Russian literature. A short introduction

and the metropolitan gentleman’s mourning of the supposedly impassable barrier between ethnic groups with the lower-class settler’s conviction that such a barrier was an illusion. At the same time, Pechorin’s own confrontation with the Caucasus and the world of the Orient was not straightforward: it ended with his death in Persia, and before that he was repeatedly threatened with physical and mental disintegration. As Susan Layton has pointed out, Russian writers found it more difficult to believe in the ‘alterity of Orient’ than did their counterparts in Western Europe (with the exception of Spain, one might add), because of their country’s absorption of waves of invaders (the Pechenegs, the Tartars) and the assimilation of ‘Orientals’ into their own culture.

The labile, fluid character of Russian national feeling was never more clearly indicated than in the publication of the merchant Afanasy Nikitin’s remarkable fifteenth-century account of his visit to India, Voyage Beyond Three Seas, in Karamzin’s epoch-making History of the Russian State (1818). At the heart of a history that celebrated the creation of a puissant Russia stood a text ending with an almost exact transcription of the prayer spoken by converts to Islam. The publication of Nikitin’s narrative in Karamzin’s showed the uncertainty at the centre of Russian national identity and illustrated how the result of contact with ‘the other’ could be a sense of Russia’s closeness to the East, rather than of the gulf between Russia as part of Europe and the further territories.

This sense of closeness had resonance not only in the foundation, during the 1820s, of an outstanding tradition of scholarly investigation directed at the languages and cultures of the Eastern Empire, but also in philosophy and in artistic representations, culminating in the ‘Eurasianism’ of the early twentieth century. Blok’s important cycle of lyric poems ‘At Kulikovo Field’ (1908) was a highly original interpretation of a famous victory over the Tartars in 1380, a battle as crucial to triumphalist national history as Borodino (or, in English