Lecture 'Three Caucasian Captives: Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy'

THIS MATERIAL (INFORMATION) WAS PRODUCED BY A FOREIGN AGENT, BYKOV DMITRY LVOVICH, AS CONTAINED IN THE REGISTER OF FOREIGN MASS MEDIA AGENCIES PERFORMING THE FUNCTIONS OF A FOREIGN AGENT, ON 29.07.2022.

In Russian literature, there aren’t all that many cases where authors deliberately give their works the same title. They do it consciously: to argue with a predecessor, to clarify their idea, to reinterpret it, or to mock it. Thus Mayakovsky, naming his poem “War and Peace,” enters into a dialogue with Tolstoy’s novel. Or, for example, in “The Twelve Chairs” (though this is no longer a Soviet context) the plot of “The Golden Ass” is parodically reworked and brought to grotesque exaggeration. Such cross-references are a natural mechanism of literary development and debate.

This principle is the focus of our lecture: how the notion of “the colonization of the Caucasus” changed in Pushkin, Lermontov, Leo Tolstoy, and, already in post-Soviet times, Makanin. Why do these texts need the Caucasus, what does it symbolize, and what role does it play in the fate of the hero—of Pushkin’s and Lermontov’s? And above all—how do three key works of Russian literature explain the meaning of the coexistence of Russia and the Caucasus?