Khadzhi-Murat, Tolstoi's last major fiction, stands alone in his oeuvre in flagrant violation of his late ethical and aesthetic standards—an unprecedentedly dark apprehension of the human condition and a reconceptualization of piety. At its heart are silences—literal, near-, figurative, and implicit—in unspoken critique of all nontrivial language, narrative, moralizing, and teaching. Silence first strikes the reader in the hero's refusal to murmur against God as he dies, but retrospectively turns up everywhere, despite the obvious presence of lots of words: in the peculiar plot that has nothing to say; in the refusal to perform the usual Tolstoian adjudication of the disparate viewpoints depicted; in the hero's childhood reminiscences, hidden from listeners even as the essential in them is hidden from him; in the painful taciturnity of God himself, which, like the other core themes, is purposefully barely mentioned. Khadzhi-Murat's, indirection enacts an intuition whose mere assertion would fail, since it is an intuition about assertability itself. Something central has shifted for Tolstoi; now it is through silence and absence—the gaps in the said and the sayable—that the most important truths come to us, hence that is the only truthful way to inscribe them.