The Exotic Prisoner in Russian Romanticism

The Good Russian Prisoner: Naturalizing Violence in the Caucasus Mountains

“…At first glance, one could observe that this mythic cycle is fundamentally about the displacement of the Russian protagonist and the attendant anxieties of colonial power. Indeed, there are many excellent critical works on each iteration of the Prisoner cycle, most notably by historians, literary critics, and film critics (Austin 1984(Austin , 1997Barrett 1998;Friedrich 2003;Gillespie 1999;Layton 1994;Ram 1999;Sandler 1989). The story has flexibly moved across genres to secure its place in the Russian cultural landscape from the imperial classics of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tolstoy to the commentaries of Eisenstein, the kinetic Soviet archetypes of Gaidai, and the mass cultural resonances of the story's cinematic reappearance in 1996, which was contemporaneous with the precarious ending to Boris Yeltsin's first Chechen war.…”

“…18. The Imperial Academy of Sciences lost one of its botanists to kidnapping in 1774; see Austin 1984. 19. Two of the best-known cases in the years leading up to Pushkin's work included the capture of the Russian General Potto by Chechens in 1811 and the Russian Major Shevtsov, who was reported as captured by the Circassians while going to visit his aging mother.…”