Go to the Caucasus and you will return a poet.
—Mikhail Lermontov
On 30 Floréal, year VI, or May 19, 1798, according to the French revolutionary calendar, a distinguished group of 167 scientists, engineers, scholars, and artists sailed from the Mediterranean port of Toulon. These learned men were joining a flotilla under the ambitious Corsican general Napoleon Bonaparte, whose aim was to wrest Egypt from Ottoman control. While the venture was primarily motivated by the Directoire’s desire to cut Britain’s links with India, Napoleon also had more intellectual aims. Along with dealing a severe blow to the colonial prosperity of France’s hated maritime rival, possession of the lower Nile would enable his brain trust to systematically study, catalogue, and describe a great ancient civilization, in the best tradition of the Enlightenment’s encyclopédistes.1
At first Napoleon seemed set to repeat the brilliant success of his Italian campaign the previous year. Within three weeks of landing at Alexandria, his troops routed Mamluk forces at the Battle of the Pyramids and were soon in possession of Cairo. But the Corsican’s glory was short-lived. No more than ten days after he had vanquished Egypt’s defenders on land, the Royal Navy sank his fleet in Aboukir Bay, cutting the French expeditionary army off from the homeland and ultimately dooming the operation.
Nevertheless, the setback did not deter Napoleon’s cultural efforts. Before its inevitable return home three years later, his corps of savants carried out an unprecedented inventory of Egyptian antiquities, whose crowning achievement was the twenty-volume Déscription d’Egypte. According to Edward Said, the invasion was the defining moment in modern scholarship of the East, “the first in a long series of European encounters with the Orient in which the Orientalist’s specialized expertise was put to functional colonial use.”2 The ill-fated Egyptian expedition also left an important legacy to art, as over the coming decade painters produced over seventy canvases glorifying the future emperor’s military exploits.3 And when French generals began their conquest of Algeria in the 1830s, many artists joined them in the Napoleonic fashion, thereby helping to launch a vogue in Europe’s salons for Near Eastern themes.4
The literary impact of Napoleon’s campaign on the Nile was more subtle but no less profound.5 French efforts to strike at Britain’s most valuable colony via Egypt now brought the Ottoman Empire to the forefront of great-power politics. Although the Porte’s grip on its vast possessions had already been loosening for at least a hundred years, during the previous century only its more immediate European neighbors, Austria and Russia, had paid its troubles much heed. But the events of 1798 made the eastern Mediterranean a vital geopolitical concern for the continent’s other leading chancelleries as well. Right up to 1914, the “Eastern Question”—the European rivalries to benefit from Ottoman infirmity—would be one of the most incendiary elements of Western diplomacy.
Turkey’s travails also raised its profile in European drawing rooms and salons. As Victor Hugo observed in 1829, “Whether as image or thought, the Orient has become a general preoccupation for both the intellect and the imagination…. The whole continent inclines to the East.”6 At the same time, the Ottomans’ decline made their picturesque empire much more accessible to foreign tourists. Many of them published colorful travel accounts that were greedily devoured back home by a public eager to escape vicariously from their more humdrum bourgeois existence, thereby feeding a literary fashion for the Near East much more intense than the eighteenth century’s playful turquerie. The most influential works by far were Lord Byron’s phenomenally popular Orientalist verse. Informed by the flamboyant poet’s own grand tour of the eastern Mediterranean in 1809–11, the fictional Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage that he began publishing soon after his return to London, as well as The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, and his other “Oriental tales” of the time, virtually dominated European letters for about a decade after their publication in the early 1810s.
The age’s Romantic sensibilities made the European public particularly receptive to this eastward turn. Essentially a reaction against eighteenth-century classicism, Romanticism rejected the former’s emphasis on reason, order, restraint, and decorum, not to mention its idolization of the Greco-Roman past.7 Although it was initiated by a 1761 French novel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s La nouvelle Héloïse, a tale championing passion and the imagination over society’s conventions, the movement’s deepest roots lay in German philosophical and literary trends during the eighteenth century’s closing decades. Pioneered by a Lutheran pastor from East Prussia, Johann-Gottfried Herder, the leading advocates included Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schelling, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his younger years. Along with others, these writers stressed the primacy of emotion, intuition, spontaneity, and the mystical. They firmly believed that poetry was the most direct means to the sublime.
In rebelling against Hellenism, the German Romantics also looked to alternative sources of wisdom, especially to their own medieval past and the East. The Orient was particularly appealing. Theories about European languages’ origins in India heightened interest in Asian antiquity. At the same time, the Near East’s exoticism and sensuality appealed strongly to contemporary aesthetic tastes. According to Schlegel, “We must seek the most sublime Romanticism in the Orient.”8
Increasingly receptive to broader European literary trends, early nineteenth-century Russian authors could not fail to be influenced by Romanticism. The movement’s Orientalist proclivities were no exception. But if Lord Byron and other Western poets helped spark Russians’ interest in the East, there were also sources of inspiration much closer to home.9 Not only did Russia repeatedly clash with Turkey and Persia on the southern frontier, but it was also becoming increasingly involved in a lengthy struggle to “pacify” insurgent Islamic minorities in the Caucasian highlands within its own borders. Indeed, many leading writers of the day had direct knowledge of Russia’s Orient through travel or service in the Caucasus. This familiarity made Russian Romantic poets conscious of a special affinity with Asia. Meanwhile, their nation’s eastern geography made them particularly susceptible to Herderian notions about Oriental roots, which the presence of various Islamic minorities on the empire’s territory only reinforced. As the Ukrainian-born writer Orest Somov pointed out in his influential essay of 1823, “On Romantic Poetry”: “No nation on earth is as rich in various popular beliefs, legends, and mythologies as Russia…. Without crossing the border, Russian poets can roam freely from the North’s austere and gloomy folklore to the luxuriant and brilliant fantasies of the East.”10
The nineteenth-century literary critic Vissarion Belinskii asserted that “Pushkin discovered the Caucasus.”11 By the same token, the bard also introduced Russians to the literary Orient. He did have antecedents, such as Gavrila Derzhavin, Nikolai Novikov, and Empress Catherine II, who had already invoked the East with their quills in the late eighteenth century. But nothing did more to popularize Asian themes in the Russian reader’s imagination than Pushkin’s “southern poems” of the early 1820s.
For his compatriots, Pushkin’s literary role resembled that of Byron in European letters. Indeed, many have seen him as the English lord’s Russian double. For one thing, their biographies bore many resemblances. Both proudly boasted their blue-blooded pedigrees yet felt themselves at odds with society’s conventions and politics. Marked by passionate affairs, clashes with authority, exile, and tragic, early deaths, their tempestuous lives personified the spirit of the Romantic age in strikingly similar ways. Slavists often cringe at comparing their verse too closely, and Pushkin would eventually come to disown the Englishman as a model.12 However, when it came to literary Orientalism, in his younger years he was unquestionably Russia’s Byron.
Generally acclaimed as his nation’s greatest poet, Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin was born in 1799 to a somewhat dissolute but cultured retired guards officer in the old capital of Moscow.13 His family had a distinguished past—the name appears no less than twenty-eight times in Nikolai Karamzin’s History of the Russian State—but its prominence had faded since the ascent of the Romanovs some two hundred years earlier. In the poet’s own words,
A fragment of decrepit stock
(And not the only one, alas),
I hail from ancient boyars …14
Aleksandr’s mother, Nadezhda Osipovna, née Gannibal (Hannibal), had a less conventional background, for her grandfather had come to Russia as an African slave boy in the early eighteenth century.15 Presented to Peter the Great by his Turkish ambassador, the lad had been christened Abraham Petrovich and raised under the former’s care. The tsar took a shine to little Abraham. Blessed with a quick intellect and an aptitude for geometry, Peter‘s favorite rose to the rank of general as a military engineer in the army. Proudly highlighting his black identity, Abraham styled his surname after Rome’s great Carthaginian adversary.
