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The Creation of an Imaginative Caucasian Geography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Susan Layton
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Extract

In a study of English letters from the seventeenth century into the romantic era, Marjorie Nicolson analyzed the rise and persistence of topoi of mountain poetry. Beginning in the 1720s, such celebrated poets as James Thomson proved able to create compelling verse about peaks that they knew only from their reading; and even after seeing stupendous rocky terrain themselves poets tended to produce works conditioned to some extent by previous literary representations. Such a dynamic, whereby one text becomes the model for another in a continuing process, also figures in the depiction of the Caucasian landscape by Russians, starting with Gavrila Derzhavin. Most Russian mountain poetry is concentrated in the 1820s, when a conception of the southern borderland as sublime wilderness was firmly established by Aleksandr Pushkin in Kavkazskii plennik and then elaborated in verse by such secondary writers as K. F. Ryleev, S. D. Nechaev, V N. Grigor'ev, and V G. Tepliakov.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , Fall 1986 , pp. 470 - 485
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1986

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References

1. Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1959), pp. 38, 122, 350Google Scholar. For acelebrated discussion of the formation process of topoi, see Curtius, E. R., Latin Literature and the European Middle Ages, trans. Trask, Willard R. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 183–202 Google Scholar.

2. See Gadzhiev, Agil’, Kavkaz v russkoi literature pervoi poloviny XIX veka (Baku: Novaiaknizhnaia tipografiia, 1982), pp. 15–19, 118–122Google Scholar; and Iusufov, R. F., Dagestan i russkaia literatura kontsa XVIII i pervoi poloviny XIX v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1964), pp. 72–75, 144–145Google Scholar.

3. Belinskii, V G., “Sochineniia Derzhavina. Biografiia pisana N. A. Polevym. 1845,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: USSR Academy of Sciences, 1953–1959), 9: 298 Google Scholar. The presence of theseserpents in Derzhavin's ode has continued to be a source of concern in Soviet criticism. See, forexample, the effort to define the image of swarming reptiles as zoologically realistic in Vinogradov, B. S., “Nachalo kavkazskoi temy v russkoi literature” in Russkaia literatura i Kavkaz, ed. Tomakhin, V. M. (Stavropol', 1974), pp. 20 and 25, n. 78Google Scholar. With the support of a citation from a 1967 report by a traveler who claims to have witnessed such a scene in Azerbaijan, Vinogradov argues that Derzhavin, unwittingly, gave an accurate picture of Caucasian snakes—engaged either in battle ormass copulation.

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5. Belinskii, “Sochineniia Aleksandra Pushkina. Stat'ia shestaia,” Polnoe sobranie l-312–2iTi.

6. A. S. Pushkin, Kavkazskii plennik in Sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh (Moscow: GIKhL, 1959–1962) 3: 118, n. 8. The full text of Derzhavin's ode, which was originally published under thetitle “Na vozvrashchenie iz Persii cherez Kavkazskie gory grafa V A. Zubova, 1797 goda,” appearsin Derzhavin, G. R., Stikhotvoreniia, 2nd ed. (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel', 1957), pp. 255–259 Google Scholar.

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9. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, pp. 278–279. As a poet who perceived thenatural sublime in mountains, Derzhavin, within the Russian context, stands in contrast to Mikhail V. Lomonosov's tendency to reserve awe for the heavens, as in the famous ode on the northern lights. Mountains in particular made no appeal to the artistic imagination of Lomonosov, who makes onlythe barest mention of them in his poetry, without supplying any descriptive detail. See, for example, his reference to the “high crests of mountains” as one feature of the diverse topography of the vastRussian empire in the second ode to Catherine the Great (1763) in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow-Leningrad: USSR Academy of Sciences, 1950–1959) 8: 788. This lack of interest in actualmountains as poetic subject matter coexists in Lomonosov's verse with conventional allusions to thebookish peaks of the classical canon (Parnassus, Mt. Aetna) and also stands in interesting correlationto the matter-of-fact, uninspired attitude toward rocky terrain that he expressed in his contributionsto geology: see Pervye osnovaniia metallurgii Hi rudnykh del in ibid., 5: 574.

10. Karamzin, N. M., Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika in Izbrannye sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow-Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1964) 1: 264 Google Scholar. The phrase blagogoveinyi uzhas appears on p. 128 in this volume.

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13. Compare the discussion of the mountainous borderland as a region neglected by poets in Gerakov, G., “Puteshestvie k kazvkazskim vodam, po Kubanskoi linii i v Taman',” Sevemyi arkhiv no. 1 (1823): 67.Google Scholar

14. Pushkin, Sobranie 3: 97.

15. This stylistic feature is not matched in the English versions of the poetry. Although literal translations would bring such instances of common vocabulary into sharper relief, they tend to maketedious reading. Thus, I have made the effort to capture elements of rhythm and rhyme. While thisnecessarily involves some paraphrasing of the original, the translations give a valid demonstrationof the general principle of shared diction in the texts of Zhukovskii and Pushkin.

16. Byron, Lord, Poetical Works, ed. Page, Frederick, new ed., corrected by Jump, John (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, p. 218 Google Scholar.

17. Pushkin, Sobranie 3: 97 and 99.

18. Blagoi, D. S., Tvorcheskii put’ Pushkina (1826–1830) (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1967), pp. 366–367 Google Scholar.

