The tenderness and ecstasy we experience in contemplating nature… is the awareness of this unity with everything that is hidden from us by time.—Lev Tolstoy Notwithstanding that ecocriticism and postcolonial studies both originate in questions of place, these areas of inquiry all too frequently pursue parallel trajectories that converge only in the rarest of instances. Rob Nixon is one of the few ecocritics to straddle the colonial divide through a framework that incorporates cultures as wide ranging as the Caribbean, South Africa, the Middle East, and Indonesia. Nixon has enumerated four axes along which ecocriticism and postcolonial theory most commonly diverge. Ecocriticism in Nixon's account traditionally strives for purity, continuity between place and space, and a coherent national identity. The combined result of these three variables is historical amnesia. By contrast, postcolonialism, fractured by the very conditions of its emergence, has tended to embrace hybridity, displacement, transnationality, and historical recovery as its critical agenda.1 These historical differences have meant that the lineages of Edward Said on the one hand and of Rachel Carson on the other often run parallel but have rarely converged.Other ecocritics supplement Nixon's observations concerning the consequences of the unwarranted divide between postcolonial accounts of globalization and ecocritical accounts of local devastation, which among other problems, conditions the geographic provincialism of ecocritical inquiry. Lawrence Buell acknowledges that the divergence between ecocriticism's place-based orientation and postcolonial theory's diasporic situation has led to a narrow focus on “individual nations' literary histories” within environmental studies and that only recently have the latter's problematics begun to be contemplated “intensively in comparatist terms.”2 Greg Gerrad similarly notes that the provocative juncture between “environmental critique” and “the postcolonial politics of resistance to economic globalisation” has “barely been broached.”3 For Graham Huggen, ecocriticism continues to be “a predominantly white movement” that lacks “the institutional support-base to engage fully with multicultural and cross-cultural concerns,” while “ecologically related contributions to postcolonial criticism have tended until fairly recently to focus on … ‘settler cultures.’”4 Adding her voice to this chorus of critiques, Ursula Heise bluntly observes that whereas the “environmentalist ambition is to think globally,” “monolingualism is currently one of ecocriticism's most serious intellectual limitations.”5 The “spatial amnesia” that Nixon diagnosed and that many of his fellow ecocritics deem a contributing factor to ecocriticism's geographic provincialism is tied to an equally persistent linguistic tunnel vision. Monoglossia will unfortunately remain the norm for ecocriticism so long as the “moral imperative of the local typically opens out not into the specificities of the international but into transcendental abstraction.”6 No discipline or scholarly method is better suited to help ecocriticism overcome these linguistic and geographic lapses than comparative literary inquiry.As ecocriticism becomes increasingly visible in comparative literature, its geographical provincialism will gradually come to appear unsustainable. The most influential postcolonial interventions into ecocriticism have thus far engaged primarily with South Asian, African, and Middle Eastern archives. They have encompassed the writings of Arundhati Roy, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Raja Shehadeh, each of whom has brought forward vernacular landscapes “shaped by the affective, historically textured maps that communities have devised over generations, maps replete with names and routes, maps alive to significant ecological and surface geological features.”7 But the literary canons of contemporary South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East do not encompass the range of ecocritical literary engagements across the world, many of which move across these regions without inhabiting any single one. One of the most notable if least discussed loci for the ecocritical imagination is the Caucasus, a region that has served as a home for peoples of multiple religions and ethnicities since the beginning of recorded history. This article introduces the Caucasus's ecocritical imagination through the framework of comparative literature.If comparativism has yet to flourish within ecocritical discourse about literature, the same cannot be said for the literary traditions themselves, which engaged with the physical environment long before ecocritical thinking was formally recognized. Like many colonial and postcolonial literatures, the Russian encounter with the Muslim mountaineers of the Caucasus has generated an archive rich with possibilities for literary comparison. The Caucasus was the most common destination for political dissidents during the early tsarist period. Since its topography was memorialized in its early stages by Pushkin, Lermontov, and other Russian romantic poets, it is not surprising that when Russian poets took to imagining the Caucasus, they envisioned a colonial encounter shot through with the sublime.Defined in Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790) as a faculty situated in the perceiving mind which “proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense [Masstab der Sinne],” the sublime was soon grafted onto a particular