Aleksandr Pushkin flaunted both of his lineages. He tirelessly alluded to his father’s illustrious bloodline, which apparently originated with a thirteenth-century Prussian warrior who had entered Prince Alexander Nevsky’s service.16 A friend once chided him for his aristocratic airs: “Are you proud of your five-hundred-year-old nobility? … For God’s sake, be Pushkin! You are a clever enough fellow in your own right.” Pushkin indignantly corrected him: “You are angry that I praise my six-hundred-year nobility.”17
As for his mother’s black roots, these were a source of great pride as well. When Pushkin referred to himself as “the wild descendant of negroes,” he did not do so disparagingly.18 In the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Imperial Russia’s urban haut monde, mixed racial origins carried far fewer negative connotations than in the Anglo Saxon world. Catherine O’Neil notes that literate St. Petersburg readily associated ebony skin with Shakespeare’s jealous but noble Moor Othello and shared in European “stereotypes about Africa and black men as wild, fiery, sensual, threatening, and at the same time fascinating in their sexual prowess.”19 To a young man with a ravenous carnal appetite, these were all positive attributes.
According to the imprecise geography of the day, Africa was almost as Oriental as Asia. Because the former’s northern third lay within the orbit of Islamic civilization and was still nominally under Ottoman authority, it was easy for Europeans to conflate the Sahara with the Levant. Meanwhile, many of the characteristics the Romantic imagination considered to be typically Oriental—unbridled passion, savagery, indolence, and despotism—were both southern and eastern.20 Victor Hugo made this point when he emphatically included Spain, which technically lies at Europe’s western extremity, in the poetic East of Les Orientales.21 And when in 1830 French troops embarked at Toulon for the Algerian campaign, they knew they were going to the Orient.
This imprecise demarcation between east and south was doubly true in the Russian mind. A glance at the map showed that Constantinople lay west of St. Petersburg, while the Caucasus Mountains were well within the empire’s European borders, as defined in the early eighteenth century by the father of Russian geography, Vasilii Tatishchev. To Pushkin, therefore, his African blood was quasi-Oriental—as the noun he used to label his great-grandfather, arap, suggests. 22 A cognate of “Arab,” this archaic Russian word for a black from Islamic Africa simultaneously conveyed both the South and the East, as did “Moor” in English. By the same token, Pushkin’s southern poems, a series inspired by a journey to the Caucasus and the Crimea, were just as “Eastern” as Lord Byron’s Oriental tales.
Pushkin received the best education possible in Alexander I’s realm. In 1811 the emperor founded a special college to train boys of good breeding for high government posts, the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée. Later renamed the Imperial Alexander Lycée and transferred to the capital, the institution was initially housed in a wing of the Catherine Palace at the tsar’s summer residence. With its intimate ties to the court, the new school promised able graduates a brilliant career in the army and the more prestigious branches of officialdom (the first year’s intake included the future foreign minister, Prince Aleksandr Gorchakov). Despite striking his examiner as “empty-headed and thoughtless,” Pushkin demonstrated a good aptitude for French and drawing, and he won admission to the inaugural class.23
The lycée’s progressive six-year course of study stressed the “moral sciences” and was not overly taxing. As a result, the lad could also indulge in his own pursuits, such as writing verse, in which he proved to be remarkably gifted. Pushkin actively participated in his school’s rich literary life and was soon corresponding with leading poets in nearby St. Petersburg. By the age of fourteen he had published his first composition in the capital’s biweekly Vestnik Evropy (Messenger of Europe) and would see three more poems in print before graduation. Pushkin’s facility with the pen did not always do him service, especially when he wrote malicious epigrams of men in authority, including his headmaster. The most celebrated indication of Aleksandr’s precocious talent came when the aging court poet Derzhavin was invited to examine the lycée’s students in 1815 and famously proclaimed the fourteen-year-old to be his successor upon hearing him recite a nostalgic rhyme about Tsarskoe Selo.
During his final year in school, Pushkin spent many a late night happily carousing with guards officers stationed in the imperial residence. His dreams of joining them when he completed his studies in 1817 were dashed when his father pointed out that he could not afford the expense of supporting a cavalry subaltern and proposed a distinctly less glamorous career in the infantry instead. There were alternatives. While the couture was not as dashing as a hussar’s tunic, diplomacy was a perfectly respectable career for a young blue-blood. It also offered the important perquisite of beginning work in the imperial capital. Securing an appointment in the foreign office, Pushkin moved to St. Petersburg in June 1817 at the ripe age of eighteen.
Pushkin’s professional obligations as a junior tsarist official were even less onerous than his studies at the lycée. While he was perennially short of cash, his charm, school connections, and talent quickly won him entrée into fashionable social and literary circles. He also indulged in less respectable pursuits. A verse he penned on the spot during an evening out with some friends nicely conveys his days as a young man-about-town in St. Petersburg:
In the glass goblet champagne’s
Cold stream hissed.
We drank—and Venus with us
Sat sweating at the table.
When shall we four sit again
With whores, wine and pipes?24
Pushkin’s debauchery did not diminish the output of his pen. In 1819 he completed his first major work, Ruslan and Ludmilla. A fairy tale in verse set in ancient Rus, this fantasy playfully combined many exotic elements in the French classical manner. Ruslan and Ludmilla was inspired in part by The Thousand and One Nights, the French collection of Arabic stories that had first acquainted Pushkin with the East as a child. Scheherezade, malicious genies, Persian opulence, and harems all blended with elements of byliny to create what one scholar described as “a harmonic fusion of national and Oriental traditions.”25
Published in 1820, Ruslan and Ludmilla made Pushkin’s reputation as a poet. Before the author could savor his success, however, the manuscript of a more political poem he had circulated among friends, “Ode to Liberty,” caught the emperor’s attention. It was only through the intercession of influential friends that Pushkin avoided exile to Siberia. Instead, he was punished with a transfer to the southwestern frontier in May 1820.
Although Pushkin chafed at the provincialism of his new environs, the banishment came as a blessing to his nascent literary career. He also had the good fortune of being assigned initially to an indulgent superior who was not overly alarmed at having a disgraced poet on his staff. During his four years away from the capital’s distractions, Pushkin composed most of his southern poems and began work on his great novel in verse, Eugene Onegin.
Pushkin’s southern poems were the result of a reunion shortly after arriving at his new posting with a friend from Tsarskoe Selo, the young guards officer Nikolai Raevskii. Raevskii’s father, a general who had distinguished himself in the recent war against Napoleon, was en route with his family to the Caucasian spa town of Piatigorsk. When he learned that his son’s chum happened to be in town, the general magnanimously invited him along for the summer. The next few months were an idyllic time as Pushkin enjoyed the company of the Raevskii clan, which included four charming daughters. The latter took it upon themselves to teach their new guest English with Byron’s works, which were then all the rage. Fired by the lord’s verse, as his travels with the Raevskiis took him from the dramatic alpine scenery of the Caucasus to the Crimea’s subtropical verdure, Pushkin picked up his “exiled lyre.”
Pushkin’s stay at Piatigorsk inspired the first of his narrative southern poems, Kavkazskii plennik (The Captive of the Caucasus). Completed in 1821, it tells of a disillusioned Russian youth who is seized by Circassian highlanders as he roams the mountains in flight from society’s falsehoods and duplicity. Held in their camp, the prisoner wins the love of a Circassian maiden. While he is too jaded to return her passion, she nevertheless helps him flee. Brokenhearted, the girl drowns herself as her beloved returns to the safety of the Russian lines.
