Culture

Turning to Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat as Boston Locked Down

Hadji Murat (Vintage Classics) BY Leo Tolstoy. Vintage. Paperback, 144 pages. $9.
Cover of Hadji Murat (Vintage Classics)

This week, trying and failing to absorb the import of the bombings at the Boston Marathon, I let my unmoored thoughts travel away from questions of motive, politics, and ideology, and let them rest and rove in the fictionalized Chechnya conjured by Leo Tolstoy more than a century ago, in his final book, Hadji Murat.