“Have you read Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat?” wrote Will Hughes via electronic mail a fortnight ago, having just stumbled upon the book at the Singapore airport. “If not, you must,” he concluded. He must have read it in one or two sittings. The last major work of Tolstoy’s, it was published posthumously in 1912. The same day I tried to order the book through the Amazon.com website, but was surprised not to find it there. “Get me another copy on your way home,” I wrote to Will, knowing his itinerary on his academic tour of the Far East. A day later he wrote back that he had ordered the book for me through the Amazon.co.uk website. Assuming that Amazon was one, I did not even try its several branches. The book arrived a few days ago. A slim and elegant volume, it was published by Hesperus Press in London only this year, which perhaps explains why I had failed to find it. I just finished reading the book. It is about the conflict between Russians and Chechens, Orthodox Christianity and Islam, new and old worlds, treachery and loyalty. The book could not be published while Tolstoy was alive because of his damning portrayal of the Russian court and army, as well as his admiration for Hadji Murat, a Chechen warrior of renown, who first defected to the Russians in defiance of his own superior among the Chechens, but who then tried to escape from the Russian clutches. The hero dies like a hero must. But the story harbors a deeper suspicion: although admirable, Hadji Murat’s world is dying, too. And so it must. The way forward is not the way upward. Close to the end of his life, Tolstoy was not all that optimistic about the human kind. “Hey, Will,” I just wrote to my friend and academic partner until my departure from Reading, “I love the book. But what made you so sure I would love it?”