Among Yurii Tynianov’s literary works The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar (1927–1929) stands out not only for its “Oriental” subject matter, but most important for the author’s insight into the cultural phenomenon that later became known as “Russian Orientalism.” Written in the late 1920s,^[1] the novel anticipates many of the ideas that the scholars of Russian Orientalism, Susan Layton, Monika Greenleaf, and Harsha Ram, put forward in extensive studies that have appeared over the past two decades.^[2] Chief among them is the participation of belles lettres and the discipline of Oriental Studies in the process of empire-building, the intrinsic specificity of Russian Orientalism in spite of its being derivative, drawing on its European precursor, and the interconnectedness between ideology and the mode of writing. Of course, the genre of the novel does not allow Tynianov, the author, to develop these ideas by means of strict analytical argumentation. Instead, they are implied in his intertextual references to Orientalist writing of the nineteenth century on the one hand, and to the treatment of the same subject by his contemporaries on the other. This article views Tynianov’s novel as a specific form of scholarly fiction, a study in Russian Orientalism, where parody is one of the methods used in its scholarly explorations. Narrowing down Tynianov’s complex and multidimensional study in Russian Orientalism to one particular topic, namely, his treatment of Oriental travelogues, this article discusses Tynianov’s parody of Pushkin’s Journey to Arzrum (1829–1835). His parody of this nineteenth-century travelogue is compared and contrasted with Tynianov’s intertextual references to the “Oriental Journey” of his contemporary and friend Victor Shklovsky, whose autobiographical book Sentimental Journey (1923) contains a chapter dedicated to Persia. The final part of the article analyzes the work of each of the three authors, Pushkin, Shklovsky, and Tynianov, in relation to that landmark text the Journey from Petersburg to Moscow (1790) by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinker Alexander Radishchev; in it, he condemns imperialism and international justice, and also, famously, serfdom as a form of internal colonization. We shall see that Shklovsky in his Journey expresses similar implacable attitudes toward imperialism by using Radishchev’s rhetorical devices. Earlier, Pushkin in his unfinished article “Journey from Moscow to Petersburg” (1834) criticized Radishchev, thereby attracting readers’ attention to Radishchevs’s ideas. At the same time, while questioning particular methods of Russian colonization of the Caucasus in his Journey to Arzrum, Pushkin does not join Radishchev in denouncing imperialism in general. His contemporary Alexander Griboedov, the hero of Tynianov’s novel, actually participated in the imperial project directly, although like Pushkin, he was often critical of the colonial policies of his supervisors. In his novel, Tynianov contrasts the attitudes of Pushkin and Griboedov, permeated by both Eurocentrism and romantic nationalism, with the all-inclusive humanism of Radishchev and Shklovsky. Working in the genre of the novel, a form more synthetic than a travelogue, Tynianov structures his book as a Journey that encompasses all four Journeys of his literary predecessors. He does this by following the road maps of the previous Journeys; his hero Griboedov travels first from Moscow to Petersburg (an allusion to Radishchev’s Journey and Pushkin’s polemical response), then from Petersburg to Tiflis (as in Pushkin’s and Shklovsky’s Journeys), and from Tiflis to Tabriz (as in Shklovsky’s Journey). While combining the roadmaps of these three Journeys that were written in three consecutive centuries, Tynianov juxtaposes both the literary devices their authors used and the ideas they adhered to, creating a dialogue around the topics of imperialism and Russian Orientalism.

