A Caucasian Utopia in Russian Literature and Politics: Alexander Griboedov and Iuri Tynianov

Abstract

The protagonists of my paper are the Russian writer and diplomat Alexander Griboedov, the author of the “Project for the Establishment of the Russian Caucasian Company,” which he considered, if one can believe some sources, the main achievement of his life. Approximately 100 years after the death of Griboedov, Iuri Tynianov wrote his fictionalized biography where all of the action revolves around the Caucasus Project, with which, according to Tynianov, Griboedov signed his own death sentence. Here the question naturally arises: why did Tynianov, forced, after the defeat of Formalism, to turn to fiction and literary heroes, shy away from questions of literature, focusing instead on matters of Russian foreign policy and diplomacy? Why was the Caucasus a key topic for him? And should we not see in the biography of Griboedov a hidden message, a story, not so much about the affairs of bygone days, but rather about Tynianov’s own time and its problems? However, this story has still another mystery: what role did the Caucasus Project actually play the in the fate of Griboedov and what really were the goals he pursued with it? The paper tries also to underline the utopian nature of the project which inscribes it, in an unexpected way, not so much into economic and political History/ Archaeology, as into the Russian literary assimilation of the Caucasus and the so-called “Caucasian text” of Russian literature, the utopian space that literature of the time allocated to the Caucasus, into which, in fact, Griboedov's project seemed to fit very harmoniously