Caught in the Imperial Trap: Nikolay Leskov’s The Enchanted Wanderer and Russia’s Colonial Ambitions

Image source: N.S. Leskov, Ocharovanny strannik. Illustrations and design by N.B. Rosenfeld. Moscow; Leningrad: Academia, 1932.  [Н.С. Лесков, "Очарованный странник", иллюстрации и оформление Н.Б. Розенфельда, Москва, Ленинград: Academia, 1932]  

An adept storyteller given to literary experimentation, Leskov is famous for his skaz artistry and highly stylized prose that playfully engages with a mixture of archaic genres. Exemplifying these distinctive qualities, The Enchanted Wanderer (1873) has another important dimension, which reveals a less recognized, but equally significant aspect of Leskov’s craft. As this talk seeks to show, the story is ideologically loaded. It captures the political challenges of its day and addresses them in a satirical mode. This tale of a roaming peasant depicts the Russian empire as a place of nonstop violence, abuse, and subjugation. Shot through with cruel conflicts of all sorts, The Enchanted Wanderer particularly foregrounds the tensions between colonizers and colonized. It portrays the “barbarous Asiatics” as a danger to the civilized world – and in this way the tale, written in the midst of the tsarist army’s conquest of Central Asia (1860s-1880s), seems to justify colonial war. Demeaning Orientalist tropes that figure in the chapters set in the Kazakh steppe seem to support this impression. And yet, as the tale unfolds, it increasingly reverses those tropes to Orientalize Russia and expose its politics of empire. This talk argues that Leskov utilized the skaz technique to compose a complex, multi-layered narrative that ultimately renders colonial ambition as a trap for the Russian nation. Reading The Enchanted Wanderer in the context of the brutal war on the empire’s periphery makes it possible to capture a moment when Russian literature, deeply implicated in the colonial pursuit, began to confront it. As the talk shows, this story marks a turning point in Leskov’s intellectual trajectory: over the two subsequent decades, he would denounce the abuse of subjugated nationalities, speak from their perspective, and rebuke Alexander III’s Russification policies.

Olga Maiorova is Associate Professor of Russian Literature and History at the University of Michigan. She specializes on nineteenth-century literature, cultural history, and representations of nationality, especially in the context of Imperial Russia. Her book From the Shadow of Empire: Defining the Russian Nation through Cultural Mythology, 1855–1870 (Wisconsin University Press, 2010) examines how Russian intellectuals from across the political spectrum embarked on a major project of rendering the multi-ethnic empire in increasingly nationalist, Russian terms. She has authored some eighty scholarly articles (published in the USA, Russia, Germany. England, and France) and edited several books, including Dostoevsky in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2016; with Deborah Martinsen) and a two-volume edition of previously unpublished works by Nikolai Leskov (Moscow: Nasledie, 1997-2000; with K.P. Bogaevskaia and L.M Rosenblium). Forthcoming work includes a monograph on Anna Karenina and research on Russian artistic representations of Central Asia.