THE SCHOLARLY NOVEL

Scholars have always been tempted to interpret Tynianov’s novels as a continuation of his theoretical scholarship and criticism. Such an approach is justifiable especially as Tynianov himself praised his contemporary and fellow formalist Shklovsky for writing “things” “on the border.” In Tynianov’s view, Shklovsky’s book Zoo. Letters Not About Love or the Third Heloise (1923) fuses together a novel, a satirical article, and a scholarly study, interweaving literature and literary theory in an unusual way.^[3]
One early attempt to analyze Tynianov’s novels as a specific form of scholarly research appears in Boris Eichenbaum’s article “Yu. Tynianov’s Works” (1944). Here Eichenbaum underscores two aspects of Tynianov’s scholarly approach in his novels.^[4] On the one hand, Eichenbaum sees these novels as contributions to the history of literature, by which he is referring to Tynianov’s study of the literary works and biographies of his heroes: Küchelbecker, Griboedov, and Pushkin. On the other, he analyzes them as works of literary theory, a way for Tynianov to pose questions of style and aesthetic methods that he had not yet developed in his scholarly work, and to solve them through experimentation.^[5] Eichenbaum rephrases Tynianov’s argument about the necessity of scholarly [nauchnaia] work in creating new art by stating the opposite: “we need artistic vision, we need work that is artistic in its methodology, in order that new phenomena would appear in science or scholarship.”^[6]
Tynianov’s development of the theme of Russian Orientalism in his novel can be viewed as such a work, “artistic in its methodology.” The Oriental subject matter created the necessity to work with Orientalist texts, and the practical task of representing the Orient in the novel. In fact, Tynianov’s evaluation of Khlebnikov’s treatment of the theme of the Orient suggests that Tynianov was looking for a new approach: “The same with the Orient: in “Gul’-Mulla” there is no European Orient: neither condescending interest, nor superfluous respect. Equal – thus the measurements of the themes change, they are being reevaluated.”^[7] To find this new way of writing Tynianov the novelist parodies the texts of his Orientalist predecessors, revealing their underlying ideas and stylistic devices.
The Formalists and Tynianov always stressed the orientation of new literary works toward preexisting texts. Thus, in Shklovsky’s words: “Not only parody, but any work of art is created as a parallel and a contrast for some model.”^[8] Tynianov’s view of parody and its creative role in the process of literary evolution anticipates that of Bakhtin in his theory of the novel, though Bakhtin’s theory, dedicated primarily to the novel, contains certain insights missing in Tynianov’s theoretical writing, which are useful in discussing The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar.
Especially useful is Bakhtin’s examination of the novel as a dialogic genre, which incorporates in itself other non-novelistic genres, such as diaries, biographies, confessions, or travelogues,^[9] and combines belles lettres with “rhetorical genres” such as moral philosophy.^[10] When juxtaposed within a novel, the pieces of writing in different genres enter into a dialogue with each other. This account is especially applicable to The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar. The genres of the Orientalist writings that the novel alludes to are very diverse and include Pushkin’s narrative poem The Fountain of Bakhchisarai (1824), and Griboedov’s project on the economic development of the Transcaucasus (1928), formal documents, and informal correspondence. This diversity, on the one hand, shows the all-embracing way in which the imperial project permeated so many aspects of life in all layers of the society. On the other hand, it allows the author to juxtapose different opinions and attitudes in a comprehensive dialogue about Russian empire and its relation to the Orient.
Tynianov’s novel also provides an example of what Bakhtin describes as the dialogic resistance of the discourse being parodied. When the subject of the parody is not recognizable, the parodied discourse loses its “objectness” [ob”ektnost’] in a process that Bakhtin calls “reaccentuation” [pereaktsentuatsiia].^[11] If Tynianov’s writing is not recognized as a parody of some preexisting Orientalist texts, but as a “representation of reality,” it becomes an Orientalist piece by itself, another sample of the styles and ideas it was trying to parody.
By trying to read Tynianov’s novel as a study in Russian Orientalism and by applying the Bakhtinian notion of dialogism to it, this article challenges the position that Tynianov and the Formalists saw literature as evolving autonomously and disregarded its connection to history or life. Thus, according to Hans Jauss, Tynianov’s theory of literary evolution on the one hand historicizes literature by stressing inner conflict and change over the idea of timeless beauty and tradition. On the other hand, it reduces this change to “the succession of aesthetic-formal systems,” without revealing its “relationship to the general process of history.”^[12] This relationship, Jauss argues, is not limited to the influence of the socioeconomic formation of literature, which was the main focus of the Marxist literary theory of Tynianov’s time. Literature in its turn influences history through its “formative” social function.^[13]
Although the “formative” function of literature is not at the center of Tynianov’s literary theory, in his article “The Literary Fact” (1924), he does speak about “a reverse expansion of literature into life.”^[14] The “formative” function of literature is more prominent in Tynianov’s novel, The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, which explores a special case of such expansion, the role of Orientalist texts in the formation of Russian imperial policies. The novel directly suggests the involvement of literary Orientalism in policy planning in the episode, where the characters are discussing the future of Georgia, and “politics was as if from Pushkin’s poem.”^[15]
Tynianov’s “extraliterary interests,” according to Steven Lovell, in his article “Tynianov as Sociologist of Literature,” developed “in the second half of the 1920s,” and “were largely determined by his interest in historical questions.” Lovell argues that “it is via history that Tynianov heads away from ‘pure’ Formalism” in his theoretical writings. The historicity of Tynianov’s fiction was stressed already in the article by Eichenbaum cited above: “here history owns everything, because each thing exists not on its own, but in correlation with the world.” Unfortunately, Eichenbaum and other scholars who analyzed the historical aspects of The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar concentrated primarily on the treatment of Decembrism and autocracy, without noticing imperialism and Orientalism as the underlying themes that pervade the novel.
Eichenbaum, in developing his idea of Tynianov’s novel as a scholarly study, argues that while many historical novels are allegories for referring to their authors’ own times, Tynianov’s novel seeks a new understanding of the past. While this is largely true, Tynianov was certainly aware of the historical parallels between the conquest of the Caucasus, which the novel describes, and its re-annexation by Bolshevik Russia shortly before the novel was written. The re-annexation of Georgia in 1921 and its forced merging into the Transcaucasian Republic in 1922 were sanctioned by Lenin, despite his previously declared intentions to grant the right of self-determination to all nations of the empire after the revolution. The ensuing discontent and struggle for autonomy in Georgia were brutally suppressed by Stalin and his assistant Ordjonikidze. This prompted Lenin to advocate more autonomy for Georgia, and the “Georgian question” became his “last struggle.”^[16] Although The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar is what Bakhtin describes as a dialogic novel, where different ideas and opinions are represented without favoring one over the other, the author’s overall negative attitude toward imperialism and Orientalism often becomes apparent. This attitude on the whole coincides with the official ideology of the 1920s, which was based on Lenin’s definition of imperialism as the highest form of capitalist exploitation, and which in the 1930s changed to promote a more expansionist and Russocentric worldview. As we shall see, Tynianov states his position indirectly through literary devices, such as parody, allusion, and irony.

