The Russian urge to feminize the Caucasus found most remarkable literary expression in the symbolization of Georgia as an oriental woman. This body of writing provides a fascinating counterpoint to the intensely ambivalent treatment of Circassians, Dagestanis and Chechens in works of Pushkin, Bestuzhev-Marlinsky and Lermontov. The three principal producers of the romantic Caucasus invented Muslim tribesmen as shadow selves endowed with heroic machismo, a love of liberty, instinctual authenticity, simplicity and an aura of Homeric song. These literary creations channeled authorial rebelliousness against the tsarist state and gave sustenance to a cultural ideal of semi-Asian Russia as an enviably youthful, ascendant nation rather than a hapless laggard seeking identity by tagging after Europe.

But while romantic appropriation of the tribesmen thus inscribed Russia's superiority complex toward western enlightenment, Georgia bore the brunt of the coexistent inferiority complex which led Russians to protest how European they already were. Pushkin, Bestuzhev-Marlinsky and Lermontov contributed unequally to the invention of Georgia as an oriental other. Lermontov was by far the most important, followed by Pushkin, while Bestuzhev-Marlinsky left only the brief but significant symbolization of the Alazani valley as a nubile bride-to-be. In each case, however, the three prominent members of the nineteenth-century canon contributed to a rigidly dichotomous cultural mythology. Concentrated in the period from 1820 to 1850, this subdivision of the literary Caucasus has three striking features. First of all, despite Georgia's long participation in Christendom, authors insisted on the country's Asian, quasi-Islamic character. The second peculiarity is the exclusion of native heroes. By stark contrast to the literary Caucasus' gallery of memorable tribesmen such as Pushkin's Circassians, Ammalat-Bek, Izmail-Bey, Kazbich, Hadji Murat and Shamil, Georgian male protagonists are very scarce in Russian works.