Since the twelfth-century Song of Igor’s Campaign, captivity narratives had been a recurring feature of Russian literature, as they were in the West.26 What was new here was Pushkin’s relatively positive portrayal of the captors. Like earlier authors of the genre, the poet initially describes the foe as savage:
The idle Circassians sit …
They recall the former days
Of raids that could not be repulsed
Of the treachery of sly leaders,
Of the blows of their cruel sabers,
And of the accuracy of their arrows that could not be outrun,
And of the ash of destroyed villages …
Yet as the prisoner watches the highlanders behead slaves for their amusement at a feast, his thoughts take him back to the equally violent pastime of dueling back home. Perhaps his own kind is no less barbarous than the Caucasian “other.” To be sure, his homeland does not have much to commend itself. The prisoner recalls its
Despised vanity,
And double-tongued hostility,
And simple-hearted slander …
Meanwhile, the longer the Russian is their involuntary guest, the more he comes to admire his captors:
Among the mountain people the prisoner observed
Their faith, customs, upbringing,
Loved the simplicity of their life,
Their hospitality, their thirst for battle,
The swiftness of their movements,
And the lightness of their feet, the strength of their fists.27
If Pushkin ultimately does not malign the Circassians, his poem’s attitude toward the tsarist effort to subdue them is more complicated. Some scholars have detected in the body of the work a veiled critique of the pacification campaign.28 Yet two months after he had completed it, Pushkin added an epilogue that lauded Russia’s Caucasian mission much as Derzhavin’s odes had sung hosannas to Catherine’s earlier campaigns in Asia. Pushkin’s close friend Prince Petr Viazemskii privately complained about the jingoist postscript, which struck him as highly discordant, adding that “poetry is not the executioner’s ally.”29
Although Pushkin’s attitudes to the autocracy were highly ambiguous, he was not categorically opposed to Eastern conquest. Shortly after his holiday with the Raevskii family, he wrote to his brother that “The Caucasus, this sultry Asian frontier, is interesting in all respects. Ermolov [the general who first commanded the counterinsurgency] has filled it with his name and his benevolent genius…. We must hope that this conquered land … will not be a hindrance to future wars—and, perhaps, will help us carry out Napoleon’s chimerical plan to conquer India.”30 And in the unfinished history of Peter the Great that he undertook after his return to the capital, Pushkin lauded the tsar’s wars against “predatory” Turkish and Persian neighbors.31 Regardless of Pushkin’s political views, there was no contradiction between opposition to the emperor and enthusiasm for extending Russia’s Asian dominions. Many of Pushkin’s radical friends, such as the conspiratorial leader Pavel Pestel’, strongly supported a vigorous expansionist policy in the East.32
Lord Byron’s Childe Harold, which established the trope of the gentleman rebel who flees to the untamed Orient in search of freedom, clearly influenced Pushkin’s Captive. There are similarities as well with the novels of François-René de Chateaubriand, such as Atala, the story of a young American Indian woman who falls in love with a captive from another tribe but commits suicide to preserve her vow of chastity. Rousseau’s noble savage and his glorification of alpine splendor left their mark too.
The Captive of the Caucasus, in turn, was a seminal work in Russian letters. It initiated a number of important nineteenth-century literary conventions, including the “superfluous man,” the Caucasus as an exotic sanctuary from society’s oppression, and the honest, brave highlander. At the same time, Pushkin blurred the boundaries between European and Asian. Susan Layton suggests: “Despite the poet’s ambivalence about the matter, this catalogue of savage virtues in ‘The Prisoner of the Caucasus’ launched the Muslim mountaineers on a long literary career as the Asian ‘others’ whom the nineteenth-century Russians proved eager to embrace as surrogate ‘selves.’”33 This symbiosis of self and other would become an intriguing feature of Orientalism in Russian culture.
Pushkin’s Captive was prescient in likening Beshtu, one of the range’s more prominent peaks, to Mount Parnassus, sacred to the Muses of Greek mythology, for his poem launched a Caucasian vogue among Russian Romantic writers.34 Many of them also had involuntary firsthand knowledge of the region. Aleksandr Bestuzhev, who penned a number of popular tales about the mountains under the pseudonym Marlinskii in the 1830s, had been exiled there as a common soldier for his participation in the abortive coup of December 1825.
Mikhail Lermontov, a Life Guard hussar subaltern of Scottish descent who dabbled in Romantic poetry, was also banished to the campaign against the Islamic insurgents. An avid admirer of Pushkin, Lermontov had incurred the tsar’s displeasure in 1837 for circulating a verse that suggested that the great poet’s death was the result of a high-level conspiracy. His Oriental exile inspired Lermontov’s most important work, A Hero of Our Time, which is considered a masterpiece of Russian Romantic prose. Described as “a Childe Harold in Russian cloak,” the novel about a world-weary officer’s erotic and military exploits in the Caucasus betrays Byron’s strong imprint, while also bearing many traces of Pushkin’s work, including The Captive.35
Together with Pushkin, Lermontov and Bestuzhev (Marlinskii) were among the better-known Russian writers to find inspiration in the mountains. The 1830s saw a host of what Layton calls “little Orientalizers,” whose often sensational and patriotic exotica appealed to a less discriminating audience.36 The last major prerevolutionary writer to turn to Caucasian themes was Count Leo Tolstoy. In addition to his own “A Prisoner of the Caucasus,” a children’s story whose plot resembled Pushkin’s poem, Tolstoy also published a distinctly un-Romantic novella about the region in 1863, The Cossacks. Much later in life the increasingly rebellious aristocrat penned a savage indictment of the tsarist small war against the Muslim highlanders with his novel of 1904, Hadji Murad.
Pushkin’s The Captive also struck a chord with the literate public more broadly. According to Belinskii, it was so popular that, twenty years after its publication, most educated Russians could still recite its description of the Circassians from memory. Indeed, many read The Captive not just for its aesthetic merits but also as a source of information about a little-known region.37 Belinskii was not exaggerating when he claimed that it “first acquainted Russian society with the majestic image of the Caucasus and its bellicose natives.”38 The poem would inspire a number of creative works, including a ballet, songs, César Cui’s most popular opera, and more recently a film.
After their stay in Piatigorsk, the Raevskii family and Pushkin sailed to the Crimea, where the poet spent what he later described as the happiest period of his life. One of their excursions on the peninsula took them to the old Tatar palace at Bakhchisarai. Like Catherine the Great during her jubilee tour of 1787, Pushkin was enchanted, and the occasion moved him to write another well-known narrative poem, The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. Initially titled The Harem, The Fountain was based on an old legend about a Crimean khan’s frustrated love for Maria, a virginal blonde Polish princess he had seized in a raid, and the violent jealousy this aroused in another female slave, the dark-haired Georgian Zarema.39 Much more than The Captive, this poem incorporated various Near Eastern literary elements, from an epigraph by the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sa‘di to the evocation of roses, nightingales, the moon, and other typical Oriental metaphors.40
Starting with Belinskii, many critics have read a clear opposition between West and East in Pushkin’s depiction of the Madonna-like Maria on one hand and the sultry Zarema, as well as the despotic khan, on the other.41 However, as one Soviet scholar pointed out, the poet shows no preference for either the pure Occidental maiden or her passionate Oriental rival. Instead Pushkin portrays them as two sides of the same feminine coin.42 As for the khan, while he is described as “the scourge of peoples, the savage Tatar,” his yearning for the unattainable princess humanizes him. The reader ultimately feels sympathy for the lovesick Crimean chieftain.
While under Sa‘di’s spell, Pushkin also wrote shorter poems after his fashion, including “The Grape,” “The Rose Maiden,” and the briefer “Fountain of Bakhchisarai Court.” He was hardly unique. Translations of Near Eastern verse were a favorite of Romantic authors, and they inspired a number of simulations. Although there is no evidence that Pushkin ever read it, the best-known example of this genre was Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan, the German poet’s 1819 celebration of love that blended Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and even Indian styles with his own. Like Goethe, Pushkin saw such efforts as a synthesis of Orient and Occident; he never aspired to adopt an entirely Asian literary persona. Pushkin explained his approach in a letter to Prince Viazemskii: “The Oriental manner was my model, inasmuch it is possible for us rational, cold Europeans to adopt it…. Even when enraptured by Eastern splendor, the European must retain the taste and perspective of the European.”43
The Fountain of Bakhchisarai was published in March 1824 to great public acclaim and earned its author a generous honorarium. Pushkin was less fortunate in his nominal career with the foreign office. Now assigned to Count Mikhail Vorontsov, the governor-general of New Russia (southern Ukraine) in Odessa, he intemperately flirted with his new superior’s coquettish younger wife. Making matters worse, authorities intercepted a letter that appeared to espouse atheism. Fired from his post, Pushkin was banished to his family’s estate at Mikhailovskoe that summer.
