Oliver Bullough on The Caucasus

Your first book is The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus by John Frederick Baddeley, a military history of the Chechen and Dagestani resistance to Russian invasion in the early 19th century.

J F Baddeley was an English journalist and businessman who travelled extensively in Russia and the Caucasus in the 19th century. He knew the Caucasus as well as any foreigner and wrote a great deal about his experiences there. This is the more well known of his two books on the Caucasus which focuses on the resistance of the Chechens and Dagestanis to the Russian conquest. Led by Sufi Muslim leader Imam Shamil, they fought very effectively and bravely for 40 years until they were finally conquered in 1859. The book is based almost entirely on Russian sources and accounts of events, since indigenous Caucasian languages were not written down until the 20th century. It’s a monumental piece of military history.

The Russian experience of the Caucasus is clearly central to books on the region. Your next choice is Nabokov’s translation of A Hero of Our Time by Lermontov.

Lermontov wrote this novella directly after the unsuccessful Decembrist revolt against Tsar Nikolai I in 1825 which led to savage repression and resentment amongst young members of the intelligentsia who lost the ability to express themselves in any way. Many troublesome young intellectuals were punished by being sent to the Caucasus, which turned out to be a much freer environment for writers. Having offended the Tsar with his poem ‘On the Death of a Poet’, which was seen as an attack on Russian society, accusing it of being complicit in Pushkin’s death, Lermontov was himself sent to the Caucasus in 1837.

In A Hero of Our Time, I think Lermontov is expressing the rage and boredom of young people of his generation with the stultifying atmosphere of bureaucracy and control in Russia at the time. Parallels have been drawn between Lermontov and Pechorin but I think we can see Pechorin as more of an everyman for his generation. Tsar Nikolai completely missed the point and thought that the rather boring stooge Maxim Maximych was the hero of our time and not Pechorin. It’s a short book and is structurally very interesting, and I really recommend the Nabokov translation.

There are so many different nationalities in the Caucasus and as many as 50 languages or dialects.  Nart Sagas of the Caucasus is your next book. Probably not one that people would have heard of!

This is a collection of folk tales of the Circassians, Abkhaz and other peoples from Western Caucasus who had a corpus of legends that were their equivalent of Greek myths. I actually had one read at my wedding. They’re very peculiar stories with lots of parallels with the Greek myths. For example, there’s an Achilles character called Sosruquo who, instead of having a weak point in his heel, has a weak point in his knee. He was boiling hot when he was born and when they dipped him in the blacksmith’s water to cool down, they held him by his knee and so that was the bit that didn’t harden.

These stories are all the more compelling because of the brutal oppression of the Circassians under the Tsars. They’re a really fascinating people, a huge part of ancient Mediterranean civilisation, but they pretty much vanished after the Russian invasion of the 1860s. The Russians gave them a choice to move north of the mountains and settle as peasants under Russian law or leave. I think they were quite surprised when a million or so Circassians chose to leave, but about a third of this group died in the course of the exodus. These events have since been recognised to be the first genocide of the modern age and I think the parallels with the Armenian genocide of 50 years later are clear.