Imperial Borderlands in Russian Literature

CONQUERING THE ORIENT: ALEKSANDR BE STUZHEV-MARLINSKY ’ S AMMALAT-BEK (1832)

After securing the Crimea and the Black Sea coast, the Russian Empire began to conquer the Caucasus.

The war had a profound psychological impact: it gave rise to eth­nographic and political studies and outstanding literary works, from Aleksandr Pushkin’s “Captive of the Caucasus” (Kavkazskii plennik, 1822) to Lev Tolstoi’s Hadji Murad (1904). While official circles in St Petersburg minimized or denied the reality of the violence, claiming that the government was merely extending Christianity and the ben­efits of stable rule to the area, many Decembrists who served their sentence in the army formed a different opinion.

Russia as Double-Headed Janus

Descriptions of the war reflected views of Russia’s mission as a super­power. The empire had emerged from the Napoleonic wars as Europe’s dominant land power and as an arbiter in international affairs. Intellectuals were aware that its political strength ought to be complemented by an equally brilliant cultural identity. Educated Rus­sians knew Madame de Stael’s influential De IAllemagne (1813), in which she maintained that the literature of a nation should reflect its indigenous characteristics and national genius, and Johann Peter Friedrich Ancillon’s Analyse de l’idee de la Iitterature nationale (1817), in which the author insisted that only fully developed nations were capa­ble of a truly national literature. What, then, was Russia’s national genius? What cultural path was it following? “The philosophical epoch,” as the 1830s and 1840s have been called, sought the answer in the writings of German Romanticism, particularly of Schelling.⁶ The Romantic idea of organic wholeness derived from this philosophy was used to support both the idea of expansionism and that of slow, “natural” growth; it was claimed that Russia’s destiny, as demonstrated by historical laws and geopolitical facts, lay in assimilating its southern and eastern regions while preserving and spreading its cultural heri­tage.

Many prominent figures subscribed to the idea of Russia’s great Eastern mission. Count Sergei Uvarov presented what has been dubbed the “classic statement of purpose by an early nineteenth­century Russian orientalist” in 1810 with his “Projet d’une academie asiatique.”⁷ Since, he urged, it was Russia’s fate to act as mediator between Europe and the Orient, serious study of Asia was vital on both political and civilizational grounds: “jamais la raison d’etat n’a ete aussi bien d’accord avec les grandes vues de la civilisation morale.”⁸ In 1833 Bestuzhev-Marlinsky described Russia’s own nature as that of “a double-headed Janus” that “gazed simultaneously on Asia and Europe; her mode of existence comprised a link between the settled activity of the West and the nomadic indolence of the East.”⁹ Some saw Russia’s future literary greatness as conditional upon fulfilling this Eastern mission. Shevyrev said that “a Russian wishing to acquire European fame has no other road but to the Orient... Only the Russians are in a position to explain the Orient to the Europeans, and indeed they have been created for the purpose of being a conductor [between East and West].”¹⁰ Lermontov caught the same mood on the eve of his departure for the Caucasus in 1837 when he wrote to a friend: “I shall write to you about the country of marvels, the East. Napoleon’s words console me: ‘Les grands noms se fait a l’Orient.’”¹¹ Such personal testimonies both reflected and shaped imperial atti­tudes. They show how the desire for personal fame became fused with the perceived need for imperial aggrandisement and how both could appear to be dependent upon the subjugation and ensuing cultural interaction with what has been called “the domestic Orient of the Russians.”¹² Territorial acquisition became associated with an enlarged national and personal self-awareness while at the same time holding out the promise of a brilliant military or literary career.

The idea of intercourse with Eastern peoples as a means of spiritual regeneration could appeal for sanction to Western attitudes, where enchantment with the Orient was a popular literary topic. In Romantic literature it could sometimes be explained by the idea of the moral and cultural, though not military, superiority of the East. Victor Hugo, in the preface to his Les Orientales, which caused a furore when it appeared in 1829 following the successful Greek war of independence against the Turks, claimed that “for both empires and literatures, the Orient is called upon to play a role in the West. Already the memorable Greek war has made all peoples turn in this direction. The equilibrium of Europe appears ready to break; the European status quo, already rotten to the core, is cracking on Constantinople’s side. The entire continent is leaning in the direction of the Orient. We will see great things. The old Asiatic barbarism is not perhaps as deprived of supe­rior men as our civilization believes.”¹³

West and East in Ammalat-Bek

Bestuzhev, the Decembrist conspirator whose frank confession of his role in the uprising was rewarded by the tsar with permission to publish under the pseudonym Marlinsky, crystallized many of these pro­Oriental attitudes in his prose.¹⁴ After serving two years of exile for his role in the revolt of 1825, he was assigned at his own request to military service in the Caucasus, joining many of his co-conspirators.¹⁵ His Cau­casian stories won him a phenomenal popularity, in particular Ammalat- Bek (1832), Mulla-Nur (1836), Letters from Dagestan (Pisma iz Dages- tana, 1831), and nine ethnographic descriptions of Azerbaidzhan (1834-36).¹⁶ He learned Azeri Turkish, the dominant language in the region at the time, which contemporary Russians termed “Tatar,” and developed wide contacts among the people. As the most fashionable writer of his day, a Russian Kipling, he exerted enormous influence on officers of the army, who viewed him as their guide in regional affairs.

Ammalat-Bek brought Marlinsky his greatest fame. It describes the fate of Ammalat-Bek, a young Muslim chieftain who is captured and later pardoned by General Yermolov. The youth is befriended by a Russian officer, Lieutenant Verkhovsky, who undertakes his reeduca­tion through readings in European literature. Tribesmen, however, conspire to turn him against the Russians. He kills Verkhovsky and from that moment fights against the tsarist army. The killing is fol­lowed by the disinterment and decapitation of the body - an act so horrible that he is shunned by his own people. He dies torn between two civilizations.

This action is framed by a narrative that describes the conflict between the “European” mentality (represented by Russia) and the “Asiatic” (the Caucasus), making it the “type of story which belongs to the mythology of imperialism.”¹⁸ Marlinsky, as Layton has shown, constructs the Orient as a place of religious bigotry, slave trafficking, sensual indolence, and political despotism, while omitting any men­tion of serfdom or despotism in Russia.¹⁹ The wise general has his doubts about releasing Ammalat-Bek because “A European can be convinced, admonished, touched by gentleness, won over by forgive­ness, captured by prosperity, but for an Asiatic all this is a clear sign of weakness, and out of pure humanity I am mercilessly ruthless with them. One death will preserve a hundred Russians from death and a thousand Muslims from treason.”²⁰

Verkhovsky nonetheless convinces the general that the young man might be influenced by kindness and enlightenment. Schooling at first appears to produce the desired results as the pupil learns how to “think,” and realizes from “descriptions of the earth” that “the Tatars occupy a corner of the world, that they are pitiful savages in compar­ison with European peoples and that no one spares a thought for their aggressors or for them as a whole.”²¹ The device of the diary that records these admissions of Russian superiority, however unconvincing psychologically, reinforces the political message that the imperialist monologue has now penetrated native consciousness.

Critics have drawn attention to the fact that Ammalat-Bek is an inventory of Oriental stereotypes: he is innocent and uncomprehend­ing (the narrator compares him to a falcon that does not understand why it is hooded and a horse that has no idea why people shoe it),²² and his behaviour is unstable (first passionate and uncontrolled, then suspicious and deceitful). These qualities of mind and temperament, which Verkhovsky ascribes to all the mountain people, have, readers learn, been “imbibed with his mother’s milk and the air of his native land. The barbaric despotism of Persia, which ruled Azerbaidzhan for so long, developed the lowest instincts and the most contemptuous intrigues in the Caucasian Tatars.”²³ The same qualities are in fact unhesitatingly assigned to the entire Orient. Verkhovsky, in preparing to leave the Caucasus, says:

I am very glad to be leaving Asia, the cradle of the human race, where mind has remained in its infancy. The immobility of the Asiatic way of life over so many centuries is astonishing. All attempts at improvement and education have been smashed to pieces against Asia: it belongs most assuredly to space rather than time. The Indian Brahmin, the Chinese mandarin, the Persian bek and the chieftain of the Caucasian mountains are today exactly the same as they have been for two thousand years. The swords and flails of the subjugators left no scars on them, as though on the surface of water; books and the examples of missionaries have not made the slightest impression. Sometimes they changed their prophets, but they never acquired foreign knowledge or virtues. I am quitting a fruitful land, to return to a land of labour, that great inventor of everything useful, inspirer of everything great, that awakener of the human spirit, which here has fallen asleep on the breast of a beautiful nature.²⁴ Layton has pointed out that this passage rehearses stereotypes of the Orient as a bountiful Eden, a female, a producer of an indolent and sensual people, an unchanging, blissfully inert, primordial culture.²⁵ By contrast Russia and Europe represent industry, ingenuity, creativity, and change. The message is repeated throughout the text in com­ments by soldiers and by the narrator. Verkhovsky, for example, receives a warning from another officer: “Ammalat is, after all, an Asiatic, with all that word attests.”²⁶ The word “Asiatic,” repeated like a mantra, each time with a new shade of meaning, constructs and homogenizes the native in the language of the military-colonial administration. The same message is also inscribed in the structure of the story: racial degeneracy and obduracy justify imperial conquest and rule, but - the reader is led to understand - the mental outlook of natives is so different from the Russian outlook that integration will be a long process requiring great caution.

