Students of Russian literature love Mikhail Lermontov's novel, The Hero of Our Time (1840). With its multiple narrators and egocentric protagonist, this novel gives a complex and critical picture of the Russian imperial experience. Like Lermontov, its central character, Pechorin, fights in the Caucasian War. He dies during a diplomatic mission to Persia, like Griboedov. The novel features memorable adventures with Russian and native beauties, an inevitable duel, and a portrait of a rank-and-file imperial officer, Maksim Maksimovich, a counter-balance to the brilliant, unstable Pechorin. Having served in the Caucasus for about 25 years, Maksim Maksimovich launches the novel by cracking a typically colonial puzzle. The Ossettians drive two Russian carriages through the mountains. One carriage is light and six bulls cannot move it; another is heavy but four bulls pull it easily. The light carriage belongs to a novice in the Caucasus, the heavy one to Maksim Maksimovich. The Ossettians and even their bulls employ the "weapons of the weak," deception and sabotage, to deceive the Russians and to get more money for the service. "Horrible beasts are these Asians," says Maksim Maksimovich (Lermontov 1958: 4/10). Apart from this generalization, he manifests a detailed knowledge of the locals. He smokes a pipe of the Kabarda people, wears a hat of the Cherkess people, and strongly prefers the Chechens to the Ossettians. A storyteller, he is the first source of our knowledge about the enigmatic Pechorin, whom he leads through the incomprehensible Asia.
In a short essay of 1841, "The Caucasian," which is the best companion to The Hero of Our Time, Lermontov presented an anthropological analysis of people like Maksim Maksimovich, the backbone of the empire, the officers of an imperial army that was stationed in a rebellious colony. In this essay, the Caucasian is a typical Russian officer who, said Lermontov, knew and loved his enemy, the untamed tribes of the Caucasus. "A half-Russian, half-Asian creature," with every year of service the officer had become more and more orientalized. He had first learned about the Caucasus from Pushkin, but since then he collected much information about the customs and leaders of various tribes. He knew their genealogies. He preferred their weapons, horses, and women to the Russian ones. He admired the mountaineers' manners of riding, fighting, and living. He started learning their languages, more than once. Discussing the Caucasian tribes in comparative detail had become his and his peers' favorite preoccupation. "The true Caucasian deserves much surprise and respect," wrote Lermontov. A primary agent of imperialist rule, the Russian officer in the Caucasus turned into a lay anthropologist who felt the temptation to "go native" and had not much reason to resist (Lermontov 1958: 4/159; see also Layton 1994; Barrett 1999).
Lermontov was highly critical of these feelings. He distanced himself in equal measure from the destructive snobbery of Pechorin and the naive orientalism of Maksim Maksimovich. Throughout the long nineteenth century, the growing body of Russian literature and thought experienced the temptation to go native. Abandoning the
Figure 9: Karl Briullov, A Portrait of an Officer with his Servant (1830s). Note the oriental ambiance and the physical resemblance between the two.
Source: http://gallerix.ru/album/Brullov/pic/glrx-863742065
privileges of the higher estate and merging with the common Russian folk was often depicted as the mission of the educated class. Maksim Maksimovich exemplified a similar affection for non-Russians. Historically, this longing for non-Russian peoples preceded the mid- nineteenth-century prose about the Russian folk and the actual Going-to-the-People movement (Hokanson 1994).
In about 1820, a Baltic German in the Russian Navy, Captain Ferdinand Vrangel, visited Yakutsk on his way to Russian America. He found there a major fair that traded fur for grain, tobacco, and vodka. All the Russians in town were busy with the fur trade. All the craftsmen, hunters, and horse-drivers were Yakuts. Most of them had been christened; they even painted the icons in the town's five churches. However, they also retained their shamanistic customs, wrote Vrangel.
