The Greek

What about Nick? Did you like him/feel for him? Do you think the horribly racist stuff Frank and Cora said about him was just supposed to be "typical of the time" or did you get the feeling it was supposed to reflect especially poorly on Frank's and Cora's characters?

Frank and Cora

What did you think of Frank and Cora's relationship? Did you want them to get away with it and live happily ever after, or did you want them to fall apart and get caught?

Those darn cats!

What did you make of all the cat imagery? Cora is called a "hell-cat." The house cat shorts out the electricity, and there are the big cats at the end that play a part in sealing Frank's doom.

Postman — Intense?

Wow. What did you think? Was "Postman" a page-turner for you or did you find the plot implausible?

The end

Was Hadji Murad a hero? Was he ultimately foolish in his attempt to escape the Russians and rescue his family?

Other Tolstoy?

Have you read anything else by Tolstoy? I read "Anna Karenina" a long time ago. I remember liking it. My volume containing "Hadji Murad" has a bunch of Tolstoy's other short fiction, so I started reading "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," which is fascinating. This might be the momentum I need to finally tackle "War and Peace."

Stronger than hate

This passage after the destruction of the Chechen village really struck me:

No one spoke of hatred for the Russians. The feeling experienced by all the Chechens, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hate. It was not hatred, for they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings; but it was repulsion, disgust, and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures, that the desire to exterminate them — like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders, or wolves — was as natural an instinct as that of self-preservation.

You almost can't help thinking about current conflicts, like the Palestinians and Israel, or the American war on terror.