With Hadji Murad Tolstoy does indeed clamp his tale within the vice of a metaphor, just as he had done with the black bag in Ivan Ilyich. And yet the metaphor in this case has no significance outside itself: it makes the wonderfully told story virtually seem like a parable without a point. This effect makes it one of the most striking things that Tolstoy ever wrote. The metaphor is the tough and sturdy thistle, called by the peasants a ‘Tartar ’ thistle, which resists being grubbed up from a cultivated field. At the beginning and ending of the story Tolstoy compares it to the indomitable old native Tartar chieftain, Hadji Murad of the Caucasus, about whom he had heard many years before, when he was there in the army as a young man.

Hadji Murad had long been a thorn in the side of the occupying Russian power. At length he had decided to co-operate, and had come to confer with the Russian commandant; for some reason he began to suspect trickery, and he determined to escape from his Cossack escort and go back to a rebel life in the mountains. He is pursued, overtaken and killed, and that is the end of the story. From its nature and background the story could be romantic, in the manner of Sir Walter Scott or his numerous Russian imitators who wrote epic tales about the Caucasus. In fact Tolstoy makes the story a complex narrative demonstration – its air of transparent simplicity is deceptive – in which the participation of the reader is not solicited in any way, as it is in his other ‘simple’ stories. Here we are to see, but not to share; and not to draw conclusions. So far from being a romantic dream like Scott, or a didactic tale like the Tolstoyan tales that preceded it, it is more like Shakespeare. This is because of the manner in which it unfolds inside its metaphorical setting, bringing in the widest implications – for instance that of imperial power – but making no explicit commentary or judgement.

It was the work of Tolstoy's most admired by the philosopher Wittgenstein – he was also very impressed by ‘God Sees the Truth but Waits’ – who praised its extreme clarity and objectivity.