16 - Concluding observations

Summary

My study has stressed the cultural and psychological functions the literary Caucasus assumed as a clarifier of the semi-Europeanized Russian self during the romantic era. The coexistent complexes of inferiority and superiority to the West produced a bifurcation in the works of canonized writers. On the one side, Muslim tribal lands were glorified as citadels of free-spirited, Homeric machismo (naturally complemented by a staple supply of pliant wild maidens in the literary population). On the other side, Georgia was marginalized as a touchy oriental woman. The literary Caucasus was largely the project of Russian men, whose psychological needs it so evidently served. However, both sexes within the romantic era's élite readership could enhance their national esteem by contemplating their internally diversified orient. Effeminate Georgia fed the conceit of Russia's European stature and superiority over Asia. But knowledge of Russia's own Asian roots defied permanent repression, especially when a French consul in Tiflis or a visting marquis in St. Petersburg was ever ready to castigate the tsars' “rude and barbarous kingdom”. Under these conditions, Russians converted the Caucasian tribes into gratifying meanings about their own undeniable cultural and intellectual retardation vis-à-vis the West.

This quest for a happy accommodation of Asia was not an aberrant offshoot of the romantic era's exposure to the “wondrous” orient of la renaissance orientale. To the contrary, it represented a recurrent dilemma in Russian culture. Ramifications of admirable Caucasian primitivity can be seen, for example, in Scythianism, the pro-Asian conception of Russian identity articulated by various writers in the early twentieth century. Based on the assumption that Russia's national character was split in two, Alexander Blok's definitive verse “Scythians” celebrated precisely the elemental, non-western component, traced back to ancient nomadic hordes of the steppes.