Hadji Murat cover art

Hadji Murat

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

Hadji Murat

By: Leo Tolstoy
Narrated by: Chris Blair
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £15.99

Buy Now for £15.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

Hadji Murat is a short novel by Leo Tolstoy which was published posthumously in 1912. It tells the story of Hadji Murat, a separatist guerrilla in the Caucasus who falls out with his own commander and eventually sides with the Russians in the hope of saving his family.

Hadji Murat differs from the other works Tolstoy produced in this period: In The Devil (1889), The Kreutzer Sonata (1890), "Father Sergius" (1898), Resurrection (1899), "Master and Man" (1895), and The Forged Coupon (1905), the theme is man's moral duty, which is not the case in Hadji Murat, a realist narrative based on actual people and events. It was written about 50 years after the events described, and Tolstoy used archival material, including Murad's own account of his life.

Public Domain (P)2020 Museum Audiobooks Classics Russia

Listeners also enjoyed...

 War and Peace cover art
Shakespeare: The Complete Works cover art
Cry of the Curlew cover art
The Queen of Spades: Moonlit Tales of the Macabre cover art
The Cossacks cover art
War and Peace (AmazonClassics Edition) cover art
The Queen's Colonial cover art
The Bright Book of Life cover art
Philosophical Investigations cover art
Swann's Way (AmazonClassics Edition) cover art
Oblomov cover art
Uncle Bernac cover art
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse cover art
The Man Without Qualities cover art
The Duel and Other Stories cover art
Wuhan cover art
All stars
Most relevant  
I could not understand the logic behind the accent. It was so annoying that I almost stopped listening to it.

Accent killed it

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is one of Tolstoy's masterworks, an utterly gripping story of a thoughtless, cruel imperialist enterprise in what is now Chechnya and echoes still in Russian history, told from all points of view -- Russian commanders, Chechen tribal leaders and imams, and ordinary sufferers among the peasants and the downtrodden Russian soldiery. High politics and diplomatic intrigue are also deftly portrayed. The parallels with other foreign ventures, from British imperialist conquests to the idiocy and blindness of the invasion of Afghanistan in this century, are astonishing.

Like other reviewers, I was mystified by the accent, which is not all that Russian, nor anything else really, since even Russian words were mispronounced throughout. It took me a while to realise that 'kawk-ass-ee-an" was "Caucasian" and that the city of "teef-al-ee-ass" was Tiflis. And one key character (and real figure in history) Prince Vorontsov was pronounced "voronstov" throughout. One got used to it after a while, but the accent interfered with what was otherwise a decently performed narration.

I haven't heard it (it may be great but why would I listen to it twice?) but the reading by the other actor is probably better, though I do hope it is not shorter because it has been abridged.

bizarre reading

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Hadji Murat is a late Tolstoy classic, a book I've waited many years to find as an audiobook. And while the story, which is as sweeping in scope as War and Peace but condensed to its essence, remains worth hearing again, this performance is ill-advised and undermines the value. For some unfathomable reason, Chris Blair, an American, chose to read the book in a fake accent—something that hovers ambiguously between Russian and Middle Eastern and belongs nowhere but the dustbin. It's bearable, but it made me resent wasting a credit.

A great story undermined by a fake accent.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.