This week, trying and failing to absorb the import of the bombings at the Boston Marathon, I let my unmoored thoughts travel away from questions of motive, politics, and ideology, and let them rest and rove in the fictionalized Chechnya conjured by Leo Tolstoy more than a century ago, in his final book, Hadji Murat.
One of literature’s most seductive questions was asked by the Hungarian novelist Sandor Marai in “Embers,” his exquisite novel of friendship and betrayal, published in Budapest in 1942, but not translated into English until 2001, 12 years after his death. “Do you want it to be the way it used to be?” a woman asks a man. “Yes,” he responds.“Exactly the same. The way it was last time.” This exchange occurs not between lovers but between a 91-year-old servant and the 75-year-old general she nursed as a baby, in whose household she has remained. The general wants her to set up the dining room just