Verkhovsky glorifies the foresight of Peter the Great for his role in tearing Russia itself out of this orient and setting it the goal of con­quering Eastern barbarism: “I wandered in the footsteps of the great Peter, I imagined him, the founder, the transformer of the young tsar- dom on the ruins of the rotting tsardoms of Asia, out of which he had torn Rus and with his mighty hand rolled it into Europe.. His father­land’s great future spread out before him along with the horizon; in the mirror of the Caspian Sea he saw the future prosperity of Russia, sown by him, watered with his bloodied sweat. Not empty conquests, but the victory over barbarism, the welfare of humanity were his aim.”²⁷ This passage reflects the Decembrists’ view of literature as a civic mis­sion - the inculcation of a sense of patriotic duty and national pride - and the involuntary admiration (bordering on idolatry in the case of Marlinsky’s narrator) for both Yermolov and Peter.²⁸

However, much of the story’s interest stems from ambiguities in the discussion of the border between Europe and the East. The Caucasus have traditionally been regarded as the dividing line between Europe and Asia.²⁹ Contemplating the ruins of Alexander the Great’s wall, Verkhovsky notes that it ends abruptly, as though its builder had been unsure of its further direction. This raises the question of where the Orient actually begins and of Russia’s insecurity concerning its own identity as a country that spans the two continents geographically and culturally. Bestushev-Marlinsky, like other Russian writers of the day, affirms the empire’s mission civilisatrice in the Caucasus but displays ambivalence toward the European/Oriental opposition. Ironically, Alexander’s line of defence had been thrown up against the barbari­ans from the North to protect the Southern civilization of the Greek Empire. In Marlinsky’s text the civilized West faces the barbaric East from the other side of the wall. Moreover, Verkhovsky is a torn, unsuccessful colonialist who is suffering an identity crisis.

The real border was a fluid, culturally confusing zone, a place of cultural symbiosis where the natives were “civilized” and Russians “nativized.” It has been described as a place of “demographic mobility, shifting allegiances, cultural sharing, economic interdependencies” that led to a range of “interactions, conversions, acculturations and desertions.”³⁰ Yermolov himself, “the most repressive and chauvinistic Russian ‘hero’ of the Caucasus, was ‘married’ to three Moslem women.”³¹ Marlinsky’s story can, therefore, be interpreted as an alle­gory in which the delights and terrors of such a mingling are explored and the native point of view glimpsed.

The story challenges and then restores faith in the original “civiliz­ing” mission. The colonial subject is allowed to articulate different cultural norms, most daringly in Akhmet-Khan’s protest following the humiliation of a fellow Muslim by a Russian officer, in which he rebukes his co-religionists for passively observing while “your brother is yoked, while they ridicule your customs to your face, trample your faith under their feet! And you weep like old women instead of taking a revenge worthy of men! Cowards! Cowards!”³²

Although personal circumstances (particularly his love for the enchanting Seltanet) and his own weakness of character prepare the moment for the Othello-like transformation in Ammalat-Bek, the key point is that it occurs in a climate of racism and mistreatment that has been created by the conquering army. This is clear from the officer’s letters describing the destruction of villages, the passionate speeches of the tribesmen urging their countrymen to revolt, and Yermolov’s brutal attitude. Much of this commentary was edited from the first edition of the work and not fully restored in subsequent editions.³³ It is the experience of subjugation that allows Ammalat to interpret Verkhovensky’s comments as another aspect of the official policy that is aimed at terrorizing the natives. His reaction is consistent with his people’s resentment of colonial rule.

Verkhovsky’s disastrous attempt at re-educating the local elite, there­fore, not only indicates the enormous gulf separating West from East but suggests that military conquest was widening it. Two strategies for the “domestication” of natives are given: Verkhovsky’s enlightenment and Yermolov’s terror. The former’s views concerning the treatment of the Caucasian peoples might be more humane, the reader is led to understand, but will inevitably prove futile: the officer’s murder sug­gests a reversion to savagery by a native who has managed to acquire a thin veneer of civilization. It can also be interpreted as the inevitable native response to a brutal tsarist policy of conquest. Ammalat, in the end,joins the jihad, confirming Yermolov’s predictions.

Ammalat-Bek’s personal tragedy is magnified by his conversion to a belief in Russian superiority, a fact that humiliates and emasculates him. Courageous and quick-thinking, skilled in martial arts, physically attractive and faithful in love, he holds the reader’s sympathy until the murder. When he escapes back to the mountains, however, he is spiritually broken, isolated, and doubly victimized: the inculcation of European values has robbed him of his cultural identity, while the military operation has destroyed his homeland. The young chieftain becomes a pariah among both peoples.

Layton has indicated ambiguous subtexts that display an unconscious attraction to two aspects of the “Oriental” nature: uninhibited eroticism and ferocious violence. The “Daghestani savage” who embodies these traits “operates as a secret ideal, running counter to the professed values of Christian Russia.”³⁴ The decorous attitude to love displayed by Verkhovsky, for example, is contrasted unfavourably with the passion­ate, instinctive response of the Naturmensch, whose understanding of human nature is richer than that of the refined, but socially inhibited, officer. In a similar way the author reveals a hidden attraction for what he considers the native’s ability to indulge in violence. The local sport of beheading bullocks with swords and daggers, in which the soldiers and Yermolov excell, celebrates the army’s machismo and aligns it with violence and blood-lust. Layton has suggested that the bullocks here stand in for tribesmen as victims of army slaughter.

Marlinsky’s stories had a profound effect on readers. Many male readers were so excited by these tales that they enlisted, hoping to experience combat and “test their mettle against the legendary he- men of Asia.”³⁵ Much of the attraction lay in the way the opposition between civilization and savagery is subtly undermined so that “barba­rous” Asia’s eroticism and violence can be romanticized. While expe­riencing such transgressive thrills, readers were still provided with reassuring representations of Russia’s civilizing mission. As in other accounts of “civilization” at war with “barbarism,” the former is enjoined upon to match the latter in strength and ferocity, to borrow, when necessary, from the latter’s vitality and determination.

Marlinsky dramatized positions within the practice of colonialism, modelling attitudes and interpretations for readers.³⁶ Although the story reflects the malaise among Russian officers who witnessed the cruelties of Yermolov, Veniaminov, Grabbe, and other commanders, in the end it confirms many prejudices held by these generals and agrees with their goals. The overwhelming historical evidence is that Yermolov “set himself the aim of destroying any non-Russian nation­ality in the country.”³⁷ He and his successors felt that ruthless violence was the only option. They were convinced that “fear and greed,” as General Tsitsianov explained to the tsar, “are the two mainsprings of everything that takes place here.”³⁸ The great majority of what have been called the “men of Suvorov’s school” (after the legendary general of Catherine the Great’s day who gained notoriety in the Caucasus by slaughtering the Nogai nomads when they refused to resettle on the Volga) held firmly to the view that “Asiatics” could understand only force, and the few, like Yermolov’s predecessor General Nikolai Rtish- chev, who were unwilling to resort to harsh measures were, in Badde- ley’s words, “stigmatised as both weak and incapable.”³⁹ Few Russian authors criticized Yermolov. Marlinsky’s work does so implicitly by dramatizing the clash between Yermolov’s violence and Verkhovsky’s Christian charity but ultimately reconciles itself to the inevitable neces­sity of the former.

Ambiguities in Marlinsky’s attitude were amplified by the mystery of his death. The writer was killed in action on 7 July 1833 in what many believed to have been a suicide. Volunteering for action in a forest held by Circassians, he left the detachment and was cut to pieces. Because his body was never recovered, rumors circulated that he was still alive, fighting alongside the tribesmen and living with native wives. There were even suggestions that Shamil was really Marlinsky in disguise. These speculations can be taken as evidence of the attraction many readers felt toward the escapist fantasy of untrammelled aggression and eroticism.⁴⁰ They can also be seen as evidence of a fascination with the evolving imperial identity, whose enormous span across two continents, movable and porous borders, unclear lines of demarcation, and appar­ent selection by providence to explain the mysteries of Asia to Europe all stimulated exciting transgressive urges in the name of gaining both national and personal awareness.

