Hadji Murad

In Chapter XV of Tolstoy's late novella «Хаджи-Мурат», there is a sentence that I, with my paltry knowledge of the Russian language, find grammatically inexplicable:

Кабинет, в котором он принимал с докладом министров и высших начальников, была очень высокая комната с четырьмя большими окнами. (Emphasis added)

What is the subject of this sentence? Кабинет? Then what explains the conjugation of the verb была?

Things like this bother me. Они не дают мне спать.

But insofar as it gives us pleasure to obsess about the most peripheral things pertaining to the objects of our youthful infatuation, I find this little preoccupation worthy of a post. But then we endeavor to gild our insipid little obsessions with a veneer of significance, and so I will do the same by including a paragraph which, I think, exemplifies what I love about Tolstoy's late prose style:

Когда он в эту ночь вернулся в свою комнату и лег на узкую, жесткую постель, которой он гордился, и покрылся своим плащом, который он считал (и так и говорил) столь же знаменитым, как шляпа Наполеона, он долго не мог заснуть. Он то вспоминал испуганное и восторженное выражение белого лица этой девицы, то могучие, полные плечи своей всегдашней любовницы Нелидовой и делал сравнение между тою и другою. О том, что распутство женатого человека было не хорошо, ему и не приходило в голову, и он очень удивился бы, если бы кто-нибудь осудил его за это. Но, несмотря на то, что он был уверен, что поступал так, как должно, у него оставалась какая-то неприятная отрыжка, и, чтобы заглушить это чувство, он стал думать о том, что всегда успокаивало его: о том, какой он великий человек.

On the assumption that my few (I flatter myself) readers may not have the privilege of a familiarity with Russian, I will attempt a translation of this passage, although I cannot hope to duplicate the powerful simplicity of Tolstoy's prose - the way he skewers the philandering Tsar Nikolai I by describing his hypocrisy in the simplest possible terms:

When he returned to his room that night and lay down on his hard and narrow bed, on which he prided himself, and covered himself with his cloak, which he considered (and he said so) just as famous as Napoleon's hat, he could not fall asleep for a long time. He would by turns recall the frightened and delighted expression on the girl's pale face and the full, powerful shoulders of his habitual mistress Nelidova, and would compare the one to the other. As for the consideration that dissoluteness in a married man was not good, it did not occur to him, and he would have been very surprised, had anyone condemned him for it. But, despite the fact that he was sure that he had behaved as one should, it all still left a bad taste in his mouth, and, in order to forget this feeling, he started thinking about the thing that always calmed him down: about how great a man he was.

From this fragment and the few other translations that I have attempted, I can conclude two things, which seem contradictory, but might not be: first, that translation is incredibly difficult and that it takes a knowledge of both languages that far exceeds my own, and second, that most of the translations I've read suck at communicating the feeling that the words of the work produce in the original. I think that this feeling is essential.