Russian literature. A short introduction

of the Russian Empire of Pushkin’s day. ‘The Finns’ stand also for the Balts (Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians), and the Georgians and Armenians are not mentioned. This selection of ethnic groups is not at all accidental. Reference to the Georgians and the Armenians, literate peoples with a long history of Christianity, would have unsettled Pushkin’s representation of his poetry as a means of transmitting civilized values to savage peoples (the adjective ‘savage’ is in fact applied to the Tungus in ‘Monument’). Entertaining a Byronic fascination with Oriental exoticism in his early twenties, Pushkin had, from the point at which he wrote The Gypsies (1824), taken an ironical view of this, seeking to play down picturesque differences of ethnicity. The conclusion of The Gypsies stresses the universality of moral problems:

And everywhere are fatal passions, And there is no salvation from destiny.

An elder Gypsy proves an Enlightenment raisonneur who, quaintly, has even heard of Ovid (though not by name: he knows him only as a political exile banished from the Roman South to the Caucasian ‘North’). Still more striking is the muting of local colour through detail chosen for its relative mundanity. The Gypsy retinue includes a shackled dancing-bear such as might have been seen in many Russian villages; it is Aleko, the outsider, who is a wide-eyed idealist, his Gypsy wife Zemfira who acts out of practical self-interest. Similarly, in his travelogue Journey to Erzerum (1829), Pushkin wearily recorded the tedious difficulties of passing through the Caucasus: the unreliable transport and rapacious drivers; the dirty hotels and unattractive women; the sustained hostility of the Turks and the Caucasian tribesmen. The heroism and uprightness of the invading Russian forces can only emerge to advantage by comparison; the emphasis on the prospect of salvation through military intervention is the major difference between this text and Alexander William Kingslake’s Eothen (1841), the jaded tone being common to both. In the words of the linguist and scholar Peter France, Journey to Erzerum ‘pulls the carpet