This description of the nature of the kavkaztsy owes much to the romantic school, both in its images of traditional heroism (encompassing either boldness or coolness under fire) and in its assumption that old habits and ways of thinking were washed away by the force of new experiences. The kavkaztsy were the new men of the Russian army, and all the challenges they faced only spurred them on to new heights. While for Filipson the “unnatural order of life and service”^[1] enervated the men, Dondukov-Korsakov saw such depravations as simple self-denial and lauded the benefits of their asceticism. Although he suggested in the above passage that this transformation took place over time, he wrote elsewhere that the newcomers became kavkaztsy as soon as they donned a Caucasus uniform.^[2] Thus, it would seem that joining the company of experienced officers alone could achieve the same effect.
Dondukov-Korsakov was essentially trying to write an ethnography of the army, with descriptions of the customs of both officers and men, although I have focused on the former here. Like the gortsy or Cossacks in other texts, the officers here are brave, dashing, violent yet cool (seen, for example, in a casual duel that did not disrupt a ball), severe, hospitable, comradely. They also refused to abandon the bodies of their fallen comrades to the enemy, a classic motif in describing the gortsy.^[3] The parallels with the literary depictions of heroic gortsy are too prominent to be dismissed as coincidental. Unlike Evdokimov, who redefined the literary vision of the heroic to reflect what he admired most in his fellow officers, Dondukov-Korsakov appropriated the tropes of heroism in the Caucasus ordinarily reserved for gortsy and applied them to the Russian army. This seeming confusion of identities highlights what may be the most important consequence of service in the Caucasus for the Russian officer – the slow but steady exchange of typical Russian customs and modes of behavior for those attributed to the population indigenous to the Caucasus. Yet despite all this emphasis on the distinct identity of the Caucasus Corps, its soldiers did not come to view the Caucasus as their home. When the disastrous Dargo campaign ended, “everyone felt hope and the possibility of returning to life, to the homeland, to those close to our hearts”.^[4] Despite their cultural distinctiveness, Russia remained at the heart of kavkazets identity.

Conclusion

To return to the question posed at the beginning of this essay, what impact did actual service have on the images of the Caucasus that the officers brought with them? Literary accounts that cast the Caucasus as Russia’s Orient certainly formed the basis for their comprehension of the gortsy. The themes elaborated in literature set the terms for the officers’ descriptions, and they never strayed far from the descriptions of gortsy identity laid out in fictional accounts. Nevertheless, their portraits of the gortsy show the effects of their experience and are more flexible than the literary depictions. The less exposed the officer was to actual Muslim communities, the more stereotypical his view of the gortsy was, yet a number of the officers showed a more nuanced view of the local population. Klinger in particular presented the complex nature of Chechen society, and Ol’shevskii engaged in a vigorous polemic with the standard view of the Chechens. Even Miliutin came to his unflattering view of Alillo and his simplicity only after circumstances impelled him to do so. On the whole, though, the image of the “Asiatic” was less troubling to the officers than the image of the Russians themselves. The problem of Russian atrocities and the nature of service in the Caucasus, so central to the memoirs, are typically marginal or absent from the literary texts. As seen most dramatically in the problem of violence, the Caucasus corps often behaved less like Russians than like the very gortsy they fought, and the officers have no clear consensus on which side is more infected by barbarism. None of the officers could present the Russian army as a civilized force, let alone one that brought civilization to the Caucasus. The violent practices endemic to the Caucasus Corps were too unsettling to be explained away, and the officers made no effort to justify them. Even the most ardent admirer acknowledged the presence of dark and reprehensible aspects of the Corps’ character. The positive aspects of the Corps also set it apart from the rest of the Russian army, as the nature of heroism had to be redefined to fit local conditions. What set the kavkaztsy apart from ordinary Russians, in the end, was the nature of life in the Caucasus, in all its aspects. The inevitable impact of that place on the soldiers who lived and fought there made it very difficult, at times, to distinguish between the Asiatic and the European.