One place I had really wanted to see in Tbilisi was the Tiflis Imperial Theatre, opened in 1851 to promote Russian culture and to distract people’s attention from the North Caucasus war. The young Tolstoy had attended the Italian opera there, and I felt certain it was the same theatre that he imagined Hadji Murat visiting. Unfortunately, the building turned out to have burned down in 1874. Instead, I stopped by its original site, in Freedom Square, where Pushkin Street meets Tbilisi’s main thoroughfare, Rustaveli Avenue. Standing in the busy square, gazing from the City Assembly building, constructed in the nineteenth-century Moorish Revival style, to a Courtyard by Marriott Hotel, renovated in the early-two-thousands Courtyard by Marriott style, I felt the words “center” and “periphery” slowly losing their meaning. In Tolstoy’s career, was Tbilisi peripheral, or was it central? Tolstoy’s first novel, “Childhood,” was written in Tiflis but set in Russia. Fifty years later, “Hadji Murat” was written in Russia, but set partly in Tiflis.
Historical phenomena—revolution, modernity—are often said to start at a center, and then to spread to the peripheries. But that hierarchy or chronology—center first, periphery second—can be misleading. Technically, capitalism wasn’t born in a self-sufficient Western Europe and then transmitted to the rest of the world. It was, from the beginning, enabled by the wealth streaming into Western Europe from non-European colonies. The peripheries were always already playing a central role.
I thought of Edward Said’s “Culture and Imperialism” (1993)—a classic text that I read for the first time only after my Ukraine trip—which makes a similar case about novels. As Said points out, novels became a dominant literary form in eighteenth-century Britain and France, precisely when Britain was becoming the biggest empire in world history and France was a rival. Novels and empires grew symbiotically, defining and sustaining each other. “Robinson Crusoe,” one of the first British novels, is about an English castaway who learns to exploit the natural and human resources of a non-European island. In an influential reading of “Mansfield Park,” Said zooms in on a few references to a second, Antiguan property—implicitly, a sugar plantation—belonging to Mansfield’s proprietor. The point isn’t just that life in the English countryside is underwritten by slave labor, but that the novel’s plot itself mirrors the colonial enterprise. Fanny Price, an outsider at Mansfield, undergoes a series of harrowing social trials, and marries the baronet’s son. A rational subject comes to a scary new place—one already inhabited by other, unreasonable people—and becomes its rightful occupant. What does a story like that tell you about how the world works?
In college, I had studied Said’s earlier and more famous book, “Orientalism,” which is often assigned alongside the Russian literature of the Caucasus. (It’s about how Western descriptions of the East, whether scientific or artistic, end up reinforcing modes of Western domination.) But I had never read “Culture and Imperialism,” or considered the role of imperialism in novels like “Anna Karenina.” Post-colonial criticism, which Said helped pioneer, originally focussed on the legacy of British and French colonialism, meaning that places like Russia, Turkey, and the former Soviet Union tended to get left out. Said himself omitted Russia from his book, claiming that the subject was too big, and that, because the Russian Empire grew contiguously, and not by overseas conquest, imaginative projections didn’t play the same role as they did in Britain or in France. (Russian literature curricula are already changing, in the wake of the Ukraine war. The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, a leading professional organization, has dedicated its 2023 conference to the theme of decolonization.)
In Tbilisi, it seemed clear that the Russian Empire had required vast resources of imagination to build and to sustain—and that my favorite novels might have played a role. In “Eugene Onegin,” I kept coming back to Tatiana’s husband, a war hero “maimed in battle.” Though mentioned only briefly, he’s the catalyst for Tatiana’s transformation—the reversal that makes Onegin fall in love with her. We never do learn whom the general himself may have maimed. The maiming that we do see: Tatiana gazing emotionlessly at Onegin; Onegin corpselike and grovelling, as the general’s spurs clink in the hallway. Tatiana reminded me now of the Circassian girl in “Prisoner of the Caucasus,” who also loves in vain, until she aligns herself in a self-annihilating way with the interests of the Russian Empire. And wasn’t that Pushkin’s arc, too? Tatiana wrote a rash declaration to Onegin; Pushkin wrote a rash ode to freedom. Tatiana became the social queen of St. Petersburg, Pushkin its foremost poet.
