The Creation of an Imaginative Caucasian Geography

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Abstract
In a study of English letters from the seventeenth century into the romantic era, Marjorie Nicolson analyzed the rise and persistence of topoi of mountain poetry. Beginning in the 1720s, such celebrated poets as James Thomson proved able to create compelling verse about peaks that they knew only from their reading; and even after seeing stupendous rocky terrain themselves poets tended to produce works conditioned to some extent by previous literary representations. Such a dynamic, whereby one text becomes the model for another in a continuing process, also figures in the depiction of the Caucasian landscape by Russians, starting with Gavrila Derzhavin. Most Russian mountain poetry is concentrated in the 1820s, when a conception of the southern borderland as sublime wilderness was firmly established by Aleksandr Pushkin in Kavkazskii plennik and then elaborated in verse by such secondary writers as K. F. Ryleev, S. D. Nechaev, V N. Grigor'ev, and V G. Tepliakov.

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