6 The Russian Shamil, 1859–18 71
European civilization, with railroads, steam cars, gas lighting, the
comforts of life, and so on, opened a new world to these savages,
who have previously never seen anything but the pitiful poverty
and rags of Dagestan.
S. Ryzhov, 1859^1The encounter of Russia’s nobility and cultural elite with European
culture coincided with the eastern and southern expansion of the em-
pire. Russians brought the cultural confidence of the West to their
southeastern borderlands, where “half-savage peoples, ... [u]nused
to the laws and habits of civilized life,” as Pushkin wrote of the
Bashkirs, challenged the work of Russian officials and the civilizing
potential of Russian culture.^2 Like Tbilisi and the region as a whole,
which were to be transformed by their exposure to civilization and
the culture of Russia, Shamil himself was to undergo a personal
transformation as a result of his stay in Kaluga from 18 59 to 1871. The
conquered Shamil of the Russian press and popular literature was an
imaginary figure, supposedly transformed by his exposure to the
wonders of culture and civilization. Throughout his exile in Kaluga,
however, Shamil was persistent in his efforts to arrange a hajj for him-
self and his family to Mecca, and after his death his family remained
in the Ottoman Empire. The Russian Shamil, however, was a different
figure, supposedly eager to shed his past and participate in the tradi-
tions of imperial obshchestvo.
shamil in russian letters
The Caucasus War was a literary event, in part because some of the
most talented Russian writers of the early nineteenth century chose it
as a setting for their works. Russian readers were therefore highly in-
terested in the events that led up to the conclusion of the war, such as