ethnotope in lermontov's caucasian poèmy

Russian Literature XXXI (1992) 555-573 North-Holland

ETHNOTOPE IN LERMONTOV’S CAUCASIAN POhMY

ROBERT REID

This paper is in two parts. The first consists of a critical appraisal of Bachtin’s chronotope, with a view to adapting it to an approach to Ler- montov’s longer Caucasian poems, and it establishes the pre-eminence for this purpose of the topological principle. The second part suggests how topology and ethnic contrast can be used to clarify Lermontov’s thematics and use of plot. Because of its considerable hermeneutic value, A Hero of Our T’.‘.me also finds a place in the present discussion.

1. “Vychogu odin ja na dorogu.. .”

In his seminal work ‘The Forms of Time and the Chronotopos in the Novel’, Bachtin asserts that time is “the primary principle in the chronotopos”.l This is not meant by Bachtin to prejudice the mutual determinacy of time and space in the textual context, since it is precisely here that the originality of the chronotope concept resides. So it is the case, argues Bachtin, not only that space is “drawn into the movement of time, plot and history”, but also that time “thickens” and “becomes visible” as extension.2 However, since, very broadly, Bachtin is interested in those characteristics of plot - suddenness and delay for instance - which are incontrovertibly temporal, he naturally enough insists that time, of which plot is the literary portrait, must play the pre-eminent role in the chronotope.

This insistence causes problems. In general it is much clearer to us what space is, than what time is, and, because of this, when we want to clarify time, to make it “visible” and “thicken”, we are prone to spatialise it on calendars or clock faces. For the same reason we do not readily call upon the temporal to elucidate the spatial for us. This would suggest that

1992 - Elsevier Science Publishers B.V.

Robert Reid

the relationship between time and space is not one of mutual determination. Space performs a hermeneutic role with respect to time, whereas, if space is indeed “drawn in” to plot and history, it comes in of itself, needing no interpreter, as the site of plot: “conflict space” to use one critic’s term.3 Because of this embodying function of space with respect to time, certain topoi are bound to recur in plots, as particularly conducive to the purpose. Bachtin singles out the road for attention (the road has numerous advantages for Bachtin) but his view of the road as essentially chronic, so that “its basic center is the flow of time”, is surely figurative, or, at best, elliptic: roads qua roads are pretty clearly in the spatial dimension, however conducive they may be to events in the temporal.4 Furthermore, the amenability of roads to the development of plot has more obviously to do with their essential teleological function, than with accidental chronological properties. If we called the road a ‘teleotope’, we would preserve the same conjunction of location and motion suggested by chronotope, but using coordinates in the psycho-spatial, rather than the temporal-spatial dimen- sions, and while it is not necessarily worth advocating this particular neo- logism, it serves to illustrate the fact that the coordinate which comple- ments topos may be made heuristically more efficient. In particular, teleo- logically susceptible features of topos such as roads, mountain summits, distant horizons etc., are potentially creative of plot in conjunction with appropriately motivated characters.

Where, as in many of Lermontov’s Caucasian settings, these features are particularly marked, it is possible to regard the landscape offered by the text as a psychological environment in which the desires and pursuits of the fictional characters, as well as their aversions and avoidances, are represented by topographical areas - goals and barriers - possessing posi- tive or negative valence. Under these conditions plot is the pursuit by the hero of a ~&OS or path towards an emotionally charged goal, or away from an emotionally charged situation.5

Examples can be found in A Hero of Our 7?me, Mcyri and 73e Demon. In the first of these, the surmounting of a topographical barrier serves the purely aesthetic (more precisely, narrative) end of creating suspense, when we are asked in ‘Bela’ to bear with a delay in providing the denouement of that story’s embedded abduction, while we negotiate a difficult mountain crossing. The creative dilemma confronting the narrator is transformed into a bifurcation of the lectorial path, for readers can easily surmount the natural obstacle by flicking forward a few pages to the goal of their inquisitiveness, but are asked not to, and by staying on the mountain path, to treat themselves to the beauties of landscape, thereby (temporarily) validating the specious motivation of travelogue over a subversive fictionalising intent. Significant here is that aims and intentions, while they may appear to be directed, and cannot avoid being expressed in

Ethnotope in Lermontov’s Caucasian P&my 557

the figurative vocabulary of goal and direction, do not necessarily follow the principles of physical hodology when it comes to execution: a physical short-cut may not be a socially or morally acceptable path,6 and, in the case of the ‘Bela’ narrative, it may be inferred that some sense of lectorial honour is meant to keep the reader on the long road.

Equally, what is apparently a plain path for the imagination, may be anything but in physical reality: the topography of Mcyri is such, for instance, that the hero’s home is visible as an object of his longing from his monastery cell, but as soon as he attempts to satisfy it by running away, he finds that his flight takes him into a deep valley which cuts it off from view. The resultant discrepancy in point of view (in a more literal sense than usual) in effect constitutes the theme of the work, i.e. that to which it inevitably recurs, since the hero’s path, the plot, leads him first from the higher to the lower point, and back again to the higher. The topological symbolism here is rich, both psychologically and in relation to contemporary romantic convention. The hero finds himself in a double bind, such that, though his goal entails a particular plan of action, the implementation of the action precludes the achievement of the goal. This essentially tragic condition is by no means unique among romantic heroes; its singularity here lies in the topological axes which support it.