Although he was now deep in the Russian countryside, the Orient continued to be Pushkin’s muse. Already in Odessa he had begun to read the Koran, and he now deepened his study of the Islamic text. Pushkin was particularly fascinated by Muhammad, whose persecution and exile seemed to parallel his own recent travails. At the same time, the bard was struck by the Prophet’s ability to move people with the power of his words alone.44 He was soon busy with a new cycle, Imitations of the Koran. Its nine poems, which retell the story of the Muhammad’s life, are both a summons to resist oppression as well as a semiautobiographical vision of the poet’s prophetic mission.45
Pushkin hardly appreciated it at the time, but his confinement at Mikhailovskoe came as a blessing in disguise, since it cut him off from the political turmoil surrounding Nicholas I’s accession to the throne after Alexander’s death toward the end of 1825. A number of Pushkin’s friends were Decembrists, members of a conspiracy to seize the throne and establish a constitutional monarchy. They wisely avoided involving their hotheaded companion in their scheme. Their fondness for his verse was well known to the authorities, however, and he might well have been implicated in the plot had he not been languishing in rural solitude.
In September 1826 Nicholas summoned Pushkin to a remarkable meeting at the Moscow Kremlin, where the new tsar had been staying for his coronation. In a lengthy interview Nicholas questioned the poet about his sympathies for the Decembrist plot. Although Pushkin freely admitted that he would have participated had he been given the opportunity, the tsar magnanimously forgave him and offered his protection and patronage. It proved to be a Faustian bargain. The new arrangement bound Pushkin tightly to his sovereign, restricting his freedom to express himself even more than under the previous reign. While he was allowed to return to the capital and continued to write, he felt increasingly trapped.
In 1829, frustrated at the rejection of his marriage proposal to a young beauty, Natalia Goncharova, Pushkin took an unauthorized journey back to the south. Russia was once again at war with Turkey, and the poet wanted to visit his old friend Nikolai Raevskii at the front. The trip resulted in a travelogue, Journey to Arzrum, whose prosaic and often cynical tone entirely nullified the poet’s earlier Romantic passion for the East: the Caucasian scenery was banal, a pretty but decidedly unfeminine Kalmyk lass alarms him with her flirtation, a Persian court poet he encounters somewhat later speaks plainly rather than issuing the anticipated stream of florid “Oriental bombast,” while the Ottoman foe is hardly courageous or menacing.46 As he walked about the newly captured eastern Turkish city of Arzrum (Erzurum), Pushkin reflected, “I know of no expression that makes less sense than the words: Asian opulence…. Now we can say: Asian poverty, Asian swinishness, etc.”
When Byron had died in 1824, Pushkin had remarked that English lord’s “genius paled with his youth … [later on] he was no longer the fiery demon who created ‘The Giaour’ or Childe Harold.”47 He also unknowingly predicted the course of his own career. As tastes changed, by 1830 Pushkin was no longer at the forefront of Russian literary life. According to D. S. Mirsky, he “was venerated by the younger generation rather as a relic of the past than as a living force.”48
Along with these professional frustrations, Pushkin’s private life also had its disappointments. Although Natalia Goncharova finally agreed to become his wife, married life proved unhappy. The young woman’s renowned beauty made her the object of increasingly unwelcome masculine attention. One suitor, Baron Georges-Charles d’Anthès, a dashing French émigré serving as an Imperial Russian Guards officer, was particularly persistent. When in late 1836 the poet began to be openly ridiculed as a cuckold, the inevitable duel followed. It proved to be Pushkin’s last. Mortally wounded, he died in great pain two days after the confrontation, on January 29, 1837.
Published in 1835, two years before his death, Pushkin’s Journey proved the epitaph for the Romantic flirtation with the East in Russian letters. Although it would take over two more decades to subdue the Islamic highlanders, and tsarist troops would be involved in various other Asian wars from the Crimea to Korea for much of the empire’s remaining existence, none of these campaigns excited the same literary response as had the Caucasus in Pushkin’s day. By the 1840s realism had replaced Romanticism, and writers turned their attention closer to home as the Russian peasant replaced the Circassian as the exotic other of their creative imaginations.49 Only at the turn of the twentieth century would Russian poets again become enchanted with the Orient. But Asia remained very much alive in other artistic domains.
As in literature, interest in the East among Russian painters in the modern age came initially from the West. The Islamic Orient had intrigued European artists since at least the Renaissance. At the turn of the sixteenth century, intimate contact with the Turks inspired Venetian artists such as Gentile Bellini to record Near Eastern scenes and statesmen. The seventeenth-century Dutch master Rembrandt drew on his extensive collection of imported props to execute portraits of individuals clad in sumptuous Eastern silken robes and turbans. And following more playful eighteenth-century turquerie, a rococo fad for all things Ottoman, French artists such as Charles-André van Loo painted canvases featuring pashas, sultanas, eunuchs, and odalisques in fantasy seraglios, while English aristocrats commissioned Sir Joshua Reynolds to portray them in Oriental settings.50 But the Near East’s artistic appeal reached its zenith in the nineteenth century with the rise of Orientalism as a distinct style of European painting.
Political developments clearly played a role. If Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition began to revive interest in the region, Greece’s struggle for independence in the 1820s and France’s North African campaigns during the following decade helped to sustain it. At the same time, the West’s growing dominion over the Mediterranean greatly simplified travel to the lands on the sea’s eastern and southern shores.51 With their vivid sunlight, languid sensuality, and picturesque ruins, they became a popular destination among painters, much as Italy had been in earlier centuries.52
Like its literary counterpart, Orientalist painting was an offshoot of Romanticism. Predominantly French, the artistic style featured scenes supposedly taken from daily life in the Islamic world. Some were indeed faithful genre paintings and ethnographic portraits, striking largely because of their exotic locale. At the same time, Orientalist artists often imagined scenes of excess sexuality, violence, cruelty, sloth, and other sins proscribed by Christian morality. Luxurious harems, murderous tyrants, and somnolent hashish addicts were favorite motifs.
The Death of Sardanapalus (1827) by the French Romantic Eugène Delacroix is typical of the genre.53 Based on Lord Byron’s tragedy of 1821, the canvas depicts the legendary last Assyrian king reclining on a magnificent bed, calmly contemplating the execution of his concubines and horses before his own inevitable doom. Red and white silks mingle chaotically with peacock feathers, gold vessels, jeweled swords, pale female flesh, and a terror-stricken horse against a backdrop of fire and smoke. Perhaps to remind the viewer of the cliché that Eastern license came in many forms, a muscular African slave, naked save for a strategically placed black cloth, provides a homoerotic accent.
Historians of art traditionally have explained that Orientalism’s popularity was driven primarily by escapism. By portraying in lush and arresting colors Asia’s supposed boundless carnality, savagery, indolence, and luxury—all traits alien to the age’s sober bourgeois sensibilities—Orientalist paintings provided a refuge for repressed fantasies. In his 1977 book on the subject, Philippe Julian suggested that “In the century of coal, whole cities lay under a mantle of drabness. An Orientalist picture in a Victorian drawing room was a kind of escape. To our great-grandparents, these canvases were not only a reminder of a different world, of something picturesque and heroic, but they hinted at pleasures that were often taboo in Europe and titillated a secret taste for cruelty and oppression.”54
Despite such possible Freudian connotations, academic attitudes to Orientalism remained fairly benign until the 1970s.55 However, not long ago an American writer remarked, “[Orientalism is] arguably the most politically incorrect artwork going today.”56 What first gave the style a more sinister air was the publication in 1978 of Edward Said’s Orientalism.57 While Said paid little attention to painting, some art historians were quick to appropriate his argument about the link between representation and repression.58 The most sophisticated study along these lines is Linda Nochlin’s article, “The Imaginary Orient.”59 A feminist academic, Nochlin examines the style from a gendered perspective. Thus Delacroix’s Orientalism was motivated not by lust for imperial power, but lust pure and simple.60 More intriguing is her interpretation of the hyperrealistic approach of later Orientalists such as Jean-Léon Gérôme, which she sees as deliberately deceptive. Far from being, as one contemporary put it, “one of the most studious and conscientiously accurate painters in our time,” Gérôme pursued a calculated strategy of “realist mystification” by presenting an imaginary Orient with seemingly photographic precision.61
Nochlin’s observations about Gérôme could arguably also be applied to his Russian student, Vasilii Vereshchagin, Russia’s Orientalist painter par excellence. Vereshchagin’s path to Gérôme’s atelier in Paris was hardly predictable or direct.62 Born in 1842 to a landowner of moderate means in the northwestern Government of Novgorod, he was given a typical upbringing for a future officer in the tsar’s armed forces: tutors at home, three years at a junior military school, and another six at the Naval Cadet Corps in the capital.
