There were no natives there. Originally a Swedish land with a Finnish population, the suburb was inhabited by settlers whom the Empire brought there to service and feed the capital. Griboedov guessed that these particular peasants came from "the sacred banks of the Dnieper and Volga." His friend, who accompanied him to Pargolovo, specified that these peasants had been resettled from the "internal provinces" about 50 years earlier (Bulgarin 1830: 155). Both reported a touristic, ethnographic interest in these peasants, their looks and their songs. Meaningfully, Griboedov filled his parable with erotic hints, which were typical for many narratives of the contact zone (Pratt 1992).
In Griboedov's formula, the Russian gentry failed to become good Europeans because they were foreign to their own people. A trained historian, Griboedov knew that it was exactly the perceived foreign- ness that defined the mechanism of imperial power in Russia. Apart from illicit moments, the elite did not mix its blood and customs with the commoners because self-segregation was the condition of self- preservation (Wortman 1995: 5). There is a powerful feeling of discontent in Griboedov's narrative. Rather than naturalizing differences, Griboedov felt unsettled by them. The inability of his friends, the Russian gentlemen, to understand a peasant festivity, or to take part in it, made these gentlemen a "damaged class of half-Europeans." Griboedov seemed to believe that a truly European elite would have been better connected to the folk in their heartland. But he probably remembered how, a few decades earlier, his French peers observed the same gap among their people. The nobles, wrote abbot Sieyes (2003), was "an isolated people," "a stranger to the nation" in the land where "third estate was everything."
Traveling between Tbilisi and St. Petersburg, Griboedov (1999a) devised a grand-scale project that would, if accomplished, have reshaped the Empire. In 1828, he applied to the government with a plan for the Transcaucasian Russian Company, which would be modeled after the British East Indian Company. His plan would resettle many thousands of peasants from central Russia to the Caucasus, creating massive colonies there: dozens of new Pargolovos. As the best model for the Russian colonization of the Caucuses, Griboedov presented the British colonization of North America. It was an unfortunate example; American colonies had emancipated themselves a few decades earlier and the Russian government closely followed these events, which renewed its anxieties about the fate of Siberia and the Caucasus. For this reason or another, Griboedov's project was rejected. He was appointed ambassador to Persia, where he was murdered by a Muslim mob in Tehran in 1829, less than a year after his marriage to the Georgian princess.
Black Magic
Older than Griboedov, Arthur Young wrote from the other end of Europe: "What a melancholy reflection is it to think that more than nine-tenths of the species should be the slaves of the despotic tyrants!" (Young 1772: 20). The promenade to Pargolovo connoted the same melancholic reflection, but there was more to it. In colonial situations, racial difference defined statutory difference; Griboedov knew how it worked in the Caucasus. Now in the countryside near St.
Petersburg, he discovered the same correlation between race and power, but the causality was reversed. Status inequality changed the perceived racial characteristics of people so much that they seemed to belong to two different tribes. Griboedov's experience was close to a colonial construction of race as the instrumental divide that cuts across humanity to benefit its minority. If Griboedov was right in his perception, a Russian village, an army platoon, and even a noble manor were all places of intercultural miscommunication, "contact zones" (Pratt 1992) that hosted myriad routine dramas typical for a colonial order. In a similar trope, Kastor Lebedev, a respected lawyer and member of the Russian Senate, wrote in 1854 about his routine trip to a village near Oreclass="underline"
Peasants are not far from domestic animals. This old man, unwashed, unkempt, barefoot; this half-naked woman; these dirty, disheveled boys lying in the mud and straw, all them are not human figures! It seems as if they all are beyond the boundary of the State, all are illegitimate children of Russia, all are defeated by a conqueror who does not belong to their tribe; as if all our memos, boards, and committees, all these cases in the courts are not about them, not for them. (Lebedev 1888: 354)
The law was not for the peasants and they were not for the law; they lived, worked, and traded outside the law. Unless a serf fled his master or was killed by his master, the state did not interfere in the life of the manor. The serf's life was bare: though they could be punished, they could not be sacrificed (Agamben 1998). Griboedov described the oceanic difference between the masters and the serfs by saying that they seemed to belong to two different, unmixed races. He clearly referred to the invasion of the Varangians, and the idea that the gentry were their descendants.
On January 28, 1974, Michel Foucault gave a lecture in the College de France:
One must say . . . that two races exist whenever one writes the history of two groups which do not . . . have the same language or, in many cases, the same religion. . . . Two races exist when there are two groups which, although they coexist, have not become mixed. (2003: 76)
Like Griboedov, Foucault detached the concept of race from colonial discourse and applied it to the relationships between groups inside Europe. Exploring the war-like nature of politics in a time of peace, Foucault suggested that the struggle between races was at the origin and the center not only of colonial, but also of metropolitan politics. Two groups form "a single polity only as a result of wars, invasions, victories, and defeats" (2003: 76). In other words, races merge only as a consequence of great violence. Examining how the English and French revolutions reactivated the ancient memory of wars between the races of Romans, Celts, Saxons, and Normans, Foucault generalized about the internal colonialism that the pre-revolutionary Europe imposed on itself (2003: 103). When English or Scottish kings claimed their divine right to govern, they had to present themselves as heirs of William the Conqueror. It was not that the theory of divine right was connected to the theory of Norman succession; these two theories were the same. Those who questioned their power, like the radical sectarians of the English revolution, protested against the kings' "Norman yoke" and referred to the people's "Saxon right." Foucault detected similar constructions in medieval France. He could also have mentioned the Russian myth of Rurik or the revolutionary idea that the Romanovs were a "German dynasty."
While Marxian social historians interpreted these racial ideas as a disguised form of class war, Foucault neutralized the very difference between class and race. He presented two mythological languages, one of race and another of class, as mutually convertible. Sometimes the former, sometimes the latter was closer to the actual experience of historical agents. But theorists and ideologists always had their preferences. In a broad stroke, Foucault presented Hobbes's and Marx's political philosophies as attempts to pacify the race war. Like Marx, but in a different way, Hobbes proposed a scheme of things - the state of nature, covenant, sovereignty - that made races irrelevant. "In a word, what Hobbes wants to eliminate is the Conquest" (Foucault 2003: 110).