POETICS OF RAVISHMENT AND REMORSE: MIKHAIL LERMONTOV

I hear everywhere spoken the language of philosophy, and everywhere I see that oppression is the order of the day.

Marquis de Custine, on his trip to Russia in 1839

Lermontov was sent to the Caucasus in 1837, after his poem on Pushkin’s death became known. When threatened with demotion to the ranks, which, as one writer put it, “entailed automatic loss of status as a noble, the risk of corporal punishment and other frightening penalties,”⁴¹ he apologized to the tsar, confessing that his friend Raevsky had helped him distribute the poem, a fact that resulted in the latter’s exile. Upon joining his regiment later that year, Lermontov wrote to the banished Raevsky: “I’ve already made plans to travel to Mecca, to Persia... It only remains for me to ask to join the expedition to Khiva with Perovsky.”⁴² Lermontov was not allowed to join General Perovsky’s disastrous expedition to Central Asia, in which nearly all members perished and which has been described as “one of the tsar’s least successful imperial adventures,”⁴³ but the statement’s bravado shows that for him, as for many officers, a brief stint in the Caucasus was seen as an enjoyable way of redeeming a tarnished reputation while benefitting from the imperial push to the East.⁴⁴

Careerism, financial motivations, and the idea of military service were inextricably interwoven.⁴⁵ In fact, officer careerism was an impor­tant factor in the war: “After the close of the Napoleonic wars, promo­tions came slowly for Russian officers, but the mountain wars gave them the opportunity to rise more rapidly through the ranks, and they were sorry to see the campaigns end.”⁴⁶ Lermontov’s desire to belong to the highest circles was strong. Count Vladimir Sollogub described the poet as excluded from the quintessential Petersburg society, “but loving it and raving about it, even when ridiculing it.”⁴⁷ His aunt Vereshchagina could see that his financial status would deny him entry into this upper echelon: “These people catch either rich ones or persons of rank, and Misha is too poor for them. What is his income of twenty thousand, a hundred thousand is too little, they call it ‘une petite fortune.’”⁴⁸ A military career - what Lermontov called “the path of vice and stupidity” - was, therefore, accepted out of necessity.⁴⁹ Nonetheless, it offered compensations. As a writer he was able to taunt the beau monde that had excluded him with shocking pictures of war. There was, moreover, a combativeness, even a cruel streak in his character, which came out in his goading of colleagues, his love of boxing matches, which he organized among his peasants,⁵⁰ and his cruel behaviour toward women. The best-known example of the last characteristic is his pursuit and humiliation of Ekaterina Sushkova in revenge for her earlier refusal to fall in love with him. Two other cases are worth noting for their conjunction of sexism with power. The first is the (frequently censored) early letter to Raevsky in which he comments that his life in the country is boring and he could not avail himself of the usual sexual relations with peasant girls “because they stank.”⁵¹ The second is his “Hussar poetry” of 1832-34, which is devoted to the sexual esca­pades of fellow officers. The most popular poem, “The Uhlan Girl” (Ulansha, 1833-34), describes a gang rape that leaves the woman bruised, bitten, and barely recognizable as the company moves off the following morning. The joke is at the expense of the powerless woman; the soldiers exploit a situation for personal gratification.⁵² This poem can be read as an internalization of military violence, an acceptance of its necessity, and, ultimately, a dismissal of its consequences.

Ravishment

A major theme in Lermontov’s work is domination - of one individual over another (usually a male over a female), a state over a colonized people, or a more powerful natural force over a weaker one. The love of women is linked to their control, just as the admiration for the savage tribesmen is inseparable from the idea of their conquest. The writer’s stories of seduction, rape, kidnapping, love, rejection, and sep­aration along the borders of imperial expansion - whether they involve women, as in the stories “Taman” and “Bela” from A Hero of Our Time (Geroi nashego vremeni, 1841), or boys, as in “Ismail-Bei” (1832), “Boiarin Orsha” (1842), and “The Novice” (Mtsyri, 1840) - can be read as eroticizations of violence and allegories of an imperial-colonial relationship that ends in every instance with violence and destruction.

Lermontov could draw upon military reality for the love-slave theme: on occasion captured women were sold as slaves or distributed to Russian officers so that in winter quarters “for the officers, at least, the Commander-in-Chief setting the example, the time passed pleas­antly enough in the company of native wives.”⁵³ General Yermolov himself, as has been noted, kept three Muslim consorts and fathered a daughter “who remained for all her life an object of curiosity and pilgrimage for Russian officers passing near her village.”⁵⁴

In literature the sexual subjection of colonized and conquered women frequently represents the relationship between an empire and a conquered territory. Among such women in Lermontov’s tales one could name the Circassian Bela, the Georgian Tamara from “Demon,” the Ukrainian nymph from “Taman,” and “The Lithuanian Woman.” Already colonized politically, their men removed from the scene, they are, in Anne McClintock’s words, “made available for the sport of sexual conquest,” becoming “the living flesh of the national body, unveiled and laid bare for the colonial’s lascivious grip.”⁵⁵ Always resistant, at least initially, and frequently dangerous, they are examples of the erotics of sexual/political ravishment and boundary markers for the empire. However threatening these encounters may be for the Russian soldier, he invariably belongs to the conquering military. Lermontov’s heroes play the sport of sexual conquest, deriving little spiritual satisfaction from it: they are ultimately either denied the love they seek, or they discover their own incapacity for it.

Denationalization of native elites is encoded in these encounters with conquered nations. It was tsarist policy to draw members of this native elite into Russian service to serve as “enlighteners” in their own countries. Lermontov came into contact with acculturated natives like Shora Nogmov, a former Mullah who had become an officer in the Caucasian Highland Guard. The poet even studied Eastern customs from such individuals, made an attempt to learn Azeri Turkish (“Tatar,” in his words), and gained an acquaintance with local folklore and literature. A favourite plot structure in his work is the conflict of loyalties stemming from the time a native has spent in the enemy camp. His heroes and heroines find themselves temporarily on the “other” side of national-cultural boundaries. “Izmail-Bei” tells of a Circassian boy who is sent to Russia by his father to obtain an education and military training. Like Marlinsky’s Ammalat-Bek, he returns to lead his tribes against the Russian army. After he is killed by a brother suspi­cious of his Russian past, a hidden locket of blonde hair and the Cross of St George (the coveted imperial distinction for bravery in combat) are found hidden on his body. In this way he is revealed to be a man of ambiguous national sensibility and religious commitment.

The imperial army, with its code of ruthless violence and absolute loyalty, was a primary agency of depersonalization and denationaliza­tion. Any dissident feelings required concealment. Dissimulation is such a common feature in Lermontov that it almost appears to be the natural state. Those who are incapable of it or who admit their true feelings are destroyed. Ismail-Bei, the orphaned youth in “The Novice,” like other victims in Lermontov made homeless by imperial expansion, pretends to maintain a Russian identity, but he has been among Rus­sians for so long that he has largely lost his “native” identity. The same plot structure occurs in stories devoted to the empire’s western bor­derlands. “The Lithuanian Woman” (Litvinka, 1830) is the story of a captured beauty who eventually escapes captivity (both matrimonial and national) and kills her former imprisoner and national oppressor in battle. In “Boiarin Orsha,” Arsenii, who has been raised by Orsha, also defects to the Polish-Lithuanian side and kills his former lord in combat. Upon learning of his beloved’s death under Orsha’s impris­onment, his life loses all meaning. His better feelings evaporate, and he sees only the career of a heartless mercenary in front of him:

Now only one thing is left to me:

I go. Where? It is all the same, To one side or the other?⁵⁶

Deracination and hatred is the tragic imperial legacy on both the western and the eastern front.

Russian officers, however, can return to their cultural origins rela­tively unaffected after a sojourn in a foreign environment. One of Lermontov’s last works, “The Caucasian” (Kavkazets, 1841) is a short prose sketch of a war veteran who, after long service at the frontier, has apparently assumed a hybrid identity. However, the cultural trans­vestite is revealed to be a poseur. Cultural-racial identity, at least for Russians, runs deeper: Lermontov suggests a firm, undilutable essence beneath the surface of any acquired exoticism.⁵⁷

These narrative structures indicate that the poet saw war through imperial eyes. His relatively sympathetic portrayal of native rebels was a conventional Romantic sympathy for freedom-loving outlaws derived from Byron and Walter Scott. Poems like “Dagger” (Kinzhal, 1837) and “Poet” (1838) suggest the army’s need to borrow some of the mountaineers’ passion in order to “harden” its own character. As in Marlinsky, the courageous, ruthless native is admired for a barbaric energy and machismo, which contrasts favourably with effete, “civi­lized,” metropolitan society. The Caucasus, it is made clear, have a revitalizing role to play for Russians, who must use the energy of the colonial war to restore their strength. The captured kinzhal, in the poet’s hands, symbolizes appropriation through conquest. One histo­rian has written that “weapons for the mountaineers were more than a practical necessity; they were their pride and signified their man­hood and freedom. Weapons were handed down through generations from father to son, and were regarded as among a man’s most precious possessions. Disarmament was, therefore, a terrible humiliation.”⁵⁸

The dominant message is that in the long run, resistance is doomed, the empire will prevail. The third canto of “Izmail-Bei” begins:

Resign, Circassian! Both West and East

May soon share your fate.

