Russian literature. A short introduction

closely resembled the cult of the Bedouin among British visitors to Arabia in the first half of the twentieth century (for example, T. H. Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger). The characteristic Romantic fascination with what could not be obtained applied itself here to the relationship between cultures as well as that between men and women: the ultimate object of desire perpetually defied possession. At the same time, tribes who resisted the project of colonization in which writers were themselves embroiled lent especial lustre to the process of subjugation: the valour of the invaders enhanced in proportion to the dangers associated with invasion. In the words of Susan Layton, the Caucasus was not only a ‘redemptive space’, but also a ‘killing field’, the ultimate testing ground for the Russian officer’s sword of honour.

At the same time, the more thoughtful Russian writers sensed subtleties and contradictions in Russia’s relationship with ‘subject peoples’ that made them eschew costume-dramatic representations of the confrontation between ‘civilization’ and ‘savage’. A case in point was the representation of the Cossacks, the traditional defenders of Russia’s borderlands (in Gogol’s fervently nationalist novel Taras Bulba they were shown holding the frontiers of Russia and Orthodoxy against the perfidious Poles). Contrary to nationalist myth, Cossack settlers in the Caucasus, rather than defending the front line between Russians and other ethnic groups, demonstrated how permeable it was. As a recent historian, Thomas Barrett, has wondered, ‘How “Cossack”, for example, was Iakov Alpatov of the Cossack village of Naur who twice fled for the mountains, converted to Islam, and formed a thieving band of Chechens and Cossacks in the 1850s that robbed farmsteads, stole cattle, and took captives, not only from Cossacks but also from Kalmyks and Nogais well into the steppe?’. These tensions of identity figure also in Tolstoy’s novella The Cossacks, in which the protagonist, Alpatov, finds himself confronted with a culture that is just as ‘Oriental’ and insusceptible to the gaze of the outsider as a community in Turkey or Egypt might have been. And if here the boundary between ‘Orient’ and ‘West’ had simply moved slightly further eastwards (separating Alpatov,