There is a contemporary (to Lermontov) artistic significance too in the parallactic points of view in Mcyri. By Lermontov’s time, the aesthetic convention was already well established of equating point of view with intellectual and social standing. To ‘have’ a view from one’s dwelling, and increasingly in the eighteenth century this was becoming a consciously landscaped view, was simultaneously to exhibit in symbolic form the pos- sessor’s understanding and perspicacity; low, cramped places, bereft of prospect, suggested narrowness and ignorance, something increasingly brought to fulfilment in Western Europe by the industrial revolution, but having its predecessors in the closed garden and the maze, suggestive respectively of reclusiveness and confusion.7 The intellectual (and behind it the social) relationship between top and bottom in the topological context has a strongly Hegelian flavour: those above see and comprehend; those below do not, but are themselves seen and comprehended from above.

Clearly there are exhilarating vantage points in Lermontov’s Caucasian landscape which impart a comparative authority to the character who hap- pens to possess, or impart that point of view. It is by rapturising from such lofty eminences that the travel writer in A Hero of Our Time establishes his credentials, and ultimately those of the whole textual conglomeration. When high enough too, Lermontov’s down-looker may descry serpents below, which lowlanders see only as rivers. Elsewhere, though, the per- spectives on setting are more complex variations on this theme. Il’ja Ser- man’s analysis of ‘Gornye versiny’, for instance, suggests that high and

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low, though fust contrasted in the poem, are then shown to be not sub- stantially different in terms of any inspiration they can offer the onlooker, since sleep (stasis) prevails at all levels.*

Lermontov is unwilling to allow a congruence between literal and figurative superiority without providing some qualification to it. Thus the Demon’s supernatural status, though it allows him the advantage of aerial perspective, prevents him from benefiting from it: he is compelled by his nature to reject what he sees.9 The Demon’s hodological advantages, too (like the reader of ‘Bela’ he has the possibility of taking short-cuts), though they facilitate the realisation of his intention - the death of Tamara’s bridegroom; the pursuit of Tamara -are nullified by the fact that they are unnatural. They are short-cuts in the figurative, pejorative sense: unfair, and used for evil ends. The topography of the Caucasus, with its many natural barriers and handicaps to travel, here represents in heavy relief a moral landscape which is to be tracked by legitimate paths, rather than short-cuts.

Mcyri’s advantages are similarly off-set, and the epistemological con- ventions of high and low are effectively inverted in the poem. A clear view of his homeland is vouchsafed to Mcyri only from his monk’s cell in which he is effectively imprisoned. It is a clear but also an abstracted vision, and the clarity of the vision is in inverse proportion to proximity. Mcyri’s attempt to realise it by approaching its source, results in loss of the vision, danger, bewilderment and delirium in the maze-like valley bottom. Yet although we have here the psychic symbolism of the low place, the poem seems to suggest, particularly in the manner of its narra- tion by the hero, that its function is to strip away illusion and expose the realities of the natural world.

The spatial opposition of high and low is thus ideologically dynamic, and productive of meaning, but the mutual exclusiveness of these oppositions means that they can never be co-situated in the text. Either one must be mediated through the other (the high perceives the low) or they must be realised in themselves seriatim: first the high, then the low; or vice versa. In A&w and 77re Demon this is achieved hodologically by means of a path or journey between these oppositions: from heaven to earth and back again; from the monastery hill to the valley and back again. The path becomes the means of making explicit the meanings inherent in the dif- ferential between high and low. The path also has this role of meaning- producer even in the less unified setting of A Hero of Our 7’ime. It constitutes the principal functional characteristics of the writer of ‘Bela’ and ‘Maksim Maksimyc’ - a writer of Pave1 notes - and it is this quintes- sentially hodological avocation which motivates the introduction of all further characters and material in the novel: Maksim Maksimyc as travel


guide, Pecorin as a differently motivated traveller, and the ‘Journal’ itself (a record of his travels) fatefully changing hands at a stop on the road.

In one respect the road in A Hero of Our 7’ime bears out one of Bachtin’s observations about the road as chronotope. It serves as a plausible occasion for chance meetings and coincidences of the sort by which Pecorin’s ‘Journal’ was acquired. To this one might add that Mcyri’s cell is the antipode of this chronotope (though Tamara’s is not proof against demonic short-cuts). But other properties which Bachtin associates with the road seem in very short supply in Lermontov’s Caucasus. Car- nivalisation - which, in the hodological context, is the ultimate development of the randomness in human affairs intimated by chance meetings and coincidences - is largely sacrificed in favour of the opposite, but equally valid condition of the traveller: solitude. The social lies always off the road for the Caucasian hero. He may have come from it, like the heroes of I3eg1ec or KaZly, or have set off in search of it like Mcyri. He may encounter it tangentially, like the Demon in Georgia, or Pecorin in Taman’. The proper condition of Lermontov’s traveller, which constantly reasserts itself, as though it were a natural condition, is solitude. The path is usually someone ‘spath, an inalienable feature of his characterisation.

There is another sense in which the Caucasian pathways qualify Bach- tin. Bachtin’s road is a chronotope, because manifold hurryings along it seem to confm a temporal dimension. For Bachtin, though, time is im- plicitly present when a plot is in motion, and roads do indeed enter literary contexts as vectors of plot. However, we find Lermontov making explicit- ly negative reference to time in relation to hodos. If paths prove not to be teleological, but aimless, then they will cease to generate the chronic in the Bachtinian sense, and, if they continue, they will do so either endlessly or circularly, but at any rate without aim. Lermontov’s separation of telos from chronos produces the vecnye stranniki of ‘Tuci’ and the termless wanderings of the Demon, while

I3oc~en3ane~o~ BIZK~~XGUI,

Kax3a MHH~TOIDMHH~T~, @Iuoo6pa3Hon YepeAon.. . lo

It also produces the fatal circularity of Mcyri in which a failed hodos assimilates end to beginning, and validates the unchangeability of the hero’s initial situation.