PUSHKIN’S FORMULA

Tynianov’s engagement with Pushkin’s Journey to Arzrum embraces both the artistic experimentation to be found in The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar and scholarly analyses, which he presented in his article “On the ‘Journey to Arzrum’” (1936). The former seems to slightly precede the latter chronologically: although Tynianov’s article is based on a presentation he gave in 1927, his archival work on Pushkin’s text started only in 1929. Regardless of chronological order, the two methods of Tynianov’s research complement each other: in the novel Tynianov reveals Pushkin’s manner of writing through parody, while in the article he analyzes it in scholarly terms.
While analyzing in his article Pushkin’s methods of writing his “travelogue,” Tynianov notes how the narrator assumes the posture of an ignorant civilian, whose “neutral” account of events reveals their absurdity or how, in using documents he slightly changes them thus giving them a new meaning. At the same time, by suggesting the rationale for using certain literary methods, Tynianov explains Pushkin’s ethical position. Thus, discussing in his article the poem “Delibash” (1829) written by Pushkin soon after his return from the journey, Tynianov suggests that the method of “satirical ‘indifference’” is used to make a “call” “toward peace:”

“Instead of the usual belligerent appeals, characteristic for this sort of work, both poems contain calls of an opposite kind, – towards peace... instead of an ode there was the genre of the battle skit, in which at the end lapidary poetic precision and immediacy turn into irony:
They rush, they collide in a common shout...
Look at them!...
Delibash is already on a lance,
And the Cossack is without a head.
Here, clearly, the neutrality of a poet observer turns into the satirical “indifference” of the poet.”^[17]

This ironic neutrality that at times turns into “satirical ‘indifference’” is a characteristic feature of Tynianov’s own writing in The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar. The following sentences from Chapter Twelve of the novel, describing the fate of Griboedov’s remains, after the members of the Russian mission of Teheran have been killed by an angry mob, read as an exaggerated imitation, or a parody, of Pushkin’s style: “Kebabchi stuck the head on a pole, it was much lighter than his basket with patties, and he was shaking the staff. Kiafir was guilty in wars, in famine, in the oppression of the foremen, in the poor harvest.”^[18] As in Pushkin’s poem, the “satiric indifference” in a representation of violence appears in the context of condemnation of war. Tynianov both emulates the formal aesthetic aspect of Pushkin’s writing and recreates its ideological, ethical context.
If the episode mentioned above refers to the poems Pushkin wrote as a response to his travel, the entire subchapter describing the fate of Griboedov’s remains is built around the following phrase form Pushkin’s travelogue: “His disfigured body, which was for three days a game of Tehran’s rabble, was recognized only by his hand, at one time shot through with a pistol bullet.”^[19] This statement does not correspond to the documented facts, and has a literary origin – Adam Mickiewicz’s improvisation on the death of the patriarch of Constantinople.^[20] Note that Tynianov’s writing here is particularly susceptible to Bakhtinian “reaccentuation.” Reading Tynianov’s passage as a “representation of reality,” rather than a parody on Pushkin’s texts, would turn it into an Orientalist text, a description of “Oriental brutality.”
In his article on the Journey Tynianov points out Pushkin’s extensive use of documents and literary texts in his “travelogue.” “‘Journey to Arzrum’ was written in 1835 on the basis of notes of 1829. In the process, a big scholarly and literary apparatus was used.”^[21] Tynianov emphasizes that the Journey is not simply Pushkin’s travel notes, but a semifictional recreation of his travels that happened six years before: “The very method of working on the ‘Journey to Arzrum,’ the text of which was formed on the basis of notes and books six years after the journey, was not a method of registering the immediate impressions.”^[22]
Emphasizing the element of parody in the Journey, Tynianov juxtaposes paragraph by paragraph the original texts used by Pushkin with Pushkin’s rendition of the same texts. The latter appear to be very close to the originals, yet their meaning has been manipulated through subtle changes: “Leaving the exposition of the factual side of the event without a change, Pushkin considerably simplifies the pompous style, and with it the pompous meaning of the relation. ‘The deputies,’ who ask to fire against the ‘mutineers,’ turn into ‘dignitaries,’ who are afraid of the fire of their own canons.”^[23] Tynianov’s own treatment of the original texts in The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar is very similar. Thus, in the original text of K. A. Borozdin, which Tynianov probably used, Alexander Chavchavadze, Griboedov’s father-in law, appears as a person of “an ancient family of Georgian princes,” who “advanced during the reign of the Georgian tsars Irakli II and Georgi II,” was “loved both by Russians and natives,” and brought them closer together.^[24] In Tynianov’s rendering, “the prince” (Chavchavadze) was a man of an excellent “native” “family,” and “advanced” “during the reign” of Alexander, by suppressing his own compatriots.^[25]
Tynianov follows Pushkin’s text closely, and at the same time defamiliarizes the original words by recontextualizing them. One sees this in the following passage where Pushkin develops what Tynianov calls the formula of “the samovar and Christianity:”

“Circassians hate us. We forced them out of the spacious pastures; their auls (villages) are ravaged, entire tribes are annihilated.... They keep the prisoners with the hope of ransom, but treat them with terrible inhumanity, force them to work beyond their ability, feed them with raw dough, beat them, whenever they want to, and assign guarding to their boys, who for a single word have the right to slash them with their child’s sabers... the impact of luxury may be favorable for taming them: the samovar would be an important innovation. There is a means more powerful, more moral, more in conformance with the enlightenment of our age: preaching of the Gospel.”^[26]

In this passage Pushkin obviously retells some written or oral source. His missionary “formula” is justified as a more civilized alternative to the violence of military subjugation, and as a necessary response to the alleged brutality of the enemy. Tynianov takes Pushkin’s formula, as well as the idea of a “child’s saber,” out of context and combines it with the following passage, where Pushkin describes his personal encounter with a family, who provided him with food during his journey:

