Canadian Slavonic Papers

Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy by SusanLaytonReview by: Victor O. BuyniakCanadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. 37, No. 1/2 (March-June1995), pp. 271-273Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40870709 .

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BOOK REVIEWS 271

insight into the iconography of this rarely discussed area. Nancy Condee's and Vladimir Padunov's article, "The ABC of Russian Consumer Culture: Readings, Ratings and Real Estate" is by far the most interesting. It deals with several aspects of Russian consumer culture, among them advertising, the rise and fall of publications, the film industry and the emergence of a new fascinating phenomenon: art patronage. It is a revealing and very well-documented article which discusses recent phenomena in popular culture in an engaging manner. The article finalizes a provocative and insightful discussion of the changing status of cultural objects and practices in an economic order that has collapsed.

Although the book looks like a rather eclectic combination of articles referring to different areas of expertise, its contributors have successfully managed to explain the ways in which incompatible cultural texts illustrate a recurrent tension between two opposing tendencies in Russia today: the impulse* to eradicate the cultural hieroglyphics of the Soviet past and the compulsion to reinscribe those sacred images onto contemporary texts. Of interest for scholars in several disciplines, Soviet Hieroglyphics provides many insights into recent Russian visual culture. The only disapproving comment elicited by the reading of this book is that many other aspects of popular culture in Russia have been left untouched, probably patiently awaiting another publication opportunity.

Janina Falkowska, University of Western Ontario

Susan Layton. Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xi, 354 pp. Map. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $59.95, cloth.

The recorded history of the Caucasus and the surrounding area goes back to antiquity and predates the emergence of the earliest organized Slavic states by centuries if not by millennia. The region had been a northern periphery of the Mediterranean civilization yet the nineteenth century witnessed its conquest by the Russian Empire whose official policy was to civilize it. The author takes a synthesizing view of how Russian literature of the time reflected the imperial thrust into this area. The book is based on extensive study of primary and secondary sources and represents the state of research in the 1980s and 1990s. It uses the latest social, philosophical and literary theories, among them those of Mikhail Bakhtin, especially with respect to their impact on the interpretation of history.

Plans for territorial expansion into Asia date back to the times of Ivan IV. Peter I had his own political interests in the Caucasus, but it was Catherine II with her "oriental project" to access the Indian Ocean who started the modern push into the Caucasus. Some nineteenth-century Russian historians contend that there was no planned conquest of the region and that individual rulers or policy makers effected the action in a haphazard way. Few contemporary intellectuals in Russia questioned the legitimacy and moral right of the great "civilized" powers to deny the small Asian tribes the right to national self-determination.

Individual descriptions of the Caucasian land and peoples began appearing in Russian literature during the eighteenth century. But these were unrealistic accounts since the authors never visited the region. The first work that made an impact on the reading public was A. Pushkin's poem "Prisoner of the Caucasus" (1822). Pushkin relied quite a bit on the description of the Caucasus in the works of his predecessors, among them Byron, Derzhavin and Zhukovsky. At the time, this work provided contemporary readers not only with escapist entertainment and aesthetic pleasure but

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272 BOOK REVIEWS

also with a wealth of ethnographic material about the land and its people. Layton explains that readers never sufficiently recognized the fact that the poet invented rather than recorded his Caucasian experience. The poem started further literary emulations by Pushkin's followers. It also created a perception that, with the annexation of Georgia in 1801 and with General A. Ermolov's advance into the Caucasus, the region had become safe for tourism, especially if one were taking the "cure" at Piatigorsk and not venturing into territory where military campaigns were still being conducted. Thus, to relieve boredom at home, the élite could add another exotic place to their foreign travels.

Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky was forced to fight for the cause of Empire in the Caucasus against his will. In his works, he dealt carefully with the moral dilemma of Russia's conquest in the name of civilization, lest he provoke the almighty censors. Like Pushkin, he created a romantic, unrealistic world of the highlanders in his semi- fictional work "Ammalat-Bek" (1832), which became popular among the reading public. Although M. Lermontov' s long poem "Izmail-Bey," published posthumously in 1843, did not make the same impact on readers, its romanticizing of the Caucasus and its "fiery" heroines and heroes contributed to the myth of a wild and exotic land. Many a young man from the nobility volunteered for military service in the Caucasus under the influence of these works.

The nineteenth century brought more oriental scholarship which generally approved of Russia's Asiatic conquest as a civilizing activity. There were also works in Western European languages on the topic. But for a long time readers preferred to get "the facts" about these exotic places from literary rather than from scientific works. Some change in this romantic approach started to be felt after Pushkin's publication of the travelogue Journey to Arzrum (1829) and Tolstoy's Caucasian stories of the early 1850s. Lermontov' s other Caucasian works, in particular the novel, A Hero of Our Tune, and the poem, "Valerik," also started to sway the public's romantic perception of the Caucasus. The romantic myth was further eroded by the appearance of Tolstoy's novel about the frontier life of the Caucasian Cossacks in 1863. It was a parody of the romantic treatment of the region by his predecessors. Cossacks contained a realistic description of life, it condemned war as immoral, but it retained a non-committal attitude vis-à-vis the question of Russia's military involvement in the Caucasus.