A time will come - and yourself you’ll proudly say:

A slave I may be, but of the universal tsar! A time will come when a new fearful Rome Will grace the north with a second Augustus!⁵⁹

Remorse

And yet Lermontov, like Marlinsky, did have first-hand knowledge of the brutality of the war and was one of the first to describe it in passages that have become famous indictments. The words placed in the mouth of the Cherkess in “Izmail-Bei,” like those of Marlinsky’s angry native, convey a rebuke to the complacent:

Why with jealous hand

Have you disturbed our fate?

We wretched will not part

With our freedom and steppe

For gold, luxury and finery

Because we revere

What you coldly despise!

Do not fear, speak out:

Why do you hate us?

By what rudeness has a simple people

Caused you offence?⁶⁰

It took considerable courage, in the face of a public consciousness automatized by state propaganda, to describe the war in the following demystificatory terms:

The villages burn; they provide no haven,

The enemy has vanquished the fatherland’s sons...

Like a savage animal in a quiet home

The conqueror rushes in with bayonets, Kills the old men and children, Innocent maidens and young mothers.⁶¹

This comes close to recognizing the mountaineers’ right to self­defence and rejecting the ideological premise that the war repre­sented a struggle against “savagery,” “banditry,” and “treason.” Such lines, at least momentarily, subvert what Dziuba has called the “classic opposition in the Russian mentality” between fatherland (Russia) and enemy (warlike mountaineers and all insubordinate peoples) by reversing the positions so that the Caucasus of the mountaineers is the fatherland and Russia the enemy.⁶²

In a meditation on the results of the battle on the Valerik River, in which Lermontov participated, the narrator asks:

And with a secret and heartfelt sadness

I thought: pitiful man,

What does he want!. The sky is bright, Under the sky there is room for everyone, But ceaselessly and vainly He alone makes war - why?⁶³

Susan Layton has argued that this poem demonstrates a profoundly divided identity behind the writer’s apparently successful integration into the army. According to her these lines describe a state of shocked alienation produced by the killing: “Lermontov’s lyric persona compre­hends war as murder rather than invigorating machismo only when he

has blood on his hands; and as a result of combat, he becomes discon­nected from his own comrades.”⁶⁴ Tormented by a sense of his own culpability, he pens what is in fact a confession and self-condemnation. By placing the action in a natural setting (“beneath the sky there is room for all”) the poet suggests that the Earth itself has been violated.

This is perhaps an overinterpretation of the officer-poet’s divided identity. The moment of remorse is but a hint of the reality of the war and the feelings it inspired. Henri Troyat has written that the tribes “exterminated the women and children who could not follow them into retreat. Often in reprisals they mutilated captives and sent them back, bloodied, to Russian lines. Exasperated by these ferocities... the Russians in turn executed the wounded.” A witness to these battles reported that “The day’s trophies were several corpses of mountain people, whose heads had been severed and wrapped in sack-cloth. For every head General Veliaminov would pay a chervonets (three roubles) and the skulls would be sent to the Academy of Sciences.”⁶⁵ General Grigorii Zass also collected tribesmen’s heads, impaled them on stakes around his house, and sent some to anatomists in Russia and Berlin.⁶⁶ Veliaminov was a freethinker whose moral and religious views had been formed by reading the French encyclopaedists and whose favourite books were Gil-Blas and Don Quixote. Yermolov was also known for his liberated views and independent mind, which led the Decembrists to designate him head of their provisional government following their planned seizure of power. Nonetheless, in a dangerous theatre of war, where the rules of the civilized conduct were suspended, these generals executed a ruthless, calculated policy of razing villages to the ground and exterminating hostile populations.

Lermontov himself fought courageously and was on two occasions recommended for, but denied, decoration. He was given command of a detachment composed of cossacks, Tatars, and Kabardians who were all veterans, specialists in guerrilla warfare, and famous for their daring and lack of discipline. They were described by Baron Rossilieu, a major-general, as dirty, unshaven, and negligently dressed men who took the most dangerous assignments: “Lermontov has assembled a band of ignoble cut-throats. They despise fire-arms, wander through enemy villages, conducting a guerrilla war and glorifying themselves as Lermontov’s regiment.”⁶ In front-line action the poet tasted the for­bidden attractions of a life ruled by violence, where men of the margins were, in Mary Douglas’ words, “licensed to waylay, steal, rape.” The anti-social behaviour was even encouraged: it was “the proper expression of their marginal condition.”⁶⁸ Following their segregation from society, these liminal men were allowed to return with a new status. Marginality, segregation, and reintegration was therefore a pat­tern repeatedly rehearsed by colonial discourse.⁶⁹

The Elemental Force

Any sense of culpability did not shake the poet’s faith in the inevita­bility or legitimacy of imperial conquest. Frequently anthologized poems like “Borodino” (1837), “Motherland” (Rodina, 1841), and “The Dispute” (Spor, 1841) merge patriotism with the defence of the state. The last poem combines what has been called “a dirge for the age-old freedom of the independent peoples of the Caucasus”⁷⁰ with a condonation of Russian aggression in the Middle East as a historical fatality. It is, in fact, the latter attitude that provides the framework for Lermontov’s views on national liberation. In April 1841 he took “The Dispute” to the Slavophile Iurii Samarin and asked him to pass it on to the editor of The Muscovite (Moskvitianin), the last periodical anyone would have accused of liberal or seditious views. It has been suggested that Lermontov heard from Aleksei Khomiakov the view that smirenie (meekness or resignation) was the distinguishing Russian phi­losophy and that his purpose in submitting the poem might therefore have been to challenge the Slavophile attitude to Russia’s historic mission and cultural-political identity.⁷¹ Khomiakov, however, was no critic of Russia’s conquering mission, and Lermontov’s poem is not a challenge to but an alignment with Khomiakov’s views. “The Dispute” pits two cultures, the European and the Asiatic, against one another. It describes Russia “moving East as the representative of European culture and the industrial age,” as part of the “unavoidable and natural course of history.”⁷² Sympathy for native resistance is totally eclipsed by state egoism and the Russian national will. Although the accent differs from Khomiakov’s, the message of forcible conquest and assim­ilation is the same. In “Motherland,” which Eikhenbaum has argued was a response to Khomiakov’s “whole political world-view,”⁷³ the poet explains that he does not love Russia for its military glory bought with blood or for its ancient traditions but “organically and spontaneously,” as Eikhenbaum puts it, simply for what it is.⁷⁴ This message is implicit in the final image of the lively Russian village dance. It was natural for Russia to be herself, a wisdom the poet claimed to have learned from the East. In a conversation with Andrii Kraievsky he said: “We should live our own independent life and make our own particular contribu­tion to general humanity. Why should we always drag ourselves after Europe and the French? I learned much from Asiatics, and I would like to penetrate the mysteries of the Asiatic world-view, the origins of which are little understood both by Asiatics themselves and by us. But believe me, there in the East lies a secret cache of rich discoveries.”⁷⁵ Orthodoxy and religious messianism are here unaccented, but the belief in the Russian people and the assertive, assimilatory message in these two poems is the same as Khomiakov’s. “Being herself” for Russia meant being an empire, appropriating territories and cultural trea­sures. Lermontov’s Russia is represented as a powerful, self-confident civilization developing an intimacy with a culturally seductive, but politically insignificant, East. Like the Decembrist officers who served in the army before him, he may have been uncomfortable with mes­sianism andjingoism, but he shared the expansionist vision.

Given Lermontov’s character and biography, however, another inter­pretation suggests itself. As the universalism of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason receded, a new activist form of Russian nationalism emerged. It challenged Nicholas I’s reactionary Official Nationality pol­icy, counterposing a passionate nationalism and an assertive, interven­tionist foreign policy to his cautious policies. Mark Bassin has written that “an active desire for the export of national, and ultimately political, influence became interwoven into the very fabric of Russian nationalist thought in the 1840s” and that this desire “formed one of the most important sources of nationalist opposition to Official Nationality.”⁷⁶ The stultifying conservatism of Nicholas’s reign could be portrayed as failing to sufficiently promote national interests. Lermontov’s temper­ament and situation would have aligned him with this opposition.

