaineers lost around a hundred men killed and wounded (35).

The impersonal nature of the military report dehumanizes Avdeev’s suffering as a mere statistic. The report spotlights the gap between the lived experiences of soldiers and the sanitized accounts presented in official records. The narrative contrasts the “light” injuries of two privates with the "around a hundred men killed and wounded" among the mountaineers, an imbalance that reflects war’s toll and questions the celebrated narratives of victory and valor.