"The Man of the People appears in the novel as a bearer of a wise attitude towards life and death, which has been lost by the ruling classes," wrote Bakhtin (1975: 384). More often than not, this character is the enigmatic one who possesses a mystical and threatening, God-like power. In such narratives, Eve is a classless but national object of desire. Sometimes she is passive, but often she is endowed with the power of choice between the rivals for her affections. Gender structure intersects with class structure and both are contained within a national space, which is symbolized by the woman character-type, the Russian Beauty. Relations between these character-types are based on the story from Genesis. The Man of Culture, a descendant of the sinful Adam, argues with the Man of the People about the possession of the Russian Eve.
In its interactions with historical situations, this triangular plot produced the variety of Romantic literature, Russian style. This is a reductive reading, of course. There are many stories that have little to do with this plotline, and in those novels that generally comply with this scheme, there are many characters and many branches of the story that do not fit into the triangle. However, I will argue that in its multiple versions, this narrative structure replicates the intricacies of internal colonization in rich, diverging narratives. At the close of these stories we can often discern the ancient motif of sacrifice, which resolves what Girard describes as a "sacrificial crisis." Depending on which of them the novel sacrifices - the Man of the People, the Man of Culture, or the Russian Beauty - we can identify different types of this triangular narrative. Throughout the nineteenth century, male characters largely replaced female characters as objects of novelistic sacrifice.
Exchange and Mercy
In 1882, the French historian Ernest Renan grounded his definition of "nation" on the common experience of suffering and sacrifice.
"Suffering in common unifies more than joy does. . . .A nation is a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices" (1996: 53). Renan was referring to wars and revolutions, but the fictional life of culture plays out these constitutive, sacrificial narratives without actually spilling blood. Forty years earlier, a character of a Russian novel contemplated: "We are no longer capable of great sacrifices for the good of mankind nor even for our very own happiness, for we realize its impossibility." This was Pechorin from Mikhail Lermontov's novel A Hero of Our Time (1840). There are at least four violent deaths in this story, but most of them are women; for Pechorin's idea of a "great sacrifice," women do not count. In his poem "Demon," Lermontov portrayed a fallen angel in love with a woman from the Caucuses. Ruined by his sublime desire, she dies after a kiss. A demon flies away in sorrow. Nothing more occurred; just another colonial woman was killed. If it had been the other way round - that the male demon, contaminated by the filth of flesh, had died or decomposed - we could expect an overthrow of hell and heavens, a revolution of a sort. But this, in the course of Russian literature, was not to happen until somewhat later. A sacrificial death was clearly important for Romantic fiction. No less important was the choice of the sacrificial object: was it a man or a woman? The gender of sacrifice was a historically changing variable, and it was crucial for the function of the narrative.
Pushkin constructed a triangular structure in his novella The Captain's Daughter (1836), with a Cossack rebel Pugachev as Man of the People, the young officer of the imperial army, Grinev, as the Man of Culture, and Mashenka as the Russian Beauty. On the side of the people, there are horrifying depths, undeclared strength, and untold wisdom; behind the state there is poor discipline and alien rationality. Pugachev, a Cossack, Old-Believer, and romantic rebel, fascinates even the loyal member of the imperial hierarchy, Grinev. The story is played out between St. Petersburg and Orenburg - the center of the Empire, located on the periphery, and a distant province in its geographical center. Ethnically and culturally, the mixture of Cossacks, Bashkirs, and runaway serfs who rebelled in the Orenburg steppe was not much different from the irregular troops who represented the Empire. The struggle belongs to the history of colonial uprisings, but both sides fought against their own kind. Many characters in this historical novel - the rebels like Pugachev and the imperial officers - started their careers in the Russian-Prussian war that occurred two decades earlier (Kretinin 1996); Grinev is close to the historical Bolotov (see Chapter 9). Rebels have Russian beards and wear Eastern-style pantaloons, Pugachev in the Tartar style, his lieutenant in the Kyrgyz style. Pushkin depicted the rebels with a mixture of orientalist prejudice and human respect; those occidentals who personified imperial power in the steppe are described with much irony.
The Captain's Daughter should be read in the comparative context of such events as the Sepoy mutiny in British India in 1857, now remembered as the First War of Independence. In British narratives of the mutiny, common motifs include the executions and rapes of the English by the insurgents (Sharpe 1991). Pushkin's story is much the same, but there is one exception: the captain's daughter, who is captured by Pugachev, remains unharmed. Against the background of the oriental brutality that Pushkin describes in a straightforward manner, the absence of violence toward the object of all the characters' desire is a kind of negative device. The honor of the heroine is of critical importance not only for the characters of the story, but also for its entire colonial construction. By saving Mashenka, Pushkin allows her to recount her unlikely adventure to the Empress, appealing to her - and to the reader - for mercy toward those who rose up and perished. The narrative is full of migrations in the cultural space, but the most unlikely of these - going at first to the very depths of a rebellious people, then to the very heights of the imperial order - is accomplished by a woman. Her salvation halts the vicious circle of violence, symbolizes the renewal of the civil peace, and promises the viability of the colonial order. The reader who was aware of the reality of peasant uprisings would notice the unusualness of this plotline, and would therefore be able to apprehend its ideological significance.
Impervious to imperial power, the province obeys its own rules of exchange, in wealth and violence alike. Throughout The Captain's Daughter, the native rites of gift-giving interact with the rationalism and unforgiving justice of the imperial state. Pushkin's analysis reveals these two conflicting principles and tries to find a balance between them. It is in this middle ground that the hope of maintaining the colonial situation resides. The first gift in this novel is, appropriately, one of fur. Grinev gives Pugachev a hare fur coat: "The tramp was extraordinarily pleased with my gift." Just as in Marcel Mauss's anthropological studies of the Maoris, so too with Pushkin's literary studies of the Cossacks: the gift obliges the recipient to repay it, not because of some external law, but rather because the thing in itself - here, the fur coat - carries with it something of its former owner that must be returned. The two authors, Mauss and Pushkin, were equally ambivalent in their attitudes toward the customs described: which is better, justice and the settling of accounts, or mercy and giving? In native rites, each successive gift is greater than the previous one. In return for the fur coat, Pugachev gives Grinev a sheepskin, a horse, and life. Pugachev begins another chain of giving by preserving Mashenka's honor and gifting her to Grinev. In return, Grinev "passionately" wants to save Pugachev's neck, and he and Mashenka will pray for the salvation of his soul. In Mauss's formulation, the gift is thus a way of "buying the world," the very same world that in "civilized" conditions is protected by the state (Mauss 2002; Bethea 1998). When Grinev returns from the rebellious people to the civilized world and goes on trial, Mashenka circumvents the state and returns to the world of the gift, asking Catherine II for "mercy, and not justice." She receives not only mercy, but also, according to the rules of ritual giving, her dowry. Pushkin's compromise has worked. Many generations of readers will be captivated not only by the black- bearded and inscrutable Pugachev, but also by that extra-legal mercy of the Empress. The novel ends, however, with Pugachev's execution on the scaffold. The Captain's Daughter was the first work to embody the horror of Russian rebellion, and the first to reify the equally familiar "charm" of the Russian people that even in the twentieth century many felt to be irresistible (Tsvetaeva 2006).