Empire’s erotic conquests: Circassian women in Russian romantic literature

As the traveling narrator imposes his subjective temporal experience upon his readers, we begin to suspect that he may have done more to alter the novel's content than simply reorder its chronology. Proof of this lies in his reworking Kazbich's song into Russian verse form. <...> We are forced to question the degree to which both the traveler and Maksim Maksimych might have contaminated the novel's content (ibid: 17).

There are many instances in the text that point to the unreliability of the sources of the presented information. The reader learns about Bela from the notes of the traveling narrator to whom Maksim Maksimych told the story orally. The traveling narrator was “forcing” the story when he admitted that he was sure that Bela's story had to have an “unusual” ending, because whatever started in an unusual way ought to have an unusual ending (Lermontov, transl. by Pasternak Slater, 2013: 29). Likewise, the role of Maksim Maksimych as an “expert” on the Caucasus and as a mediator between cultures is questioned multiple times. All of this suggests that there is yet another way to interpret Lermontov's novel as a whole, and Bela in particular as an inversion of the conventions of the Orientalist paradigm; as an ironic play on Orientalist clichйs and stereotypes. Lermontov's own Preface to his novel suggests for the readers that the novel should be read ironically: “Our public are still so young and naпve that they can't understand a fable unless they find a moral at the end of it. They can't get a joke, they can't sense irony; in fact they're just ill-educated” (ibid: 5). Lermontov wrote the Preface in response to his critics who had been “quite seriously outraged at having such an immoral person as The Hero of Our Time held up as an example... ” (ibid).

There were many critical responses to Lermontov's novel from his contemporaries. To the list of narrators who retold Lermontov's novel, we can also add the nineteenth-century Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky who praised the novel in one of his reviews (Belinsky / Белинский, 1954). In his seventy-eight page essay, Belinsky retells the novel in his own words interspersing it with Lermontov's text. Belinsky tried to “save” Pechorin from the negative reviews and harsh criticism of his contemporaries. Analyzing Pechorin's character, Belinsky calls him a “mysterious type,” Bela, on the other hand, he remarks “is all before you” (ibid: 199). As many critics have noted, the schematic representation of Bela could hardly be seen as “all” that there is to this character, nor could it be seen as a realistic portrayal of a Circassian girl, who could have winded up in captivity in a Russian or Cossack fortress. Lermontov himself must have been aware of this when he rehearsed through Maksim Maksimych the long tradition of wholesale ethnographic descriptions of natives, as well as the Orientalist clichйs and myths surrounding Circassian women, some of which he debunked in his novel. We get a first glimpse of Bela as she enters Maksim Maksimych's tale “literally drawn out from his pseudoethnographic account of an `Asiatic' wedding, an account that both disappoints Orientalizing fantasy. and trades in tales of the exotic” (Costlow, 2002: 91). Pechorin's first remark at the wedding was: “I had a far better notion of Circassian girls” (Lermontov, transl. by Pasternak Slater, 2013: 13). To which Maksim Maksimych replied: “`You wait!' I grinned back. I had an idea of my own in my mind” (ibid). Bela is presented here as an “idea” in Maksim Maksimych's confused mind.

The character of Maksim Maksimych, who is called “the old-time Caucasian army man” (staryi kavkazets) reminds us of the figure of the perfect fatherly colonizer, who simultaneously exemplifies and complicates Said's mapping of Orientalism. Maksim Maksimych, as he first appears in the text “puffing on a little silver-mounted Kabarda pipe” and wearing a “Circassian fur hat” (ibid: 7), stands for those liminal figures, outcasts on the threshold of two cultures, and examples of travelers “gone native.” He positions himself as a mediator between the two cultures, as he translates to Pechorin not only the language but also the customs of the natives. He assumes the position of authority who “knows” the locals. However, one has to question how much is “lost in translation” or has been misinterpreted. He exemplifies ambivalence which, to reiterate, involves both mimetic and discursive duplication, by wearing Circassian dress, by knowing the customs, by performing as if he were one of the Caucasians. Maksim Maksimych embodies an exemplary Russian colonialist who lacks a concrete identity; he belongs neither in Russia, nor in his “adopted” home in the Caucasus. This tension within his self is also manifested in his ambivalent perception of the Circassians and Chechens who constantly frustrate his colonial authority by resisting his power. He praises them, and scolds at the same time: “Our Kabardinians and Chechens, now -- they may be robbers and ragamuffins, but still they're real daredevils. <...> Fine fellows, though!” (ibid: 10) Maksim's ambivalent attitudes towards Circassians and Chechens extend also to Bela. His compassion toward Bela did not stop him from perceiving her as a savage Other. He did also harbor a colonial desire for her, as he admitted himself after witnessing the episode in which Bela fell completely for Pe- chorin's charms: “I was upset, because no woman had ever loved me that much” (ibid: 24). Maksim Maksimych did not put a cross on Bela's grave after her death, even though he wanted to do it at first, after all, the Russian colonizers did not actively engage in converting the locals to Christianity. Instead he left her grave unmarked, erasing all traces of her existence:

Early next day we buried her outside the fort, by the riverside, near the place where she had last been sitting. White acacia bushes and elder trees have grown up round her little grave now. I should have liked to place a cross, but you know, it wouldn't have been right -- she wasn't a Christian, after all (ibid: 38).

Bela's death, thus, symbolizes a wish-fulfillment to empty the land from its people (Azouqa, 2004: 115), and as Scotto explains, her unmarked grave renders her totally “lost to history” (Scotto, 1992: 257).

Through his use of irony, Lermontov effectively distances himself from his Russian characters in the novel, Pechorin, Maksim Maksimych, and the traveling narrator, and the imperialist mentality expressed by them. As Lermontov presents this story to his readers, it seems that he not only shows that there are too many flaws, omissions, and inconsistencies in the reader's perception of the Caucasus, but he also seems to question the whole imperial discourse that positions the colonizers as more civilized, more knowledgeable, more human than the colonized. On the contrary, as Susan Layton points out, Lermontov seems to emphasize the similarities between all men, (including Kazbich and Azamat) in their treatment of Bela (Layton, 2002: 71). Bela is the object of desire of at least three men in the novel (Pechorin, Kazbich, and Maksim Maksimych). She is also presented as someone who can be stolen, exchanged and won over by gifts. Thus, Lermontov playfully reworks the clichйs and stereotypes surrounding the Circassian beauty myth, questioning at the same time the Russian imperialist ideology. This is not to say that Lermontov's novel is free from Orientalist stereotypes. At the same time as it demonstrates the colonizer's willingness to humanize the Other, it operates within a familiar vocabulary of Orientalist images, offering the readers the exotic elements they expect.

CONCLUSION

This article has examined the objectified portrayals of Circassian women in Westem/Russian colonial discourses and historiography. Circassian women, as well as other ethnic or native women, have for a long time been objects of study and representations by others, mostly male authors. And the instances in which they did represent themselves -- when they told their own stories in their own voices, as part of the oral tradition -- have been muted or erased. One of the central ways in which the meaning of gender, race, sexuality, and ethnicity is culturally constructed is through representations -- namely spoken or written words and images. These are the modes through which forms of knowledge and feelings, that is, discourses as particular ways of speaking about gender, race, sexuality, and ethnicity are constituted and circulated. Given the peculiar position that the Caucasus occupies in the nineteenth-century Russian literary imagination that has been reflected in the canonical works written by Pushkin and Lermontov, we ought to ask ourselves the following questions: To what extent does the literary canon serve the purpose of the erasure of colonialism from the national memory or of perpetuating the coloniality of knowledge and being, and how does it affect the current discourses on culture and cultural differences in Russia and its former and current colonies, specifically in the North Caucasus? As this article has shown, the recent postcolonial scholarship problematizes the ways in which the nineteenth-century Russian canonical texts are read and interpreted. The postcolonial critics argue that these texts need to be subversively re-read, criticizing the reductive and stereotypical representations of the Other and highlighting the complex, and often violent, history between the Caucasus and the Russian Empire. The Russian imperial tactics and the Caucasus war served only as a romantic backdrop in the works of Pushkin and Lermontov. The discussions of these Romantic works, especially in the school classrooms, require the use of defamiliarization, i.e. stepping outside of the text by introducing counter-narratives that expose the constructed nature of otherness in these texts.

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23. Sandler, S. (1989) Distant pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the writing of exile. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ix, 263 p.

24. Scotto, P. (1992) Prisoners of the Caucasus: Ideologies of imperialism in Lermontov's “Bela” // PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. Vol. 107. No. 2. P. 246-260. DOI: 10.2307/462638

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26. Tlostanova, M. (2010) Gender epistemologies and Eurasian borderlands. N. Y.: Palgrave Macmillan. xx, 240 p. (Comparative feminist studies series).

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