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From: ESRCs East West Programme [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Serguei A. Oushakine
Sent: Wednesday, November 24, 2010 8:29 PM
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Subject: Book review: Bruce Grant, The Captive and the Gift (Comparative
Studies in Society and History)

Comparative Studies in Society and History (2010), 52:485-486 Cambridge
University Press
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2010

Bruce Grant, The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in
Russia and the Caucasus. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.

In this insightful and useful new book, the anthropologist Bruce Grant,
author of the highly regarded In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of
Perestroikas (1995), documents the emergence and transformations of a master
trope he calls "the gift of empire" in Russian literature and discourse, as
the Tsarist empire expanded its borders southward into the Caucasus region
in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In its more direct
manifestation-still commonly encountered in the reproachful remarks of
Russians concerning the post-Soviet Caucasus-the colonization of Circassia,
Chechnya, Georgia and the rest of the region is justified as a mission
civilisatrice, which cost the Russians more than they received in return.
According to this "logic of sovereign rule," to use Grant's terminology, the
peoples of the Caucasus should feel gratitude, rather than resentment,
toward the colonizers who brought them schools, roads, clinics, and
liberation from backward traditions (to say nothing of the 70 percent of
North Caucasian regional budgets currently funded by the Russian federal
government).

One of the most effective vehicles for popularizing the concept of the gift
of empire is the motif of the "Prisoner of the Caucasus," this being the
title of a poem composed in 1822 by Aleksandr Pushkin, as the Russian
military incursion into the Caucasus went into full swing. Literary
portrayals of a man (with whom the author and presumed readers identify)
taken captive in an exotic locale, then released through the love of a local
woman, go back to Antiquity, but it is in Tsarist, Soviet, and even
post-Soviet Russia that a homegrown variant of the Pocahontas tale achieved
its greatest and most enduring popularity. Behind their flattering
portrayals of the colonizer's superiority and desirability, Grant detects
within these narratives a "sleight of power," consisting in a series of
inversions masking the true asymmetries of the Russian-Caucasian encounter.
The analysis has much to commend it: Grant demonstrates a sophisticated
familiarity with Russian literature, Soviet popular culture, and Caucasian
history, and his tracing of the "gift of empire" concept from Pushkin's time
to the present provides valuable insight into the peculiarly intense
attachment Russians feel to the Caucasus. (Incidentally, I would recommend
The Captive and the Gift as background reading to anyone seeking to
understand Russian perspectives on last year's war in South Ossetia.)

In portrayals of captives in the Caucasus written from the colonizers' point
of view, as Grant notes, the indigenes are mostly silent. Grant therefore
provides space for selected individuals from the other side to give their
perspectives on the "gift of empire"-among others, an Azeri film director
and the Abkhaz writer Fazil Iskander. One promising avenue of inquiry for
extending this work, in my view, would be to take a closer look at how
representations of encounters akin to that of the Prisoner of the Caucasus
are deployed in local-language literatures and popular cultures. Georgian
literature and cinema, for example, yield not only variants told from the
"prisoner's" point of view (he being a Russified city-dweller, she a native
of the remote valleys of the Northeast Georgian highlands), but also from
the woman's perspective.1 Nana Djordjadze's glasnost-era film Robinsonade,
or My English Grandfather (1987) features an Englishman who is held captive,
in a sense, by a Communist agitator after the Soviet invasion of Georgia in
1921. He is released at the behest of the agitator's sister, who has fallen
in love with him, but in the end it is he, not she, who dies. What is more,
she is pregnant, and, as the title implies, her grandchild narrates their
story many years later. In the plot of Robinsonade, as well as its
post-Soviet quasi-remake Chef in Love (1996), Pushkin's "sovereign logic"
has been problematized and inverted: Rather than being one of the
conquerors, Djordjadze's foreigner is among their victims, and his union
with the local woman bears fruit, in the form of culturally Georgian
offspring. In works such as these the bearer of the gift of empire undergoes
a contrastive and doubtless deeply ironic refiguration.
________________________________________
Notes
1 Tuite, K., Ethnographie et fiction en Géorgie. Célébrer une vie: actes du
colloque en honneur de Jean-Claude Muller, Kiven Strohm et Guy Lanoue, dir.
(Montréal: Département d'anthropologie, Université de Montréal, 2007),
161-69