1 - Introduction

Summary

The Russian empire included realms so diverse as Poland and Central Asia in the nineteenth century. But among all the assertions of imperial tsarist authority, the conquest of the Caucasus stimulated an incomparably rich body of literature and an exceptionally lively engagement with questions of Russian cultural identity. This book explores those literary and cultural ramifications of empire-building by focusing on Russian perceptions of the Caucasus as the orient. Russia's periphery offered other candidates for orientalization, as the Crimea illustrates. On her first visit to this land of Muslim Tatars which she annexed in 1783, Catherine II proclaimed it a “fairy tale from The Thousand and One Nights.” The Crimea would indeed acquire an aura of eastern exoticism in Russian literature and récits de voyage. The Caucasus, however, upstaged its rivals in the oriental domain. The explanation lies largely in historical timing: aggressive tsarist penetration into the Caucasus in the early decades of the nineteenth century coincided with the rise of Russian romanticism, a cultural phenomenon which entailed an extensive interplay with Europe' renaissance orientate. The processes of empire-building brought an unprecedented number of Russians to the Caucasus as civil servants, travelers, soldiers and exiles (so many of the latter, in fact, that the territory was nicknamed the “southern Siberia” already in the time of Alexander I). Given these new contacts, Russians conversant with western orientalia and the European imperial manner in Asia readily latched onto the Caucasus as their “own” orient.

But if frequently enough remarked in Russian literary criticism since the 1920s, the Caucasus' oriental status has not been thoroughly probed as a cultural offshoot of imperialism.