Drawing on Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, Lermontov pictured the empire as an elemental force, a self-constituting struggle of opposites. Extraordinary natural forces and powerful personalities could both be seen as functioning in an elevated realm where they were beyond morality, outside the rules of normal human conduct.⁷⁷ Napoleon, the great empire-builder himself, was such a superhuman power and law unto himself. Hugo, who had been convinced by the Greek revolution that violent insurrection was permissible in a just cause, wrote a paeon to empire-builders in his preface to Les Orientales: “One should remem­ber that it is she [the old eastern barbarism] which produced the only colossus which this century can place against Bonaparte, if Bonaparte can have a counterpart; this man of genius, Turk and Tatar, is in fact Ali-Pasha, who is to Napoleon what the tiger is to the lion, the vulture to the eagle.” The East here appears as a teacher in the science of power and conquest. It is suggested that imperial competition and political violence on a global scale are governed by laws of nature - laws that it is senseless to oppose.

Since they were operating within such a philosophical context it is not surprising, therefore, that neither Pushkin nor Lermontov showed any sympathy for the Polish insurrection of 1830. Pushkin, in his “Poltava,” saw imperial domination of Ukraine as a providential occurence, and Lermontov, in the introduction to “The Novice,” argued that the protectorate of Georgia was prospering behind the “barrier of friendly [Russian] bayonets.” Moreover, Lermontov pro­duced a salute to Napoleon’s greatness in “His Last Move” (Poslednee novosele, 1841) and a sympathetic, “Napoleonic” portrait of Ivan the Terrible in “Boiarin Orsha.” In this last poem the poet represents the tsar, who is viewed as beginning Muscovy’s imperial expansion, in a sympathetic light. Belinsky was deeply moved by the poem and was especially intrigued by the personality of Ivan, whom he defined as “a fallen angel” deserving of our sympathy.⁷⁸

The empire as an elemental force may also be read into Lermontov’s nature poems. They exhibit a typical structure: peace, an eruption of conflict, and a restoration of equilibrium imposed by the greater power. His “Terek” is an example. In it the freedom-loving stream tempts the quiet Caspian Sea to passionate, impulsive activity and is then subdued by it. The poem suggests an eternal relationship of stimulus and reac­tion in which aggressive but weaker forces challenge stronger ones to action and then retire when their energy is spent. It is a struggle that takes place at a high level of abstraction, in an amoral realm where passion and violence require nojustification. Imposing abstractions - size, vitality and freedom - as Susan Howe has pointed out, have always hallowed the imperial exploit, providing it with an aura of “national or racial destiny, a mission, as of something inevitable, dynamic, not made by human agency but set in motion by some impersonal life-force.”⁷⁹ It is, of course, a short step from such abstract speculation to the out­right justification of political violence, a fact recognized by the Roman­tics and one that stimulated their concern with nature’s dark side. Schelling wrote, “When the abysses of the human heart open them­selves in evil and those terrible thoughts come forth which ought to remain eternally buried in night and darkness; only then do we know what possibilities lie in man and how his nature is for itself or when left to itself.”⁸⁰ These remarks, Andrew Bowie has suggested, “could be directly applied to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where Kurtz is precisely concerned to find out ‘what possibilities lie in man.’”⁸¹

In chapter 4 of Ammalat-Bek Bestuzhev-Marlinsky had described the Terek’s progress and transformation from ferocity in its higher reaches to calm accommodation in its lower reaches. Lermontov’s “Terek” describes the river as bringing gifts to and arousing the mighty sea. The poem contains a strong political subtext. The Russian imperial forces were at the time securing the Caspian coast by building a string of forts that would seal off the mountain peoples. The Terek’s constant provocations can be seen as a metaphor for native resistance, which ultimately produces a large-scale response by the tsarist military and a subduing of the mountaineers. The poem would also have recalled to readers Pushkin’s “To the Slanderers of Russia” (Klevetnikam Rossii, 1831) in which the poet had compared smaller nations to “Slavic streams” and foresaw their engulfment in “the Russian sea.”

There are, however, instabilities in Lermontov’s attitude to imperial conquest, which can be illustrated by anticolonial readings of two works: “Taman” and “The Demon.”

Taman as Colonized Ukraine

Taman in Lermontov’s famous story of the same name is the quintes- sentially mysterious colonized identity. The legendary Tmutorakan was first conquered by Prince Sviatoslav, the father of Volodymyr (Vladimir) the Great, in the tenth century and incorporated into the Russian Empire only in Catherine’s reign. It bore the marks of succes­sive colonizing civilizations: Greek, Tatar, Ukrainian, and Russian. At the time the story was written, it was a stronghold of the Black Sea Cossacks, the remnants of the Zaporozhian army who had been trans- fered there by Catherine with the mandate of guarding the coastline. Edward Daniel Clarke, who travelled through the region in the early nineteenth century, described them as “now the possessors of the country.”⁸² He also observed the hostility and sense of caste-like dis­tinction between them and the local Russian settlers.⁸³ The Black Sea Cossacks remembered and resented the liquidation of the Sich in 1775. Many had initially escaped to the Danube Sich, where they had lived under Turkish protection, and had only later made their way to Taman and the Kuban in a second wave of resettlement. Moreover, the imperial attitude to them remained suspicious. A hotbed of resis­tance to imperial rule in the eighteenth century, they had been assigned to the defence of the empire’s eastern borders, in part because there was less chance of their escaping abroad from that location. The identity of Taman is therefore layered. The hostility, which the intruding imperial officer in the story feels instantly and instinctively, is probably historically accurate: it comes from the mys­terious, resistant, local identity that blends both Ukrainian and Tatar and has inscrutable eastern traits ascribed to it.⁸⁴

Several features define the town in the story. It is an outermost point, a frontier, the edge of the world known to and controlled by the empire, a geography of precipices, shorelines, and horizons. Two other features are closely linked to this liminal condition: Taman’s association with night and with danger. The town, it is immediately made clear, is a mysterious place of nocturnal, secret trafficking with forbidden, foreign, perhaps even occult, forces. The conflation of foreign hostility with supernatural evil makes it a perilous place for a Russian officer to venture: one in which a soldier may lose his life. The visitor is thrown into proximity with these local people against his will in the course of military service. It is an unwelcome encounter from which there is no escape. The ensuing entanglement almost proves fatal and uproots the lives of some local smugglers.⁸⁵

The local language is Ukrainian. The blind boy speaks it to the officer. However, when not in his company, he speaks perfect Russian. His mother also feigns deafness but appears to be perfectly capable of hearing and understanding conversations. Simultaneously able to move within Russian culture and yet part of a transgressive and poten­tially disloyal underworld, they are dangerously equipped with the ability to understand without being themselves understood. The young girl appears to invite him to a tryst, but in fact, her intention is to drown him. All three characters practice deception. The blind boy, the old woman, and the young girl can be read as the deformed, weakened structure of an incomplete society. Its men-folk are else­where; those left behind carry on the struggle to survive using what­ever means are available: shunning, misdirecting, and if necessary, murdering outsiders.

The officer-narrator describes the manless world of this outpost in terms that Nikolai Danilevsky would later use to justify imperial con­quest: it was not a healthy body but deformed and defective. “I admit,” he says, “to having a strong prejudice toward all blind, lame, deaf, dumb, legless, armless, hunchbacked etc.” He suspects a connection between physical and spiritual deformity: the loss of a limb or a sense is, in his view, accompanied by the loss of some human attribute. Taman, like its inhabitants, is therefore a physically and spiritually crippled hinterland. The ambiguous adjective nechisto (dirty, or evil) is used to describe both its physical appearance and its spirit.

The visiting officer’s disorientation is in large part due to his exclu­sion from the local world. The cataracts on the boy’s eyes are impen­etrable; the old woman refuses contact; the young girl speaks in riddles. The lack of familiar symbols, such as icons on the walls, is disturbing. His only security is his weaponry, and even this, in the end, is stolen from him.

The officer’s attitude to the girl is emblematic of his attitude to the colonized region. She is the anthopological other: mysterious, with an exotic appearance, strangely beautiful and beguiling. Yet she has to be subdued and overcome; her seductive invitation is an entrapment. He describes her in the way he would a fine horse, full of spirit and health but requiring taming. This creature of nature derives from Romantic literature’s fascination with the Naturmensch. It is reminiscent of the description of Caucasian tribesmen and their beautiful women in other Russian fiction of the period. At first he thinks of her as Goethe’s Mignon, a graceful, beautiful child whom he can rescue from an unhappy life and who would become devoted to him. Like Bela from Lermontov’s story of the same name, she excites and attracts him. Unlike the passive Bela, however, this girl extends the invitation and sets the trap. The expectation of sexual adventure remains unfulfilled.

Yanko, who is in league with the girl, exhibits the same vigour, courage, and daring. He is described as wearing a Tatar hat but sporting the distinctive cossack hairstyle. This appearance associates him with both the unassimilated Tatar and Ukrainian identities. His trade is to ferry goods through the straits while avoiding the imperial coastguard, which links him to foreign lands and illegal activity. The girl leaves Taman with him after their smuggling consipacy is uncov­ered, and the officer survives an attempt to drown him.