ideology of power.8 As Harsha Ram recounts, over the course of the long nineteenth century “a romantic myth quickly developed around the Caucasus, replete with spectacular mountain scenery and ethnographic color, combining the artist's need to flee the suffocating constraints of civilization and a paradoxical awareness that this path to freedom had first to be cleared by the tsar's armies.”9 The romantic aesthetic was thereby yoked to the imperial mission, and hunger for power was harnessed to the quest for the sublime. Out of this convergence, a discourse Ram has influentially termed the “imperial sublime” was forged.As rich in ecological and linguistic diversity as the Caribbean, South Asia, and the Middle East, the Caucasus, situated between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea, adds another dimension to the ecocritical archive of authors who could not afford to luxuriate on romantic landscapes denuded of human habitation. Drawing on the poetry and prose of writers who navigated between native and imperial idioms, this article details what the literatures of the Caucasus can contribute to a postcolonial ecocriticism that actively engages precolonial archives. In exploring alternative relations between the literary imagination and the physical environment, it contests the provinciality of North American ecocriticism while challenging postcolonial theory's anthropocentrism. I begin by examining the legacy of Russian romantic poets who helped to constitute a poetic discourse shaped by imperial power. After briefly discussing this precedent, I turn to Lev Tolstoy and Magomed Mamakaev, two authors who contested and complicated their predecessors' imperial entanglements, in the first instance by contrasting nature's peaceful silence to imperial corruption and in the second instance by showing how rocks speak.As in other postcolonial contexts, the imperial sublime was forged in the Caucasus in the aftermath of a series of brutal colonial incursions. “During the final stage of the Caucasus wars, in the 1850s and 1860s,” notes Charles King, “clear-cutting of forests was pursued with particular vigor, creating a vast and lasting denuded landscape in parts of the north Caucasus.”10 Slash-and-burn techniques were accompanied by the destruction of the mountaineers' physical environment along with their domestic arrangements. “Crops were burned or ordered ploughed under,” notes King, while “herds of cattle and flocks of sheep and goats were slaughtered or stolen.”11These acts of destruction were propelled by an official ideology, which held that the annihilation of the Caucasus's natural resources was a legitimate reaction to mountaineer rebellions. As Aleksandr Petrovich Ermolov, Russian proconsul to the Caucasus (1816–1827), recalled of his own expeditions, mixing past and future as if prophesying that the effects of his actions would be felt last for many generations, “Rebellious villages were destroyed and burned, gardens and vineyards were cut to the root. The traitors will not be able to return [these villages] to their original condition for many years. They shall be punished with extreme poverty.”12 Famously linking the force of imperial rule to its ability to instill fear, this same Ermolov proclaimed his desire that “the terror of my name should guard our frontiers more potently than chains or fortresses, that my word should be for the natives a law more inevitable than death.”13 During the decade of Ermolov's reign, a series of fortresses, including Groznaia, Vnezapnaia, and Burnaia (names meaning “terrifying,” “sudden,” and “stormy,” respectively), were constructed along the Caucasus mountain range, overlooking the mountaineers' villages—and often displacing the mountaineers—in order to better instill fear. From the Russian vantage point, destroying the mountain landscape was a means of subduing the local population. Meanwhile, hoping to delay the destruction of their natural environment, the mountaineers cultivated “sacred groves” that were intended to be protected from cutting and instituted “prohibitions against felling trees by river heads, lakes, and streams.”14 Given the imbalance of military power, however, it was inevitable that the mountaineers' precautions would be powerless to forestall the destruction of their natural environment.In the early years of the Russo-Caucasus wars, few Russian writers vocally opposed these strategies of conquest. Instead of attacking Ermolov's systematic deforestation of the Caucasus, Aleksandr Pushkin, credited with being the first Russian poet to create “vivid descriptions of Russian landscapes” that were “closely connected with his characters and their milieu,” prophesied the mastery of nature by colonial armies in terms emblematic of an entire era.15 “Submit and bow your snowy head, Caucasus” Pushkin proclaimed in the concluding lines to his poem “Captive of the Caucasus” (1821), “Ermolov marches!”16 In aligning the subjugation of landscape with the destruction of local sovereignty, Pushkin perpetuated a romantic opposition of nature to civilization and of civilization to barbarism. As Susan Layton contends in her history of Russian literature's entanglement with empire, in these concluding lines, Pushkin's “snow-capped peaks function as the head of a body politic,” with the mountains serving as a metonym for the imperial state.17 Like Ermolov's invasions, Pushkin's jingoistic celebration of conquest was an early installment of “a prolonged political tragedy whose textual record