The assertion of inevitability (or fate), so characteristic of Lermontov’s plots, or its reassertion after an unsuccessful bid for freedom by the hero, has the effect of neutralising dynamic time, chronos, as an agent for meaningful change. But if both hodos and chronos prove unable to deliver the aims and aspirations of protagonists, it is because of the preteriteness

560 Robert Reid

of their objects of desire, their chronological inaccessibility, and the consequent inappropriateness of hodological means for their realisation. However, since “we have a sense of place in time which rivals our sense of place in space” (it is this unavoidable translation of the temporal into the spatial which erases the underlying distinctions of the chronotope concept) and a “temporal orientation” which parallels the spatial, there is a marked tendency for characters to locate their lost desiderata in a reachable here, rather than to abandon them to an unreachable tien.ll Proustian, rather than Proppian strategies would seem to be more appropriate to the predicament facing the Demon and Mcyri. However, consoling re-evoca- tions of the past are, for them, outweighed by the painful awareness of their separation from it.

Translated into diegetic terms, Lermontov’s hodos generates a dynamic of tragedy, of thwarted aims, whereas chronos is essentially non-dynamic, the unchanging repository of the eternal ideal. Herein lies the problem of applying time-space coordinates to Lermontov’s narrative poems. Time is largely Platonised and chronic mutation is replaced by eternity, the stress in this case being upon endless duration (sempitemity), rather than time- lessness (achronism). There is a consistent tendency in the p&my and elsewhere in Lermontov’s works, to place human concerns sub specie aeternitatis, and commonly enough aspects of topography are used - mountains, crags, rivers-to embody durability, changelessness and resist- ance to a dynamic chronos. Time in Lermontov’s Caucasus is constantly prevented from achieving a sufficient degree of specificity, or a sufficiently varied historic diapason to enable it to act as a corresponding structural- analytical coordinate to the immense richness of place.

In part this imbalance reflects a chronotopic law, which doubtless precedes its articulation by Bachtin: namely that there exists an inverse proportion between perceptions and representations of time and space, such that a detailed preoccupation with one will tend to weaken the other. As early as 1576 we find William Lambarde making this sort of distinction in his topography (“and no chronographic”) of Kent, and we have already recalled that the narratorial pretext for A Hero of Our 7’ime was the highly topological travel notes rather than any historical enterprise (the prevalence of this principle, despite the loss of the notes, produces a highly aria- chromktic work). 13 However, the particular weighting of chronotopic elements in Lermontov’s narratives also clearly reflects certain trends pre- valent in the romantic aesthetics of the early nineteenth century. It is from these that we may derive elements of a concept more topologically biased than chronotope and more susceptible of application to Lermontov’s Cau- casian contexts.


2. 3 milogo severa, v storonu juznuju.. .”

Among trends characteristic of romantic aesthetics, the notion of autochthony gained particular popularity in Russia, and we find it ela- borated in the theoretical writings of the Russian romantics, particularly Somov, who articulates it with some clarity, although he is in large measure indebted to his European predecessors, such as Herder and Mme de Stael,rh However, the lexical estrangement of their concepts in the course of translation, and their subsequent development, is sufficient to enable us to speak of a specifically Russian version of the acquired ideas.

For Somov the key requirements for romantic poetry are narodnost’ and mestnost’. Narodnost’ was to develop a life of its own in contexts beyond the aesthetic, but in its original sense it implied a sense of the folk, of nationality, in short, of ethnic specificity. Its matrix was clearly romantic nationalism, and, in the first instance, narodnost’ implied om people. For the romantic writer the folk was encountered both as oiler and own, the former hypostatising the latter in an authentic ethnic identity. Equally, narodnost’ can imply an interest in other ethoi. Exoticism might seem a plausible aesthetic end in itselc in practice, though, as Lotman points out, the exotic provides a vital bearing in the triangulation by which Russia sought to locate itself in the nineteenth century: north-south-west.15 In these conditions one’s own r.~ar& is encountered comparatively, or con- trastively, and is literally defined, for the aesthetic role of the ethnic other is to show where and what one’s own is not. Such an other is likely to be a construct, or at least a partial reception on the side of the observer. Never- theless, despite what is the anthropological constant of cultural solipsism, it is possible to distinguish sharply between the different sorts of construct, at least in the literary context, and that of Lermontov in particular.

Mestnost’ may be regarded as the geographical or topographical equivalent of narodnost’, at least in the way it is used by Somov. As narodnost’ is ideologised ethnos, so mestnost’ is the romantic ideologisation of topos, which is constructed, or landscaped, to yield a particular symbolism, one generally in accord with the corresponding ethnos. Such a romantic aesthetics implies that authentic literature should be about a specific people in its specific place, and, in an adaptation of the Bachtinian concept, we might refer to the complex of relationships between the people-place coordinates as an ethotope. In works in which ethnotope dominates, these coordinates will determine both plot and characterisation. The truly ethnotopic character would be an autochthon - a person living among his own people in his own place. Such characters feature in all Lermontov’s Caucasian narratives and in those in which autochthonous features predominate - KaZ1y and BegZec, for instance - the specious &&onf7&tiost’of the ethnotope never-

