119 The Russian Shamilstayed for ten years; and the widow of the Georgian king Irakli was
in Kaluga with her children in 1834–35.^63 In the three-storey home of
a landlord by the name of Sukhotin, which was to be his residence,
Shamil inspected in detail all its conveniences and luxuries, including
its adjoining barn and well, and he was in particular enamoured of
two bronze busts of Greek church fathers.^64 His visits around Kaluga
included exposure to magnets, air pumps, and other various new
technological devices.^65 On 12 October he witnessed the annual cele-
bration of the Procession of the Cross (krestnyi khod) across from the
main cathedral in Kaluga, in memory of the city’s liberation from the
French. For Russian readers, Shamil’s Kaluga possessed important
symbols of Russification: the heritage of Byzantium, Orthodoxy,
modern technology, and Russian military power. Shamil spent time
reading Colonel Boguslavskii’s translation of Verderevskii’s Prisoners
of Shamil, which had immediately disappeared from the libraries and
bookstores of Kaluga. Aside from a few mistakes in his historical bi-
ography, “Shamil verified everything that was said in this book.”^66
Happy, contented, and settled in Kaluga, this imaginary Shamil af-
firmed that the image was indeed accurate.
A few commentators dissented from this 1859 version of the imam.
How could “educated society” feel this way about him, A. Gariainov
wondered, when he “himself stood outside their laws,” and was re-
sponsible for the loss of many Russian lives in the course of the long
war? Gariainov reminded Russians of the incarceration of Prince Or-
beliani, and he suggested that Shamil was a cunning manipulator of
the mountaineers and their claims of freedom, nationality, and reli-
gion. The imam, he concluded, should be shot, just as he had exe-
cuted many Russians. “He can’t expect any better.”^67 Petr Egorov
doubted the many stories of Shamil’s asceticism and courage and his
claims about his lack of knowledge and understanding of the genuine
character of Russia. Egorov believed that Shamil was feigning interest
in Russian society and culture: “Palaces, the wonders of science and
culture, the balls, theatres, and all the brilliance of European life is for
him only a temporary pastime, while all of Russia [remains for him]
an enormous prison.”^68 Egorov doubted the stories of Shamil’s hon-
esty and naïveté, and he emphasized instead the savage events of the
Caucasus War, complete with grisly detail: the naib Adalo, who in-
vaded the Georgian village of Kvareli and killed defenceless women
and children, paraded around the head of a boy on a stake, and cut a
girl in half in order to resolve an argument about who would acquire
her as booty. On another occasion, mountaineers descended upon
“some village” in Georgia, attacked an imperial official, and cut off
and took away his hand as a trophy; upon returning home and