Let Our Fame Be Great (14 page)

‘The young girl entered the poet's chamber. No one knows what happened there. A shot was heard, then a cry; then, finally, Bestuchef came out, pale and frightful. In the chamber, Oline lay on the ground, dying, bloodied; a bullet had passed through her chest. A fired pistol was close by her. The dying girl could still speak; she asked for a priest to be found. Two hours later, she was dead. The priest swore under oath that Oline Nesterzof told him that she had wanted to take the pistol from Bestuchef 's hands, and the pistol had gone off by accident. She was shot, she died pardoning Bestuchef for this accidental murder,' wrote Dumas, full of the passion of the tragedy.

The priest then supposedly testified at Bestuzhev's trial, and his testimony alone acquitted the poet of murder. But, Dumas assures us, Bestuzhev was never the same again. He was overcome by a need
for danger, and would throw himself into the thick of battle. But he lived a charmed life and, despite his wish for death, he was spared again and again. Dumas was enthralled by the tale. ‘Finally, in 1838, he made an excursion in the land of the Abazertskys: they attacked the village of Adler. At the moment of entering in the forest, it was clear that this forest was occupied by a mountaineer force three times stronger than the Russians. The mountaineers had, as well, an advantage in their position, because they were dug into the forest. The colonel gave the order to retreat. The retreat was sounded. Bestuchef commanded the riflemen along with another officer, Captain Albrand. Instead of obeying the trumpet call, these two forced their way into the forest in pursuit of the mountaineers. Captain Albrand returned, but Bestuchef did not.'

Dumas claimed to have received these details from a certain ‘Prince Tarkanof ', an eyewitness to the battle. Apparently, fifty soldiers were sent to hunt for the writer but all that was ever found was his watch.

The story shows how successful Bestuzhev's effort to present himself as a Byronic hero had been, while also showing how well the secret of his literary alter ego had been kept. Dumas clearly knew of Bestuzhev's past as a poet in St Petersburg and wrote about him as one who had written some good verses, but does not appear to have realized that he was a novelist, nor that Marlinsky and Bestuzhev were the same person. If he did, he kept it very quiet, since he went on to publish translations of two of Marlinsky's novels, including
Ammalat Bek
, under his own name. He claimed to have come across the manuscripts in Derbent, and did not feel the need to mention that they had already been published to vast acclaim in Russia. He called them
Sultanetta
– the name of the heroine of
Ammalat Bek
, and the woman for whom Ammalat killed his Russian friend – and
La Boule de neige
.

The translator of an American version of the novels in 1906 subtly condemned Dumas for it. ‘In “Sultanetta” Dumas evidently struggled against assimilating the story of the Russian novelist whose romance he admits, under a somewhat specious plea, that he “rewrote”, ' the translator said. By that time, the secret of Marlinsky's
identity was out, but his novels had been all but forgotten. So much so that the translator did not even bother to record his name.

Bestuzhev is a writer in the unfortunate position of being more interesting for who he was, than for what he wrote. But many of his imitators do not even have that distinction. Following his lead, they produced reams of trash, which revelled in the oriental details of Marlinsky and Pushkin, often with semi-pornographic overlays.

One Elizaveta Gan wrote an erotic fantasy in the first person called
A Recollection of Zheleznovodsk
, which purported to be the memoir of a lady who had stayed at this spa resort. She enjoyed horseback riding in the wilds around the town, but was ambushed by Circassians and fainted out of fear. On coming to her senses, she had been slung over the back of a horse, and was being carried deep into the mountains. ‘So my dream had come true: fate was casting me into that country which I had desired to see for such a long time – into the canyons, the refuge of the wild sons of nature. I was going to see the Caucasus in all its charm and terror.'

It was a Mills and Boon novel with a colonial twist, and you can almost see the society ladies flicking forward through the pages to the inevitable bed scene. A dark figure enters her quarters and foils her escape plan. ‘Lightning flashed. I saw the prince, and his eyes gleamed more dreadfully than all the sky's lightning.' The lady saves her virtue by seizing the prince's dagger and killing herself with it, only to wake up in her own bed to find it was all a dream. Nevertheless, she refused to apologize for her over-active imagination and promised to ‘keep having such dreams every night and describe them in even greater detail'.

These novels have been extensively studied by Susan Layton, whose rather dry
Russian Literature and Empire
cannot hide its joy whenever it records another erotic thriller. She describes another such book plotted around a harem love triangle in Abkhazia, in which the son murders the father and the sex slave hurls herself into the sea while lightning flashes. In a rather uncomfortable afterword, the author then goes on to lecture his audience on the importance of civilized Russians colonizing the Caucasus to stop such irrational foreign behaviour.

The dramatic setting of the Caucasus as created by Pushkin and Marlinsky was exploited outside Russia as well, with British writers joining in on the act. They could combine the standard celebration of the lusty savage with a good measure of anti-Russian prejudice, and came up with results every bit as dreadful as their Russian counterparts.

Grace Walton set
Schamyl, or the Wild Woman of Circassia
in the basic factual framework of the war in the eastern Caucasus, but otherwise seems to have imagined the mountain folk to be more or less equivalent to the townsfolk of
Romeo and Juliet
. Schamyl – her version of Imam Shamil, the ruler of the highlanders – has a son Hamed, who is staunch and fearless, a daughter Lelia, who is a ‘peerless beauty', a ward Ivan, who is noble and handsome, and an aide Hassan Bey, who is sly and treacherous.

