Literary critics often amuse themselves by arguing which first sentence in which great novel is the best of all.
Those arguments strike me as futile because such qualitative judgements as ‘best’ imply the existence of objective criteria to be applied. Since no such criteria exist, ‘good’, ‘better’ and ‘best’ are fated to remain subjective statements of taste.
This isn’t to imply that all tastes are equal, far from it. But any comparative aesthetic judgement ultimately has to boil down to an ad hominem.
Thus you can’t prove to your opponent that Franz Schubert is a greater musician than John Lennon. By insisting that Winterreise is superior to Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, all you are saying – correctly, as it happens – is that your taste is superior to his.
Following this logic, I steadfastly refuse to join the arguments about the relative merits of Austen’s “It is a truth universally acknowledged…”, Dickens’s “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” and any number of other celebrated opening lines.
However, defying that logic, I can identify categorically and in a manner brooking no dissent the greatest last sentence in a work of fiction. None of all those ‘to my taste’, ‘arguably’ or ‘one could suggest’. Down with equivocation: the greatest last sentence ever written concludes Tolstoy’s novelette Hadji Murat.
My relationship with the author is complex. In my book, God and Man According to Tolstoy (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009), I tore to shreds Tolstoy’s philosophical and religious works, which, alas, take up half of his 91-volume legacy.
However, I never concealed my veneration of the other half, his works of fiction whose artistry, in my view, has never been matched by any other novelist in any language.
His longer novels, War and Peace, Anna Karenina and especially Resurrection are overburdened with Tolstoy’s hectoring asides on history, education, agriculture, morality, religion and other subjects close to his heart. Most of those digressions are as silly as his non-fiction. Yet even they can’t damage the works of art shaped by Tolstoy’s masterly hand.
I’ve never read such piercingly moving depictions of new life coming and old life going as the scenes of Andrei Bolkonsky’s dying in War and Peace and Kitty’s giving birth in Anna Karenina. Still, the sheer length of these masterpieces, and the intrusion of Tolstoy’s asides, take something away from the artistry, though mercifully leaving enough left for us to admire.
Tolstoy’s late novelettes, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Hadji Murat, each under 150 pages long, are free from annoying pseudo-philosophical distractions, which makes them arguably the most flawless gems in the treasure trove of prose fiction.
You see, I too can hedge my aesthetic judgement with ‘in my view’ and ‘arguably’. Yet, as I’ve mentioned earlier, I’m not going to do that when identifying the greatest last sentence in world literature. It appears in Hadji Murat, which I recently re-read after a hiatus as long as the average life expectancy in Russia.
The protagonist was a historical figure, a prominent independence fighter in the Caucasian wars Russia started in the early 19th century and has continued, on and off, ever since. Hadji Murat was a controversial character who intermittently tried to get rid of the Russians by using Imam Shamil and then to get rid of Imam Shamil by using the Russians.
Both men were Avars, one of the Muslim tribes in the Caucasus. However, Shamil was a proponent of Muridism, an ideology that combined Sufi tenets with a call to jihad against Russian imperialism. Hadji Murat saw that ideology as a threat to their common cause, which eventually drove him away from Shamil.
The last straw came crashing down when Shamil named his son as his successor. To Hadji Murat that meant the perpetuation of Muridism, something he couldn’t accept. Shamil knew that and decided to have his rival killed.
Yet one of Shamil’s men warned Hadji Murat and he managed to escape. But his family, including his beloved son, was left behind and held captive.
Hadji Murat surrendered to the Russians who both admired and mistrusted him. Russian generals saw him as one of history’s great cavalry commanders; their wives swooned when that dark romantic hero floated into the room with his exotic entourage.
The Russians effectively kept Hadji Murat under house arrest and remained deaf to his pleas for men and arms he needed to rescue his family from Shamil. When one day Hadji Murat found out that Shamil was about to have his son blinded, he could wait no longer.
He escaped again, this time from the Russians, and rode out with a handful of his trusted comrades to rescue his family or die in the attempt. But the Cossacks and Caucasian tribesmen hostile to Hadji Murat tracked them down. In the ensuing firefight the outnumbered great warrior was killed, and his embalmed head was sent to the Tsar.
