Comparative Studies in Society and History 2009;51(3):590–618. -- With Pushkin’s narrative poem Prisoner of the Caucasus (1822), Circassians entered the Russian imperial imaginary as exemplary personifications of the savagery and freedom of the Caucasus as a whole (Layton 1994; 1997; Grant 2005; 2007). Accordingly, the Russian imagination of Circassian polity, now as egalitarian “free societies,” now as hierarchical aristocracies, now as “noble savages,” now as ignoble brutes, Muslim “fanatics,” or “Asiatic despots,” was a microcosm of the Russian colonial engagement with the Caucasus as a whole, often as not reflecting tensions in the self-perception of imperial autocracy and its elites more than indigenous political organization of Caucasian groups like Circassians in reality (Layton 1997; Jersild 2002; Grant 2005). Inasmuch as such imperial imaginings informed the fantasies of young men, causing them to enlist in search of the poetry of warfare, or informed fantasies of conquest among agents of the Russian state, these imaginings became real in their consequences for various Caucasian groups (Layton 1994; 1997).

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