4 Orientalism and Empiretransformed his experience and the event into a story, comprehensible
to officials in Tbilisi. “And so concluded the funeral scene which I saw
two weeks ago.”^4 A Georgian viewing the “novelty” of an Abkhaz fu-
neral, an event in geographic and cultural terms on the imperial fron-
tier as well as the Georgian frontier, found a ready audience for his
story among both Russians and non-Russians in the Caucasus.
The transformation of the conquest of the North Caucasus into a
story is the subject of this book. Iosseliani filed his teacher’s report
only a decade or so after the conclusion of the long and brutal
Caucasus War. Members of educated society (obshchestvo in Russian,
sazogadoeba in Georgian) on the frontier felt the need to render
historically “savage” mountaineers, with their kinzhali (daggers),
blood feuds, radical Sufi brotherhoods, and episodes of bride-
kidnapping, as new subjects of the empire. Even North Caucasus
mountaineers, famously exotic and the subject of literary Orientalism
from Pushkin to Tolstoy, might find their place and function within
an imperial narrative, a story about the purpose and meaning of both
the region and the Russian Empire.^5 Multi-ethnic borderland commu-
nities from the frontier made important contributions to the growing
consciousness of Russia as an empire that emerged and developed
from the 1840s on.
The diversity of the North Caucasus contributed to the imperial
dilemma of imagining the region anew. The mountain range itself
helped to advance this diversity, extending roughly 720 kilometres
across the region from the Black Sea to the Caspian. Beyond the range
lay the Transcaucasus (South Caucasus) and the Armenians, Geor-
gians, and Azerbaijanis.^6 The Russians actually conquered these more
distant lands first, while the vast mountain range shielded its inhabit-
ants from Russian rule. Linguistically the range appears to be the site
of the original Babel: one branch of the Ibero-Caucasus languages in-
cludes the Adygei-Abkhaz and the Kabards, who live to the north-
west; another is the Dagestan-Veinakh branch of the northeast
Caucasus, which includes the Chechens, Ingush, and Karabulaks,
and the Avar, Dargin, Lak, Lezgin, and Tabasaran (the primary lan-
guages of Dagestan); the region is also host to the Turkic branch of
the Altaic family, which includes the Karachais, Balkars, Kumyks,
and Nogais; and as well, it contains the Iranian branch of the Indo-
European language family, which includes the Ossetians, Kurds, and
Tats (“mountain Jews”).^7 And mountain tribes themselves were fur-
ther divided. The internationally famous “Cherkes” (Circassians), or
the Adygei tribes of the northwest Caucasus, were composed of thir-
teen primary groups: the Zhaneev, Shefak, Natukhai, Shapsug,
Abadzeg, Bzhedug, Temirgoi, Khatukai, Egerukai, Adamiev,