These historical facts provide the bare bones of Tolstoy’s story, which he envelops in the luxuriant flesh of his artistry. The first two pages describe the narrator walking through ploughed meadows and admiring the profusion of wild flowers.
Tolstoy paints the field and its flowers with broad, lurid strokes from his endless palette, and the reader can see the blazing glory of the colours, breathe in the redolent aroma, hear the rustle of the grass. And then the narrator, having let us admire the accuracy of his eye and the sure touch of his brush, makes it clear that what he has shown with so much mastery is only a metaphor.
He comes across a thistle bent by the plough but not crushed by it: “ ‘What energy!’ ” I thought. “Man has conquered everything, destroyed millions of shrubs, but this one still doesn’t surrender!
“And I recalled an old Caucasian story, part of which I saw, other parts I heard from eyewitnesses, still others I imagined. Here is that story, as it came together in my memory and imagination.”
What follows is some 120 pages of the narrative I so crudely summed up above. The narrator recedes into the background never to reappear until the last sentence, simple and sublime, and sublime in its simplicity.
His place is taken by Hadji Murat and his comrades; by Russian soldiers, officers and generals; by Tsar Nicholas I, his ministers, courtiers and viceroys. (One of whom, Mikhail Vorontsov, has a street in London’s St John’s Wood named after him.) The pages are filled with love and hate, lust and betrayal, life and death – all drawn with the artistry so admired by, among many others, Vladimir Nabokov.
In his Lectures on Russian Literature, he calls Tolstoy “philosopher of the flesh” and compares him favourably to Flaubert. The Frenchman, writes Nabokov, takes a whole page to draw the portrait of Monsieur Bovary. By contrast, Tolstoy could have done it by creating with just one telling detail a compelling visual image that would stay with the reader for ever.
Such mastery animates every page of Hadji Murat.
The reader feels almost embarrassed: it’s as if he were a Peeping Tom, spying through the window on other people’s lives. Tolstoy’s is the kind of stark, laconic realism that draws the reader in and forces him to live the life of the protagonist, feel his feelings, die his death.
The narrative is a kaleidoscope of lurid colours, a whirlwind of penetrating insights, a maelstrom of human strengths and weaknesses, of good and evil. The narrator, the ‘I’ of the story, is nowhere to be seen, seemingly leaving the reader to do his own feeling, his own living and his own dying.
And only in that last sentence does he let his presence be known again: “It was that death that I was reminded of by the thistle crushed in the ploughed field.”
The metaphor, by now forgotten, reappears in a few short words, so unassuming that one could be deceived into thinking that anyone else could have written them. But no one else has ever written with so much power packed in so few words.
I gasped and slowly closed the slim volume that’s worth infinitely more than all the 50 volumes of Tolstoy’s ‘philosophy’ put together. Such is human nature, I suppose, never satisfied with God’s gifts, no matter how lavish, always reaching for something God withheld, in Tolstoy’s case the mind of a philosopher.
This is the kind of hubris God invariably punishes by turning the sinner into an easy target for criticism. This, to paraphrase Tolstoy, is the sin I was reminded of by re-reading Hadji Murat and trying to catch my breath taken away by that last sentence.
You should write a novel, Mr Boot.
Thank you, but Tolstoy already wrote all of them.
He didn’t write The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., which is my favourite short historical novel. (Most of my favourite historical novels are by Scott, but brevity isn’t one of his many virtues.)
I hope the translation of Hadji Murat by Pevear and Volokhonsky is tolerable, because I’ve ordered a copy.
The best last line in all literature is, of course:
“ὣς οἵ γ’ ἀμφίεπον τάφον Ἕκτορος ἱπποδάμοιο.”
“Hōs hoi g’ amphiepon taphon Hektoros hippodamoio.”
“Thus they prepared there a tomb for Hector, tamer of horses.”
But it won’t make you weep inconsolably until you’ve read the whole poem.
