And everywhere are fatal passions, And there is no salvation from destiny.
An elder Gypsy proves an Enlightenment raisonneur who, quaintly, has even heard of Ovid (though not by name: he knows him only as a political exile banished from the Roman South to the Caucasian ‘North’). Still more striking is the muting of local colour through detail chosen for its relative mundanity. The Gypsy retinue includes a shackled dancing-bear such as might have been seen in many Russian villages; it is Aleko, the outsider, who is a wide-eyed idealist, his Gypsy wife Zemfira who acts out of practical self-interest. Similarly, in his travelogue Journey to Erzerum (1829), Pushkin wearily recorded the tedious difficulties of passing through the Caucasus: the unreliable transport and rapacious drivers; the dirty hotels and unattractive women; the sustained hostility of the Turks and the Caucasian tribesmen. The heroism and uprightness of the invading Russian forces can only emerge to advantage by comparison; the emphasis on the prospect of salvation through military intervention is the major difference between this text and Alexander William Kingslake’s Eothen (1841), the jaded tone being common to both. In the words of the linguist and scholar Peter France, Journey to Erzerum ‘pulls the carpet
from under the Romantic primitivism of much Caucasian writing [ . . . ] meant as a parody of Châteaubriand’s Itinéraire de Paris à Jerusalem, it mocks the clichés of such travel literature’. At the same time, the text was in tune with the official ideologies of expanding Russian imperialism, according to which, in the geographer Mark Bassin’s words, the ‘stagnation’ with which Asia was credited ‘appeared to offer a suitably backward contrast to the creative and progressive dynamism of the West, a dynamism which Russia now claimed as its own’.
Yet so far as the imaginative world of Empire went, Journey to Erzerum was aberrant (as Pushkin himself seemed to sense: the text was published only in part before his death). Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s belief in the ‘noble savage’ still seduced many in the 1830s and 1840s; and the search for the exotic that characterized Romantic literature everywhere was, in Russia turned inward and applied to those parts of the Empire that had been colonized recently enough to have maintained a strong and sometimes threatening local identity. Of these, the most attractive were the Crimea, and especially the Caucasus, which had the virtue of combining an ‘Oriental’ flavour with the spectacular scenery that had attracted Western searchers for the picturesque to the Alps. Pushkin himself, in Prisoner of the Caucasus (1822) and Fountain of Bakhchisarai (1823), had relocated Byronic dramas of erotic fascination and cultural entanglement from the Ottoman Empire to the Crimea and the Caucasus. Of the two texts, the more seductive for many modern readers is The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. The central conflict (a jealous intrigue in the harem) is not only more fully developed in psychological terms, but lays bare powerful myths about women as the symbols of national identity (a fiery and dusky Georgian is pitted against a virtuous blonde Pole, as symbol of Western Europe). Moreover, the verse is not only beautifully lush but free of the Byronic cliché (mountains as ‘kings of the wilds’, and so on) that is calqued in Prisoner of the Caucasus. But it was the latter poem that was the more significant for Pushkin’s contemporaries: indeed, the poem can be said to have initiated the literary ‘discovery of the Caucasus’. Readers were enraptured by the
lengthy descriptions of customs, dress, and manners (borrowed from printed sources, but interpreted at the time as first-hand ethnography), and the mysterious, impassive hero whose strange malaise is healed by his stretch in picturesque capitivity. The poem, in the words of Susan Layton, author of a pioneering book on Russian colonial texts, encouraged a ‘restorative tourism focused on the self’, setting out a ‘romantic imaginative geography’ of Russia’s South that was to be drawn upon by countless other writers during the next three decades. Undoubtedly, Pushkin’s own exotic origins on his mother’s side (his great-grandfather Hannibal, ‘the Moor of Peter the Great’, was an African) helped establish his credibility as the portrayer of this ‘imaginative geography’: the publishers of the first edition of A Prisoner of the Caucasus used a swarthy, ‘Moorish’ picture of Pushkin as a child to illustrate the book. (Ill. 17.)
As this case shows, publishers, critics, and readers were apt to confuse authors and heroes, a confusion against which the author’s preface to Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time (1841) issued an irritable and timely warning. Partly this was because the myth of ‘restorative tourism’ itself tended to play on disguise motifs. John Buchan’s Sandy Arbuthnot (Scottish gentleman, ‘Greenmantle’, and dervish prophet) and Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli, brought up by animals, had a quaint precursor in the eponymous hero of Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinsky’s Ammalat-Bek (1832), the perfect tribesman who was in fact Russian by descent. The ultimate figure of Russian Orientalist fantasy was the Circassian, a mountain man and daredevil rider of astonishing bravery, leading a life of frugal pastoralism enlivened with bandit raids. This alternative world was not at all like the dangerously effeminate sphere of the bathhouse and the harem that was evoked in The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, enclosed and self-indulgent, or like the Russian Orientalism of the eighteenth century, lambasted by Derzhavin in his masterpiece of irony Felitsa, which showed the grandees of Catherine’s court lolling on velvet sofas in their silk robes, puffing at hookahs. The appeal of ‘manly’ and incorruptible Circassians to nineteenth-century Russian travel writers
17. Igor Geitman, engraving after anonymous drawing of Pushkin as a small boy. Heavy cross-hatching gives Pushkin a dark-skinned, ‘African’ appearance.
closely resembled the cult of the Bedouin among British visitors to Arabia in the first half of the twentieth century (for example, T. H. Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger). The characteristic Romantic fascination with what could not be obtained applied itself here to the relationship between cultures as well as that between men and women: the ultimate object of desire perpetually defied possession. At the same time, tribes who resisted the project of colonization in which writers were themselves embroiled lent especial lustre to the process of subjugation: the valour of the invaders enhanced in proportion to the dangers associated with invasion. In the words of Susan Layton, the Caucasus was not only a ‘redemptive space’, but also a ‘killing field’, the ultimate testing ground for the Russian officer’s sword of honour.
At the same time, the more thoughtful Russian writers sensed subtleties and contradictions in Russia’s relationship with ‘subject peoples’ that made them eschew costume-dramatic representations of the confrontation between ‘civilization’ and ‘savage’. A case in point was the representation of the Cossacks, the traditional defenders of Russia’s borderlands (in Gogol’s fervently nationalist novel Taras Bulba they were shown holding the frontiers of Russia and Orthodoxy against the perfidious Poles). Contrary to nationalist myth, Cossack settlers in the Caucasus, rather than defending the front line between Russians and other ethnic groups, demonstrated how permeable it was. As a recent historian, Thomas Barrett, has wondered, ‘How “Cossack”, for example, was Iakov Alpatov of the Cossack village of Naur who twice fled for the mountains, converted to Islam, and formed a thieving band of Chechens and Cossacks in the 1850s that robbed farmsteads, stole cattle, and took captives, not only from Cossacks but also from Kalmyks and Nogais well into the steppe?’. These tensions of identity figure also in Tolstoy’s novella The Cossacks, in which the protagonist, Alpatov, finds himself confronted with a culture that is just as ‘Oriental’ and insusceptible to the gaze of the outsider as a community in Turkey or Egypt might have been. And if here the boundary between ‘Orient’ and ‘West’ had simply moved slightly further eastwards (separating Alpatov,