Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

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.)