Many were of mixed ethnic origin. Wealthy Russian families used Yakut nurses to help raise their children and they spoke Yakut. In any case, the Russians and the Yakut all looked the same because of the fur clothing that helped them survive the climate. Their diet was also similar; grain was too expensive and flour was made of dry fish. The overall picture presented an unusually rich cultural hybridization, in which the assimilation worked in both directions and the urbane society spoke Yakut instead of French:
At the higher level of the local society the Yakut language played the dominant role, similar to French in our capitals. I was extremely surprised by this situation at a glorious dinner party in the house of the richest fur trader. . . . The society consisted of the chief of the district, the respected priests, the officials and some merchants, but the conversation was so interspersed with Yakut phrases that I could barely take part in it. (Vrangel 1841: 171)
After 1821, "Creole" became an official term in Siberia. Pure or mixed ethnically, many Russians there were bilingual and bicultural. Built on long-term processes of ethnic- and gender-specific displacement, the results were culturally productive on the Russian, imperial side. Himself a Creole, Afanasii Shchapov documented these processes in a series of essays that he wrote in political exile in the 1860s (1906: 2/365-481). He argued that Russia evolved as the result of the millennium-long Slavic colonization of lands that belonged to Finnish, Tartar, Yakut, and many peoples (Shchapov counted 111 altogether). This colonization was the substance of Russian history; "all our truth and our guilt" are connected to this process. Referring to the examples of the outright extermination of the Pacific tribes, which were known because they had happened recently, he implied that the earlier Slavic invasions in Europe were no less bloody, but that their memories had been forgotten. Shchapov was more realistic than his teacher, Eshevsky, in his understanding of the violence and oblivion that was characteristic of this colonization process. Giving many examples, Shchapov emphasized an entirely unknown aspect of Russian colonization. In two huge areas that he knew well, in the Tartar lands near Kazan and in Western Siberia, Russians effectively assimilated the natives by christening some of them, passing their crafts to the natives, and involving them in markets. But the opposite process also took place: the Russians acquired the skills, customs, dress, language, and even the physical appearance of the local communities.
Though this reversed assimilation was not rare in the history of the empires, the Yakuts could be an exception. A people with a traditional culture of hospitality and relative immunity to European diseases, they benefited from the fur trade more than others. Further east and north from Yakutsk, several warlike tribes rejected contact with the Russians and became targets of ethnic extermination. However, Willard Sunderland (1996) gives multiple examples of the "nativization" of Russians in various areas of Siberia. Whether it was civil peace in Yakutsk or an imperialist war in the Caucasus, Russian influences on the natives met with the natives' influences on the Russians. As Lermontov demonstrates with a persuasiveness unavailable to the historian, even while waging a bloody war, the people of the dominating power admired and imitated the mores of the oppressed.
Domination without hegemony, a concept that the Indian scholar Guha (1997) used to summarize British rule, created an unbalanced situation that featured distrust, resistance, and the frequent discharge of violence. The situations of reverse assimilation in Yakutia and the Caucasus were different. In both these colonial situations, one peaceful, the other violent, domination and hegemony developed in opposing directions. With cultural hegemony not just absent but evolving as a negative entity, the officers of the Empire were going native with an unexpected agility. As Edyta Bojanowska (2007: 107) notes, in his sketch of "universal history," Gogol depicted the Roman Empire in a way that was similar to what he, a colonial himself, perceived to be the situation in the Russian Empire: "The Romans adopted everything from the conquered peoples; first they adopted their vices, then their enlightenment. Everything mixed again. Everyone became a Roman and there was no genuine Roman, not a single one!" (Gogol 1984: 6/39). The way to describe these situations is to posit a negative hegemony and reversed orientalism as corollaries of internal colonization. A negative hegemony could coexist with a relatively non-violent domination, as in Yakutia, but its combination with the massive violence in the Caucasus was doomed. From Gogol to Conrad and from Pushkin to professional Russian orientalists (Berezin 1858; Morrison 2008: 288), intellectuals on both sides of the colonial divide perceived this situation as abnormal, unviable, and reversed in comparison to western imperialism. It also gave ground for hope that as an imperial nation, Russians possess a uniquely cosmopolitan, universal comprehension. Though readers of Russian literature associate this idea with the Pushkin speech by Dostoevsky (1880) and its poetic elaboration by Aleksandr Blok (1918), these ideas were developed throughout the High Imperial Period. Writing, in the 1840s, a cultural history of migrations in world history, the polymath, Aleksei Khomiakov, was first to describe this reversed situation as the advantage of the Russian way of colonization: