Aleksandr Polezhaev and Remembrance of War in the Caucasus: Constructions of the Soldier as Victim

Abstract

And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.—Shakespeare,Twelfth NightPaul Fussell'sThe Great War and Modern Memorywas a landmark in the study of literature's role in shaping a society's remembrance of war. Although Fussell's book is primarily devoted to famous British poets of World War I, he stimulates thinking about the general question of how any military conflict comes to exist in the minds of civilian readers. A fascinating aspect of this immense topic concerns the power of words in the absence of images. Before newsreels and television regularly exposed civilians to scenes of carnage, writers had to rely on language to "depict" things a reader had never witnessed and probably never would. A picture can serve as a powerful substitute for seeing a massacre, and just one may leave an indelible mark. But words alone lack the stunning immediacy of visual images, an argument we can trace back to Aristotle. Verbal "depiction" is only a metaphor, as Viktor Shklovskii stressed when he asserted (with reference to suicide) that "'Blood' in poetry is not bloody." Unlike some deconstructionists, Shklovskii was not fretting about how much reality bloodshed has "prior to verbal configurations." He pinpointed instead the emotional and aesthetic detachment of readers never threatened by violence.