He is considered one of the greatest novelists in any language in all of human history, but many of Leo Tolstoy’s works remain obscure today. This short novel, published posthumously and recommended by Harold Bloom in his Western Canon, is the writer’s fictionalized account of his service in the Russian army in Chechen in the 1850s and of a Chechen soldier, Hadji Murád, who defects to the enemy with tragic results. Brutal and uncompromising, this remains a work of startling insight into an ethnic war that continues to this day. Russian writer COUNT LEV (“LEO”) NIKOLAYEVICH TOLSTOY (1828-1910) is best known for his novels War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877).