The latter may well have inspired Vereshchagin’s indefatigable wanderlust.63 As in all navy schools, the cadets were encouraged to learn about the world beyond their homeland’s shores, an effort strongly supported by directors that had included such maritime explorers as the illustrious circumnavigator Admiral Ivan Fedorovich Krusenstern. Geography proved to be among Vereshchagin’s favorite subjects, and during his spare time he repeatedly reread The Frigate Pallada (1858), the novelist Ivan Goncharov’s recent travel account. Vereshchagin’s high grades earned him cruises to western Europe along with the other better students during his last two summers in school. It was during these journeys abroad that he became acquainted with the writings of the radical émigré Aleksandr Herzen, which helped shape his progressive political views.
When Vasilii graduated at the top of his class in 1860, there was every expectation that he would join his classmates in a career with the imperial fleet. But already at school there had been factors that set him apart from the others. Although industrious and intelligent, the cadet proved to be sickly. More alarming, his sensitive stomach could not withstand seafaring. He was also subject to a nervous and excitable temperament, which, according to his close friend the prominent art critic Vladimir Stasov, he had inherited from his half-Tatar mother.64 And Vereshchagin liked to draw.
As a boy Vasilii had shown a remarkable aptitude in making sketches, a talent his more dedicated art teachers at school recognized and encouraged. When in his penultimate year at the corps the curriculum no longer included drawing classes, the cadet enrolled in the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, which functioned as a preparatory school for the Imperial Academy of Arts. The instructors initially regarded him as something of a dilettante. However, Vasilii’s stubborn insistence that he saw his future at an easel rather than aboard ship convinced them to take him seriously.
Vereshchagin’s parents humored their son’s interest for the time being. According to the conventions of the day, sketching was a perfectly acceptable parlor amusement for a member of his class. But as a living, the arts were considered a trade fit only for serfs and other rabble.65 When, shortly before receiving his diploma, Vasilii announced that he had decided to forsake the navy for further study at the Academy of Arts, his parents were appalled. He later recalled their reaction: “For the son of distinguished gentry … to become an artist—the shame!”66 Unable to dissuade their son through either the mother’s anguished tears or the father’s stern warnings of future privation, they reluctantly gave in.
Vereshchagin enrolled in the Imperial Academy of Arts at a time of considerable turmoil for the venerable establishment. Founded nearly a century earlier by Empress Catherine the Great, and from 1850 a subsidiary of the Ministry of the Court, its function was to promote the arts along European lines. As an institution of imperial patronage, the academy loyally reflected the neoclassical tastes of its Romanov masters. But when Emperor Nicholas I died in 1855 as his armies faced defeat against the Western powers in the Crimea, the autocracy’s grip on society and culture became less confident.67
Within the academy, the first to challenge the status quo were its students. Like many educated youth in the turbulent years that followed the “Iron Tsar’s” death, they sought to cast off the shackles of the past and adopt a more socially conscious ethos. One of the guiding lights of the shestidesiatniki, the generation of the 1860s, was Nikolai Chernyshevskii, a radical son of a priest from the provinces. His novel of 1863, What Is to Be Done?—with its strident advocacy of socialist egalitarianism, sexual emancipation, and sacrificial self-denial—became gospel to progressive Russian youth. More directly relevant to those enrolled at the academy, ten years earlier Chernyshevskii had written a master’s thesis on “The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality.”68 Arguing that art must replicate the real world, especially that of the common people, the author called on it to condemn the iniquities of the existing order. He famously called for art to be “a textbook for life,” rather than to decorate the palaces of the ruling class.69
Chernyshevskii’s angry rejection of “art for art’s sake” found a receptive audience among the academy’s students. In 1863—the same year the Salon des Refusés defied Paris’s artistic establishment—fourteen of them walked out of the institution’s gold medal competition, having refused to paint its obligatory theme from Scandinavian mythology. Led by Ivan Kramskoi, they struck out on their own by forming a cooperative workshop, following the model in What Is to Be Done? Although the venture eventually foundered, another effort at artistic emancipation in 1870 proved to be much more successful. Known as the Wanderers (Peredvizhniki) after their formal name, the Society of Traveling Art Exhibitions, the new group would transform Russian painting into a truly national school that obeyed Chernyshevskii’s dual summons to represent reality and criticize its ills with “morally indignant” canvases.70
Vereshchagin also heeded Chernyshevskii. As he would later write in his extensive musings about his craft, “The notion of art as obedient to absolute beauty … is outdated. Instead of pure, absolute beauty, modern art … is linked to everyday life in all its aspects.”71 But unlike some of his schoolmates, Vereshchagin’s rebellion against the academy took a more solitary path. He had begun his new schooling well enough and soon became particularly close to a young liberal professor, Aleksandr Beidemann, who took him along on a commission to decorate the new Russian cathedral of Saint Alexander Nevsky in Paris.
In his third year at the academy Vasilii won a silver medal for his sketch based on Homer’s Odyssey. However, a few months later—and half a year before the revolt of the fourteen—he shocked the faculty by impetuously burning a larger sepia drawing of the same theme, “to avoid any more of such nonsense,” he explained.72 Although he would not formally withdraw from the academy until 1865, Vereshchagin spent the summer of 1863 in the Caucasus, supporting himself through art lessons to Russian officers’ children. Following the example of Pushkin and Lermontov, he roamed the mountains in his spare time, filling three sketchbooks during his stay.
Vereshchagin’s life took a lucky turn early in 1864, when he inherited 1,000 rubles from his uncle. Abandoning the relative poverty of his Caucasian existence, the aspiring young artist traveled to Paris and talked himself into an apprenticeship with a new professor at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Jean-Léon Gérôme. When the latter asked who had recommended him, Vereshchagin cockily replied, “Your paintings,” adding, “I will study only with you and with no one else.”73 Gérôme had begun his career two decades earlier specializing in classical themes, but he added the Near East to his repertoire after several journeys there in the 1850s. His Oriental canvases were characterized by dramatic light and color, as well as highly realistic brushwork, all reminiscent of the Dutch Golden Age.74 Because of the artist’s scientific attention to local detail, some contemporaries classified him a peintre ethnographe.75
Vereshchagin’s sojourns in Gérôme’s atelier left their mark both in technique and choice of subject. Yet, although the men would remain on cordial terms, Vereshchagin’s relationship with his new school was little better than with the academy back in St. Petersburg. Chafing at Gérôme’s insistence that he copy neoclassical paintings at the Louvre Museum, after about a year he again decamped for the Caucasus.
Vereshchagin’s second voyage to the Russian highlands set the pattern for many of his future travels. Over the course of six months, he produced numerous sketches of the region and its people, encyclopedically recording the various national types of the latter with photographic accuracy. The artist’s interest in exotic local customs led to a characteristically macabre drawing of self-flagellants during a Shiite festival in Nagorno-Karabakh, A Religious Procession of the Moharrem Celebration at Shusha. Vereshchagin also wrote a detailed account that was soon published in the popular French monthly Le tour du monde (Around the World).76 Extensively illustrated, the travelogue was full of clichés about the barbarous, menacing Orient, from the filthy, drink-addled Kalmyk nomads and thieving gypsies to the “audacious, coarse and vengeful” Kabardians.77 Despite having been pacified by Russian arms, the threat of violence was ever present in the mountains, driven by “religious fanaticism, and the hate common to tribes subjugated by their conquerors.”78
Vereshchagin left the Caucasus in the autumn of 1865 with high hopes of publishing a journal dedicated to the region, but he could not raise the necessary start-up capital. He therefore returned to Paris, where he proudly showed his drawings to Gérôme. While full of praise, his teacher suggested that he should now master the more difficult skill of painting in oils. This time Vereshchagin took the advice, and he began to work hard to acquire the new craft.