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theless proves capable of creating narrative tension. This is because ethnos is a concept of considerable complexity: it implies not merely being a people, but, at the individual level, the conferring of identity and psychological integrity on members of a national or tribal group; it implies moreover a complex of laws, customs and traditions - an eti0.s (more will be said of this later) - to which the individual must adhere, if he is to continue to be part of that group. Ethnos, therefore, while it nominally supplants chronos for present purposes, effectively subsumes it since the awareness of time and tradition is an essential attribute of ethnicity, and chronos has, arguably, no objective or absolute existence, but is rather one of a number of culturally determined constructs, mediated to the individual conscious- ness by custom and usage. The principal shortcoming of chronotope as a structural device is that it tends to exclude the human factor from its primary terms.16 Ethnotope incorporates the human factor via an ethnos which embraces time. Ethnotope too has its limitations as we shall see, and requires adaptation in those cases in which a text’s principal theme is the relationship between the individual and his social environment, as distinct from those in which the individual serves mainly to personalise the relationship between topos and (his) ethnos.

So far, we have spoken of ethnotope in its primary, that is, autochthonous form: where ethnos and topos coincide. Such a situation obtains in romantic idylls, or, at any rate, is implicit as a kind of primal Rous- seauan state, prior to the introduction, as in Puskin’s 77re Gypsies, or Do- stoevskij’s ‘Dream of a Ridiculous Man’, of a fatal ethno-cultural virt.t~.~~ Also, as will be discussed later, it is possible for autochthonous ethnotopes to generate their own forms of conflict intrinsically; however, such conflicts are intra-, rather than inter-ethnic. In general, though, we find that exotic romanticism hasconsistently exploited heterochthony: dislocation of ethnos from topos. The right person in the wrong place, and the correlative wrong person in the right place, where right and wrong are understood phylogenetically, that is in terms of an ethnic, rather than purely individual mismatch, account in large measure for the themes of Mcyri, The Demon, Imail Bej and A Hero of Our Time.

Such heterochthonous situations, characterised by a dislocation of ethnos from topos (even if this dislocation is represented by a single character, as in Mcyr$ are clearly of a more complex nature than instances of autochthony where there is a symmetry between ethnos and topos. It is useful to call these situations asymmetric ethnotopes to designate the lack of equivalence between the two constitutive elements. The asymmetry may be reflected in various forms: ranging, at its mildest, from tosh po rodine toviolent inter-ethnic conflict. The complexity of the asymmetric ethnotope derives from the fact that there are always inherent in it four possible ethnotopic relationships, two symmetric and two asymmetric. This quater-

Ethno tope in Lermon tov ‘s Caucasian P&my 563

nity can be illustrated as follows: the situation of a French person in Eng- land constitutes a contrastive ethnotope; to it there corresponds, if only potentially, a second asymmetric ethnotope - that of an English person in France. These are literal examples for clarity; clearly, mutually alien topoi and ethnoi can also be collocated in a number of transferred or figurative forms. Thus, in the present case, the second of these ethnotopes might apply to the situation: ‘England, or the English, recollected by a French- man returned to France’; just as the first might apply to Wordsworth re- collecting a part of his youth.

The two symmetric ethnotopes have to be posited as the condition or ur-situation for the asymmetric: ‘the Frenchman in France’ and ‘the Englishman in England’. Although, per fabdam, an asymmetric ethnotope is capable of generating all four ethnotopic variants, in textual practice the process of sujetisation often means that not all are activated. In the examination of ethnotope in Lermontov’s works below the constituent elements of ethnotope have been represented algebraically, ethnos by a Latin letter and topos by a Greek letter. A symmetric ethnotope is sym- bolised by a Latin letter indexed by its Greek equivalent (Au), the asymmetric by unequivalent letter (A@. Clearly index and indexed could be reversed for heuristic advantage, but the comparative dynamism of ethnos in the individualised contexts of Lermontov’s plots makes it usually more appropriate to use topos as the qualifying agent. It is indeed possible to represent these relationships in a dynamic form reflecting the direction of plot, in cases where a literary character can be regarded as an individualisation of ethnos: A -> p for a character entering an alien topos; a-> A, for a character leaving his own topos, where the arrow, irrespec- tive of its position, always indicates the direction of movement of the bearer of ethnos.

Among Lermontov’s Caucasian narratives, 77re Demon merits first mention, since, unusually, it makes fourfold use of an asymmetric ethnotope. The four variants are as follows:

1. Ad : The Demon / in the heavens 2. Bg : Tamara/ on earth 3. AP : The Demon /on earth 4. Ba : Tamara / in heaven

The contrastive topoi are heaven/earth; the contrastive ethnoi spirit/mortal. I regard the latter opposition as ethnic, because, although mythologised, it represents the extreme of phylogenetic alienation; perhaps indeed because of such mythologisation, for history yields numerous examples of en- counters with alien cultures resolving into visits from foreign devils or

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spirits of the dead, the rre @us r&m of alienation.18 In the same way heaven/earth may be regarded as the archetype of dislocation.

The above schema uses the protagonists of me Demon primarily as embodiments of ethnos, but they are also its bearers in a literal sense, and it is by the consecutive shifts in relationship between ethnos and topos which they bring about that the poem’s plot is moved along. The dynamics of this process are as follows: a -> A; A -> fi ; B -> a ; A -> CL The plot is represented here as a sequence of incursions and excursions by means of which the four interrelated ethnotopes succeed one another. Although in static terms the poem appears to begin and end with Aa, the situations do not entirely coincide, not so much because of their chronological distance, but because of the ineradicable /3A (earth recollected by the Demon) and of Bc$ the presence of Tamara in heaven. The physical reinstatement of an ethnotopic relation is modified by the ethnotopes which have cumulatively led to the reinstatement.

