The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Written soon after the event, the Lay describes the ill-fated incursion by a minor prince named Igor Svyatoslavovich into hostile territory controlled by pagan Polovtsian tribes to the southeast of Kiev. In imagery of great lyrical power, the anonymous author of the Lay rebukes Prince Igor for his rash adventurism and laments his capture by the enemy. But historically, matters were not that tragic. By autumn 1187 Igor had escaped, and two years later his son Vladimir, who had also been taken hostage, married the daughter of Igor’s captor, Khan Konchak. The alliance made good military sense: quasi-Russified Polovtsians could then be deployed as warriors and spies against hos-tiletribes further east. The eastern frontier did not become culturally significant for its pragmatic military alliances, however. In the mid-1870s, the composer Aleksandr Borodin (1833–77) turned this ancient epic song into a Romantic orientalist opera, Prince Igor. In this new musical context, the “enemy to the east” became thoroughly eroticized, redefined as sensuousness and associated with savage, arousing dance. A century later, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn exploited another, more sinister aspect of this myth of the permeable Russian frontier. In Chapter 50 (“The Traitor Prince”) of his 1968 novel The First Circle,Russian scientists imprisoned in a research institute re-enact, as barracks entertainment, the sequence of conquest–captivity–treason–intermarriage–alliance from the Lay of Igor’s Campaign. The performance unfolds in a fictional format well known to the Stalinist era, and to these incarcerated men personally: a mock show trial. Armed with the proper sections of the Criminal Code, the inmates condemn to prison or death “Olgovich, Igor Svyatoslavich,” double-agent and spy, together with his collaborationist family, the composer Borodin, and the anonymous author of the Lay. These two famous artistic transpositions of the Igor Tale illustrate a second peculiarity of Russia’s frontier narratives: their indebtedness to Western European narrative.

Our third peculiarity concerns the compass. In the modern period, we tend to think of Russia’s frontier tensions in terms of East–West. But in fact, the North–South axis has always been equally pronounced and productive of plots. Until the twentieth century focused our attention, unhappily, on survivor narratives from Siberian prison camps, Russia’s most vibrant boundary in terms of

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aesthetic texts had been the southern tier. The Caucasus mountain range, Russia’s domestic Alps, was the birthplace of her native tradition of the Sublime. The discovery of awe-inspiring natural beauty on home territory raised Russian literature in its own eyes vis-a`-vis the West, which helped to compensate for other perceived backwardness.

“Frontier heroes” lend themselves to exemplary binaries, of which probably the most robust are the categories of free versus unfree. On the free side we find the monastic frontier communities, homesteaders, pilgrims, adventurers, commercial travelers, heroes of Romantic Wanderlust, and – after the founding of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1725 – scientific expeditions. The classic Russian homesteading text, Sergei Aksakov’s Family Chronicle (1846), describes the travails of a patriarchal household that emigrated eastward into the Ufa region in the Urals, bordering the Bashkir steppe. To this same “free” line belong all Soviet-era narratives of virgin-soil settlers, Trans-Siberian railway workers, and founders of new industrial centers in the Ural mountains. On the unfree side belong the exiles and prisoners.