3 - Imaginative geography

Summary

In gloomy Besh-Tau, the majestic hermit,

I found a new Parnassus.

Pushkin

In its treatment of landscape “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” approximated the territory to the Alps rather than the orient. The choice had its arbitrary element. Authors can read whatever they like into nature, and Russian literature would Islamize Caucasian peaks in the 1830s when war against the tribes had escalated. But if mountains themselves do not predetermine an alpine imaginative geography, their salience in Pushkin's experience undoubtedly contributed. The poet passed most of his time in the Caucasus around Besh-Tau (“five mountains” in Persian) and the other four peaks which gave Piatigorsk its name (a Russian calque of “Besh-Tau”). The most southerly point of Pushkin's trip, this area of mineral springs is situated in the central range, about 80 kilometers north of stupendous, twin-peaked Elbrus (5,633 meters, by comparison to Mt. Blanc, 4,807 meters). Had Pushkin ventured over the mountains into Georgia, he would have found a clime more readily assimilated to romanticism's conventional topoi. To illustrate the possibilities, the minor belletrist Alexander Shishkov orientalized Georgia in a poem written in 1821 during military service in Tiflis: he cast the land as a gigantic pleasure garden with babbling ‘streams of Saadi” and maidens like “divine peris” Balmy Georgia was excluded, however, from Pushkin's poem which started the “Caucasian epidemic” (as Zhirmunsky termed it).

Besides reflecting the limitations of Pushkin's itinerary, the concertedly alpine paysage of “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” expressed a romantic preoccupation with wilderness disjoined from its local population. As later chapters will substantiate, the poet certainly conceived the Caucasus as exotic Asia, but his imaginative geography effected a certain separation between the territory and the Asians who lived there.