136 Orientalism and Empirethe topic that had shaped his own youthful experience and criticized
the emerging mythology of conquest and colonial benevolence.^62 Al-
though he had participated in the Caucasus War as a young man in
the 1850s, he portrayed Hadji Murat as the tenacious and “terribly
strong” thistle, stepped upon by Russian rule.^63 Tolstoy became an
avid reader of Sbornik Svedenii o Kavkazskikh Gortsakh as well as a sub-
scriber to other ethnographic publications from his estate at Yasnaya
Polyana.^64 He consulted with Arnol’d Zisserman, who by this time
had retired to an estate just twelve kilometres from Yasnaya Polyana.
Tolstoy, on this issue as on many others, offered a minority view,
however. Most Russians felt the need to emphasize that the primary
identity of the region was as “one of the best decorations of our dear
Orthodox mother Rus’.”^65 By the turn of the century, chauvinistic
works were more popular for many readers throughout the empire,
who were accustomed to a long tradition of writing about heroism,
conquest, and the savagery of the borderlands. Often left by former
participants of the war by then well advanced in years but nostalgic
for the adventure of their own youth, memoirs recalled a past that
was increasingly irrelevant to the concerns of the present. They con-
tributed to the climate of intolerance in the borderlands in the late
nineteenth century.
Arnol’d Zisserman had pursued adventure and travel in the
Caucasus in order to contribute to ethnography, to a more effective
colonial administration, and to a better-informed public about bor-
derland affairs. By the late nineteenth century, Russian readers were
extraordinarily interested in the drama of the exploits of colonial dis-
covery but without the lessons of Zisserman’s experience. Fin-de-
siècle travel writing drew on the tradition of the Romantic fascination
with the exotic East but possessed a painfully imperial style, in par-
ticular because of the new colonial relationship and situation of the
later nineteenth century. For Romantic writers, the savage was also
noble, unburdened by the artifice of civilization. Young Zisserman
sometimes learned from and admired the Khevsur. Later Russian
travel writers such as A. Krasnov complained about inadequate hotel
service and transportation, luggage delays, and too much time spent
in Sochi among “Turks” and Georgians.^66 There was no longer genu-
ine adventure and danger in the region, only writers who turned out
a stale reproduction of the danger associated with the Caucasus War.
Mostly they complained about the “natives,” as did A.V. Pastukhov,
who climbed Mount Ararat in the company of nine Cossacks in
189 3.^67 In Romantic fashion, N.Ia. Dinnik pondered his own “power-
lessness and insignificance” in the face of glaciers in Terek oblast in
188 4 and then enjoyed several stories and anecdotes provided by his