A battle separates them, threatening their total destruction, only for them to be helped by a mad woman called Wenda who appears out of the mountains and rescues them from a desperate fate. The plot twists and turns in an ever more complex web of love intrigues. Hamed ends up marrying the ward of a Russian general after he spurns an employment offer from the tsar. Lelia, who is not really Schamyl's daughter, marries Ivan, who actually is Schamyl's son. Hassan Bey gets his just deserts after trying to seduce Lelia, while Schamyl finds the wild woman is really his lost wife and the mother of Ivan.

In one exceptionally racy passage, Catherine Dubroschi – the young Russian girl who ends up marrying Hamed – is stripped to the waist and threatened with a flogging. The audience is treated to an illustration of the scene, with her perfect skin and only-just-not-visible right breast threatened by the knout. It is certainly not what you expect from Victorian literature.

The influence of Bestuzhev-Marlinsky ran deep indeed, and it settled on a young man called Mikhail Lermontov, who had holidayed at the mineral spas as a young lad. In a museum now devoted to him in Pyatigorsk is a sketch he did illustrating the story of Ammalat Bek, with a savage mountaineer shooting dead a Russian officer with a rifle at close range.

When Lermontov was aged ten, his family was taking the waters at Pyatigorsk. He fell in love with a girl he met there, or so he said a few years later, adding a layer of sensual allure to a place that already had a hold on him. ‘My heart began to throb, my knees felt weak; I had no idea about anything at that time. Nevertheless, it was passion, strong though childish, it was real love. I still haven't looked like that since. They laughed at me, teased me, for they noticed the emotion in my face. I would weep silently without reason. I wanted to see her. The Caucasian mountains are sacred to me.'

As a teenager, Lermontov's fascination with the mountains endured, even after his return to the north, and his subtlety of thought quickly outstripped anything Bestuzhev was capable of. In his poem ‘Izmail-Bey', written when he was fifteen or sixteen and only a few months before the Decembrist revolt, he revealed a very ambiguous attitude to Russia's conquest of the south.

‘The village where his youth was spent, the mosques, the peaceful roofs, all rent and ruined by the Russians are,' the poem says, in justifying the hero's decision to turn his back on Russian service and return to the Caucasus of his forefathers. Lermontov based his poem on stories he had heard during his trips to the south, but his story is still celebratory of Russia. Disillusion would come later. For now, he believed that when the Circassians were subdued they would proclaim ‘slave though I be, I serve a prince most high, a king of the world'. But even this did not go far enough for the censors, who cut it when the poem was finally published in 1843.

For the censors, after the Decembrist revolt, became even more restrictive than before. One censor called Buturlin later remarked he would have censored the gospels for their democratic tendencies if he could, and it became increasingly hard to write or think freely. Lev Tolstoy, himself destined to write about the Caucasus, studied at Kazan University at a time when the philosophy course was based exclusively on the set books of St Paul's epistles to the Colossians and to Timothy. Another great author, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, was transported to Siberia just for owning a printing press, while Turgenev was put under house arrest in 1852 for writing a kind obituary of the disgraced satirical genius Nikolai Gogol.

It was a stifling atmosphere, and was not one that Lermontov reacted well to. Throughout his short career, he was like a wild animal
kept as a pet. He would entertain with his looks, his wit and his outrageous comments, but would lash out if bored and be savagely punished for it. This explosive temperament was too much for the university in Moscow, which he dropped out of. He enrolled in the army and endured two years of training, his soul oppressed by the boredom of drill and the marriage of his childhood sweetheart to a fat man twelve years her senior. His works from this period are savage satires of society, condemning the futility of upper-class existence.

Pushkin felt the stuffy atmosphere too. Though some of his most celebrated works date from after 1825, he was subject to humiliating scrutiny. In 1829, he broke out and travelled to the Caucasus without permission, producing a travel memoir of boredom, rage and despair called
Journey to Arzrum
. As a book, it lacks the grace and beauty of his poetry, but the truth of its message is all the more powerful for that. It reflects the blank gloom of a generation in which geniuses were forced to be bureaucrats, where the life of an officer was the most freedom a man could hope for.

He stopped off at the spa towns that had entranced him in 1820, but now he thought they had been become too smart. ‘Nailed up on the walls of the bath-houses are lists of instructions from the police; everything is orderly, neat, prettified,' he wrote. The Caucasus had lost its edge, this was no longer a place where a man could be free. Even the tribes were no longer noble, just savage.

‘The Circassians hate us. We have forced them out of their free and spacious pasture-lands; their auls [villages] are in ruins, whole tribes have been annihilated. As time goes on, they move deeper into the mountains, and direct their raids from there. Friendship with the peaceful Circassians is unreliable: they are always ready to aid their rebellious fellow tribesmen. The spirit of their wild chivalry has declined noticeably. They rarely attack the Cossacks in equal number, and never the infantry; and they flee when they see a cannon. Even so they never pass up an opportunity to attack a weak detachment or a defenceless person. The area is full of rumours of their villainies,' he wrote in a bleak condemnation of all sides.

‘Recently a peaceful Circassian who shot a soldier was captured.
He tried to justify himself by saying that his rifle had been loaded for too long. What can one do with such people?'

He continued on his melancholy progress to Vladikavkaz, the central fort that held the key to the Caucasus and which dominated the only serious pass across the mountains. Here he saw Circassians kept as hostages, dressed in rags and smeared in filth. This was the truth of the civilizing war he had praised a decade earlier. Even the magnificent pass over the Caucasus did not interest him. Indeed, it was obscured by clouds.

Most of his book is set to the south of the mountain range, where he visited the front line of the Russian war against the Turks. His return to the northern side of the mountains only takes in a couple of pages, but they are a subtle satire of the stuffy constraints of the imperial court, told as a reaction to a review of his work.