4 Narodnost’: Russian
Ethnographers and Caucasus
Mountaineers
If a substantial seed of the spiritual life of a people [narod] falls on
historical soil and receives the opportunity to develop on its own- then the natural poetry of the people will be reborn as art, its
folklore – as literature.
V.G. Belinskii, 1842–44^1
“originality” and empire
Russia’s enthusiastic appropriation of the German Romantic tradi-
tion meant that the empire in principle or at least potentially was
home to many peoples. All peoples possess folklore (slovesnost’),
wrote Vissarion Belinskii, and “[w]hen a people becomes acquainted
with the culture of literacy, its literature takes on a new character, de-
pending on the spirit of the people and the stages of its civilization
and education.”^2 “Westerners” like Belinskii shared with Slavophile
thinkers many common concerns and interests, although they tended
to cast the question of Orthodoxy to the side. Slavophiles such as
Khomiakov and Iurii Samarin foresaw that in the modern era it
would be possible to cultivate tradition without faith, and they often
reminded readers that the development of Russian narodnost’ drew
its sustenance from its close connection to Orthodoxy.^3
As for the question of faith, the exploration of narodnost’ on the
frontier had implications for regional autonomy and the eventual
“national question,” but this was not on the agenda in the 1850s and
186 0s. Russia itself was not a nation. A literary critic such as
Aleksandr Pypin was wishfully recasting Russian cultural history in
Western terms when he associated the Russian interest in narodnost’
with Europe’s reorganization of itself according to the “principle of
nationality.”^4 Instead, the debates about narodnost’ were informed by
a nativistic respect for local custom and indigenous culture rather
than the new forms of mass culture, parliamentary politics, and civic