Severed Heads and Living Corpses: Lev Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat

The central image of Leo Tolstoy’s late novella Hadji Murat is that of the eponymous dead hero’s severed head. Although severed heads have been objects of fascination in many cultures, in the modern West they have usually been linked to ideas of “oriental” brutality. Tolstoy, by contrast, opposes the curiously alive severed head of the non-European Hadji Murat, with its “childish, good-natured expression,” to the dead head of the living Tsar Nicholas I, with is “lifeless glance” and “dead eyes.” This contrast allows the reader to understand why Hadji Murat, who embodies many traditionally negative qualities for Tolstoy, is nevertheless a positive figure in the novella, and lets us see how Tolstoy attempted to overturn orientalist paradigms of “Eastern barbarity” in Hadji Murat.