That’s the translation my wife has just read. I looked through it, and it looked decent. They resorted to the cop-out of attaching a glossary of the words they didn’t know how to translate. Since I don’t know how to translate those words either, I can’t blame them. In general, Tolstoy is easier to translate than Gogol and Dostoyevsky. His language was simpler, less idiosyncratic.
Often difficult words are best left untranslated. Consider the Greek dēmokratia and tyrannia, and how misleading their common translations as “democracy” and “tyranny” are. This isn’t very troublesome for a reader of Plato or Aristotle, who define their terms, but for a reader of Thucydides or Plutarch it may be ruinous. After forty-five years’ familiarity with such words, I still can’t translate them.
Dostoyevsky in translation has the great virtue of making me think, and Gogol in translation has the great virtue of making me laugh. The translations of Tolstoy I’ve read so far have exhibited neither virtue to me, but perhaps that’s Mr and Mrs Aylmer Maude’s fault.
I remember being delighted by Natalie Duddington’s translation of Goncharov’s Oblomov, but my delight is the only thing I can remember about it. It’s now off the shelf and added to the ever-increasing pile of books I want to read again.
I ought to learn Russian.
I thought I’d checked my “italic” tags carefully. Oh well.
Tolstoy is best read as a slice of life, both outer and inner. He could lay his characters bare for all to see better than any other novelist I know. And no one else has ever written of birth and death as powerfully. As a pure genius of idiosyncratic language and striking imagery, Gogol is superior, but Tolstoy has the advantage of being translatable, which Gogol isn’t. If you read Gogol in translation, you aren’t reading Gogol. You are reading someone telling you what Gogol wrote. Still, Gogol can make you laugh all right, but he can also make you cry. He himself described his work as “laughter through tears”. His Overcoat is a tale of woe (Dostoyevsky said, “All Russian literature came out of Gogol’s Overcoat”), and he certainly didn’t write his Neva Stories or Taras Bulba for laughs. As for Dostoyevsky, he isn’t quite my cup of vodka. His writing is sloppy, his language is rough-hewn, his style never properly edited, and he can rival Dickens for cloying sentimentality. (I too prefer Thackeray.) I mean, one can read only so many stories of whores with a heart of gold. If I want to read moral philosophy, I read works of moral philosophy. Reading novels, I can never quite forget that they are supposed to be works of art. Tolstoy does that sort of annoying thing too, but by way of compensation he is also a true artist, which I don’t think Dostoyevsky is. (When Flaubert read Anna Karenina, he exclaimed: “Il se répète! Il philosophise!” Yes, but that’s not all Tolstoy does.) Still, de gustibus… and all that. Each reader has his own criteria of greatness.
In other words, I ought to learn Russian.
All English novelists, from Richardson and Fielding onwards, are moral philosophers. Neither the highest men nor the lowest have much use for moral philosophy, but the middle classes are all amateur moral philosophers, and novelists from Richardson and Fielding to Stephen King and Lee Child have fossilized the prevailing middle-class moral philosophy of their times.
This is why I prefer poetry. There are morals in George Herbert and G M Hopkins, but no moral philosophy. And in prose I prefer the romancers to the novelists: Malory, Scott and Tolkien are moral writers who never moralise.
Thank you. I have read The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I will add Hadji Murat, along with God and Man According to Tolstoy, to my ever-growing list.
Nicholas, my 11-year-old son, recently told me he misplaced his current book (one of the Harry Potter series). I told him we have plenty of books, to go choose something to read until he finds the missing book. He went to my shelves and returned with Crime and Punishment. I had to laugh. He said he was able to understand what he read, but the next day he was back to Mr. Potter and his many adventures. I don’t suppose he got much of the Russian character in his 30 minute sojourn.
In your discussions of the Russian masters, Mr Boot, you always leave out Turgenev. Surely he belongs in that pantheon?
Proust says of Tolstoy, that Dostoyevsky had a significant influence on his works.
Turgenev is held in higher esteem abroad than in hid native land. A fine writer, no doubt, but I only really like his Fathers and Sons. He and Tolstoy hated each other, and once almost fought a duel. Tolstoy actively disliked Dostoyevsky, but I suppose all contemporaries influence one another.