In the 1850s Shamil became an exotic personality for the reading public. The literary works by other authors of the nineteenth century, among them women, continued the romantic trend and many of them approved of Russia's benevolent and civilizing impact on the Caucasus. Their approach was sentimental rather than realistic and they tried to see in Russia's conquest a conflict between Orthodoxy and Islam, despite the fact that there were some old Christian countries in the Caucasus. In portraying the natives, writers usually exalted the Caucasian women while demeaning the men as cruel, barbarian and savage. Tsarist soldiers and the Cossacks were presented as seductive protectors of oriental women from their male countrymen.

But it was Tolstoy's Hadji Murai, written between 1896 and 1904, which became an open condemnation of Russia's imperialist policy against the Caucasian nations. It was also an indictment of Russia's upper classes and their descendants for collaborating with the régime in the implementation of this policy or tacitly approving it. The novel was intended (linguistically, stylistically and in subject matter) for the guilt-ridden élite and not the newly literate readers to whom Tolstoy was generally catering at the time. In the novel, both Nicholas I and Shamil are presented as players in a political game of self-aggrandizement, megalomania and hypocrisy while the main character is a pawn in their game. Unlike previous literary

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BOOK REVIEWS 273

works about the Caucasus, Hadji Murat shows a Russia divided into two classes and cultures: the illiterate peasants and the élite.

In her study, Layton offers a number of innovative interpretations of individual works, symbols, elements or observations in Russian literature about the Caucasus. She compares the Caucasus with an empty temple, devoid of native population, reserved for Russian worshippers as a place of solitary contemplation (p. 61). She contends that writers of the time somehow symbolically "feminized" the various aspects of the Caucasus in their works, both in a positive and in a negative sense (p. 181). According to her, the essence of the poem "Valerik" is "Lermontov's song of self-destructive Russian bestiality in the Edenic Caucasus" (p. 228). In Hadji Murat, Tolstoy stigmatizes the written word as false in comparison with the spoken one (pp. 274-76). Tolstoy was conscious of his own power of artfully "manipulating" the written word in order to slant his material in the name of moral truth (p. 279). In addition to Russian authors, Layton mentions and sometimes briefly discusses pertinent works of Western and neighbouring countries, especially those from the Caucasus.

In a book of such length a few minor things could be changed or improved, e.g., the addition of another, more detailed and contemporary map of the region. All the names and titles of works could have been included in the index (e.g., Shota Rustavelli and his poem The Man in the Panther Skin [p. 207]; Inal Kanukov [p. 291]; Taras Shevchenko's poem, "The Caucasus" [p. 325]; to mention only a few). Some transliteration errors could have been eliminated. The twelfth-century "rusitsi" should not have been made equivalent to the modern "Russians" (p. 322). But on the whole, this is a first-class synthesizing scholarly study on the topic.

Victor O. Buyniak, University of Saskatchewan

Marc Raeff. Political Ideas and Institutions in Imperial Russia. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994. xiii, 389 pp. $49.95, cloth.

Few scholarly careers are as impressive as Marc Raeffs, Bakhmeteff Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies at Columbia University. The author of over three hundred and forty books, articles and book reviews, Raeff has produced a new book, Political Ideas and Institutions in Imperial Russia. Raeffs writings on topics in Russian history (e.g., public administration, peasant revolts, intellectual life, territorial expansion, and the post- 1917 emigration, among others) have had a seminal impact on a whole generation of scholars. His latest book, a collection of some of his more important pieces, continues this process.

Political Ideas and Institutions in Imperial Russia, a "scholarly Odyssey," to use the author's description, that spanned four decades, gathers together twenty essays on diverse subjects, ranging from the Pugachev rebellion to A.I. Turgenev and his circle, that reflect Raeffs preoccupation with political ideas and change in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia. He considers the problems of imperial Russian politics and administration, analyzes Russia's intellectual history and places these unique Russian phenomena in the context of the Central and Western European experience. Certain essays stand out. For example, in chapter 3, Raeff takes up a familiar question and provides a lucid, original explanation of the peculiarities of Russian liberalism and of why it had such difficulty thriving in tsarist Russia. In chapter 7, while discussing the myriad official and semi-official draft plans for political reform of the autocracy, he draws a brilliant characterization of the three levels of Russian officialdom. On the bottom, dividing the empire's subjects from the Tsar, were the

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