While physical geography inspired the alpine ethos just examined in poetry and travel literature, Russians considered the Caucasus' native cultures strictly Asian. Ever since the mideighteenth century, Russian map-makers had taken the Caucasian range as an outer limit of Europe. No universal consensus on the matter reigned in popular imagination, however. Instead of regarding the mountains as the vital demarcation, certain travelers from Russia in young Pushkin's era said farewell to “Europe” with apprehension and excitement when they crossed the Terek river. The variability of “Asia's” threshold and its capacity to stir irrational sentiments illustrates how arbitrary and affectively powerful such delimitations can be. As Edward Said has stressed, the drawing of a boundary between “us” and “them” always carries a plethora of “suppositions, associations and fictions” about the foreign people. In no way requiring the others' consent about the character attributed to them, such structures of thought basically convert the foreign into meaning about “our” culture and mentality. An appropriation occurs, to serve the needs of the observing writers and their compatriot audiences.

As a preface to reading pertinent literary works of the romantic era, the present chapter will explore the meanings Russians deduced about themselves by rendering the Caucasus “Asian” or “oriental”. We should note immediately that these overlapping terms designated particularly broad cultural spheres for the élite of Pushkin's time. The Mongols loomed large in national consciousness as barbarians who had oppressed the homeland for some two hundred and fifty years. But in subsequent periods, the tsarist state had turned the tables to extend power over various Asian peoples. Ivan IV subjugated the Tatars of the Volga and Ural river regions. A push into Kazazh areas began in the 1730s.