Russian literature. A short introduction

lengthy descriptions of customs, dress, and manners (borrowed from printed sources, but interpreted at the time as first-hand ethnography), and the mysterious, impassive hero whose strange malaise is healed by his stretch in picturesque capitivity. The poem, in the words of Susan Layton, author of a pioneering book on Russian colonial texts, encouraged a ‘restorative tourism focused on the self’, setting out a ‘romantic imaginative geography’ of Russia’s South that was to be drawn upon by countless other writers during the next three decades. Undoubtedly, Pushkin’s own exotic origins on his mother’s side (his great-grandfather Hannibal, ‘the Moor of Peter the Great’, was an African) helped establish his credibility as the portrayer of this ‘imaginative geography’: the publishers of the first edition of A Prisoner of the Caucasus used a swarthy, ‘Moorish’ picture of Pushkin as a child to illustrate the book. (Ill. 17.)

As this case shows, publishers, critics, and readers were apt to confuse authors and heroes, a confusion against which the author’s preface to Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time (1841) issued an irritable and timely warning. Partly this was because the myth of ‘restorative tourism’ itself tended to play on disguise motifs. John Buchan’s Sandy Arbuthnot (Scottish gentleman, ‘Greenmantle’, and dervish prophet) and Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli, brought up by animals, had a quaint precursor in the eponymous hero of Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinsky’s Ammalat-Bek (1832), the perfect tribesman who was in fact Russian by descent. The ultimate figure of Russian Orientalist fantasy was the Circassian, a mountain man and daredevil rider of astonishing bravery, leading a life of frugal pastoralism enlivened with bandit raids. This alternative world was not at all like the dangerously effeminate sphere of the bathhouse and the harem that was evoked in The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, enclosed and self-indulgent, or like the Russian Orientalism of the eighteenth century, lambasted by Derzhavin in his masterpiece of irony Felitsa, which showed the grandees of Catherine’s court lolling on velvet sofas in their silk robes, puffing at hookahs. The appeal of ‘manly’ and incorruptible Circassians to nineteenth-century Russian travel writers