During a conversation with his former academy professor in summer 1867, Vereshchagin learned that General Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman, the tsar’s new governor-general of Turkestan, wanted to hire a young artist for his headquarters in Tashkent. There would be considerable hardship and danger, since Russian troops were still actively campaigning in the central Asian province. Nevertheless, Vereshchagin rushed to offer his services to the general. “I had no passionate love for the East, God forbid!” he later told a friend. “I studied in the East because I was freer there … than in the West. Instead of a Parisian garret or some room … on Vasil’evskii Island [in St. Petersburg], I would have a Kirghiz yurt.”79 Satisfied with Vereshchagin’s educational credentials and the quality of his sketches, Kaufman took him on.
After some hurried preparations, Vereshchagin set out in August from Orenburg, a major trading center in southwestern Siberia on the central Asian steppe frontier.80 He proceeded on the post road to Tashkent by ta-ran tass, a basketlike wooden chariot uninhibited by springs; one French account described it as “an instrument of torture.”81 The 2,000-kilometer journey took him south to the Aral Sea and then southeast along the Syr Darya, reaching the colonial capital in six weeks. Aside from the typical discomforts of traveling in a largely untamed land, it was an uneventful journey. Vereshchagin’s first impression of his new hometown was hardly favorable. He recalled: “For those acquainted with the Levant, Tashkent offers nothing new: One sees mostly mud houses, oil-paper windows, grayish walls, and torturous narrow streets where the rains dig muddy pits that swallow horses right up to their knees.”82 Taking an apartment in a local quarter, he busied himself over the next few months by capturing the architecture and the remarkable ethnic diversity of the population in his sketchbooks.
The artist was particularly interested in Tashkent’s less wholesome aspects, including its opium dens, beggar guilds, prisons, and bachas (dancing boys). He did point out that things had been even worse before tsarist troops had captured the city a dozen years earlier, as there had also been thousands of slaves then. While he occasionally detected undercurrents of hostility, Vereshchagin was convinced, like many of his compatriots, that most of the new Russian subjects were becoming reconciled to their new rulers. As the inhabitants of a suburb greeted him warmly, he mused: “Were they sincere? Allah alone, who knows their hearts, can say. Perhaps they were, since we know that in central Asia the Infidels govern with greater firmness and justice than the indigenous potentates.”83
Next spring the general sent his artist on an ethnographic survey of the provincial countryside. Accompanied by two Cossacks and a Tatar translator who claimed princely blood, Vereshchagin made his way southward along the upper Syr Darya to study the local Kirghiz and Sart communities. About thirty kilometers from Tashkent, there were reports that Kaufman was marching on the emir of Bukhara. Vereshchagin’s thoughts raced: “War! And so close to me, right here in central Asia!”84 This was so much more interesting than folklore.
The object of Kaufman’s assault was Samarkand, Tamerlane’s ancient capital. Vereshchagin hastened to the fabled city, but much to his disappointment it had already fallen the day before his arrival. Nevertheless, there were magnificent medieval monuments to be drawn, and he put his pencil to work. The young artist’s wish to see combat close up was soon realized when, shortly after Kaufman left Samarkand with the bulk of his troops to pursue the emir, the local population rose against the Russian garrison.85 For a week in early June 1868, the 500-man force the general had left behind held out against overwhelming odds. Seizing a rifle from a fallen soldier, Vereshchagin played a major role in the defense. At one point, when some troops wavered during a counterattack, he rallied them by storming ahead with the shout “Brothers, after me!” He also joined two sorties out of the citadel into the labyrinthine city streets beyond, narrowly escaping death on both occasions when his comrades rescued him from encounters with the foe.
Vereshchagin displayed fearlessness off the battlefield as well. After the siege had been lifted, he criticized Kaufman in front of his staff for not having done more to secure the fortress. Although one officer indignantly suggested that the artist be shot for insubordination, the general did not take offense and even nominated him for the Saint George Cross, Russia’s highest decoration for military bravery.86 At the time, Vereshchagin objected to the distinction, but he relented when the order’s council voted to award the medal. He proudly wore it on his civilian jacket for the rest of his days. Fiercely jealous of his independence, the painter would refuse all other honors during his career, even a professorship at the Imperial Academy of Arts.87
The events in Samarkand exacted their toll on Vereshchagin’s fragile health. Succumbing to a fever, he decided to travel to Paris to continue work on his paintings. Hopes of organizing a show in the French capital did not materialize, although Le tour du monde once again printed his travel account. Early in the following year, the artist got word that Kaufman was back in St. Petersburg. Might he be convinced to sponsor an exhibition? The general, who was eager to show off his central Asian domain to the Russian public, readily gave his consent when Vereshchagin broached the question.
Occupying three rooms at the Ministry of State Domains on the Moika Canal for a month in spring 1869, the Turkestan exhibition displayed stuffed animals, mineral specimens, costumes, and artifacts, as well as Vereshchagin’s sketches and paintings. With free admission and its central location just south of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral, it attracted large crowds. Emperor Alexander II paid a visit on the opening day with Kaufman as his guide, and expressed his satisfaction. When the tsar asked for the painter to be presented to him, however, the latter made himself scarce. “I do not like to do the bidding of important men,” he later explained to his brother.88
The highlight was the room with Vereshchagin’s canvases, which featured two battle scenes, After Victory and After Defeat, as well as a genre painting, The Opium Eaters. There was also a photo of another oil, The Bacha and His Admirers. Portraying an anxious young dancing boy in a girl’s dress surrounded by a group of well-fed, middle-aged central Asian men as they greedily eye their quarry, the painting had been destroyed earlier by the artist on the advice that it might offend.89
The Opium Eaters particularly struck viewers.90 Narcotics were a favorite theme of Orientalist art, which often included a narghile or hashish pipe in its harems and souks.91 What made this particular work unusual was its objective approach, utterly devoid of moralizing disapproval or clichéd exoticism. Although clearly in an Eastern setting, it struck the critic Andrei Somov as offering a more general comment about human degradation.92 Vereshchagin hinted that Asians were no more predisposed to the vice than others when he mused, “Is the day far off when opium will become widespread in Europe, as if Europe doesn’t already consume enough Western opium, that is to say tobacco?”93
The two other paintings rebut the notion of Oriental and Occidental as polar opposites. One featured two Uzbeks contemplating their trophy of a dead Russian soldier’s severed head, while in the other a tsarist colonial rifleman casually smokes his pipe as many central Asian corpses litter the ground around his feet. In displaying these two scenes of humanity’s indifference to the savagery of war, the artist suggested that East and West were actually not far apart. As if to stress this point, he ironically titled the first canvas After Victory and the second After Defeat, that is, from the enemy’s perspective.
Encouraged by the success of his first exhibition, Vereshchagin headed back to central Asia as soon as the show closed in April 1869. Kaufman now arranged an appointment for him at the civilian rank of collegiate registrar on the staff of Major General Gerasim Kolpakovskii, his deputy as governor of the Semireche district in eastern Turkestan. Based in Tashkent, over the next year the artist traveled extensively throughout the province. He did not hesitate to seek out danger once again. On one occasion Vereshchagin joined a Cossack raid deep into Chinese territory to discipline Islamic insurgents, earning more laurels by saving the life of the unit’s commander.
Kaufman was clearly pleased with his painter. When Vereshchagin returned to St. Petersburg in 1870, the general awarded him a three-year stay abroad to translate his central Asian experiences into art. The official goal would be to “acquaint the civilized world with the life of a little-known people and to enrich learning with materials important for the study of the region.” Left unsaid was the equally important motive of allaying European suspicions about tsarist colonial expansion.94
This time the destination was Munich. Because of the Franco-Prussian War, Paris was not an attractive option that year. The Bavarian capital also happened to be the home of a friend, the young Elisabeth Marie Fischer, whose hand he soon took. To simulate Turkestan’s bright desert light, Vereshchagin designed a special open studio that rotated on rails to keep his models fully in the rays of the sun as it rose and set during the day. Working with a frantic energy, by 1873 he had completed an impressive thirty-five canvases. They would be sensations.
