18. A Circassian warrior: here the manly hero is portrayed by a nineteenth-century British artist.
the city-dweller, from tribal culture as represented by local settlers, rather than local settlers from tribal culture), other texts called the very existence of such a boundary into question. The most original and touching character in Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time is not the splenetic Pechorin, a close descendant of Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, but the inarticulate and intellectually commonplace Maksim Maksimych, a low-ranking army officer whose knowledge of local conditions has given him not only a brusque intolerance of ‘lazy natives’, but also an exquisitely tactful sensitivity to local beliefs. On the death of Pechorin’s short-term Circassian mistress Bela, it is Maksim Maksimych who not only makes the practical arrangements for the burial, but who offers a moving epitaph to Bela herself:
We buried her behind the fortress, by a stream and near the place where she was sitting that last time. Now the bushes have grown up round her grave, white acacia and elder. I wanted to put a cross up, but, well, you know, I felt a bit uncomfortable about it; after all, she wasn’t a Christian . . .
There is a grating contrast between this passage and Pechorin’s formulaically cynical verdict on Bela when he has tired of her: ‘The love of a female savage is scarcely more appealing than that of a young lady of high society: the ignorance and simplicity of the one grow as boring as the coquetry of the other.’ Even Pechorin’s response to Bela’s death is stereotypicaclass="underline" in the words of Maksim Maksimych, ‘He raised his head and laughed . . . That laugh raised goosepimples all over me.’ For all Pechorin’s tribal play-acting, he remains as distant from the spirit of the mountains and from that of their inhabitants as does the dilettante ‘travel writer’ narrator who discovers Pechorin’s journals and decides to make a literary sensation by publishing these, and who provides the second layer of commentary in Lermontov’s multi-perspective novel.
Lermontov’s novel, then, juxtaposed the Romantic dandy’s pose of assimilation with the mundane man of action’s respect for difference,
19. A Cossack soldier. Note the ‘orientalized’ appearance of this man and his wife, portrayed by a minor nineteenth-century Russian artist.
and the metropolitan gentleman’s mourning of the supposedly impassable barrier between ethnic groups with the lower-class settler’s conviction that such a barrier was an illusion. At the same time, Pechorin’s own confrontation with the Caucasus and the world of the Orient was not straightforward: it ended with his death in Persia, and before that he was repeatedly threatened with physical and mental disintegration. As Susan Layton has pointed out, Russian writers found it more difficult to believe in the ‘alterity of Orient’ than did their counterparts in Western Europe (with the exception of Spain, one might add), because of their country’s absorption of waves of invaders (the Pechenegs, the Tartars) and the assimilation of ‘Orientals’ into their own culture.
The labile, fluid character of Russian national feeling was never more clearly indicated than in the publication of the merchant Afanasy Nikitin’s remarkable fifteenth-century account of his visit to India, Voyage Beyond Three Seas, in Karamzin’s epoch-making History of the Russian State (1818). At the heart of a history that celebrated the creation of a puissant Russia stood a text ending with an almost exact transcription of the prayer spoken by converts to Islam. The publication of Nikitin’s narrative in Karamzin’s showed the uncertainty at the centre of Russian national identity and illustrated how the result of contact with ‘the other’ could be a sense of Russia’s closeness to the East, rather than of the gulf between Russia as part of Europe and the further territories.
This sense of closeness had resonance not only in the foundation, during the 1820s, of an outstanding tradition of scholarly investigation directed at the languages and cultures of the Eastern Empire, but also in philosophy and in artistic representations, culminating in the ‘Eurasianism’ of the early twentieth century. Blok’s important cycle of lyric poems ‘At Kulikovo Field’ (1908) was a highly original interpretation of a famous victory over the Tartars in 1380, a battle as crucial to triumphalist national history as Borodino (or, in English
tradition, Agincourt). The imagery of Blok’s cycle recalled not only the Zadonshchina, a late fourteenth-century text celebrating the victory at Kulikovo, but also The Lay of Igor’s Campaign, a still more famous twelfth-century text eulogizing a glorious Russian defeat. This intertextual double-exposure was only one of many layers of ambiguity in a text whose perspective slipped between the fourteenth century and the time of its composition, and which – as was revealed by Blok’s contemporaneous essay ‘The People and the Intelligentsia’ – was also intended as a lament for the ‘infrangible boundary’ between the ‘Tatar’ intelligentsia and the ‘true Russian’ lower classes.
In a sense, then, one could see Russian literature as at once colonial and post-colonial, speaking simultaneously from the viewpoint of conqueror and conquered. Nikolay Trubetskoy, the most original thinker in the Eurasian group, took a militantly relativist attitude to European culture – ‘European culture is obligatory only for the group of nations that created it’ – which was very much in the spirit of négritude, the self-assertion movement among Francophone African and West Indian intellectuals in the 1940s, and of African-American philosophy as well. For Trubetskoy, the diversity of Russian culture was a source of pride, as was the racial mixture in the Russian Empire. So far as landscape was concerned, though, the Eurasian sensibility was attracted to the familiar rather than the exotic. It was the steppe, rather than the impassable mountain ranges of the Caucasus, that had become the preferred imaginative space. Rivers, the only borders in the steppe, were seen not only as ‘infrangible boundaries’ between battle-lines, but also as frontiers that might be crossed by stealth, or used as trading routes. Exactly so was the Russian language, the primary symbol of national difference for a Westernized Russian such as Turgenev, now seen as permeable to the East, distinguished from other Slavonic languages by its capacity for absorbing Turkic loan-words and phonetics.