My college fascination with the Russian literature of the Caucasus hadn’t lasted—the books I liked best seemed to be the ones set in the center, not the peripheries—but I had once written a term paper comparing Hadji Murat’s head at the end of “Hadji Murat” with Anna Karenina’s head near the end of “Anna Karenina.” When Anna jumps in front of a train, having grasped, in the course of a revelatory stream-of-consciousness carriage ride, the futility of human relations and of her love for Vronsky, her body is mutilated—but “the intact head with its heavy plaits and hair curling at the temples” continues to exercise its magnetism, “the lovely face with its half-open red lips” wearing a terrible expression. In both cases, the human head, detached from its customary function and milieu, is represented as a static image for contemplation—rather than as a symbol of a potentially avoidable human-rights incident.
Now I dug up my old copy of “Hadji Murat” and reread the pages set at a newly opened theatre in Tiflis, where Hadji Murat stoically endures the first act of an Italian opera. The description of him limping into the theatre in his turban recalls the scene in which Anna Karenina, wearing a rich lace headdress, defies social norms by appearing at the opera in St. Petersburg. Will the Russian viceroy protect Hadji Murat’s family? Will Karenin grant Anna a divorce? Considered side by side, the operas of Tiflis and St. Petersburg seemed to become more than the sum of their parts—as when two photographs, taken from different angles and viewed stereoscopically, cause a three-dimensional image to spring from the page. The hidden mechanisms of patriarchy and expansionism suddenly came into focus as two facets of the same huge apparatus. What other aspects of the “universal” Russian novel might be visible from a trip to the former imperial peripheries?
My flight from Istanbul was overbooked and delayed. I headed straight from the airport to the program orientation in a courtyard in Old Tbilisi, arriving just in time to hear an audience of thirty-odd, mostly British university students receiving instruction in how to practice their Russian without triggering the local population. A list of Russian-friendly bars was distributed. (There had been stories of Russian speakers being ejected from bars.) I was introduced to the students as a guest lecturer. The lectures, I learned, would be followed by something called “( ref )lectures.”
“It’s terrible! It’s so bad!” Meredith said gleefully of the name, which he had made up himself. He had also, despite objections by the lecture coördinator, Katya Korableva, called the program “We Must Believe in Spring.” When I asked Korableva about the name, she shook her head and looked down, eventually saying that she thought it was too optimistic. (I would later encounter a similarly visceral-seeming lack of optimism in other antiwar Russians I met. Once, in a rustic courtyard in Telavi, I heard an expatriate podcaster from Moscow mutter, “I can’t even,” as he turned his back on a picturesque wooden window shutter: the boards happened to form a letter “Z,” a symbol of Putin’s war.)
At breakfast the next morning, I felt nervous about speaking Russian, which limited my ability to exchange niceties with some people making pancakes in the kitchen. I stress-ate several pancakes, while trying to figure out what to prioritize: rereading Russian novels, reading Georgian and Ukrainian novels, meeting Georgian people, meeting Russian people, visiting historic sites? What was the right way to untangle the relationship between Russian imperialism—arguably a forerunner of both Soviet and post-Soviet expansionism—and the novels I’d loved growing up?
I was staying at the Writers’ House of Georgia, an Art Nouveau mansion said to be haunted by the ghost of the poet Paolo Iashvili, a member of the Georgian Blue Horns symbolist group, who had shot himself there in 1937. Lavrentiy Beria—who orchestrated Stalin’s purges in Georgia—had been making writers testify against one another. Tbilisi’s Pushkin monument was a short walk away, and I decided to pay it a visit. I’m the kind of person who can get lost anywhere, so I spent a long time wandering around the Writers’ House, trying to find the exit. In one hall, I came upon a wooden door with a plate that read “Museum of Repressed Writers.” I tried the door handle. It was locked.
Once I had escaped from the building, I turned right, onto a street named after Mikhail Lermontov. Lermontov had been exiled to the environs of Tiflis as a military officer in 1837, for writing a poem that implicated court slanderers in Pushkin’s duel-related death. He went on to serve in the Caucasus, which furnished the materials for his ironically titled novel “A Hero of Our Time.” (The opening line is “I was travelling post from Tiflis.”) Pushkin, too, had first come to the region as a political exile, in 1820. Inspired by his surroundings, he wrote “Prisoner of the Caucasus,” a narrative poem in which a Circassian girl falls in love with a Russian prisoner of war, who is too brooding and Byronic to return her feelings—until she risks her life to set him free, at which point he implores her to go with him to Russia. No longer capable of happiness, she drowns herself instead. It’s considered the first major work of the Russian literature of the Caucasus, and I had reread it in preparation for my trip.
In the epilogue, Pushkin implies a connection between the Circassian girl’s fate and that of the North Caucasian peoples. The most ominous line—“Submit, Caucasus, Ermolov is coming!”—had recently been quoted to me by the Ukrainian Telegram bot. General Alexei Ermolov, a Russian commander whose brutal tactics contributed to the elimination of some nine-tenths of the Upper Circassian population, once declared, “I desire that the terror of my name shall guard our frontiers more potently than chains or fortresses”—an ambition in which he was arguably assisted by Pushkin.
I turned onto Pushkin Street, which led to Pushkin Park, and there was Pushkin, or at least his bust, perched on a pink marble plinth. I felt somehow relieved to see him. Then I felt ashamed of feeling relieved. I wondered what Pushkin had felt—whether shame had entered into it—after getting banished by a tsar, at twenty, for a poem he had written as a teen-ager. “Returning to St. Petersburg from his exile, Pushkin stopped criticizing the Russian throne, and started to write great-power odes, glorifying imperial aggressive acts of tsarism against neighboring peoples”: that’s the chronologically reductive, but not totally inaccurate, interpretation offered by the Ukrainian chatbot. For the rest of his life, the Pushkin who championed individual freedom was always alternating with the Pushkin who celebrated the Empire.
Take the preface of Pushkin’s poem “The Bronze Horseman” (1837), which shows Peter the Great contemplating the swamp, dotted by the blackened hovels of “miserable Finns,” where he plans to found St. Petersburg. (It was by establishing a westward-facing capital with access to the Baltic Sea in 1703, as well as by radically Westernizing military and civic institutions, that Peter transformed Russia into a major European power.) “From here we shall threaten the Swede,” Peter reflects. It wasn’t like there was nothing there that could remind you of Putin. At the same time, “The Bronze Horseman”—a nightmarish fantasia in which the most famous statue in St. Petersburg, an equestrian Peter, leaps off its pedestal and terrorizes a clerk to death—is surely, among other things, a testament to Pushkin’s ambivalence toward monuments. In its way, it’s a poem about a monument that dismantles itself . What would Pushkin have made of the Pushkinopad movement in Ukraine? It might depend on which Pushkin you asked.
I headed back toward the Writers’ House on a street named after another Blue Horns poet, Galaktion Tabidze. Having lost both his wife and a cousin in the purges, Tabidze had eventually jumped to his death from the window of a psychiatric hospital. It occurred to me to wonder whether I was already inside the Museum of Repressed Writers. Maybe that locked door hadn’t been keeping us out but locking us all in.