Reflections on Hadji Murat

I hardly have the patience for long books anymore. It’s been like this for quite some time. When I read, it’s often short novels, poetry, or the contemplative writings of Tibetan masters, early Christian mystics, or other contemplative thinkers. Sometimes, I pick up a book and simply open it—without much thought or plan.

I’ve always had a deep love for Russian literature—for its beauty, its depth, and the way it doesn’t shy away from the rawness of the human experience.

It was this Christmas evening, almost intuitively, that I picked up Hadji Murat by Tolstoy.

It wasn’t a grand decision—no carefully planned moment with tea steaming beside me or a candle flickering nearby. I just opened the book in the quiet of the evening and began to read. Sometimes, the most profound encounters come uninvited, slipping into our lives quietly, without ceremony.

It was late in the book, during a passage where Hadji Murat finds himself alone at night, surrounded by silence and the sharp glitter of distant stars. There, in that stillness, Tolstoy sketches a moment that felt eternal. Hadji Murat is neither hero nor villain—he is simply a man, caught between allegiances, between power and powerlessness, between the raw desire to survive and the unyielding dignity he carries within him.

Tolstoy doesn’t romanticize this moment. There are no grand speeches, no overt metaphors. Instead, there’s just the cold night, the heaviness of fate pressing down on a solitary figure, and the quiet clarity that suffering often brings.

“He knew that death was near, but it did not frighten him. He was only sad that all he had done and all he had lived for would end so senselessly and so soon.”

I read those lines slowly, letting the words seep into me. When I closed the book, I felt something heavy pressing on me. I needed to move. I needed some air.

So I stepped outside into the Dutch winter evening. The sky hung heavy above me—gray, clouded, low enough to feel like it might press down onto the earth. The streetlights cast long, tired shadows, and a damp, sharp, and unmistakable cold clung to the air—unique to Dutch winters.

It felt as though Hadji Murat had stepped out of the pages of the book and walked with me through the cold. His story stayed with me, lingering in my thoughts as I walked.

In Russian literature, suffering is never avoided or explained away—it’s faced directly, carried with a kind of unflinching honesty. This reflects something essential about the Russian spirit itself.

There’s a depth in it, a devotion, a fullness that holds both strength and sorrow. It’s a spirit shaped by vast landscapes, by long winters, by a history marked by suffering and resilience.

You see it in Tolstoy, in Dostoevsky, in Turgenev. There’s a willingness to confront the darkness of the human condition without turning away, but also a quiet spirituality that threads through it all. It’s a spirit that seems to live in paradox: the transcendent and the destructive, the spiritual and the brutal, devotion and despair.

It’s as if the Russian soul holds both the cathedral and the ruin within itself—something grand and sacred standing alongside something broken and tragic. You feel it in their literature, their music, and their way of confronting life.

My grandfather, who had been part of the humanitarian resistance during the Second World War, once told me, “The only good thing about those times was that it was clear who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. But after the war, I never felt that clarity again.”

His words stayed with me. Is it clear now? How do we know if we are on the right side of history?

The story of Hadji Murat—a man caught between forces far beyond his control—felt painfully familiar in the context of what’s happening there now. Ukraine has become a chessboard where global powers act out their ambitions. On one side, NATO expansion and Western geopolitical interests; on the other, Russia’s drive to secure its geopolitical influence and protect its strategic boundaries.

But those who suffer most are not sitting in offices or war rooms. They are not the policymakers or the generals studying maps. They are the people on the ground—the families huddling in basements, the elderly trapped in freezing homes, the soldiers sent to the frontlines with little choice and even less hope. They are the children who wake to the sound of explosions and the mothers who cannot promise them safety.

War is not fought by those who declare it. It’s fought by those who cannot escape it.

The stories we hear—through headlines, through broadcasts, through carefully framed talking points—reduce this suffering to something distant, something abstract. Narratives are crafted to make sense of chaos, to assign blame, to justify actions. And in this simplification, something essential is lost: the human reality of war.

In recent years, the Western media has often shaped a singular narrative—a story not just meant to inform, but to guide emotions, to align perspectives, and to secure consent. It’s how societies are prepared for conflict. It’s how fear and moral certainty become tools.

But reality isn’t a neat story. Reality is chaotic, messy, and stubborn. It refuses to fit into the categories we try to impose on it.

And when the political winds shift, these same narratives start to crack. The certainty begins to fade. The moral clarity becomes murky. And the stories we believed start to feel thin, incomplete.

For us Europeans, it’s easy to let ourselves be swept into geopolitical currents shaped by distant powers—primarily American geopolitical interests. But we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be played apart from Russia. Geographically, historically, and spiritually, we are not so far from each other as we might like to believe.

At that moment, I turned a corner and saw a Christmas tree glowing softly in the window of a nearby house. The warm golden lights reflected gently off the glass, and a quiet stillness seemed to settle around me.

It reminded me how much we still share—this Christian legacy that shaped both Russia and the West, and this deeper humanity expressed through it. Despite our differences, despite the divisions, there are still fragile threads that connect us—threads woven from wisdom, from ancient traditions, from the teachings of saints and contemplatives, from the simple truths of our humanity.

These threads are fragile, yet they endure. They remind us that societies are not abstract entities—they are made of countless individual decisions. Every choice we make, every word we speak, every moment we act with compassion or give in to fear, contributes to the collective direction we take.

In the stillness of the night, under heavy skies and scattered lights, I thought of the words of Buddhist teachers—that the roots of war and peace lie not in nations or treaties, but in our minds. As the Dhammapada says: “The mind is everything. What you think, you become.” And “The mind is the forerunner of all things.”

If we want to change the world, we must start by changing our minds. From clarity and stillness within, peace begins to flow outward—into our words, our actions, and the way we meet others.

May we find the courage to keep our hearts open despite the vast and unyielding suffering of our world.