“Several women in multicolored, tattered clothing were sitting on the flat roof of an underground saklia (house). I expressed myself somehow. One of them went down to the saklia and brought out some cheese and milk for me. After several minutes of rest I set out further.”^[27]

As a result of combining the two passages cited above into one, the “child’s saber” appears as a toy rather than a weapon, and Pushkin’s desire to “tame” the poor family loses its contextual justification. In the new context, it sounds like a prejudice against their “otherness:”

“Women in multicolored tatters were sitting on a stone – a flat roof of an underground saklia. A boy with a child’s saber was dancing in the rain.
– Some tea, – said Pushkin, he dismounted, and took shelter under the stone awning.
They brought out some cheese and milk.
Pushkin threw them money. The rain stopped as suddenly as it had started. He set out farther, and looked back.
The boy walked about in a puddle; the women were following him with their eyes...
“the influence of luxury and Christianity could tame them, – he thought – the samovar and the Gospel would be important means”.”^[28]

The subjectivity of Pushkin’s point of view in describing the “other” is underscored by mentioning the gazes of the women, who, on their part, were observing Pushkin. The difficulty in communicating with the women in Pushkin’s original text is, in Tynianov’s parody, rendered as clear miscommunication: Pushkin asks for tea, and the women bring him cheese and milk. By emphasizing miscommunication between Pushkin and the people he meets during his Journey, Tynianov’s parody reveals one of the important underlying themes of Pushkin’s travelogue, namely, as Monika Greenleaf has put it, the “impossibility of crossing over into another culture.”^[29] The understanding of this impossibility does not preclude the feeling of cultural superiority over the Orientals, which Tynianov underscores by having Pushkin throw them money.
It is worth noting also how Tynianov rearranges the two parallel sentences in Pushkin’s original, one suggesting the importance of luxury in general and the samovar in particular in “taming” the locals, and the other proclaiming the preaching of the Gospel as an enlightened means of their subjugation. He combines the two sentences into one, in such a way that “the samovar” and “the Gospel” become two equally important strategies in dealing with the Caucasus. This combined sentence is rearranged further into the famous formula of “the samovar and Christianity,” which Tynianov uses in his article on the Journey, completely replacing Pushkin’s own words: “Farther Pushkin develops his idea of missionary work in the Caucasus. ‘The samovar and Christianity’ – such is the formula of colonial politics he suggests.” In this complete replacement of the original, Tynianov again uses Pushkin’s device that he analyses elsewhere in his article. “The tissue of the ‘Journey’ is so concealed and ironic,” explains Tynianov, that Pushkin’s intentional misquotation of a certain article “up to now passes” for its “factual exposition.”^[30] Tynianov’s formula underscores once more Pushkin’s ironic “neutrality,” which at times took the form of “abstaining from judging about the hierarchy of things and events being described, about what is important and what is not important.”^[31] It is possible that Tynianov’s interpretation of the passage on the samovar and the Gospel coincides with that of Monika Greenleaf, who reads it as an “ironic glance over his shoulder at other missionary travelogues.”^[32] If this is true, then here, too, Tynianov’s parody aims to reveal and amplify Pushkin’s original, rather than underscore its weaknesses.
The formula of “the samovar and Christianity” sounds like Tynianov’s pun on Pushkin and Christianity, the name of a chapbook published in 1915 by the symbolist Vladimir Gippius, who was looking for religious and philosophical meaning in Pushkin’s works.^[33] It hints at the manner in which literary and ideological movements of different periods used Pushkin’s name to promote their own ideas and worldview. The Silver Age myth, according to Evgeny Dobrenko, perceived Pushkin’s value “in the themes of the poetic vocation and freedom of creativity,” as opposed to the “messianic nationalist myth” of the nineteenth century that was revived by the “Russocentric populism” of the mid-1930s. The Formalists, Dobrenko argues, destroyed both myths by analyzing “Pushkin’s writing merely as a set of literary devices.”^[34] While it is true that Tynianov does not recreate the myths surrounding Pushkin as a literary and historical figure, he does underscore the cultural and historical importance of his Journey to Arzrum by placing the parody of it in the epilogue to The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar. Thus, Tynianov finishes his novel with words borrowed from Pushkin and rendered in a parody that can be defined in Linda Hutcheon’s term as “a method of inscribing continuity while permitting critical distance.”^[35] In his article on Pushkin’s Journey, behind the apparent goal of analyzing Pushkin’s literary devices, Tynianov aims to exonerate Pushkin by showing that his Orientalism was ironic. This irony, in Tynianov’s view, was a way to ponder “the questions of Russian colonial politics” that the journey to the Russian Orient “posed before Pushkin.” In the last paragraphs of the article, Tynianov departs from his literary analyses to evaluate Pushkin’s Journey in terms of Pushkin’s moral stance. He gives a complete citation of the passage, where Pushkin describes the miserable condition of amanats, children from the neighboring mountaineers’ tribes, who were kept by the tsarist army as hostages, commenting that “a real collision with the practices of the colonizers forced Pushkin to notice their dark features and to describe them with all the harshness.” Tynianov’s engagement with Pushkin’s Journey to Arzrum both in his novel and in his scholarly work clearly reveals ethical principles that guided him as an author and a scholar.

