48 Orientalism and Empirelanguages, transcribed in the Cyrillic alphabet, of the students.
Shamanism, he argued, was a form of religious expression character-
istic of “young tribes,” but nonetheless a genuine example of the
“striving toward the divine and the unseen” that, in his view, made
up the most important component of human nature.^66 Il’minskii con-
cluded that small peoples in the Middle Volga had fallen into “apos-
tasy” because of the absence of literacy, written scripts in the local
language, and missionary instruction in the native language.
Similarly, in the North Caucasus missionaries and officials agreed
that the absence of literacy and written scripts among the mountain
peoples in the past had encouraged a formulaic relationship to faith.
Mountaineers forgot the essence of the faith because they were un-
able to transmit the tradition to subsequent generations. The
Ossetians lacked their Cyril and Methodius, proclaimed travel writer
Evgenii Markov, and over time had adopted Islamic practices and
traditions. No one wrote down their language, he lamented, and they
were left “without a single comprehensible prayer, without liturgy,
without the gospel.”^67 “Unable to distinguish A from B,” added
Dubrovin, the Chechens “blindly fulfilled religious rites they did not
understand, the quickest path to superstition and fanaticism.”^68 The
Adygei had mastered “only the ritual aspects of Christianity and
completely mixed these up with pagan rites,” argued V. Novitskii.^69
Christianity via the incomprehensible Byzantine Greek, wrote
Dubrovin, had failed to influence the “moral understanding and in-
ternal life” of the Adygei.^70
Again in a way similar to the experience of Il’minskii, the turn to
native language instruction as the most effective means of education
and the transmission of the Christian message was a product of diffi-
cult experiences and frustrations. Educators and missionaries such as
Il’minskii had trouble communicating with those they were deter-
mined to enlighten. In the North Caucasus, what were Russians with-
out a knowledge of the local tongue to do in remote mountain
villages? Russian Grigorii Beliaev found himself in such dire straits
among the (Ossetian) Digors in 1861 that he could not “even get a
piece of bread” and practically starved. The poverty and isolation, he
claimed, made it “impossible to be a Russian person.” He did not
have any materials to aid him in his work, and “Beyond this I didn’t
know the Digor language, and without a priest or a translator – what
could I do?”^71 He was recalled and replaced by an Ossetian speaker.
A Russian graduate of the Tiflis Women’s Gymnasium, Kinopleva,
taught at the Tionetsk Women’s School without the ability “to pro-
nounce even one word in the Georgian language.” She conducted
church singing in Old Church Slavonic, which was completely