In the Black Sea just off the Bulgarian coast lies Nessabar, an island (nowadays artificially an isthmus) that has been a trading center for several thousand years. Still standing in the old city are churches and fortifications that date from the 8th and 9th century. It's authentic and it's intriguing, but it's also one of the very few places in Bulgaria that's distinctly over-touristed, so it was a relief to hop the informal ferry (really no more than a glorified dinghy) from Nessebar back to the mainland. To be afloat on the fabled Black Sea felt--how else can I say it? -- Romantic and a far cry from landlocked Colorado. It was that windy boat ride that pushed me into reading about the inhabitants of the Black Sea littoral and of the neighboring Caucasus. This is the land of the ancient Thracians, builders of tumuli, of the Scythians, who went to war with mares only, and also of the Sarmatians (of whom the sum of my knowledge had been the story of the ten virgins of Sarmatia deflowered in a single night by the Emperor Procopius -- who was, according to Montaigne, a "master workman and famous in the task." It's a land that is presently the home to Abkhazians, Georgians, Circassians, Ossetians, Chechens.
My ruminating eventually brought to mind that I've read a novel set in the Caucasus -- Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of our Time. The novel was written in the late 1830s (its author was killed in an idiotic duel in 1841 at the age of twenty-seven). A sickly but wealthy Muscovite, Lermontov had been sent to the frosty Caucasus several times in his childhood for the bracing air and the healing baths. Later, as a Russian officer, he participated in the displacement and genocide of the Caucasian peoples -- a war that began in the days of Peter the Great and continues to this very moment. Of the novel itself I could recall only vaguely the deep romantic chasms and rushing mountain streams, the unlettered tribesmen, the gallant horsemanship. Re-reading was, as always, a revelation. The nominal hero, Pechorin, of whom I'm embarrassed to say I had not the least memory trace -- but let's face it, forty years is a long time-- is a hyperconscious but conscienceless cad. He's the underground man as cavalry officer.
Here's a sample hunk of plot: at a wedding, lustful Pechorin is taken by the sight of a fair young Circassian girl named Bela. Bela is also sought by Kazbich, a swarthy Chechen fighter, the owner of a most remarkable horse. The horse is coveted by Bela's younger brother Azamat. Azamat and Pechorin conspire: Azamat will kidnap and deliver his sister to Pechorin if Pechorin will help him abscond with the horse. The intrigue succeeds and Pechorin takes the "wild girl" Bela as his concubine. She, of course, sickens. One day, while Pechorin is out hunting boar, Kazbich returns and attempts to re-abduct Bela. Pechorin, returning home, shoots at Kazbich and wounds him; Kazbich escapes but not before fatally stabbing Bela with his dagger -- preferring, it's assumed, to kill rather than surrender her.
It seems like a horribly racist tale -- made worse by the fact that the Chechens are regularly characterized as thieves, the Ossetians as stupid, and so on. The equation of horse and woman is inherently offensive. But the story is redeemed from bigotry because blonde Pechorin is by far the nastiest character in the novel, and because the whole episode can be and perhaps should be interpreted as a rebuke to the brutality of Russian imperialism.
It's obvious that the novel's themes are not specific to the Russian-Caucasian frontier. It's easy to imagine a translation of A Hero of Our Time into a film set in the American west where Chechens become Sioux, the Caucasus becomes the Rockies, Pechorin is played by James Stewart while Bela transmutes into Debra Paget in a buckskin skirt, and racial, imperialist and genocidal themes are enacted in a frontier that is more familiar but equally falsified and romanticized.
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