SOURCE: Scotto, Peter. “Prisoners of the Caucasus: Ideologies of Imperialism in Lermontov's ‘Bela’.” PMLA 107, no. 2 (March 1992): 246-60.

In the following essay, Scotto discusses nineteenth-century notions of orientalism and imperialism evidenced in Pechorin's treatment of Bela as an exotic “other” in A Hero of Our Time.

On 10 April 1837, Cornet Mikhail Iurevich Lermontov left Moscow for service with the Russian army in the Caucasus. As punishment for his incendiary verses on Pushkin's death, he had been transferred out of his prestigious Petersburg guards regiment and sent south to join the Nizhegorodsky dragoons stationed just outside Tiflis. In 1817, the Russian Empire had begun in bitter earnest a protracted campaign to pacify the fiercely independent Islamic tribes in the great mountain range to the north of its possessions in Transcaucasia. By 1837, the war was entering its third decade, and the hard-pressed mountain tribes, whose struggle against the Russians had become a genuinely...