Bloody Verses: Rereading Pushkin’s Prisoner of the Caucasus

Pushkin’s 1822 narrative poem, Prisoner of the Caucasus (Kavkazskii plennik), is frequently pointed to as Russia’s first literary introduction to the Caucasus and its peoples. Belinsky praised it both for its accurate representation of the region and for the beauty of its verses.¹ One section of the poem, the so-called ethnographic section in which the Circassian customs and way of life are described in some detail, was reprinted six times in Pushkin’s life alone.² Yet, for all of its popularity, critics and readers alike have continued to struggle with the poem’s epilogue and its relation to the first two parts of the story. This epilogue, written approximately three months after Pushkin finished the first two parts of the poem, differs both stylistically and thematically from the remainder of the work. Resembling first the elegy, then the epic narrative, and finally the ceremonial ode, as Harsha Ram points out, the form of the epilogue is as discordant as its apparent new message: the celebration of imperial might and the outright conquest of the Caucasus.³

And, in fact, the epilogue does express a clearer political message than the remainder of the poem by celebrating the destruction of the Caucasian tribes and the expansion of the Russian Empire:

[…][…] ⁴

And I will celebrate that glorious hour,When, having felt the bloody attack,Upon the indignant CaucasusOur double-headed eagle raised itself[…]You I glorify, hero,O Kotliarevskii, the scourge of the Caucasus!Wherever you rushed, a terror—Your speed, like a black plague,Destroyed, annihilated tribes.[…]And the violent cry of war fell silent:All is subject to the Russian sword.Proud sons of the Caucasus,You have fought, you have perished terribly.⁵

In this article I will offer a new interpretation of Pushkin’s epilogue and its relationship to the remainder of the poem. Pushkin succeeds in problematizing Russian imperial expansion precisely through the addition of such a nationalistic ending to what at first appears to be a Romantic work about an exotic people. In the first two parts of the poem, Pushkin plays on his readers’ expectations, largely based on European literature, in particular Byron, as well as on their own unspoken, sometimes unconscious, desires to experience vicariously the danger and excitement of the still mythical Caucasus.⁶ He then describes the bloody consequences of this fascination with the region and its peoples: total conquest by Russia and the destruction of Caucasian society. Pushkin’s poem reveals the double-edged sword of imperialistic expansionism: on the one hand, there is an idealization of the Other and its way of life, while on the other, contact between the empire and the Other leads to the destruction of that way of life. From this conclusion, I will then reread Pushkin’s poem with this end in mind and show how the body of the work leads more organically to the epilogue than it first appears.

Reaction to the Epilogue

Upon publication, Pushkin’s epilogue inspired little to no commentary. In fact, in the majority of reviews of the poem, literary critics simply chose not to address it.⁷ Susan Layton suggests that critics were unwilling to speak out against the epilogue due to the political climate of the time.⁸ In private, though, the epilogue caused some degree of discomfort for at least one of Pushkin’s contemporaries, Prince Viazemsky. “It grieves me, that Pushkin stained with blood the last verses of his tale,” he writes to Alexander Turgenev in a letter from September 1822. “What kind of hero is Kotliarevsky, Yermolov? What here is good, that he, ‘like a black plague, / Destroyed, annihilated tribes?’ From such praise, one’s blood freezes and one’s hair stands on end.”⁹ He goes on to complain that it was impossible even “to allude” (nameknut´) to his displeasure with the epilogue in his review of the poem due to the censor.¹⁰

The Soviet scholar, Boris Tomashevsky, offers one of the lengthier and more detailed analyses of the poem, and the epilogue in particular. Regarding the epilogue, Tomashevsky...