As for “Anna Karenina,” it really does start where Onegin ends: with a flawlessly dressed heroine married to an influential imperialist. The tension between center and periphery is woven into the plot. The character of Karenin, a statesman involved in the resettlement of the “subject races,” turns out to be partly based on Pyotr Valuev, the Minister of the Interior from 1861 to 1868. Valuev oversaw the Russian appropriation of Bashkir lands around the Ural Mountains—and also issued a notorious decree restricting the publication of Ukrainian-language educational and religious texts throughout the Empire. (It reads, in part, “A separate Little Russian language never existed, does not exist, and shall not exist.”)
Unlike Tatiana, Anna doesn’t remain faithful to her empire-building husband. She leaves Karenin for Vronsky, who turns down a prestigious military post in Tashkent in order to travel with her to Italy. But the Imperial Army gets Vronsky back in the end. That final image of Anna’s lifeless head is actually a flashback Vronsky has, on his way to join a Pan-Slavic volunteer detachment fighting the Ottomans in Serbia. With Anna dead, and the love plot over, his only desire is to end his own life, and to kill as many Turks as possible in the process. To quote a recent think piece titled “Decolonizing the Mysterious Soul of the Great Russian Novel,” by Liubov Terekhova—a Ukrainian critic who was reassessing “Anna Karenina” from the United Arab Emirates, as Russia bombed her home city, Kyiv—“Russia is always waging a war where a man can flee in search of death.”
Literature, in short, looks different depending on where you read it: a subject I found myself discussing one afternoon over lunch, in a garden overlooking Tbilisi, with Anna Kats, a Georgian-born, Russian-speaking scholar of socialist architecture, who immigrated to Los Angeles as a child. We talked about the essay “Can the Post-Soviet Think?,” by Madina Tlostanova, an Uzbek-Circassian proponent of “decoloniality,” a theory that originated in Latin America around the turn of the millennium. A key tenet is that “thinking” is never placeless or disembodied. The first principle of thought isn’t, as Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am,” but “I am where I think.”
I remembered the first time I read Pushkin’s travelogue “Journey to Arzrum,” the summer I turned twenty—during my own initial foray into travel writing, for a student guidebook. I had requested an assignment in Russia, but my Russian wasn’t good enough, so I was sent to Turkey. To improve my Russian, I was reading Pushkin on night buses, feeling excited every time I saw Erzurum (Pushkin’s Arzrum) on the schedule board at intercity stations.
Turkey hadn’t been Pushkin’s first-choice destination, either—he had wanted to go to Paris. Denied official permission, he resolved to leave the country the only way he could think of—by accompanying the military in the Russo-Turkish War of 1828-29. The tone of the resulting travelogue fluctuates unsettlingly between chatty verbiage and dispassionate horror. “The Circassians hate us,” Pushkin writes at one point. “We have forced them out of their open grazing lands; their auls”—villages—“have been devastated, whole tribes have been wiped out.” Nine years after his first visit to the Caucasus, Pushkin seems to have gained some clarity on the Circassians’ plight. (In 2011, the Georgian parliament voted to characterize Russia’s actions there as a genocide.) Still, in the next sentence, he goes on to observe, implausibly, that Circassian babies wield sabres before they can talk. Later in his account, Pushkin describes a lunch with troops during which they see, on a facing mountainside, the Ottoman Army retreating from Russian Cossack reinforcements—leaving behind a “decapitated and truncated” Cossack corpse. Pushkin quickly segues to the congeniality of camp life: “At dinner we washed down Asiatic shashlik with English beer and champagne chilled in the snows of Taurida.”