19. See V. D. Tepliakov, “Kavkaz” and S. D. Nechaev, “Vospominaniia,” both in Poety 1820–1830-kh godov, ed. L. la. Ginsburg, 2nd ed. (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel', 1972) 1: 605 and 1: 111, note 3. (This two-volume edition will be cited hereafter as Poety.) Compare also the Caucasus as “Russia's Italy” in Radozhitskii, I. T., “Doroga ot reki Dona do Georgievska na prostranstve 500verst,” Otechestvennye zapiski, no. 40 (1823): 344.Google Scholar

20. See Nechaev, , “K. G. A. R[imskomu]-K[orsykovu],” Poety, 1: 101 Google Scholar; Zaitsevskii, E. P., “Abaziia” [sic], Poety 1: 515 Google Scholar; and Shishkov, A. A., “Dagestanskaia uznitsa” in Dagestan v russkoi literature. Dorevolutsionnyi period, ed. Dalgat, Uzdiat and Kirdan, Boris (Makhachkala: Dagestanskoe knizhnoeizdatel'stvo, 1960), pp. 56, 67Google Scholar.

21. Ryleev, K. F., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 2nd ed. (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel', 1971), pp. 91–93 Google Scholar.

22. Nechaev, Poety, 1: 105.

23. In addition to the poems discussed in the present article, see also Iakubovich, L. A., “Kavkaz” (1836) Poety 2: 272 Google Scholar; and, for El'brus as a woman's secret love, the Countess Rostopchina, E. P., “El'brus i ia” (1836), Stikhotvoreniia, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg: A. Smirdin, 1857) 1: 173–175 Google Scholar. Some of Rostopchina's additional contributions to the Caucasian theme appear in this volume, pp. 263–265 and pp. 269–270.

24. Čiževskij, Dmitrij, On Romanticism in Slavic Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1957, pp. 29–35 Google Scholar.

25. Pushkin, Sobranie 3: 87–88, 115.

26. On the popularity of the “Circassian Song,” see Tomashevskii, Boris, Pushkin (Moscow-Leningrad: Akademiia Nauk, 1956) 1: 425 Google Scholar.

27. Poety 1: 387, 1: 605–607 and 2: 270.

28. See “Vid Kazbeka v polden'” in Russkiepisateli o Gruzii, ed. Vano Shaduri (Tbilisi: Zariavostoka, 1948) 1: 417–418.

29. Pushkin, Sobranie 3: 87, 117. Byron too represented the mountain as “monarch “: “Theycrowned him long ago On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds, With a diadem of snow.“

30. Pushkin, Sobranie 2: 269.

31. Poety 1: 385.

32. See the texts in Russkie pisateli o Gruzii, 1: 419–420, 422–423. On the question of datingOznobishin's poem, see Gadzhiev, Kavkaz v russkoi literature, pp. 40–41.

33. Lermontov, M. Iu., Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literature, 1983–1984) 1: 76–79 Google Scholar.

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36. Pushkin, letter to L. S. Pushkin, 24 September 1820, ibid. 9: 19.

37. Compare a similar formulation in another context in Hartman, Geoffrey H., Criticism in the Wilderness (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 23 Google Scholar.

38. Pushkin, Sobranie 2: 266. In a quatrain generally regarded as a conclusion to “Kavkaz” andgiven in notes to the poem in standard editions of the poet's works, Pushkin draws a politicallycharged correlation between the “caged” river and the Caucasian tribes: “So turbulent freedom isstrictured by law, So government torments the heart of a savage, So now does the Caucasus ranklein silence, So alien power oppresses the land.“

39. Lermontov, Sobranie 1: 43–44.

40. See the general discussion in White, Hayden, “The Forms of Wildness: Archeology of anIdea” in The Wild Man Within. An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Dudley, Edward and Novak, Maximillian E. (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh, 1972), p. 7 Google Scholar.

41. Bachelard, Gaston, La poétique de l'espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957), pp. 15–21, 191–207Google Scholar. For discussion of a poetics of “Oriental” space, elaborated in the West, see Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979, pp. 52–55 Google Scholar.

42. Bronevskii, Semen, Noveishie geograficheskie i istoricheskie izvestiia o Kavkaze (Moscow: S.Selivanovskii, 1823) l: viii Google Scholar.

43. Kosven, M. O., “Materialy po istorii etnograficheskogo izucheniia Kavkaza v russkoi nauke,” Kavkazskii etnograflcheskii sbornik (1955) 1: 289–374.Google Scholar

44. Belinskii, review of Podvigi russkikh voinov v stranakh kavkazskikh, s 1800 po 1834 god, comp. Platon Zubov, Sobranie 1: 409.

45. Unsigned review of Iakov Kosmenetskii's Zapiski ob Avarskoi ekspeditsii na Kavkaze, 1837 in Sovremennik, 26 (1851), otd. 5: 68–71.

46. For the argument that “realism” and increasingly objective perception of the Caucasuseventually triumphed over poetic fancy, see Gadzhiev, Kavkaz v russkoi literature, pp. 44–56, 67–76, 156–158; Iusufov, Dagestan i russkaia literatura, pp. 97–122, 253–258; and Vinogradov, , Kavkaz v russkoi literature 30-kh godov XIX veka. Ocherki (Groznyi: Checheno-Ingushskoe khnizhnoe izdatel'stvo, 1966)Google Scholar, passim.

47. For two examples, see Verderevskii, E., Ot Zaural'ia do Zakavkaz'ia. Iumoristicheskie, sentimental'nye i prakticheskie pis'ma s dorogi (Moscow: V Got'e 1857), pp. 116–122, 194–197Google Scholar; and Markov, Evgenii, Ocherki Kavkaza. Kartiny kavkazskoi zhizni, prirody i istorii, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg: M. O. Vol'f, 1904), pp. 579–583 Google Scholar.

48. Bodenstedt, F., “Iz poslesloviia k perevodu stikhotvorenii Lermontova” (1852) in Lermontov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1964, p. 292 Google Scholar.