In all of Tolstoy's fiction there is a tension between his need to preach and his prodigious talents as a story-teller and scene-setter. Increasingly, as he grew older, he was concerned with the great stained soul of his own country, interested in matters of religion and reform. Thus his skills at establishing the complexity of a single character through subtle and inspired use of detail and nuanced shades of feeling seemed, especially after the completion of Anna Karenina in 1877, to come second to his need to change the world. His short novels and stories written between then and his death in 1910 appear like beautiful moments of pure forgetfulness, times when his own great restless spirit was distracted and he managed to allow his political and religious preoccupations to play against the glittering constructs of his imagination.

Sometimes in the last 30 years of his life it was his very hatred for authority that caused him to tell a story that would place the authority in disrepute. In his fury he could work fast. "After the Ball" was written in one day in 1903. It told a story of great tenderness and cruelty, as a young man, in love with a colonel's daughter, experiences a night of rapture at a ball, which is full of luxury and civilisation. And then at dawn he witnesses the colonel, who a few hours earlier had been dancing, mercilessly overseeing a prisoner being savagely beaten as he runs the gauntlet.

Hadji Murad was written in the same period and was Tolstoy's last major piece of fiction to be completed. In the year before his death his wife wrote in her diary: "I have done nothing but copy out Hadji Murad. It's so good! I simply couldn't tear myself away from it." It was not published until 1912.

Although Tolstoy used his own experiences as a young soldier in the story - he lost money at gambling, as does Butler - he also did a good deal of research, reading memoirs and military histories and pestering his cousin, who knew life at court, for information about Nicholas I. "I absolutely must find the key to him," he wrote in 1903. "That is why I am collecting information, reading everything that relates to his life and personality. Mostly what I need are details of his daily life, what are called the anecdotes of history."

He saw his warlord hero trapped between two despots. "It is not only Hadji Murad and his tragic end that interest me," he wrote. "I am fascinated by the parallel between two main figures pitted against each other: Shamil and Nicholas I. They represent two poles of absolutism - Asiatic and European."

This fascination, however, belonged merely to Tolstoy's genius as a polemicist and public figure; his real fascination lay with the complex and untidy and unpredictable life that lay between the two poles. As an artist, he loved the pull of opposites within a character; he loved characters behaving out-of-character; and he also loved establishing a poetic moment in his fiction, a shimmering ending to a scene, for example, whose point was to create mystery and strangeness, because these interested his deeper nature more than any set of patterns or parallels.

In the opening pages of the story, we learn in ways that are beautifully concrete and memorable that Hadji Murad commands love and respect and loyalty. Soon, we watch the mixture of care and courtesy with which he moves. Having surrendered, he can be charming and beguiling and then suddenly turn watchful and serious, stubborn and proud. He has become as mercurial and interesting as his author who also, in the years when he invented this warlord, was caught between degrees of disloyalty to the tsar and the tsar's enemies.

The spirit that guided Tolstoy's imagination was, at times, immensely tender. He wrote with sympathy and perception here about love and grief, finding it impossible to pass over a scene without allowing a background character a moment of yearning, or without insisting on offering a dramatic background to his minor figures. Neither could he resist drawing a portrait of the military that showed the officers awash with petty jealousy and boastfulness. And while Hadji Murad's story is one of loyalty and bravery in the face of treachery, the tsar Nicholas I is merely venal and lecherous and obsessed with his own greatness. The pleasure Tolstoy must have felt at depicting the infidel warlord as full of love for his family and the tsar as one-dimensional and moody and cruel is palpable.

Tolstoy's Nicholas I in Hadji Murad is a feline creature whose arbitrary cruelties equal his vanity. Entering into his mind, coldly observing the obsequiousness of life at his court, and balancing this against the death of an ordinary soldier or Hadji Murad's surrender, give the story the aura of a compass needle as it seeks to pin-point Russia with its despotic ruler and its long-suffering population. Tolstoy, the fearless old preacher in his rural exile, must have written the court scenes with relish. In Section XVII, when the villagers return to find their homes in ruins, you can feel his blind rage all the more strongly because he has introduced the villagers earlier in the story as though they were merely a small, placid stage on Hadji Murad's road to surrender.

His rage and his relish give way, however, to an extraordinary sympathy for Hadji Murad that has nothing to do with preaching or politics and everything to do with the sheer range and power of Tolstoy's imagination. The scene where Hadji Murad gets ready to depart to rescue his family, for example, is one of pure emotion. The tug of memory and fierce attachment, the vision of his mother as young and handsome, and his son dressed and armed when he had last seen him, are set against the song of the nightingale and the noise of preparation.

Tolstoy's empathy is at its softest when he dramatises one of his central preoccupations - the innocent love of a young man for another man's wife. Early in Hadji Murad, Poltoratsky feels this love for Marya Vasilevna, just as towards the end Butler feels it for Marya Dmitrievna. This is part of the general patterning of the story in sets of doubles: the strange echoes between the fate of Sado's son and the threats to Hadji Murad's son, for example; or Nicholas I and Shamil, the despots who both order executions and experience similar uneasy feelings of lust, who exude power and pride, but whose self-delusion is almost matched with concealed guilt and self-reproach.

Hadji Murad himself stands against doubleness and patterning. Too headstrong and human, too proud and brave, too foolhardy and defenceless, too ready to let love dominate his plans, he towers above all those around him, fierce and independent. At the end, after the great quietness of the preparations for departure, just as Tolstoy has distracted us with thoughts of love, his hero's bloody and gruesome end comes as a shock. In his description of the last battle, which was also his own last description, the old master's essential genius - the art of making us see as though we were a witness - comes into its own with a pathos and majesty and pure excitement worthy of his great career.

© Colm TÀibÀn 2003 This is from Colm TÀibÀn's introduction to Hadji Murad by Leo Tolstoy published by Hesperus.