MORAL SENTIMENTS

Working on Vazir-Mukhtar, Tynianov in his turn confronted the same “questions of Russian colonial politics.” On the one hand, these “questions” emerged from the historical material he was using as an author, but on the other, they were still vital in Tynianov’s own time. It is no accident that Tynianov refers in his novel to the Oriental encounter of his contemporary and fellow Formalist Shklovsky side by side with that of Pushkin, the contemporary of his hero Griboedov. Tynianov’s treatment of Shklovsky’s Sentimental Journey in his novel, as well as his evaluation of Shklovsky’s other works in his articles, shed more light on the ethical nature of Tynianov’s engagement with this topic.
The title of Shklovsky’s book refers back to the Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne (1768), who adhered to the idea of an ethics based on feelings rather than on rationality. Adam Smith gives the philosophical basis for this idea in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), where he argues that the basis of human morality is compassion or sympathy, which, as a necessary precondition of our existence, is one of the “principles” of our nature.^[36] In his Sentimental Journey, Shklovsky not only imitates Sterne’s “literary devices” but uses the “sentimental point of view” to reveal his attitude toward World War I, then in progress, and to the Russian presence in Persia.
In this respect, Shklovsky’s Sentimental Journey does not conform to the statement about art being “pitiless” [bezzhalostno] or “outside pity” [vnezhalostno] that he makes in his article “‘Tristram Shandy’ and the Theory of the Novel,” which interestingly analyzes another work by Sterne:

“Sentimentality cannot be the content of art, if only for the reason that there is no content in art. Representing things from the “sentimental point of view” is a special method of representation, similar, for example to representing them from the point of view of a horse (Tolstoy – Kholstomer) or a giant (Swift).”^[37]

Such statements allowed scholars to view Russian Formalism as a literary theory that does not concern itself with the ethical aspect of the literary text. Recently, the scholars Ilya Kalinin, Douglas Robinson, and Michael Denner have reexamined this assumption. Thus, according to Douglas Robinson, Shklovsky’s statement on sentimentality does not represent the “true core” of his theory, or of Formalism in general.^[38] At the core of Shklovsky’s theory, Robinson sees what he calls “somatic mimeticism” or “embodied empathy.” Far from establishing the autonomy of art, Shklovsky’s idea of estrangement [ostranenie] as it appears already in his 1917 article “Art as Device” treats art as an essential component of life. In the course of our everyday experience, our sensations or feelings [oshchushcheniia] wear away. As a result of losing our sensation of life, we make wrong choices and our life deteriorates. By restoring our sensation of life, art helps us to make it better.
Among the sensations Shklovsky talks about is the sensation of pain, the loss of which brings the world to suicide:

“Guinea pigs with cut leg nerves gnaw off their own toes. The world that together with art lost the sensation of life is now committing a monstrous suicide. The war in our time of dead art passes by consciousness, and that explains its cruelty.”^[39]
Art in Shklovsky’s understanding not only restores the worn-out sensual perceptions of the world, but by restoring the sensation of pain gives us back the ability for empathy, or “sympathy,” the “fellow feeling” so important for Adam Smith and the sentimentalists. One of the principal literary devices Shklovsky uses for such restoration is estrangement – by making things, characters, and events strange, art prompts us to see them as if for the first time. In the Sentimental Journey, estrangement restores the reader’s sensitivity to the horrors and abomination of the imperialistic war and in this sense Shklovsky follows the tradition of Tolstoy. The abundance of citations from Tolstoy’s works in Shklovsky’s article “Art as Device,” where he defines and develops the notion of estrangement, is not accidental. According to Michael Denner’s article, Shklovsky’s idea of estrangement itself bears the influence of Tolstoy’s writing, and his “renovation of perception has an inevitable social result.”^[40]
In the following passage from the Journey, Shklovsky uses estrangement to show the unnaturalness of war:

“After the explosion, the soldiers who were surrounded by the enemy, waited for the rolling stock, and occupied themselves with collecting and putting together the torn bodies of their friends.
They were collecting for a long time.
Of course they mixed up the body parts of many.
One officer walked up to a long row of lying corpses.
The last deceased was put together from constituent parts.
It was a trunk of a large man. Placed against it was a small head, and on the chest there were small, uneven hands, both of them left.
The officer kept looking for a rather long time, then he sat on the ground and started to laugh... laugh... laugh...”^[41]

Here the dehumanizing effect of the war makes it possible to put a person together as a puzzle. Tynianov parodies this passage in his novel, dedicating one of its subchapters to the story of putting together the bodies of Griboedov and other members of the Russian mission. And again, rather then entering into a polemic with the parodied text, Tynianov’s parody magnifies the effect of Shklovsky’s original and spells out his idea of war and violence, turning people into identical, anonymous, inanimate objects:

“Soon black, half-rotten bodies and body parts were found. They threw them on the surface of the ditch, and they lay side by side, looking alike, as if the same factory manufactured them under the same number. Only some were missing arms, others legs, and there were also completely anonymous objects, having no names.”^[42]

