Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy

ISBN-13: 9780521444439 / Angielski / Twarda / 1995 / 372 str.

Susan Layton; Catriona Kelly; Professor Anthony Cross

Opis

This is the first synthesizing study of Russian writing about the Caucasus during the nineteenth-century age of empire-building. It covers major writers including Pushkin, Tolstoy and Lermontov, but also introduces material from travelogues, oriental studies, ethnography, memoirs, and the utterances of tsarist officials and military commanders. Setting these writings and the responses of the Russian readership in historical and cultural context, Susan Layton examines ways that literature underwrote imperialism. But her study also reveals the tensions between the Russian state's ideology of a European mission to civilize the Caucasian Muslim mountaineers, and romantic perceptions of those peoples as noble primitives whose extermination was no cause for celebration.

Recenzje

"In laying bare the ambivalent and often contradictory expectations of this market, Layton is acute and perceptive...there is much to be learnt from this investigation of an imperial relationship which contained elements of both the creative and the destructive." Goeffrey Hosking, Russian Literature

Spis treści

Acknowledgements; Map; 1. Introduction; 2. The poet and terra incognita; 3. Imaginative geography; 4. Sentimental pilgrims; 5. The national stake in Asia; 6. The Pushkinian mountaineer; 7. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky's interchange with the tribesman; 8. Early Lermontov and oriental machismo; 9. Little orientalizers; 10. Feminizing the Caucasus; 11. Georgia as an oriental woman; 12. The anguished poet in uniform; 13. Tolstoy's revolt against romanticism; 14. Post-war appropriation of romanticism; 15. Tolstoy's confessional indictment; 16. Concluding observations; Notes; Bibliography; Index.