Vereshchagin’s Turkestan series consisted of genre paintings and battle scenes, in addition to a few ethnographic studies. While some were imaginary, many were based on personal experience and observation. Together they justified Russia’s mission in central Asia by invoking Orientalist tropes about despotism, cruelty, fallen glory, and vice. Yet some canvases also raised disturbing questions about the conquerors themselves.
A major theme in Western perceptions of the East at the time was the notion of stagnation and barbarism amid traces of greatness rooted in centuries long past. Vereshchagin captured the idea in two paintings that contrast the Timurid Empire at its apogee with the miserable reality of the present. At Tamerlane’s Doors (1872–73) imagines a fourteenth-century view of the conqueror’s palace in Samarkand. Possibly inspired by Gérôme’s The Seraglio’s Guard (1859), it features a pair of sentries armed to the teeth as they stand watch in perfect symmetry over its entrance. Some critics have pointed out that the men in their finely decorated robes are purely ornamental, for the main subject is the pair of massive wooden doors at the center. To emphasize their master’s despotic power, the guards face inward rather than toward the viewer, while the intricately carved doors, half hidden in shadow, heighten the air of mystery.
No such awesome majesty attends At the Mosque’s Gate’s (1873), the previous painting’s contemporary companion. Rather than two formidable guards, here a sad duo of mendicants with begging bowls await the worshippers’ alms at the entrance of a central Asian mosque in Vereshchagin’s own day. Gone too is the symmetry of the men; one of the paupers leans on his staff, while his companion is hunched in quiet sleep. And these doors, now in the full glare of the sun instead of shadowy darkness, clearly show signs of age.
Vereshchagin must have had a change of heart about the propriety of certain themes when he painted The Sale of the Child Slave (1872). Much like Gérôme’s well-known The Snake Charmer (1870), it is a commentary on two evils Europeans at the time commonly associated with the East: slavery and pederasty. In his tiny shop, a merchant slyly extols the quality of his ware to a wealthy, aged client, who lustfully eyes a nude boy while hypocritically counting his prayer beads. The painter again effectively manipulates light and shadow, heightening the contrast between the child’s innocent nakedness and the old man’s luxuriant bright yellow silk robe and white turban.
Vereshchagin paid little attention to heterosexual motifs. Whereas harems and odalisques abounded in Western Orientalist art, they are entirely absent from his Turkestan series. Indeed, women almost never made an appearance in any guise whatsoever.95 This lacuna was hardly an expression of misogyny. Like Chernyshevskii, the artist advocated female emancipation, and his travelogues waxed indignant about sexual inequality in central Asia: “From the cradle, sold to a man; as a child taken by that man, when she is neither psychologically nor physically mature, she never lives a real life, for childbirth ages her [and she will spend the rest of her days] exploited and withered by a beast of burden’s toil.”96 The only exception was a relatively little-known work, Uzbek Woman in Tashkent (1873), which portrayed a female passerby entirely hidden by her burqa and face mesh. The only glimpse of skin is a small flash of wrist, accidentally exposed amid the sexless garment’s folds. The painter underscores his protest against the confined segregation of women in central Asia by placing the subject next to a tall, prisonlike wall that entirely cuts her off from the blue sky and green trees beyond.
Turkestanis’ cruelty to their fellow men featured more prominently in Vereshchagin’s art. One canvas, The Samarkand Zindan (1873), imagined the citadel’s notorious subterranean prison with its doomed inmates, which the painter saw before Kaufman ordered it destroyed.97 Much more dramatic was a reconstruction of another scene before the Russian capture, They Rejoice (1872). On Samarkand’s market square, with the decaying turquoise facade of the great seventeenth-century Shir-Dar mosque as backdrop, a mullah exhorts the faithful to wage jihad against the infidel. In the foreground a variety of spectators, from the emir and merchants on camel-back to beggars and feral dogs, watch the scene. Separating the onlookers from the rest of the crowd is a straight line of ten tall poles with darkened tops, which on closer scrutiny prove to be the heads of Russian casualties. An epigraph on the frame with the following words from the Koran reminds the European viewer of Islam’s proverbial fanaticism: “Thus God commands, that all infidels die! There is no god but God …”98
If the genre paintings in his Turkestan series repeated many common Orientalist motifs, Vereshchagin’s battle scenes were much less stereotypical. Some effectively conveyed the excitement of combat. Based on the artist’s own experience during the siege of Samarkand, At the Fortress Wall: “Hush. Let Them Enter!” (1872) pictures a group of desert troops preparing to meet an anticipated enemy strike through a break in the crumbling defenses.99 The title refers to the reply the commanding officer gave Vereshchagin when the latter suggested rushing out to attack the foe. The men’s anxious expressions, their erect bayonets, and the composition—a broadening white line pushing against the gray of the shaded barrier—all convey the tension moments before the clash.
Likewise inspired by an episode the artist had witnessed, Mortally Wounded (1873) presents war in a distinctly minor key.100 Shot in the chest, a dying soldier staggers ahead as red blood begins to stain his white tunic. An enveloping cloud of thick dust and smoke suggests his imminent departure from the living. According to a Russian specialist of the genre, “All war artists have pictured casualties as an inevitable accessory of crowded battle scenes, but until Vereshchagin no one ever made a wounded soldier the main subject of a virtually solitary scene.”101
Their combination of exotic vistas, thrilling action, and macabre realism made the Turkestan series an instant success with the public. Since Russia was still very much on the margins of the European art world, Vereshchagin arranged his debut in a more cosmopolitan setting at London’s Crystal Palace. The reviews for the exhibition, which opened in April 1873, were almost universally positive. The Pall Mall Gazette praised the paintings as “very luminous and spirited pieces … giving us the acquaintance of an original and considerable artist,” while The Spectator’s critic gushed, “They are not like anything that has ever before been seen in England; they stand alone in their beauty and barbarism. The color of them, the cruelty of them!”102
The choice of London as his venue was intriguing. At the time Britons were particularly anxious about Russia’s central Asian ambitions, which they regarded as a threat to India. The artist portrayed his empire’s advance much like Prince Aleksandr Gorchakov’s famous circular of 1864, which had justified the conquest of Tashkent as an action perfectly normal for “all civilized states that come into contact with half-savage, wandering tribes.”103 In the preface to his exhibition’s catalogue, Vereshchagin drew an even more explicit parallel with British colonial expansion: “The Central Asian population’s barbarism is so glaring, its economic and social condition so degraded, that the sooner European civilization penetrates into the land, whether from one side or the other, the better.”104 He added that he hoped his paintings would “assist in dispelling the distrust of the English public towards their natural friends and neighbors in Central Asia.”105
Vereshchagin brought his Turkestan series to St. Petersburg the following year. Exhibited at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the show attracted “countless multitudes.”106 Despite—or perhaps because of—murmurs of official disapproval, the show garnered generally good reviews in the press, as well as the enthusiastic praise of other artists.107 The writer Vsevolod Garshin was moved to pen a verse “At Vereshchagin’s First Show,” Modest Mussorgsky composed a ballad based on Forgotten, while Ivan Kramskoi, a leading member of the Wanderers, wrote that “it is a milestone, a conquest of Russia, far greater than Kaufman’s victory.”108 Although Vereshchagin was unable to interest the tsar in buying the paintings, the Moscow-based industrialist Pavel Tretiakov soon acquired them for his collection.
To paraphrase Dostoyevsky, what was central Asia to Vereshchagin? When he learned that Stasov was writing an article about his exhibition for the prominent St. Petersburg daily Novoe Vremia (New Times), he dashed off a letter explaining his thinking behind the Turkestan series. The artist suggested that he could have focused on colorful Oriental costumes. But he really had a more serious aim in mind. “My main purpose,” he continued, was “to describe the barbarism with which until now the entire way of life and order of central Asia has been saturated.”109
Vereshchagin had titled a group of seven paintings in the series Poèmes barbares. Based partly on episodes in Kaufman’s ongoing small wars, he intended them to be “chapters” within a narrative about a successful raid on a tsarist unit by the emir of Bukhara’s forces. Beginning with They Observe (1873), which pictured Uzbek and Kirghiz scouts as they spy on their foe, the canvases took the viewer through the assault, the Russians’ last stand, the tribute of their severed heads to the emir back in Tashkent, celebrations on the market square (They Rejoice), and a prayer of thanksgiving at Tamerlane’s grave.