In the end, when the officer realizes the situation, he expresses both regret for overturning the precarious existence of the community he has stumbled upon, whose members he calls “honest smugglers,” and an administrator’s contempt for the petty lives of the folk he must disturb on imperial service: “What do I have to do with thejoys and sorrows of humanity, I, a wandering officer, and to boot one on official service!” This final sentence captures the irony of his position. He represents a ruthless force that unintentionally disrupts and destroys local lives. The result of his adventure might be cause for personal regret, but human feeling cannot stand in the way of military duty - a duty that he claims absolves him from feeling compassion for those whose lives are affected. The story aligns a Ukrainian alterity (in this case the Black Sea Cossack settlement) with the foreignness of a border outpost, expressing the narrator’s ambiguous attitude to the exercise of imperial power. The structure of seduction followed by remorse and half-hearted self-justification is here rehearsed in a Ukrai­nian colony.

The Imperial Demon

Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, Layton has said, pinpointed the incoherence of Russian cultural mythology, when he wrote of the angel of death in paradise and hinted that a Russian national tragedy was under way. According to Layton he posed the questions, “Can we murder our way into the restorative garden?” and “Can we secure Eden by exterminating the natives?”⁸⁶ But it was Lermontov who made this theme most famously his own in “Demon,” the poem on which he worked for most of his life. Its final version is set in the Caucasus and describes the Demon’s ravishment of a helpless maiden. The poem has often been criticized for superficiality: the cascading rhetorical effects, it has been argued, disguise a lack of philosophical or psychological depth. However, it has also been pointed out that many artists - Vrubel, Aleksandr Blok, and Boris Pasternak among them - have found the poem’s attractions irresistible.⁸⁷ Mirsky has suggested that the reason lies in “an unusual quality of poetic appeal audible to poets if not to critics.” It is, he ventured, “the tragedy of the individual opposing himself to society and mankind, and seeking to overcome his tragic and unbearable solitude by romantic union in love with another human being.”⁸⁸ Another explanation of the poem’s power lies in its communication at a subconscious level of disquieting, forbidden emotions: the attrac­tion of imperial power and the guilt of complicity in conquest. Beneath the surface, wrote Mirsky, “there is what can hardly be described otherwise than as the real presence of demons.”⁸⁹ When read in the light of colonial expansion, the poem yields a meditation on the dilemmas of power.

The Demon’s nature is ambiguous. This demiurge is neither an angel nor a terrible visitor from hell. He is neither day nor night, neither light nor dark. He appears to have been exiled from some original state of blessedness, although his description could be read either as “the banished spirit” or as “the spirit that banishes” (dukh izgnaniia). He wanders the earth’s expanses, sowing evil wherever he goes but deriving no pleasure from this ceaseless activity. His all­conquering but joyless gaze surveys the glories of the land under his power. Catching sight of Tamara, he falls in love.⁹⁰ To win her love he offers not happiness but an elevated perspective, a realm where one stands above personal grief and enjoys the benefits of power.

The Demon’s appearance and eloquence dazzle Tamara, who finds his offer seductive but remains alarmed and confused. For all her innocence, she is described as a “sinner,” full of “criminal thoughts,” inaccessible to “pure raptures.” Her soul prays to the Demon. This vacillation on her part and a desire for love and self-reform on his allows a momentary hope for shared happiness. The Demon enters prepared to change his ways, but the sight of a Guardian Angel who threatens to take Tamara from him brings out the violence in his nature;jealousy, hatred, and the urge to possess overcome him.

His claim to Tamara is based on the rights of familiarity:

Leave her, she is mine!

Too late you’ve come, defender,

And who are you to judge her or me.

On a heart, filled with pride,

I have placed my imprint;

This is no longer your temple,

It is I who rule and love here!⁹¹

When Tamara asks the Demon’s identity, he replies by summarizing the temptations and the price of power. Tamara asks him to renounce the use of power for evil. He then swears to reject vengeance and pride and offers to make her empress of the world: she will gaze without pity or empathy on an earth where there is no real happiness or permanent beauty; she will inhabit a realm far removed from petty human passions, from where the great drama of history assumes monumental patterns; she will have wealth, knowledge, and servants. The price, however, is a transmutation of hope and passion into a mausoleum-like beauty. He overcomes her, but his embrace proves fatal: poison penetrates her breast, transforming her appearance into that of lifeless marble. Tamara’s awakened sexuality “tarnishes her,” according to one critic: by experiencing erotic desires, she introduces “shades of moral dissolution” into the narrative.⁹² Although this inter­pretation is persuasive, it omits the fact that it is the conjunction of imperial power with eroticism that defines evil. The Demon does not merely deflower Tamara, he seduces her with an irresistible offer of partnership in power.

Several details of the Demon’s speech and actions that have been criticized for their lack of psychological motivation acquire greater credibility as the voice of realpolitik or the siren-call of imperial glory and permanence. For example, the Demon’s ostensible motives, like the empire’s, are justified in the language of international diplomacy: the rationale for action is minding one’s own (“national security”) interests while driving off competing powers. The attractions he offers can tempt even a saintly nature, and understandably he assumes Tamara’s silence signifies compliance. The desires of the powerful male, like those of the empire, initiate activities and structure the action. The female subaltern is reduced to scrutinizing motives. Her decision to share in the benefits of imperial power entails a modifica­tion of her personality, a spritual impoverishment and isolation. This is the price to be paid by the willing collaborator.

It is telling that the Demon arranges the murder of Tamara’s bride­groom, in this way removing the local and legitimate contender for her love. In any case, we are informed, she is being given over to matrimonial slavery in the patriarchal Georgian world. The heroine’s surrender to a more powerful and enlightenned despotism (as in Pushkin’s “Poltava”) can therefore be justified from the imperial Demon’s viewpoint as an improvement in her meagre prospects.

The poem has been interpreted as an allegory of the struggle beween good and evil, and the motivation of the action has been criticized for obscuring this allegorical focus. One commentator wanted the Angel and the Demon to struggle for supremacy in Tamara’s attentive presence, so that her decision would be a clearly conscious choice made in the hope of saving the Demon.⁹³ This, however, would have eliminated the subtle message conveyed by the poem’s eroticiza- tion of violence, the insight that empires do not merely coerce but also seduce. It has also been argued by those for whom the poem is a question of theodicity that it handles “an important and complex topic” in an “intellectually impoverished context.”⁹⁴ The Demon, it is charged, “behaves remarkably like a Hussar officer” who chases after women but longs for the serene pleasures of Paradise, who is not consistently defiant and has even grown bored with doing evil. These details, however, assume a coherent appearance when the Demon is read as an incarnation of the imperial will to power and Tamara as an emblem of the land he covets.

The pastoral elements that Tamara represents - love, the organic community, nature - are counterpoints to and inevitable victims of conquest. Only after her death, when she is being carried to heaven in the arms of the Guardian Angel, does she recognize the Demon as the spirit of darkness. Her moral purity earns God’s forgiveness. The Demon, his desire denied, is left to curse fate. This ending has been criticized as incongruous, as has the fact that the Demon does not exercise his power to embrace Tamara earlier or that the Guardian Angel does not intervene sooner to save her. But this line of criticism neglects the fact that “it is always expedient to ‘love’ what you covet.”⁹⁵ Even the most despotic power prefers willing, ideologically committed support to cringing flattery: “incense wearies the idol,” Custine wrote.⁹⁶ The dominant discourse aims at a hegemony that obviates the use of force. However, a monologic uniformity, once achieved, leads to spiritual impoverishment and loss of identity: surrender to the Demon’s power inevitably poisons the dazzled innocent.

Lermontov’s verse frequently asks the reader to consider the issue of overpowering another through violence, rape, or seduction. As in the Greek myths this sometimes involves negotiation, temptation, or deception. In the Russian poet the overpowering leads to defeat: it does not engender the new but brings a fruitless love and proves to be an impossible pairing leading to remorse. Lermontov’s poetic great­ness comes in significant measure from such insights into the psychol­ogy of power, particularly the power to do evil, something Baudelaire sensed when he wrote that the Russian writer would be one of the few poets he would include in his own pantheon. Pechorin, the hero of Lermontov’s novel A Hero of Our Time, is precisely such a study in the psychology of power. He sees all human relations as political, rejecting the possibility of equality: “I’m incapable of friendship. Of two friends one is always the slave of another, though often neither will admit it. I can never be a slave, and to command in these circumstances is too exacting, for you have to pretend at the same time... my chief delight is to dominate those around me. To inspire in others love, devotion, fear - isn’t that the first symptom and the supreme triumph of power?”⁹⁷ These glimpses into the fetishization of power, the link between eroticism and violence, and the conflicting desire to learn reciprocity and love, provide the tension and tragic pathos of Lerm­ontov’s poem.