In Pushkin’s Journey the mutilated body of Griboedov was recognized by his arm and hand with a ring. Tynianov combines Pushkin’s version with Shklovsky’s description of the soldier with somebody else’s arms placed against his body: in his novel, Griboedov’s hand with the ring is applied to the best-preserved body. According to Ilya Kalinin, the mutilated bodies in both Shklovsky’s and Tynianov’s episodes allude to fragmentariness in their authors’ writing, which in turn reflects the feeling of fragmentation that the turbulent historical time brings into their lives. Kalinin establishes connections between the Formalists’ personal experiences of living through the historical times of revolutions, World War I, and the Russian Civil War and the ideas of estrangement and fragmentation as they appear in their theoretical and fictional writing. The Formalists’ ideas, according to Kalinin, are a direct response to the traumatic experience of the crucial historical shift, a way to deal with the trauma.^[43]
Kalinin’s interpretation of both episodes is very convincing. What I would like to stress, however, is that Tynianov’s episode is clearly a parody on Shklovsky’s Journey on the one hand, and on Pushkin’s Journey on the other. By juxtaposing the two originals in one parody Tynianov induces a dialogue between them. Pushkin and Shklovsky differed both in their attitude to the Orient and their evaluation of imperialism, as emerges in the way Tynianov treats them in his novel.
In the following passage from the Journey to Arzrum, negating the stereotype of “Asiatic luxury” with that of “Asiatic poverty” is a cliché in itself and probably a parody of preceding travelogues, which does not mean that Pushkin does not subscribe to their ideas:

“I do not know an expression that would be more meaningless than the words: Asiatic luxury. This saying was probably born during the crusades, when the poor knights, leaving behind the bare walls and oak chairs of their castles, for the first time saw red sofas, motley carpets and daggers with multicolored gems on their handles. Now one could say: Asiatic poverty, Asiatic squalor etc., but luxury is, of course, the attribute of Europe. In Arzrum, no amount of money will buy you the things which you will find at a convenience store in the little town of Pskov province.”^[44]

In the Sentimental Journey, Shklovsky recreates the same situation – a person, who arrives in Persia in anticipation of an exotic Orient, is bewildered by seeing only poverty and destruction: “He came to the East and expected it to be multicolored like a peacock’s tail. What he saw was an East made of clay, straw, and an entirely bare war.”^[45] Poverty here is not a natural state of the Orient, the result of its inner sluggishness or cultural backwardness, but the consequence of the “predatory” imperialistic war. Shklovsky blames the Russian and British presence in Persia for its ruined economy: “We came to somebody else’s country, occupied it, added to its darkness and violence our own violence, we constrained its trade, we did not let it open factories, we supported the Shah.”^[46] At the same time, he undermines another Orientalist cliché, the notion of inherent Oriental despotism, by suggesting that the Persians’ initiative to democratize the country failed because the imperialist countries considered it more advantageous to preserve the old regime.
In his novel Tynianov uses Shklovsky’s motif of Russia’s guilt in the 1919 famine in Persia, but puts it in the context of events that happened a century earlier in 1829. Trying to analyze the causes of the famine, Shklovsky points to Russian meddling into the distribution of irrigation water, and the requisitioning of barley by the troops, which coincided with a poor harvest year.^[47] In Tynianov’s novel, similar circumstances, war, famine, and the poor harvest, appear to trigger the violent reprisal against the members of Russian mission: “Kiafir was guilty in wars, in famine, in the oppression of the foremen, in the poor harvest.”^[48] In spite of the absurdity of blaming the poor harvest on Griboedov, Tynianov’s parody introduces into the novel Shklovsky’s view of imperialism, and creates the notion of continuity between the events of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It posits the strain of a lost war and economic hardship as the underlying cause of the violence against the Russian mission, rather than inherent cultural and religious differences.
Although both Pushkin’s and Shklovsky’s Journey combine elements of a war memoir with that of an autobiography, their narrator’s involvement in the events is different. While Pushkin presents himself as an “independent gentleman,” an “ignorant civilian” observing the war, Shklovsky not only participates in the events, but is endowed with power and burdened with responsibility. He is an insider, both a military and an ideological leader, and a technician, who knows how to fix and operate military machines. For all that, he often admits his own confusion and lack of understanding: “The cases crept along, swelled through all the committees and investigatory commissions climbing up to me. I understood little in them.”^[49] Yet, Shklovsky’s lack of understanding is different from that of an “ignorant civilian,” the narrator of Pushkin’s Journey. War does not make any sense for Shklovsky precisely because he knows it too well:

“In a civil war two emptinesses advance on each other.
There are no white or red armies.
It is not a joke. I have seen war.”^[50]

If Pushkin does not find it possible to “cross over” to the “other,”^[51] Shklovsky questions the very division between the “self” and the “other.” He shows if not complete understanding of other cultures, then deep care for their representatives. He considers his main mission in Persia to be the withdrawal of Russian troops with the least causalities both for the Persian civilians and the Russian soldiers. He is especially concerned with the fate of the Aisors, the local people, who put themselves in danger by becoming the allies of the Russians. Instead of adhering to a political ideology, he tries to uphold the idea of humanism:

“We should not be so smart and so farsighted in politics. If instead of trying to make history, we would try to simply consider ourselves responsible for individual events, amounting to this history, then maybe the outcome would not be ridiculous. It is not the history one should make, but a biography.^[52]
Here “biography” stands for one’s personal moral responsibility, and history for the victory of one’s ideological beliefs. Writing his prose, Tynianov seems to follow Shklovsky’s advice literally – all three of his historical novels are biographies. They explore the personal lives of Küchelbecker, Griboedov, and Pushkin, figures who each to a certain degree influenced literary and social history. In The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, Tynianov’s hero Griboedov, unlike his Decembrist friends, who had attempted to make history, felt responsible for individual events and for the people entrusted to him. Like Shklovsky in the Sentimental Journey, Griboedov is an insider endowed with knowledge and power, who at times feels helpless and confused by the complexity of the historical events he is participating in. His responsibility is to safely transport to Russia its former citizens – mostly Christians from the South Caucasus, who lived in the territory contested by the war, which now belongs to Russia, and who find themselves in Persia against their will. This situation is a parallel to Shklovsky’s responsibility for the group of Christian Aisors and his attempt to save them from persecutions.
Griboedov’s refusal to give up just one person, the eunuch of the Shah’s harem, who asked for asylum, cost him his life. Hinting at the possibility of humanistic motives and sympathy to the eunuch’s fate on Griboedov’s part, Tynianov, however, puts forward, as Griboedov’s main motivation his patriotism and his resoluteness to “comply honestly with the treaty” of Turkmanchai that he himself negotiated with the Persian government.^[53] Tynianov’s interpretation of Griboedov’s character is similar to that of his contemporary O. I. Popova. Her book on Griboedov’s diplomatic career was published in 1929, like Tynianov’s novel, as part of a hundredth anniversary commemoration of Griboedov’s death. Popova describes the events of 1819 when, like Shklovsky, Griboedov led the withdrawal of Russian soldiers from Persia: “Despite Griboedov’s own humane attitude toward the soldiers, which is evident from his message about them to Mazarovich, his main concern was not so much his care for the soldiers, but care for Russia’s prestige.”^[54]
Unlike Griboedov, as Tynianov and Popova saw him, Shklovsky in the “Sentimental Journey” declares love of humanity [chelovekoliubie] as his primary motivation in advocating the withdrawal of the Russian troops from Persia. “In the name of revolution and love of humanity I demand the withdrawal of the troops” – Shklovsky cites his telegram to his commissary in Persia, adding: “He did not like that telegram very much; after all it is naive and funny to demand the withdrawal of the troops in the name of humaneness. But I was right.”^[55] The same love of humanity appears as the motivation for Tynianov’s writing as presented in Eichenbaum’s article. Eichenbaum believes that Tynianov’s works “are born from worry about man – pity of him, anxiety about him, interest toward him.”^[56] Tynianov’s and Shklovsky’s all-inclusive humanism and their disregard for national or imperial ideas reflect the frame of mind of the 1920s, with its concern for the well-being of all the peoples and anticipation of world revolution.^[57] At the same time their beliefs can be traced back to the anti-imperialist convictions of a number of Enlightenment thinkers in the late eighteenth century,^[58] among them the Russian enlightener Alexander Radishchev. Aware of this affinity, both Tynianov and Shklovsky allude in their writing to Radishchev’s Journey from Petersburg to Moscow.

THE PASSIONATE WORD

The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar starts as a journey that takes the opposite direction to the one described in Radishchev’s book: Griboedov travels from Moscow to Petersburg, as the last stage of his mission to deliver the Turkmanchai peace treaty to the emperor’s court. Such a beginning alludes to Pushkin’s “Journey from Moscow to Petersburg,” his unfinished polemic with Radishchev. According to some scholars, it had a hidden agenda of attracting attention to Radishchev’s ideas by lulling the vigilance of the censorship. By imitating the style of both authors in his novel, Tynianov reintroduces the dialogue between Pushkin and Radishchev, transferring its main focus from the problem of serfdom to that of imperialism. As Pushkin’s polemical parody deliberately distorts Radishchev’s work at the same time serving as an impetus for the reader to check with the original, Tynianov’s novel “sends” his reader to the many texts that touch upon the political and cultural life of the Empire, leaving “clues”^[59] that help to identify the original sources.
As in Shklovsky’s Journey, Tynianov’s novel imitates Radishchev in alternating irony with emotionally loaded passages. These alternations should not be interpreted in the way Eichenbaum interpreted the intonations of Gogol’s narrator in his early article “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ Is Made” (1919), as “grotesque, in which the expression of laughter interchanges with the expression of grief – both one and the other appear as a game, with conventional alternations of gesture and intonations.”^[60] Tynianov’s evaluation of Shklovsky’s novel Zoo argues against such an interpretation: “This novel is emotional, it is not afraid of sentimentality.”^[61] In his introduction to Zoo Shklovsky says that it is easy to show the world as ridiculous, and asks the readers’ permission to be sentimental.^[62] On the one hand, he views irony as due to a lack of courage to reveal one’s real feelings, on the other as a device that helps the author to overcome the difficulty of representation.^[63] Since in their Journeys, both Radishchev and Shklovsky follow the Sentimental Journey of Sterne, their irony can be interpreted in the terms of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. In the writing of both authors, irony creates a kind of outward detachment that increases the readers’ emotional response, similarly to the way “lowering” the “pitch” of one’s emotions increases the sympathy of others in Adam Smith’s theory.^[64]
Shklovsky and Tynianov imitate what Bakhtin calls the “passionate word” [pateticheskoe slovo]^[65] of the Russian Enlightenment to resume the dialogue around the ethical and political issues associated with it. Radishchev’s “passionate word,” according to Andreas Shönle, “is replete with exclamations, vocatives and imperatives, rhetorical questions, and other devices mimicking oral speech in its conative function, the function language adopts when it is set toward an addressee.”^[66] Both Shklovsky and Tynianov use these devices to create an emotional appeal by the narrator to readers, which is colored by the allusion to the eighteenth-century enlightener. Thus, an entire subchapter of Tynianov’s novel, where he retells the history of the military conquest of the Caucasus through the poetry of Russian classicism and romanticism thereby outlining the first “study” in Russian literary Orientalism, is framed with questions: “What is the Caucasus?... Who lived there in the Caucasus?... Who dwelt there?... But what is the Caucasus?...”^[67] The question-and-answer pattern alludes to the chapter “Novgorod” of Radishchev’s Journey. While the main theme of his Journey is the problem of serfdom, in “Novgorod” Radishchev reflects on imperial domination and the right of nations to self-determination. He starts the chapter by describing the bygone glory of the self-ruling Novgorod and denouncing its appropriation by the grand duke of Moscow in the fifteenth century: “But what right did he have to go on a rampage against them, what right did he have to appropriate Novgorod?”^[68] From here he proceeds to a more general question: “What is the people’s right?”^[69] Using the form of questions and answers Radishchev argues that, as long as the relations between the nations are similar to those between individuals in what has been hypothesized as their “natural state,” the stronger nations will always dominate the weaker ones. Therefore, he questions the state of international relations of his own times, when “people’s right” is based on “natural right,” implying that nations as individuals should enter into some state of “social contract” preventing domination of one nation over the other.^[70] Thus far, Radishchev says, the only judge between the nations has been the sword, and its judgment cannot be appealed. His discontent with the existing order reflects the vital discussion of his times on the necessity of some form of international organization, which would regulate the conflicts between the nations and secure peace in the world. Several Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century had proposed projects of an international federation that would govern the relations between the nations.^[71] Their ideas found realization in the twentieth century, when in the aftermath of World War I the League of Nations was created.
Alluding to Radishchev’s chapter “Novgorod” while writing about the military conquest of the Caucasus as it was reflected in Russian poetry, Tynianov contrasts the romantic Orientalism of the nineteenth century with anti-imperialist convictions of the late Enlightenment, which disapproved of the very idea of imperial domination. The loss of freedom by self-governing Novgorod paralleled not only the conquest of the Caucasus but its later re-annexation by the Bolsheviks, which was discussed among other forums at the League of Nations.^[72]
The late Enlightenment’s moral stance against imperialism is rooted in its view of a human being “as an end” and not “as a means.”^[73] In his Journey, Radishchev brings in an argument against considering the personal well-being of any particular individual as insignificant in comparison to the history of the society: “no arguments about the insignificance of a particular case can persuade a person, if he himself is that particular case.^[74] This view is shared by Shklovsky, for whom the Bolshevik’s readiness to sacrifice the present for the future, and their will to shape human beings according to an idea is a moral defect: “The Bolsheviks believed that the material is not important, the design is, they wanted to lose the present day, to lose the biography and to win a stake in history.”^[75] The material here stands for a life [zhizn’] that does not always fit the formula.^[76] The negative connotations of the words “design” [oformlenie] and “formula” may be a hint at Shklovsky’s reevaluation of his Formalist ideas.
In the same way as no individual should be considered insignificant, no national culture should be labeled as low, according to Shklovsky. He expresses this point of view in his article “On Historical Novel and on Yurii Tynianov” (1933), providing another twist in the intertextual dialogue between the two friends. Shklovsky criticizes Tynianov’s novel for presenting Nina Chavchavadze, Griboedov’s Georgian wife, as a provincial woman, and Georgia as Griboedov’s suburban estate in the vicinity of Moscow. These shortcomings are the result of writing “history” from the center of the empire, “from Moscow.” Tynianov, as the “average intellectual” in his own article “How We Write” (1930) knows that the sun does not go around the earth, but is unable to incorporate this knowledge into his daily activities.^[77] Georgian culture, Shklovsky continues, is different from Russian, but not lower than it: “Georgian princes made good translations of French poetry, and they were people of a culture, different from Griboedov’s, but not a lower one.” Note that Shklovsky himself cannot avoid a Eurocentric point of view by appraising Georgians for their cultural connections to France, unmediated by Russia.
By criticizing Tynianov, Shklovsky disavows his own description, in his Journey, of Georgia’s capital Tiflis as a city in the style of Moscow [pod Moskvu], a pun for “pod Moskvoi” (in the suburbs of Moscow), and of Georgian Futurists like Chekhovian three sisters, dreaming about Moscow.^[78] Shklovsky’s argument, in his article on Tynianov, about the futility of comparing the cultures of the colonizer and the colonized, goes back to the ideas of the anti-imperialist enlighteners, who insisted on the incommensurability of different cultures, undermining the imperialist rhetoric of civilizing mission. They saw an inextricable connection between personal and cultural freedom.^[79]
Both for Radishchev and for Shklovsky cultural and social diversity does not preclude the existence of “a generic point of view, one that would be the expression of humanity itself.”^[80] Like Radishchev, Shklovsky writes his Journey “to compel the readers to experience the otherness by stepping out of themselves.”^[81] In Tynianov’s novel the allusions to the Journeys of both his contemporary and friend on the one hand, and to the eighteenth-century enlightener on the other stand in contrast to his parody of Pushkin’s nineteenth-century Journey. While disapproving of “Russian colonial politics” in the “Orient,” Pushkin questions neither the legitimacy of the colonization in principle nor the stereotype of superiority toward the “Orientals,” his main concern being “the aesthetic freedom of Russia’s artists,” rather than “the political liberty of the Caucasian peoples.”^[82] Both Tynianov and Shklovsky are far from being interested only in the formal, aesthetic aspect of literature. Tynianov reveals in his novel the interconnectedness between literary Orientalism and the imperial project, while Shklovsky openly denounces imperialism in his Journey. Their moral involvement in the problem shows their affinity with the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment to which they “offer their hands over the head of the nineteenth century.”^[83]