The final “chapter” of these “barbaric poems” was also Vereshchagin’s best-known work, Apotheosis of War (1871–72). On a light brown postapoca lyptic desert plain against a backdrop of an ancient city’s ruins and Daliesque, desiccated trees, an enormous pyramid of white human skulls rises into the cloudless blue sky. The only sign of life is a flock of black ravens, searching in vain for remnants of carrion on the fleshless heads. The artist had initially planned to title the work Apotheosis of Tamerlane, since it had been inspired by accounts of the medieval khan’s custom of leaving such monuments. However, Prussia’s recent clash with France had reminded him that war’s cruel violence remained as much a feature of his own century as it had been of the fourteenth. To stress this point, he inscribed the frame with the ironic epigraph, “Dedicated to all great conquerors, past, present and future.”110
The subtext is obvious. If the Oriental was barbarous, the Occidental could be just as uncivilized. There was no fundamental difference between East and West. War was the clearest proof. In his letter to Stasov about the Turkestan series, he concluded with this point: “I must remind you of the fact that both warring sides appeal to a single God … a truth that is just as valid in Asia as it is in enlightened Europe.”111 Whether a soldier took to arms with the cry “Allahu Akbar!” “S nami Bog!” or “Gott mit uns!” the tragic outcome was the same. The implication for a generation of Russians who flaunted their atheism was that religious zeal led to fanaticism and violence among all nations, regardless of race or creed.
A firm believer in progress and the perfectibility of mankind, Vereshcha-gin did not think that Turkestan was eternally condemned to barbarism. Given the proper circumstances, the East could reach the same level of development as the West. What was necessary was the fatherly guidance of the latter. Europeans, including his own compatriots, had a duty to bring civilization to their Asian brethren, a task best accomplished by conquest and rule. According to Vereshchagin, “Whatever the cost, and with all due respect to the law and justice, the question [of colonizing Turkestan] must be settled, and with the least possible delay. It concerns not just Russia’s future in Asia, but above all the well-being of those under our rule. In truth, they have more to gain from seeing our authority definitively established than to return to their former tyranny.”112
The artist’s conception of Russia’s mission in central Asia was the colonial equivalent of “going to the people,” the vast agrarian populist migration to the Russian countryside in the summers of 1873 and 1874 to bring enlightenment to the peasantry. There was no inherent contradiction between such left-leaning sentiments and championing General Kaufman’s small wars. Friedrich Engels once explained to Karl Marx that “Russia in truth performs a progressive task in the East…. Russian rule is a civilizing force for the Black and Caspian Seas, as well as for Central Asia.”113
While the tsar’s attitude to Vereshchagin’s Turkestan series remains unclear, some of the paintings did offend a number of his senior officials. Many of the battle scenes portrayed Russia’s central Asian campaign in a distinctly inglorious light. The artist’s own political views—some labeled him a nihilist—did not help. Yet contrary to his reputation in later years, Vereshchagin was not dogmatically pacifist. He never questioned tsarist ambitions in Turkestan. During Russia’s war with Turkey in 1877–78, he fully supported its war aims, even if his brush produced a scathing critique of the way they were executed. Indeed, when his brother Aleksandr considered leaving the military after being wounded on the Balkan front during that conflict, he urged him to stay on and fulfill his duty to fatherland and family.114 And when Japan went to war with Russia in 1904, he bombarded Nicholas II with letters urging the tsar to take a firm line against the “yellow faces.” He also offered his help: “If my saber isn’t strong, permit my pencil to serve you.”115 What Vereshchagin did oppose were the excesses of war and the incompetence of the generals who waged it.
At the same time, as an artist who firmly believed in his obligation to portray reality, Vereshchagin considered himself honor bound to avoid glorifying or sentimentalizing an inherently cruel enterprise. To him, the way painters traditionally had portrayed war was fraudulent. In a discussion of the more established German military artist August-Alexander von Kotzebue, he explained, “He was a battle painter of the old school…. On his canvases it was obvious that [soldiers] attacked, charged, maneuvered, took prisoners and died as the academy taught, and entirely according to the official accounts of the commanders, in other words, as they wanted it to be known and not as it really happened.”116
Not one to rest on his laurels, Vereshchagin left St. Petersburg even before his show at the interior ministry had ended. In April 1874 he sailed with his wife to India, where he spent the next two years traveling throughout the immense colony. Although at times his progress was hampered by British suspicions that the former navy officer was a tsarist spy, Vereshchagin’s canvases of the journey were entirely apolitical, focusing on the subcontinent’s exotic architecture, people, and scenery in rich, bright colors.
Vereshchagin never completed all the Indian paintings he had planned, since rising tensions in the Balkans between the Orthodox populations and their Ottoman overlords soon drew his attention. By the time war had broken out between Russia and Turkey in April 1877, he had secured himself a posting to the staff of a senior tsarist general to see the action firsthand. Even more than his Turkestan battle scenes, the works that resulted from his year at the Balkan front captured the difficult campaign in all its inglorious misery. While he again fully supported St. Petersburg’s military aims, his brush highlighted the grim toll on the troops and the callous indifference of their commanders.
In the following three decades Vereshchagin took extensive sojourns in Palestine, the Philippines, North America, and Japan, all of which yielded more paintings. It was during a second voyage to northeast Asia as Japan took up arms against Russia that the artist met his end on March 31, 1904, aboard Admiral Stepan Makarov’s flagship Petropavlovsk when it struck a mine in Manchurian waters off Port Arthur.
Neither Vereshchagin’s brush nor his pen had shied away from expressing strong opinions. When it came to central Asia, these included a strong faith in Russia’s mission civilisatrice, the duty of all modern nations to bring the benefits of more enlightened ways to their less advanced brethren. In this way, General Kaufman’s campaign in Turkestan happened to coincide with the artist’s progressive political leanings. At the same time, his commitment to Chernyshevskii’s credo of critical realism obligated him to present war’s brutal cost to Russian conscripts in searing honesty.
As a student of one of Paris’s foremost teachers, Vereshchagin naturally adopted the tropes of Orientalist art about the East’s cruelty, fanaticism, and vice. Nevertheless, as his writings make clear, he made no fundamental Saidian distinction between European “self ” and Asian “other.” In an oft-quoted remark he made in later years, Vereshchagin repeated his firm belief that the two were not really quite so far apart: “We often hear claims that our century is highly civilized, and that it is hard to imagine how mankind could possibly develop even further. Is not the opposite really true? Wouldn’t it be better to accept that mankind has only made the most tentative steps in all directions, and that we still live in the age of barbarism?”117
When early nineteenth-century Russian poets found their muse in the Orient, they were following a European trend. But they took a different course. If, like the great Romantic Lord Byron, the Russians also traveled to the East, they rarely did so by going abroad. For Pushkin, Lermontov, Bestuzhev (Marlinskii), and the others, the Caucasus was well within their own country’s borders. At the same time, their attitudes were not just shaped by the peculiarities of political geography. Although Russia’s Romantic poets considered themselves to be European, they were also aware of a special affinity with Asia. Pastor Herder’s ideas about Eastern roots seemed much more concrete to them than to his own compatriots to the west.
Bestuzhev put it well: “The two-faced Janus, Russia simultaneously looked both to Asia and to Europe.”118 And when gazing East, Romantic Russia also saw some reflections of itself. Whether consciously or not, this recognition that the boundaries between Orient and Occident were much less distinct than for Germans, French, or English made Pushkin and his contemporaries more empathetic with the East. In Said’s terms, there was much less difference between self and other. While the Orient was less important to Russian painters, Vasilii Vereshchagin’s canvases and prolific writings show that artists could have very similar thoughts about the East’s alterity.
Pushkin’s era would come to be known as the Golden Age, when Russian letters first reached their full florescence. As a result, while Asia faded into the literary background during the rest of the nineteenth century, the Oriental theme would remain inextricably linked to this time of poetic greatness. And it did not stay entirely dormant, particularly as Russians entered the twentieth century.