61 Russian Ethnographers and Caucasus MountaineersStGiorgi Church in Tbilisi and was attended by prominent Russians,
Georgians, and Armenians from the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the mili-
tary, the imperial service, and the worlds of culture, the arts, and jour-
nalism. Scholarly societies, literary societies, folk music collectors,
and Georgian culture generally flourished throughout the imperial
era.^13 The Russian and Georgian relationship to “tradition” shaped
imperial discourse about the highlanders of the North Caucasus, and
“tradition” in the wake of the Romantic era meant not just the history
of Orthodoxy but the history of indigenous custom.
romanticism and travel literature
Susan Layton has described the misgivings of famous Russian liter-
ary figures about the conquest of the Caucasus. While Romantic writ-
ers were unable to visualize an alternative to the march of Russian
“civilization,” they were ambivalent about the demise of mountain
(noble) savages and alarmed at the callous destructiveness of Russian
military policy. Pushkin and his heirs created a world of frontier es-
cape and “freedom,” perhaps as a means of personal rebellion in re-
sponse to the strictures of the imperial state and the world of
officialdom.^14 Leo Tolstoy most notably revived this impulse at the
turn of the century with powerful novellas such as Hadji Murat and
The Wood Felling. This fundamental ambivalence about the course of
the conquest extended beyond the world of literature to educated so-
ciety generally. The Decembrist M.O. Orlov, for example, criticized
the work of Ermolov in a 1820 letter to Pushkin and suggested that
peace would come to the region via not “the bayonet but time and
enlightenment.”^15
Russian Romanticism put the mountain peoples on the map of
Russian cultural history. The “imaginative geography” of the region
remained close at hand as officials conquered and incorporated the
North Caucasus.^16 “In general one of my dearest hopes is to take an
extended trip to the Caucasus,” wrote the brother of the tsar, Grand
Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich, to the office of the viceroy in Tbilisi.^17
Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinskii served in the Caucasus from 1829
until his death in a skirmish with mountaineers on the Black Sea coast
in 1837. A.S. Griboedov served in Turkey and in the Caucasus under
Ermolov; A.I. Polezhaev participated in Vel’iaminov’s 1832 expedi-
tion into Chechnia; and Aleksandr Odoevskii spent two years in the
Nizhegorod dragoon regiment until he died of fever at Pzeuapse on
the shore of the Black Sea in 1839.^18 Russians throughout the century
needed to see and experience what Pushkin referred to as the “burn-
ing border of Asia,” a place “fascinating in all respects.”^19