In contrast to The Demon, Mcyzi uses only part of the possible ethnotopic range, and offers a paradigmatic ethnotope of alienation:

[a -> A; A -> p]; AP; p-> A; A -> p; AP.

The precipitating formulae for this ethnotope are shown in square brackets, because, although they are essential to Mcyri’s fabula, they lie outside the framework of sjuget, which, in Mcyn; is marked by a change in narrative person from impersonal to fast. Within this first person narrative we are in fact confronted by only one asymmetric ethnotope Ap, which, together with its two hodological possibilities, l3 -> A and A -> b, constitute the plot. ‘A&, the primal condition of the pre-exile Mcyri, or A -> a in its dynamic form, remains an ideal presence throughout the poem, and though not realised, motivates the plot. This non-realisation underlines the close relationship between ethnotope and hodos as discussed in the fast part of this paper. Mcyri’s inability to reinstate Aa, the symmetric or autochthonous ethnotope ‘Mcyri-in-his-homeland’, lies in his physical failure to find, or complete the hodos A -> a. Asymmetric ethnotopes imply hodos (removal, travel, dislocation) in their realisation and in the plots formed out of their transformations into other ethnotopes.

Mcyri, as we have said, stresses one aspect (AP) of the ethnotope’s fourfold possibilities at the expense of the rest. The autochthonous situation of the monks (BP), for instance, plays little role in the narrative. More redundant still is the other asymmetric possibility (Ba): the situation of ‘a Georgian monk exiled among (Mcyri’s) mountain tribesmen. Yet these suppressed or subtextual ethnotopes surface sufficiently to under- mine the dominant Afi of the hero’s exile and the ideal Aa of his return. For the failure of l3 -> A suggests that BP may now accurately define


Mcyri’s own ethnotope, while his dream image of himself, cassocked and ridiculed by his own people, suggests that the longed-for Ao might indeed prove to be Bo. In texts in which a single asymmetric ethnotope dominates thematically, the suppressed permutations of the ethnotope are likely to subvert, or, at least, qualify the dominant.

IzmtiZ-Bej, though a stylistically awkward work, is striking in its exploration of precisely that ethnotope (Ao) which Mcyri fails to realise. Izmail-Bej has returned to his village in the Caucasus, having spent his youth in exile in Russia, where he became an army officer. The asymmetric ethnotope AP which is central to Mcyri is therefore a fabular presence in Izma&Bej(Circassian-in-exile) situated (at first) outside the frame of the sjuzet which begins with his return. However, as is frequently the case with neglected or suppressed fabular material, the Ap ethnotope is one of the causes of epistemic suspense in the poem (we want to know what Izmail’s AP was like), the other being our desire to know how, or whether, Izmail will reintegrate himself into his tribal community (i.e. what his Ao will be like). The satisfaction of the tirst of these curiosities is probably the most ingenious element in the work’s narrative structure.

Izmail, still not feeling wholly accepted by his own, is approached when alone by a Russian officer who has recently seen action against the Circassiansl9 The officer reassures him that he has nothing against Circassians in general (some such justification being needed for the dialogue to continue!) but expresses hatred towards one in particular - Izmail- Bej - whom he has sworn to kill (a further condition for this dialogue is the concealment of Izmail’s face under a large fur hat; rather improbably, this arouses no suspicions in the Russian officer). The situation is now one of considerable ethnotopic complexity: Bu is present in the shape of a Russian officer in the Caucasus. Ignorant of his true identity, the soldier addresses Izmail throughout as “Circassian”, and as a Caucasian autochthon (Ao):

Circassian! Circassian! You, of course Have never had to part from anybody.2o

However, the burden of his discourse is Izmail’s sojourn in Russia (A@, his account of which naturally incorporates elements of BP (Russians-in- Russia) including his own BP. This conjunction of ethnotopes underlines the fact that ethnotope can be mediated through any structural area of the text (characterisation, dialogue, internal monologue, reminiscence), as well as through the more obvious plot and setting; and that it is also capable of producing, or participating in the production of such lectorial effects as suspense, pathos and (as here) irony.

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The soldier’s account concerns Izmail’s remarkable successes with women while in Russia, and with one in particular, personal concern for whom is at the root of the soldier’s hatred for the unrecognised Izmail who sits before him. The plenitude of Ap is therefore narrowed to a single sexual theme, and, moreover, one with inescapably racial overtones:

His [Izmail’s] oppressive gaze was full Of eastern lasciviousness: He was poison for our [Russian] women! He inflamed their imaginations And subdued them without effort!*l

Interestingly, the Russian soldier cannot resolve in his own mind whether Izmail’s conduct is truly bad, or whether it is the result of being (to allude to a more recent ethnotope) “oversexed [. . .] and over here”:

I don’t know whether it was scorn For the laws of a forei n country Orperverted feelings! 57 *

Among the last women seduced and abandoned by Izmail, before his departure from Russia is the soldier’s own betrothed, and his tragic love, interrupted by Izmail’s Ap, is the countervailing sexual theme (BP) in the soldier’s story. Significantly, Izmail is described as leaving Russia, “for- getting that there is an avenger on high / And another on earth”;23 the soldier, though, feels sure that his listener, being a Circassian, will fully understand the necessity for revenge:

Circassian, I can see that you have understood How righteous my vengeance is! There are curses on your lips More than once you shuddered as you listened.24

Of course, this is a melodramatically ironic misconstruction of Izmail’s reactions. The suggestion, however, that vengeance is a characteristic of Caucasian ethnos (less so of Russian) is borne out by the frequency with which it is made the theme of those of Lermontov’s works which are based upon the symmetric ethnotope, i.e. are set entirely among natives of the Caucasus.

