This 'Orient' was not a place that could be found on any map. It was in the south, in the Caucasus and the Crimea, as well as in the east. The two compass points of south and east became combined in an imaginary 'Orient' - an exotic counter-culture in the Russian imagination - and it was made up as a sort of pot-pourri from many different cultural elements. In Borodin's Prince Igor, for example, the melismatic music of the Polovtsian Dances, which came to represent the quintessential sound of the Orient, was actually drawn from Chuvash, Bashkir, Hungarian, Algerian, Tunisian and Arabian melodies. It even contained slave songs from America.63
Long before the Russians ever knew their colonies as ethnographic facts, they had invented them in their literature and arts. The Caucasus occupied a special place in the Russian imagination, and for much of the nineteenth century, as the Tsar's armies struggled to control its mountainous terrain and fought a bloody war against its Muslim tribes, Russian writers, artists and composers identified with it in a romantic way. The Caucasus depicted in their works was a wild and dangerous place of exotic charm and beauty, where the Russians from the north were strikingly confronted by the tribal cultures of the
Muslim south. It was Pushkin who did more than anyone to fix the Russian image of the Caucasus. He reinvented it as the 'Russian Alps', a place for contemplation and recuperation from the ills of urban life, in his poem The Prisoner of the Caucasus - a sort of Childe Harold of the Orient. The poem served as a guidebook for several generations of Russian noble families who travelled to the Caucasus for a spa cure. By the 1830s, when Lermontov set his novel A Hero of Our Times in the spa resort of Piatigorsk, the 'Caucasian cure' had become so fashionable among the upper classes that the annual trek southwards was even being compared to the pilgrimage of Muslims to Mecca.64 Some travellers were disappointed not to find the wild, exotic spirit of Pushkin's poem in the grey and prosaic actuality of the Russian garrison towns where, for safety's sake, they were obliged to stay. Such was the craving for adventure and romance that even a patently second-rate (and today almost entirely forgotten) belletrist like Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky was widely hailed as a literary genius (the 'Pushkin of prose') simply on account of his Caucasian tales and travelogues.65
This fascination with the Caucasus centred on more than a search for exotic charm, at least as far as Russia's writers were concerned. Pushkin's generation was deeply influenced by the 'southern theory' of Romanticism expounded by Sismondi in his De la litterature du Midi de I'Europe (1813), which portrayed the ancient Arabs as the original Romantics. For Russia's young Romantics, who were looking for a source to distinguish Russian culture from the West, Sismondi's theory was a revelation. Suddenly, it seemed, the Russians had their own 'south' in the Caucasus, a unique colony of Muslim-Christian culture whose possession brought them closer to the new Romantic spirit than any of the nations of the West. In his essay On Romantic Poetry (1823) the writer Orest Somov claimed that Russia was the birthplace of a new Romantic culture because through the Caucasus it had taken in the spirit of Arabia. The Decembrist poet Vilgem Kiukhelbeker called for a Russian poetry that combined 'all the mental treasures of both Europe and Arabia'.66 Lermontov once said that Russian poetry would find its destiny by 'following the East instead of Europe and the French'.67
The Cossacks were a special caste of fiercely Russian soldiers living
since the sixteenth century on the empire's southern and eastern frontiers in their own self-governing communities in the Don and Kuban regions along the Terek river in the Caucasus, on the Orenburg steppe and, in strategically important settlements, around Omsk, lake Baikal and the Amur river in Siberia. These ur-Russian warriors were semi-Asiatic in their way of life, with little to distinguish them from the Tatar tribesmen of the eastern steppes and the Caucasus, from whom indeed they may have been descended ('Cossack' or 'quzzaq' is a Turkic word for horseman). Both the Cossack and the Tatar tribesman displayed a fierce courage in the defence of their liberties; both had a natural warmth and spontaneity; both loved the good life. Gogol emphasized the 'Asiatic' and 'southern' character of the Ukrainian Cossacks in his story 'Taras Bulba': in fact, he used these two terms interchangeably. In a related article ('A Look at the Making of Little Russia', that is, Ukraine) he spelled out what he meant:
