Russia's People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present

10 Imam Shamil

Mosaic of Imam Shamil in modern-day Gunib. Photograph by Rebecca Gould. •• • 10 Imam Shamil (1797–1871) REBECCA GOULD When the Georgian modernist poet Titsian Tabidze decided to commemorate his recent excursion to the mountain village Gunib, the site of Imam Shamil’s surrender to the Russian general Bariatinskii in 1859, it was not necessary to provide much context for his Georgian readers. Written in 1928, the poem was never published in his lifetime, and only made it into his collected works in 1966. Titsian was well aware of his poem’s unpublishability under the conditions of Stalinist rule. The most articulate text produced by a Georgian about the Russian conquest of the north Caucasus, a conquest facilitated by Georgian generals in the Tsarist army, thereby escaped censorship . Thanks to this evasion, the words that have been preserved have not lost their resonance: I crossed Daghestan. I saw Gunib. I, an infidel, now a shahid. My sword is an arrow; it will not bend Though it may kill me. [ . . . ] I see the ghost of a nest, ravaged by eagles. My eyes recall my shame. How did they embalm these cliffs? Why did they exterminate this sky? Georgia, this mountain’s grief belongs to you. Our bones rot beside our swords and bayonets, I pity my gangrened Georgian flesh. Those who gave their lives are safe in paradise. As for you who remain behind, My Georgian brothers, memory has no mercy. Tonight, the wind shudders. Shamil prays for his men. You sold us into slavery, you spoiled the battle. The night won’t weep for cowards under a foreign sky. I never pulled the fatal trigger. 118 Rebecca Gould I never donned the fighter’s armor. But this battle moves even me to ecstasy. I don’t want to be a poet drunk on blood. Let this day be my penitence. Let my poems wash away your treachery.1 It is not known whether Soviet Georgian authorities were directly acquainted with Titsian’s evocation of Imam Shamil’s defeat. Certainly the Russian authorities were not, as the poem was never translated into Russian. Nor has the text been rendered into Russian in the eighty years since it was written. But it seems unlikely that Titsian’s execution nine years later, while the poet was imprisoned on the charge of espionage and after he had undergone torture intended to extract a confession, was entirely unconnected to his authorship of this poem. Arguably his masterpiece, “Gunib” was never translated by Boris Pasternak, translator of Titsian’s finest poems into Russian, and Nobel laureate for his own poetry and prose. Pasternak is largely responsible for Titsian’s fame as the second-greatest modernist poet in Georgian among readers of Russian, but he remained ignorant of this particular masterpiece. Not by coincidence, Titsian Tabidze was working on a novel about Imam Shamil when the NKVD (Stalin and Beria’s secret police) arrived in his Tbilisi apartment to take him away to jail. Titsian’s compatriot Grigol Robakidze did escape Soviet Russia before the purge. From his Geneva home, Robakidze wrote the story Titsian never wrote, or at least never published: “Imam Shamil” in his 1932 collection Caucasian Novellas.2 Significantly, Robakidze wrote his account in German rather than Georgian or Russian, as if to suggest that the European Shamil was more likely to pique his readers’ interest than the Shamil known to Robakidze in his own language. Imam Shamil, who led the peoples of Chechnya and Daghestan in their resistance to the twenty-five-year Russian conquest of the northeast Caucasus (1834–59), has never lost his hold in the imaginative historiography of Russian colonialism. Born in 1797 to an Avar family in the village of Gimri in mountainous Daghestan, Shamil’s original name was ‘Ali. During a childhood illness, ‘Ali was rechristened Shamūēl, a name meaning “that which repels sickness.” Shamūēl was modified to Shamil, the name by which he is known today in both Arabic and European sources. From birth, Shamil was a weak child, but after the name change, he grew to be strong, courageous, and widely esteemed for his eloquence and learning. By the age of twenty, Shamil had mastered all the traditional subjects taught in the madrasas of the north Caucasus: Arabic grammar and rhetoric, hadith (stories and sayings of the Prophet), and Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) and theology (kalam). This training was to prove useful in...