The writer’s work resonated with the public because he drew on wider discursive practices echoing the regime’s blandishment, cajole­ment, and disciplining of its own intellectuals and their seduction by and collaboration with the imperial project. He employed references that were a part of contemporary political and philosophical literature, borrowing, for example, from Enlightenment views of Eastern Europe as a despotic, backward “orient.”⁹⁸ De Custine, in describing his travels through Russia in 1839, used many of the same images and terms to describe Russia, the tsar, despotism, and autocracy; he viewed political problems through similar philosophical concepts and also defined Russia in terms of fate and natural forces. For De Custine the Russians (“the North” in the terminology of the day) were driven: “Remaining fixedly attached neither to persons nor to things - willingly quitting the land of their birth - born for invasions - these people appear as though merely destined to sweep down from the pole, at the times and epochs appointed by God, in order to temper and refresh the races of the South, scorched by the fires of heaven and of their passions.”⁹⁹ Not surprisingly, the Frenchman did not view such refresh­ment with the same equanimity when it was directed toward Western Europe. Towards the end of his book he comments, “The Russians, when they turn against the West the arms which they employ success­fully against Asia, forget that the same mode of action which aids their progress against the Calmucs, becomes an outrage of humanity when directed against a people that have been long civilised.”¹⁰⁰

THE POETICS OF MESSIANISM: ALEKSEI KHOMIAKOV

I would annex the planets if I could.

Cecil Rhodes

Nineteenth-century liberal ideals of individual freedom and societal progress were not, as the cases of Bestuzhev-Marlinsky and Lermontov suggest, incompatible with adherence to the idea of a colonizing mis­sion. The conservative Slavophile camp, which was guided by a faith in tradition and the superiority of the Orthodox faith, was even less conflicted about supporting imperial goals.¹⁰¹ The writings of the early Slavophiles have been described as the “first formulation of Russian nationalism,”¹⁰² and Aleksei Khomiakov’s poetry serves as one of its more unabashed manifestations. Khomiakov was more of a nationalist than Ivan Kireevsky or Konstantin Aksakov, the “romanticists of Slavophilism.” Andrzej Walicki has described him as “a chauvinist... given to enthusiastic visions of military victories and Russian power.”¹⁰³ From his first poem “Message to the Venevitinovs” (Poslanie k Venevi- tinovym, 1821) in which he describes himself as “heart and soul in the midst of a bloody war” on the side of Orthodox Greece against the Turks, his leading theme became combat in the cause of Slavdom and Russia. Until the end of 1830, wrote one commentator, “Khomiakov in his lyrics did not devote a single line to Russia that was not con­nected to the question of its military glory, and until the thirties he extolled not so much Russia’s glory as his own thirst for battle.”¹⁰⁴

The Russo-Turkish war of 1828, in which he served, inspired him to initial poetic statement. The Polish revolt of 1830 moved him to compose an “Ode” (Oda, 1830) in which he criticized Polish rene­gades for taking up arms against their fellow Slavs. This poem ends with a vision of a “new age of miracles” in which the Slavic eagles “bow their powerful heads before the senior Northern eagle” of Russia, which acts, in the words of one critic, as the “big-brother protector over small Slav nations.”¹⁰⁵ The eagle as an image of state power had been used at the signing of the Treaty of Pereiaslav in 1654 and became a common way of depicting tsarism in the eighteenth century. Khomiakov exploits this image in his poem entitled “Eagle” (Orel, 1832), which is an encoding of his political ideal for Slavdom. In it he calls upon the powerful northern eagle of Russia to turn its atten­tion to its “younger brothers” who suffer oppression in a number of regions: in southern lands, along the distant Danube, beneath the Alps and Carpathians, and in the Balkans. Ivan Dziuba has pointed out that Khomiakov’s support for the liberation struggles of the Bulgars, Serbs, and Croatians here signified did not extend to those of the Poles, Ukrainians, and Belarusans: violent revolutions, in other words, were only welcomed abroad, wherever they were “convenient from the viewpoint of a great-power, Orthodox-nationalist strategy.”¹⁰⁶ Utilizing another key imperial metaphor, the sea or flood, his “Source” (Kliuch, 1835) depicts Russia as a pure, ceaselessly flowing fountain that cre­ates a stream running ever deeper and stronger. The poet believes that this stream, grown to a mighty river, will inevitably overflow its boundaries. Foreign nations will then come to its flooded banks as to the source of a revitalizing spirituality. In “To Russia” (Rossii, 1839) he tempered this optimistic message with a warning that greater empires than Russia’s had fallen in the past. Consequently, she should not forget that her strength lay in the Orthodox religious mission: having “embraced all nations in love” the empire could bring them the “secret of love” and the “light of faith.” Here Orthodoxy appears to be an extrapolation of Khomiakov’s nationalism and serves as a justification for expansion. In “Kyiv” (1839) he envisages the city as the fount of “Russian” Orthodoxy and integrator of all “Russian” traditions, forseeing the recovery of the Western Ukrainian lands of Volhynia and Galicia. In his opinion, these territories had been “taken from us by sword and flattery, deceit and fire” and now found them­selves under a “foreign flag,” governed by a “foreign voice.” They would return upon hearing the clarion call of Kyiv, like “children who have been torn away” from their “father.”

In “To Russia” (Rossii, 1854) the poet welcomed the Crimean War, which was also greeted enthusiastically by the Slavophiles Konstantin and Ivan Aksakov.¹⁰⁷ Whereas Konstantin Aksakov suggests in his “Russian Eagle” that the goal ought to be the capture of Istanbul-Constantinople, Khomiakov’s vision of liberation for the Southern Slavs leads him to call for a Russian military advance far beyond this city to the Aegean Sea. “To Russia” describes the confict as a “holy war” waged by God’s “chosen people.” The great expansionary mission, Khomiakov feels, may be beyond Russia’s ability because of the “terrible sins” that lay upon her. His suggestion that social evils, particularly serfdom but also “Godless flattery” and “corrupting lies,” might make her incapable of fulfilling her calling caused a storm of critical protest. Although contemporary public opinion and some subsequent commentary viewed this poem as indicative of his critical attitude to Russia, this was, in fact, a misreading of the poet’s intentions. As Walicki has pointed out, Khomiakov was suggesting that Russia was “a chosen country; God himself had summoned her to a holy war and victory would therefore be hers.”¹⁰⁸ He ends the poem by calling upon Russia to prostrate herself before God, then to arise and “throw herself into the heat of bloody battle.” His contribution to the war, it might be noted, was not merely rhetorical: during the campaign he invented an improved rifle, ordered an armament factory to produce it, and offered it to the Russian government free of charge for the arming of its infantry.¹⁰⁹

Khomiakov’s next poem, “A Penitent To Russia” (Raskaiavsheisia Rossii, 1854), which was cast in the form of a public apology for the scandal caused by “To Russia,” aimed at answering his critics. In it he suggested that the desired moral transformation of Russian society had already been achieved. Russia was portrayed as a terrible “angel of God with a fiery brow” whom nations were calling to go forth “with love in her heart and thunder in her hand” in order to liberate her Slavic bretheren.

It is significant that Khomiakov was deeply concerned with the entire strategy of imperial expansion. In letters he described Ivan the Terrible’s decision to move west as a mistake. The tsar, in his opinion, should have moved further east after the successful conquest of Kazan, taking the advice that “Christian and educated nations can be tethered by treaties,” as he phrased it, “while Mohammedan and nomadic peoples would always remain enemies of Russia, both because of their faith and on account of their nomadic, lawless customs.”¹¹⁰ Khomiakov carefully studied Russia’s campaigns in the East and asserted that the empire’s expansionary activity should be concentrated there. In 1853, in a letter to O.M. Popova he wrote:

The tale of Bekovich, the diplomacy of the Italian, and the fear which Russia instilled into the entire area beyond the Caspian Sea shows, in my opinion, our great and age-old blindness. All our attention was directed toward European affairs; but our true advantages called us to stronger activity in the East, which would have come to us very easily. We ought to have, and could have, transferred the cossacks there; they were out of place on the Don. Of course, it would have been a quiet activity and almost unforced. Persia would have been continuously in our hands, etc. The morality of such an expansion is as obvious as the justice of Algeria’s conquest, and in the course of almost a century our own Russian forces would have grown in the Caspian area, which, naturally, would have helped us to handle the Caucasus, especially the left flank that causes us so much trouble. Peter seems to have grasped things, but his system pulled us too far into European conflicts and suppressed our natural instincts.”¹¹¹

Khomiakov’s first play, Ermak, written in Paris in 1825-26 but pub­lished in 1832, deals with Russia’s conquest of Siberian peoples under Ivan the Terrible. It conveys the message that the spirit of every people “requires bloody sacrifices” in order to reconcile foreign lands to its rule.¹¹² This is the price exacted by history. Russia paid dearly for Ivan’s conquest of Kazan; it will inevitably and necessarily be required to pay the same high price for Siberia. In the denouement Yermak is killed by the natives, but the former criminal and outcast dies willingly, assured of a pardon and a place in Russian history. His last words, and the last words of the play are, “Siberia is no more; from now on this is Russia!”¹¹³

It might come as a surprise, therefore, to read that at times Khomi­akov denied the conquering nature of this expansion, claiming instead that Russia was a product of “organic, living development; she was not built, but grew.”¹¹⁴ At other times he expressed the conviction that the very idea of conquest and glory was foreign to the Russian people, who only “thought of [their] duty, of a holy war.”¹¹⁵ This idea of an organically growing empire as a natural expansion of Russian domi­nation demonstrated, in his estimation, that the Russians alone had evolved without internal struggle or foreign influences and that con­sequently their “moral virtues were far superior to the best regions of any country on the globe.”¹¹⁶ Unsullied by foreign heresies, they alone were equipped to carry the gospel of Orthodox enlightenment abroad. These views, typical of Romantic nationalists, were to be reiterated in many later contexts.

