Land, Piety and Peoplehood Book

Like many people, I associate thistles with the Scottish Highlands. I think of them as the tough warriors of the plant world, fending off grazing animals with their spiny leaves, and able to reroot themselves when they've been ploughed up, a bit like Scottish clansmen over the centuries, rebuilding their fiefs after they'd been attacked by their enemies.

Lev Tolstoy begins his story about Hadji Murat by contemplating a thistle in a ploughed field. This thistle, which he tells us is a Tartar thistle, had been upturned by the plough but nevertheless had managed to take root and grow again, indomitable.

The tale he goes on to tell echoes that introduction nicely. It is set in the Chechen area of the Caucasus mountains in the 1850s, where the Russian Army were trying to gain a foothold and where they came up against the prickly and indomitable Tartar chief Hadji Murat, who, I couldn't help noticing, sometimes wore a richly coloured tunic like the Tartar thistle in bloom, while at others, he wore garments as white as thistledown. And though he's more subtle with his parallels than I am, Tolstoy does a good job of painting the Russian army and their Cossacks as a giant plough leveling Chechen land and destroying its villages and their people.

Hadji Murat has more to contend with than the Russian plough however. He's also in a power struggle with other Chechen chiefs. To find out if he is as indomitable as the thistle, you'll have to read this fine story for yourselves.

In the meantime, a little diversion for you (actually Hadji Murat is good at diversionary tactics (and when I first tried typing Hadji Murat, it came up as 'Andy Murray' who could double as a Scottish chieftain!), but to return to the diversion: while I was thinking about thistles and Scottish Highlanders and Tartars, I wondered if there might be a connection between the tartan cloth Highlanders wore and the Tartar people. A little wiki search revealed that the word tartan comes from Old French, tertaine, a kind of cloth, which may be related to tartarin, a rich fabric that used to be imported from the east through Tartary.
That's what comes of thinking about thistles.