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This literary, cultural history examines imperial Russian tourism's
entanglement in the vexed issue of cosmopolitanism understood as
receptiveness to the foreign and pitted against provinciality and
nationalist anxiety about the allure and the influence of Western
Europe. The study maps the shift from Enlightenment cosmopolitanism
to Byronic cosmopolitanism with special attention to the art
pilgrimage abroad. For typically middle-class Russians daunted by
the cultural riches of the West, vacationing in the North Caucasus,
Georgia, and the Crimea afforded the compensatory opportunity to
play colonizer kings and queens in "Asia." Drawing on Anna Karenina
and other literary classics, travel writing, journalism, and
guidebooks, the investigation engages with current debates in
cosmopolitan studies, including the fuzzy paradigm of "colonial
cosmopolitanism.
This is the first book to provide a synthesizing study of Russian
writing about the Caucasus during the nineteenth-century age of
empire-building. From Pushkin's ambivalent portrayal of an alpine
Circassia to Tolstoy's condemnation of tsarist aggression against
Muslim tribes in Hadji Murat, the literary analysis is firmly set
in its historical context, and the responses of the Russian
readership to receive extensive attention. As well as exploring
literature as such, Susan Layton introduces material from
travelogues, oriental studies, ethnography, memoirs, and the
utterances of tsarist officials and military commanders. While
showing how literature often underwrote imperialism, the book
carefully explores the tensions between the Russian state's
ideology of a European mission to civilize the Muslim mountain
peoples, and romantic perceptions of those tribes as noble
primitives whose extermination was no cause for celebration. By
dealing with imperialism in Georgia as well, the study shows how
the varied treatment of the Caucasus in literature helped Russians
construct a satisfying identity for themselves as a semi-European,
semi-Asian people.
This is the first book to provide a synthesizing study of Russian
writing about the Caucasus during the nineteenth-century age of
empire-building. From Pushkin's ambivalent portrayal of an alpine
Circassia to Tolstoy's condemnation of tsarist aggression against
Muslim tribes in Hadji Murat, the literary analysis is firmly set
in its historical context, and the responses of the Russian
readership to receive extensive attention. As well as exploring
literature as such, Susan Layton introduces material from
travelogues, oriental studies, ethnography, memoirs, and the
utterances of tsarist officials and military commanders. While
showing how literature often underwrote imperialism, the book
carefully explores the tensions between the Russian state's
ideology of a European mission to civilize the Muslim mountain
peoples, and romantic perceptions of those tribes as noble
primitives whose extermination was no cause for celebration. By
dealing with imperialism in Georgia as well, the study shows how
the varied treatment of the Caucasus in literature helped Russians
construct a satisfying identity for themselves as a semi-European,
semi-Asian people.
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