Books: Abdul v. Ivan

THE SABRES OF PARADISE (495 pp.)—Lesley Blanch—Viking ($6.75).

This book’s heroes all seem to be sixfoot-three, thundering horsemen, invincible sword fighters and high-bouncing lovers; if the story were fiction, critics could complain that the earth does not breed such men. But Author Lesley Blanch has discovered an episode—Russia’s efforts to subdue the Caucasian mountain tribes during the first half of the 19th century —which abounds in authentic hell-and-crinoline raisers, and she describes it with enormous relish. Not much romanticizing is necessary; the source material is generally incandescent.

There is, for instance, this recollection of a Russian officer who helped sack an aoul, or mountain fortress, in 1832: “By the light of the burning thatch we saw a man standing in the doorway of the saklia [hut]. This man, who was very tall and powerfully built, stood quite still, as if giving us time to take aim. Then, suddenly, with the spring of a wild beast, he leapt clean over the heads of the very line of soldiers about to fire on him. and landing behind them, whirling his sword in his left hand, he cut down three of them, but was bayoneted by the fourth, the steel plunging deep into his chest. His face still extraordinary in its immobility, he seized the bayonet, pulled it out of his own flesh, cut down the man and, with another superhuman leap, cleared the wall and vanished into the darkness. We were left absolutely dumfounded.”

Hurled Heads. The leaping apparition was Shamyl the Avar. He was one of two fighting men to escape the ruins of the aoul. Two years later, in 1834, he was elected Imam of Dhagestan—the absolute spiritual and temporal ruler of most of the tribesmen in the Caucasus. He fired his subjects with a fanatic brand of Mohammedanism, and his dedicated Murids, or holy warriors, kept the armies of Czar Nicholas at bay for the next 25 years. As the years passed and the Czar’s frustration continued, Shamyl became a European hero. Russophobic Britons forgave the raider his five wives—one of them a Christian captive, well content with her lot—and honored him by dancing the Shamyl Schottische.

The wild tribesmen Shamyl ruled lived by the shashka (saber) and kindjal (long dagger). “They sabre each other in the way of friendship,” wrote the Russian Poet Lermontov, who, like Pushkin, served in the Caucasus and died in a duel there.

A proper courting gift for a Dhagestan maiden was a dozen or so severed male right hands, strung on a thong. Imaginative bloodletting was much admired; Afghanistan’s rulers executed prisoners by tying them across the muzzles of cannon (until Western diplomats complained of flying flesh) and the Shah of Persia delightedly invented another sort of extinction: extracting the teeth and hammering them into the skull.*

Shamyl had a flare for such dramatics; his men regularly lobbed the heads of spies into Russian camps. And when one faction persuaded his mother to suggest the possibility of surrender, he disappeared into a mosque for three days, then announced: “It is Allah’s will that the first person who spoke to me of submission should be punished by a hundred lashes! And this first person is my mother!” He flogged the old lady five times; then, glaring contemptuously at the tribesmen, accepted the rest of her punishment himself.

Cruel Gallantry. Shamyl respected courage above all other qualities and was capable of a cruel gallantry: once he halted the execution of a Russian prince because he liked the way the captive faced the firing squad. His character impressed itself upon his enemy, and when he was finally subdued and sent to Moscow, he was cheered the entire length of the journey. He submitted to captivity with grace, and for the rest of his life was treated as a Russian hero.

Historian Blanch (The Wilder Shores of Love) finds her subject perhaps too fascinating for an orderly, steady-pulsed narrative, and now and then the reader is vexed by her somewhat florid digressions. But the period is little known and the players absorbing. Mme. de Stael’s remark is quoted: “In Russia, if they do not attain their objective, they always go past it.” The author can be forgiven if she does both.

* The British used the cannon-muzzle method in putting down India’s bloody Sepoy Mutiny of 1764.