71 Russian Ethnographers and Caucasus Mountaineersin the regions of Kars and Batumi remained, in his estimation, dis-
turbingly Muslim even after Russia incorporated the area following
the defeat of the Ottoman Turks in 1877.^78 Ancient cemeteries among
“our ancestors,” the Khevsur, to move to Georgia’s northern frontier,
revealed a Christian presence deep in the mountains, in the “villages
of the fatherland,” perpetually threatened by the “hostile” and “pow-
erful” Chechens.^79 Georgians provided a local and contemporary
colouring to the imperial exploration of antiquity.
ethnographic realism
The glorification of an enduring “folk” identity from antiquity
spurred the emergence of ethnography in the borderlands. Ethnogra-
phers of Russia itself were engaged in a similar sort of exploration,
which Hans Rogger dates to the eighteenth-century interest of
Romantic writers in the unique tales, songs, and legends that they be-
lieved represented the most faithful expression of the character of the
Russian people.^80 Russian educated society was looking to the “lower
orders” for revelation, as Belinskii put it, and by the 1850s intellectu-
als in general, from Alexander Herzen to Fyodor Dostoevsky, shared
similar ideas about the importance of the world of the Russian peas-
ant to what it meant to be “Russian.”^81 Russian peasants appeared to
educated Russians to inhabit a different world, and the questions and
concerns brought by Russian ethnographers to the Russian peasantry
were not far removed from the methods employed upon the moun-
taineers.^82 Georgia’s encounter with Russia’s version of “originality”
stimulated a similar preoccupation with the culture of the common
people. A “literature of the people,” suggested a commentator in
Droeba, might be identified, “rescued,” and transformed from its in-
evitably rough state into a “poetical work” by members of educated
society.^83 As in Russia, the development of a Georgian ethnography
emerged from literary writing and newspaper essays inspired by
these new ideas about custom, tradition, and the dilemmas of an “ed-
ucated society” divorced from its primary source of sustenance.
In the more isolated and distant North Caucasus, the principal dis-
covers of tradition were often Russian and Georgian imperial offi-
cials. Arnol’d Zisserman, the previously mentioned district
supervisor in Tushetia-Pshav-Khevsuria, was initially inspired by
Marlinsky. His first essays for Kavkaz read like Marlinsky, and they
emphasized harrowing rides on horseback, the excitement and dan-
ger of combat, and the indecipherable geography of the region.^84
Sometimes Zisserman passed through “half-subjugated” regions,
guided by mountaineers and dressed as a Chechen, or he participated