Izmail-Bej spends the rest of the poem in merciless guerrilla warfare against the occupying Russians, in the course of which he again meets (and kills) his Russian accuser and finally dies of wounds and exhaustion. The spirit in which he has carried on his campaign suggests an interesting

Ethnotope in Lermontov ‘s Caucasian P&my 567

disjunction between topos and ethnos: disillusioned by the grudging and mistrustful reception of him by his own people,

It was not his native village, but rather his native hiIIs Which he resolved to defend against the Russiarxz

IzmaiM3ej seems to confirm in advance Mcyri’s prognosis that A -> a will never recover the primal Ad , that the returning exile can never be reintegrated. The returned Izmail, notwithstanding his freelance campaigns against the Russians, operates like them in Bc. The Russian officer sums this up succinctly: Izmail is “a Circassian by blood [rodom], not in spirit [ du~ojpj The fact that he loves his topos (a) and is fighting on its behalf is immaterial to his ethnotopic position. Even the Russian soldier says,

[. . .] like you [Circassians] I am captivated By the waterfall and the dark weed; I see the ice-caps and delight As I meet the riches of dawn And I love your tribe.. .*7

The Russian soldier’s position as articulated here, in effect the Russian’s point of view in the Caucasus, is a vital constant in Lermontov’s construction of topos. This constant is, as it were, the artist’s ethnotope, which we see generalised throughout Lermontov’s representations of the Cau- casus, whether textual or graphic. It is the aestheticisation of the symmetric ethnotope of the other. The Caucasian ethnotope BP becomes a repository of the beautiful (in toto: both ethnos and topos).*8 Not only is BP as to h/on a given, but Afl is the universal point of view for all Lermontov’s Caucasian narratives, whether these are based on symmetric or asymmetric ethnotopes. AD represents the situation of the Russian writer mediating BP (Caucasus-and-people) and Ap (Russians-in-the-Caucasus) to Russian readers. p might similarly characterise the Caucasus as thus mediated.

Several of Lermontov’s works highlight AlQA as complementary poetic/lectorial ethnotopes: ‘Valerik’, for instance, in its effort to accurately describe a military engagement in the Caucasus, and bring home its significance to the addressee. The epistolary form of this work introduces a hodological dimension to the whole receptional complex: writing - send- ing - reading; and builds into the text a spatial remoteness between writer and reader. The same is true of A Hero of Our Time. The travel notes stratagem ensures that intercultural hodos is built into the novel: their writer has presumably returned to Russia burdened with his own and (slightly more) Pecorin’s writings about the Caucasus, with a view to presenting them to the Russian reader. The return, even if fictitious, of a

568 Robert Reid

text to Russia is in one sense an A -> a, the return of the Russian (writer) to his own (reader). But it is simultaneously a BP -> a, the coming of the Caucasian ethnotope to Russia, and, in the case of both ‘VaIerik’ and A Hero of Our Time, it is also AP -> CZ: the coming of the Russian/Cau- casian interface to Russia.29 And of course the act of reading will itself constitute a lectorial A -> l3: the Russian reader’s excursion into the Caucasus.

The foregoing may serve as a cautionary preamble to the concluding part of this paper which will examine Lermontov’s treatment of symmetric ethnotopes. For in these there is generally no Russian presence in what are entirely Caucasian drarnatispersonae. The dramatic interest in these works is of wholly intra-ethnic origin, and the protagonists cannot be regarded as specific bearers of ethnos, since this is now an undifferentiated quality, common to all the characters in the work. However, it is true to say that one inalienable aspect of ethnos - ethos- is the usual site of differentiation and conflict in works like &NY, Au1 Bastund2i, and fie Fugitive, which exemplify the symmetric ethnotope.

Since certain phylogenetic manifestations of ethnos will always be present in an individual, they will tend to form the basis of asymmetric ethnotopes, such as those discussed above: however long he may remain in Russia, Izmail-Bej is (racially) a Circassian; however acclimatised, Maksim Maksimyc remains Russian. Clearly this kind of ethno-specific characterisation loses its force in symmetric ethnotopes (where a.lZ are Circassian) and so it is precisely the contingent, acquired, enforced, in short, cultural aspects of ethnos, which alone provide the context in which individual differentiation or estrangement from ethnos can take place. For a factor common to both symmetric and asymmetric ethnotopes in the Cau- casian context is alienation from one’s ethnos, in the second case geographical, and in the first ethical (though, as will be seen, with ultimately a topological dimension). Alienation in the symmetric ethnotope is onto- genetic: the individual separates himself from the ethos of his tribe or community. Kally, for instance, ordered by the Mullah to commit an act of revenge which he cannot bring himself to carry through, thereby places himself outside the law, and is disowned by his people. The moral colour of the separating act seems immaterial to the outcome: the Fugitive also offends the tribal code, but by an act of unquestionable cowardice, and is similarly ostracised. Chadzi Abrek is already an outlaw when his poem’s action begins; his subsequent violent conduct seems simply to bear this out and exemplify.3o

A characteristic of the purely Caucasian ethnotope is that it tends to produce stark binary oppositions between nature and culture, or, in the terms we have been using, topos and ethnos. There is in general no other community available to the Caucasian offender than the one against which

Ethnotope in hrmontov ‘s Caucasian P&my 569

he has offended, and offences are generally punished by disowning the culprit31 The offender is expelled, as it were, from ethnos to topos. I have touched elsewhere on Lermontov’s use of zoanthropic motifs to express not geographic, but genetic exile - exile from one’s own species - which, of course, requires no change of, topos.32 Man alone in topos, bereft of communitas, effectively becomes an animal. This zoological assimilation is exemplified in different ways by ICd1y and &fcti (in Mcyzi, too, there is ultimately no shift in topos, though its ethnotope is asymmetric).