Ukrainians, in his view, had been cut off from the sources of the true faith for too long. Although he admired the militancy of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, which he attributed to their fanatical commit­ment to Orthodoxy, Khomiakov thought in terms of a Russian mono­lith. He viewed Ukrainians as “an organic and inseparable part of a single, Orthodox, Russian nation, with perhaps some dialectal differ­ences in conversational language.”¹¹⁷ Holding such fiercely assimila- tionist views, he would therefore be expected to react negatively to news of any Ukrainian political activity that appeared to contemplate separatism. On learning of the arrest of Shevchenko and the Cyrillo- Methodian Brotherhood, he wrote a letter on 30 May 1847 that recalls Belinsky’s response to the same news: “The Little Russians have appar­ently been bitten by political folly. It is disappointing and painful to witness such foolishness and backwardness. When the social question has just been raised and is not only unsolved but not even near solution, even apparently wise people take up politics. I do not know how criminal the misguidedness of the Little Russians was, but I know that their stupidity [ bestolkovost] is very evident. The time for politics has passed. Kireevsky wrote about this more than two years ago, and people are still rehashing the old ideas.”¹¹⁸

Christoff has described this letter as an example of the artfulness that so enraged Herzen and other opponents. In it Khomiakov avoids reproaching Ukrainian patriots for their separatist and leftist views, “the real issue,” as Christoff puts it, and instead concentrates on their privileging of political matters rather than “the social question,” which he must have realized was inseparable from the issue of autocracy.¹¹⁹ The letter dismisses the Ukrainian group as a provincial phenomenon: belated, derivative, and insignificant, still rehashing what Kireevsky wrote “more than two years ago.” He does not admit the possibility of a national dimension to Ukrainian politics or accept the legitimacy of any national struggle within the empire.

Projecting this view of Russia onto the past, he assumes a monolithic “Rus” (which includes Ukraine as a junior partner), destined to expand to its “natural boundaries” and express its “natural instincts.” Heroic conquest and the assimilation of smaller peoples is therefore one of his primary themes. Unlike Lermontov, he did not lament the tragic loss of human life in the course of military action. Khomiakov’s focus is on the just cause and the glory to be found on the front lines. One Russian critic has written that “Khomiakov did not once condemn war as a method of deciding life’s contradictions; it would always remain an evil for him, but an inevitable one, sanctified by God and the state. He found harmony only within a Russia that was surrounded mainly by hostile (non-Orthodox) nations; Khomiakov’s ideal was the transformation of the entire planet into an Orthodox world, but this process was viewed as a long one, linked to gigantic, cataclismic wars. Therefore, in spite of Khomiakov’s disgust with war it is never denounced ethically or aesthetically, and only one palliative appears - mercy for the fallen.”¹²⁰ As a result, Khomiakov’s apotheosis of war frequently fails to reveal any revulsion or sense of armed conflict as an evil; he seldom finds it necessary to overrule a humane instinct of protest: “more often than not his aggressive pathos is completely unclouded.”¹²¹

The elevated tone of his hymns to greatness, the diction reminiscent of official tsarist proclamations, the “geopolitical” obsession with cap­turing points on the compass, and the analogies with Rome, Albion, and other great powers all suggest a complete identification with imperial might. Because of this, it is difficult not to see his sense of togetherness (sobornost) in the religious sphere and community (obsh- chinnost) in social life as a nationalist attempt to cement ideological unity and counteract the possibility of conflict within the unitary state. He approves of cultural borrowing as long as the Russian “organism” proves capable of absorbing and transforming the borrowed material. It was axiomatic to him that the Russian nation and its Orthodox faith would be the assimilatory force that gave homogeneity to the state. Although the Russian Slavophiles spoke of federalism, their vision was not a nation-freeing, republican federalism, such as that espoused by Shevchenko and other members of the Cyrillo-Methodian Brother­hood who were arrested in 1847, but a romanticized version of Russian imperial messianism, and, as such, it can be considered republican federalism’s contradictory and opponent.¹²²

Khomiakov’s poetry provides opinions on Russia’s national charac­ter and mission. These opinions reveal a curious alternation between two seemingly incompatible conceptions of Russia: the pastoral and the martial. Russia is both a peaceful, idyllic country and a powerful, aggressive one. According to Berdiaev, this constitutes a fundamental dichotomy in Khomiakov’s messianism. On the one hand, the Russian nation is meek; on the other hand, precisely this quality privileges it among others, making it most fit to conquer and assimilate its neigh­bours: “national meekness alternates in Khomiakov with ‘let the thun­der of victory sound.’ Khomiakov wishes to convince us that the Russian people are not warlike, but he himself, a typical Russian, is full of warlike spirit, and this makes him captivating. He rejected the temptation of imperialism, but simultaneously desired Russia’s dom­ination not only of Slavdom, but of the entire world.”¹²³ Berdiaev wrote sympathetically of the “inevitability” of the contradiction that the people who display the most meekness (smirenie) must simulta­neously be the proudest (samyi gordyi). He argued that there could be no “rationalistic” explanation for it; it simply had to be “accepted and lived.”¹²⁴

One of Khomiakov’s most brilliant ideological creations was the image of a poor, unrefined people and a materially backward country that was spiritually superior and destined to conquer the world. The combination of humility (of origins, manners, and spirit) with power (military, physical, and ideological) fused in the identification of Russia with Christ. This “tsar,” who is described in the poem “Shiroka, neobozrima...” (Wide, Boundless..., 1858) as “weak, pale, surrounded by fishermen” will nonetheless conquer the earth. It is an image that was to be widely exploited, perhaps most notably by Dostoevsky and Aleksandr Blok in his “Twelve” (Dvenadtsat, 1918).

The messianic aspect of Khomiakov’s thought found admirers in his own time and later in the century with Danilevsky and Dostoevsky, and it enjoyed a renewed popularity in the years of reaction after 1905. In emigre circles of the 1920s and 1930s there existed what Walicki termed a “downright cult” of the author.¹²⁵ But the poet and thinker also had his detractors. Within Russian literature the portrayal of military violence in some works by Bestuzhev-Marlinsky and Lermon­tov can be considered contrapuntal to Khomiakov’s. Shevchenko, not surprisingly, was markedly cool toward Khomiakov’s alignment of Slavophilism with an aggressive imperial policy. The Ukrainian poet’s principled anti-imperialism was the antithesis of Khomiakov’s views.¹²⁶

Significantly Khomiakov, like Belinsky, criticized Shevchenko with­out having read him. Belinsky, as shall be seen, assumed that the poetry that had offended the tsar must be scurrilous, much as Khomi­akov assumed that the brotherhood’s political activity was uninterest­ing and “backward.” If intertextuality is one of the discursive mechanisms that brings about change within discourses, the Russian discourse, by cutting off access to antithetical Ukrainian utterances, limited the field of legitimate expressions. The acceptable polarities were Romantic nationalist and liberal or Slavophile and Westernizer. The more radical critique of colonialism was pushed into the realm of the unacknowledged and unread. It is telling that Belinsky stated that he would not even read Shevchenko’s “Dream” (Son) if it were available. These comments on Shevchenko and the brotherhood from both conservative Slavophile and liberal Westernizing positions consti­tuted an attempt to marginalize the counterdiscourse. They assessed the debate on Ukraine’s identity as peripheral and refused to counte­nance any discussion of its political rights. Whereas Ukrainians read Russian literature and were compelled to react to the discourse of empire, the Ukrainian counterdiscourse, particularly in its most out­spoken and effective manifestations, was refused consideration and forced to develop as an illicit, underground counterdiscourse.

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