Hodos in these poems is naturally linked to the irruption of topos: movement or travel is consequent upon the rupture between individual and tribal ethos. We can represent the ethnotopic progression of the plots of these works as: Ao; cx -> A. 23e Fugitive is wholly hodologised by its theme: topography is born in the poem when the hero succumbs to cowardice on the battlefield. From that moment until his murder, there is nothing but a running from place to place in a fruitless search for sym- pathy and shelter. In Kally the hero begins to move as soon as he has received the Mullahs command, and, unable to carry it out, flees the village, and is described as’ living a violent wandering life in the hills, “shunning people”.

A rather more complex variation on this and the intra-ethnic theme in general is provided by Au1 Bastundi. In broad terms the plot follows the formula Aq a -> A, but with some qualifications. Selim, the hero, and his much older brother Akbulat are bachelors living somewhat aloof from the rest of their village. Akbulat brings home a young wife whom Selim soon covets, finally asking his brother to give her up to him. He receives an angry refusal and “disappears like a shadow” into the hills, to live in a cave previously inhabited by mountain lions. Despite the characteristic hints of animality, Selim has not yet severed the (always tenuous) link between himself and communitas. The final rupture, after unsuccessful attempts to lure away his brother’s wife, comes when he murders her and fires the village. In doing this he effectively annihilates his ethnos:

The village burned-and memo of it was expunged; Its sons were scattered intoexil c? 3 [my italics]

though not before (like Kally) he has been elaborately cursed and disowned by the Mullah.

Here and elsewhere Lermontov uses the closed system of the symmetric ethnotope to broach primal transgressions, the themes of which are motivated by the primitiveness of the culture, and the denouements and plots by the harshness of the Islamic ethos.34 Au1 Bastundi is the microcosmic representation of the fall of a whole society or people in the wake of a polluting crime. The theme is broachable because of the remote-

570 Robert Reid

ness of the Caucasian ethnotope for European readers, making it in effect safely mythologisable. But it is also underpinned by the European literary tradition, by romantic exoticism and orientalism, and is deeply coloured by post-Rousseauan assumptions about primitiveness. We must admit, alongside the specious Caucasian ethnotope (BP) in which these narratives operate, that authorial-lectorial ethnotope PA, mentioned above, which constructs at bottom a common emotional and moral diathesis for Cau- casian hero and Russian alike. Pecorin dressed as a Circassian in ‘Princess Mary’, and Izmail-Bej wreaking havoc among Russian society women are in a sense the same phenomenon of alienation, viewed from different angles, and dramatised by the chiaroscuro of the Russo-Caucasian ethnotope.3s

NOTES

M.M. Bachtin, ‘The Forms of Time and the Chronotopos in the Novel’. PJZ., III, 3, 1978: 493-528.495. Ibid., 493. This is Joost van Bask’s term. Of it he says:

[Chronotope] functions as the location of plot and individual perception of the world; for this plot or sujet function I use the term conflict space. (‘The House in Russian Avantgarde Prose: Chronotope and Archetype’. Essays in Poetics, 15, 1, l-2)

Op.cit.: 516. For the terms bodes and bodology, and for some of the psycho-spatial premises on which this article is based, I am indebted to Robert Leeper’s account of Kurt Lewin’s topological psychology: Robert W. Leeper, Le- win’s Topological and Vector Psychology: A Digest and a Critique (Oregon 1943). Lewin refers to this as the “distinguished path” and contrasts the winding course taken by a food queue with the much shorter ‘crow’s-flight’ distance between those at the end of the queue and the source of food. See Leeper, op.cit.: 38 and 206. For a full discussion of this subject see John Barrell, ‘The Public Prospect and the Private View: The Politics of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain’. ReadingLandscape: Country, City, Capital (Ed. Simon Pugh) (Manchester 1990: 19-40).


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Il’ja Serman, ‘Lermontov i russkaja romanticeskaja poezija 1830-ch godov’. The Russian Language Journal, XLIII, 144,1989: 71-97, esp. 88-89. Point of view is especially complex here. Although the Demon rejects what is seen below, authornvlectorial convention would tend to validate what is seen as beautiful. The demonic (temporarily anti-aesthetic) motivation facilitates the affirmation of the poem’s aesthetic norms (which the Demon himself will ultimately validate in the shape of Tamara). For a discussion of this in the context of the Demon’s psychology see my ‘Lermontov’s Demon: A Question of Identity’, SEER, LX, 2,1982: 189-210. Ikmon, I, 2, lines 3-5. I here quote William Friedman: About Time (Massachusetts 1990: 67-68). It is inherent in Aristotle’s Poetics Aristotle, in considering mythos (plot) essential to pathos, and apsis (setting) as incidental, was effectively pro- moting chronos over topos. See R. W. Vince, ‘ Opsis as a Term in Dramatic TheoqY. Assaph: Studies in the Thea&e, Section C, 6 (Ramat Aviv 1990: 89-102). W.J.T. Mitchell makes the same point about the relationship between mythos and apsis, claiming that Genette also accepts the Aristotelian position, space being for Genette the ancilla narrationis ‘Space, Ideology and LiteraryRepresentation’.PoeticsToday, 10, 1.1989: 91-102. William Lambarde, A Perambulation of Kent: Containing the Description, Hystorie and Cusfomes of that Shyre (1826: 15). I am particularly indebted here, and in the discussion of narodnost’ and mestnost’which follows, to Lauren Leighton’s excellent Russian Romantic Criticism.- An Antbo1ogy (ed. and transl. by Lauren Gray Leighton [Con- necticut 19871). This contains a translation of Somov’s ‘On Romantic Poetry’ with annotations. See also John Mersereau’s study of Somov: Orest Somov: Russian Fiction beiween Romanticism and Realism (Michigan 1989). Ju. M. Lotman, ‘Problema Vostoka i Zapada v tvorcestve pozdnego Lermontova’. Lennontovskij sbomik (ed. I.S. Cistova et al.) (Leningrad 1985: 10 and 11). The kairos/chronos distinction popular&d by Frank Kermode provides one way of rectifying this shortcoming. Elliott Jacques considers the former to be “psychological time”, the time of human experience; the latter is merely “the objective time of earlier and later of the physicist”. See Elliott Jacques, 7he Form of Time (New York 1982: 15-16). Gina Hammarberg sees the idyll as a “locusarnoenu$‘, an

extension of the poet’s harmonious, beautiful soul [ . ..I the extemalisation of an inner world [. . .] rather than actual outward reality.

This view requires that the poet create his ethnotope as a symbolic reflection of himself. Significantly, Hammarberg contrasts idyllic time with “linear,

572 Robert Reid

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19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

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historical time” as a “cyclical, eternally recurring present”. Gitta Hammar- berg, From the Idyll to the Novel: Kat-amzin ‘s Sentimentalist Prose (Cambridge 1991:46-48). It is precisely because myth proposes “a generic, typical form of human identity”, and reflects the “permanent possibilities of human existence” that it has an immtmity to time and the historical process. Hans Meyerhof, Time in Literature (Los Angeles 1955: 82). At first sight Izmail takes him for the ghost of a Russian soldier killed in battle, thus conjuring up the most extreme manifestations of alienation of which the contrastive ethnotope is capable: this world/other world. IZ3, II, 24, lines 26-27. Here and in subsequent quotations from Lermontov, the translation is mine; square brackets added for clarification. I& II, 24, lines 26-27. II% II, 23, lines 7- 10. IB, II, 23, lines 14-16. IB, II, 26, lines 6-8. II3, II, 27, lines l-4. II?, III, 4, lines 9-10. ZB, II, 22, line 9. IB, II, 22, lines 3-7. Hermann Fischer (Romantic Verse Nanative.- 73e History of a Genre [Cambridge 1991: 12-541) sees romantic verse narrative as produced by a confluence of three streams: the eighteenth-century pre-romantic digressive style, with weak plot; the historiographical tradition (Scott) with stress on ethnic verisimilitude; Gothic and German romanticism with extravagant heroes and reassertion of plot. The aesthetic assumption underlying the popularity of the second of these styles was the notion that primitive people were wholesomely spontaneous, and that the poetry describing them was therefore good in itself. On the other hand, some distinction has to be made between ‘Valerik’ and A Hero of Our Time here, along the lines of Lotman and Uspenskij’s sender/receiver orientation. ‘Valerik’ is obviously receiver oriented, whereas A Hero of Our Time has a receiver-oriented frame (travel notes), but Pecorin’s ‘Journal’ has strong sender orientation. See Ju.M. Lotman, B.A. Uspenskij et al., 7heses on the Semiotic Sfudy of Culture (Lisse 1975: lo- ll). There is a striking conformity here to Victor Turner’s formula for ‘social drama’ and rituals dealing with potentially socially disruptive forces:

breach -> crisis -> redress A 1. reintegration

b 2. recognition of schism

However, Lermontov’s symmetric ethnotopes always produce category 2 results: an irreversible breach. See Thomas Pavel, ‘Narratives of Ritual and

Ethnotope in Lermontov’s Caucasian Potkty 573

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Desire’. Victor Turner and the Construction of Social Criticism (Ed. Kath- leen M. Ashley) (Indiana 1990: 64-69). In some cases, at least, this leads to a notoriety which perpetuates the memory of the hero and, in a sense, justifies the retelling of the story. See my ‘Hero, Plot and Myth: Some Aspects of Lermontov’s Caucasian Poemy’. Essays in Poetics, 7.2, 1982: 39-64. Lermontov’s Mkyri: Themes and Structures’. Problems of Russian Ro- manticism (Ed. Robert Reid) (Aldershot 1986: 127- 168). AB, I, 4, lines l-2. It is clear that this ethnotope is naturally conducive to tragedy. The following characteristics of tragedy are based on those suggested by David Roochnik in 7The Tragedy of Reason (London 1990: 130 ff.): the theme of fate (here motivated by the presence of an Islamic tradition); extra- ordinariness of the hero (by pursuing nonconformity in a highly traditional society); there is hamartia in the form of taboo-breaking crime. However, what there is generally not (though elsewhere in Lermontov it is abtmdant) is a peripeteia through which the hero can confront and analyse his tragedy. This amounts to ‘polyculturality’ in Lotman and Uspenskij’s terms: “the possibility, while remaining within one culture, of choosing conventional behaviour in the style of another”. Lotman and Uspenskij cite in particular the adoption of foreign styles of dress. Op.&.: 20.

ethnotope in lermontov's caucasian poèmy

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