stretches from classical Russian poetry to contemporary debates in the national media.”18 While the tradition inaugurated by Pushkin and later developed by his younger contemporary Lermontov is an important inaugural moment in Russian culture's engagement with the Caucasus, these poets' prejudices—which, without being monolithic, do collectively constitute a form of Russian orientalism—have not gone uncontested by later writers.More promising from the point of view of postcolonial ecopoetics than the romantic tradition, which regarded the path to freedom as one that had to be cleared by the tsar's armies, is the postromantic stage in the Russian literary engagement with the Caucasus. This moment of ambivalent critique in Russian literary history is most thoroughly exemplified in the short stories of Lev Tolstoy. In the words of anthropologist Paul Friedrich, “Tolstoy's Caucasus works are an outraged critique of Russian high society and tsarist imperialism, colonialism and atrocity-ridden war against the Chechens and other peoples of the Caucasus.”19 Out of his experience as a soldier in the tsar's army, Tolstoy generated Russian literature's most “sustained attempt at prosaicizing and desublimating” the literary discourse that came to constitute the “imperial sublime.”20 While prior to Tolstoy, the sublime was associated with an empire that instrumentalized its power in order to legitimate its conquests, after Tolstoy the sublimity of the Caucasus's mountainous landscapes was more frequently deployed to expose the senseless brutality of colonial conquest.Tolstoy responded to Pushkin's “Captive of the Caucasus” with a short story bearing the same name as Pushkin's poem. Tolstoy's “Captive of the Caucasus” (1872) parodies Pushkin's narrative clichés. As John Bayley notes in commenting on this text, “Tolstoy's unspoken point is that Pushkin falsifies,” both by simplifying his characters and by invoking unlikely turns of plot. Unlike Pushkin, Tolstoy is determined to “give such a situation just as it would have been.”21 Decades prior to the publication of his parody of Pushkin, Tolstoy had taken up the theme of the Caucasus wars in stories such as “The Raid” (1853) and “The Cutting of Wood” (1855) and in his novel The Cossacks (1862). In each of these texts, “most of what passes for courage” among the Russians who have arrived to conquer the Caucasus “stands revealed as mere show,” while more genuine bravery is evident only in the mountaineers.22 Like the posthumously published Hadji Murad (1912), Tolstoy's early Caucasus fictions were based on his two-year experience of serving in the Caucasus. Replete with ethnographic footnotes informing the reader about the history, languages, and customs of Russia's enemies, these texts impart to Tolstoy's fictions a semblance of verisimilitude appropriate to nonfictional discourse and often associated with ecocritical writing.23Even more significant than the ethnographic style that Tolstoy introduced to Russian literary prose through his historical allusions and footnotes is his complex handling of mountain topographies and his nuanced rendering of his characters' changing relations to their physical environments. One of the most suggestive of Tolstoy's many evocations of the Caucasus occurs in The Cossacks, focalized through the world-weary protagonist Olenin, who arrives in the Caucasus from Moscow. Olenin exhibits many of the anti-mountaineer prejudices articulated by Pushkin and Lermontov, with the difference that his character changes over the course of the narrative, as the stereotypes that had blunted his perception are replaced by direct contact with nature. As a cynical urban Russian, Olenin at first approaches the mountains with the assumption that “the extraordinary beauty of the snow peaks, of which he had often been told, was as fictitious [] as Bach's music and love, neither of which he believed in.”24 Until he confronts the Caucasus, Olenin regards nature as an acquired taste that, like all civilizational accouterments, is not worth cultivating. Olenin's attitude changes radically when he sees the mountains looming twenty paces away from him, “pure white gigantic masses with delicate contours, the miraculous outlines of their peaks gleaming sharply against the far-off sky” (13).While basking in the “infinitude” of the mountains' beauty, Olenin is suddenly overwhelmed by an awareness of his mortality. He fears that the alpine panorama will turn out to be an illusion, with no more perduring claim to reality than the many fleeting pleasures that have hitherto suffused his life. He shakes himself in order to dispel the specter, but the mountains stand firm. The mountains gradually overtake Olenin's consciousness, as he is gradually “penetrated by their beauty” and begins “to feel” (“почуствовать”) their majesty (13, emphasis in original). This transformation, which remains incomplete by the novel's end, sets the stage for a new ecocritical sublime that is taken up in earnest in the Soviet period, by Russian, and even more particularly, by non-Russian Soviet writers.Well before the Soviet era, Tolstoy had begun juxtaposing images of the physical landscapes of the Caucasus with the destruction wrecked by war. Nowhere are these images more forcefully juxtaposed than in “The Raid.” This early story, which is Tolstoy's first literary account of the Caucasus wars, repeatedly contrasts a sublime mountain landscape resonant with “beauty” (“красота”) and “power” (“сила”) to the theater of war, which stimulates “hatred” (“злоба”) and the “desire for revenge” (“мщение”) and foments among the soldiers the “desire to annihilate those who resemble them.”25 Because nature is “an unmediated expression of beauty and goodness,” then all that is unkind, Tolstoy's unnamed nature-loving narrator declares, ought to “disappear when touched by nature.”Like Olenin, who doubts the reality of love because civilization has only exposed him to its simulacra, the narrator's comrades-in-arms find their lives subject to protocols that lack any intrinsic meaning. The emptiness of the regulations that guide their conduct is brought into relief through Tolstoy's ironic descriptions of mundane events, as when a convoy of troops marches toward a stream while a battalion commander sits “on a drum in the shade, his full face expressing the greatness of his rank” (17–18). Elsewhere we read of an adjutant who “wished to rise to the rank of captain as soon as possible and to obtain a comfortable position, and for that reason became the mountaineer's enemy.”26 Here the narrator's use of a reflexive form of “made” in “he … made himself the mountaineer's enemy” (“сделался врагом гоцев”) subtly reveals the interplay of freedom and cowardice. While the grammatical subject in this sentence is the adjutant, in Russian, the verb also bears the reflexive ending “ся” (“sya”), implying that the subject is also the object of his actions. Hence, the subject of this action is also the object. The adjutant is semantically passive inasmuch as he is the grammatical object, but he is culpable in rousing the mountaineer's hostility inasmuch as he is the grammatical subject.Semantically, when he makes himself an enemy of the mountaineer, the adjutant is performing an act of self-alienation. In becoming the mountaineer's enemy—or alternately, in making himself an enemy of the mountaineer—the adjutant becomes an enemy to himself. The narrator does not say all of this, of course, but his grammatical usages imply this much. Although Tolstoy does not state explicitly that the commander is filled with an exaggerated sense of his worth or that the adjutant has wasted his life due to his corrupt value system, the lengths these officials go to to elevate their rank in the military pecking order suggests the entrenched conservativism of the social arrangements that govern Russian life at home and abroad.The artifice of language belongs to the same order of falsification as the officers' attempts to aggrandize their rank. In one of his rare discursive asides, the narrator of “The Raid” explains that the truly courageous person has no need to spoil a deed with words because “when someone feels capable of performing a noble deed, no talk is needed” (37). His assertion reinforces a contrast drawn earlier, in an incendiary passage that was deleted by the censor and remained unpublished throughout Tolstoy's lifetime, between a mountaineer who has lost everything to war and a Russian officer who, because he has risen high in the ranks through his corruption and therefore has much to lose, is a coward in battle. While the forsaken mountaineer is ready to “tear off his tattered jacket, drop his gun, and draw his sheepskin cap [] over his eyes while singing his death song [],” the Russian officer rushes into battle “singing French songs.”27 Whereas the Russian officer dramatizes his encounter with war through European fashions, the first fighter, more courageous precisely because he has lost everything and has nothing more to lose, has no recourse to language.Even as he underscores the fact that the mountaineer who heroically arms himself with a sword () instead of a gun is also an enemy whose specific goal is to kill Russians, the narrator leaves his readers to conclude that the greater share of nobility belongs to the mountaineers and that his fellow Russian soldiers are by contrast weak and cowardly. Later lamenting his fellow soldiers' reliance on foreign phrases to accentuate the poetry of war, the narrator expresses his disapproval of Russian officers who turn to “vulgar [], pretentious phrases that pretended to imitate antiquated French chivalry” (37) by way of giving evidence of their courage. A courageous action speaks for itself, Tolstoy's contrasts imply. Language by contrast inhibits the attainment of courage and can even falsify the reality it proposes to describe.Nature is also susceptible to the mimetic impulse that drives human usages of language. When the Russian troops pause to rest by stream, the tall poplars settle on the transparent clouds “crowding around the snowy peaks” and create a mountain range of their own “as if imitating” the Caucasus itself during sunset (19). But whereas the first kind of mimesis, of a battalion commander who projects his rank onto his subordinates and of an adjutant who acquires enemies in order to boast when he returns home, makes the actors look foolish and constitutes a waste of human energy, the second kind of mimesis, whereby a cloud imitates the mountains' physical chains, is suffused with the ecopoetical sublime that attends the best writing about the Caucasus.Indeed, the paradox of war unfolds in the text as an oscillation between the natural () and unnatural (). Only war's persistence as an “unnatural occurrence makes it seem natural, and [only] a feeling of self-preservation makes it seem just.”28 In rendering the unnatural natural, the regime that upholds “civilization” through violent conquest licenses the destruction of the ecosystem and promulgates an ethical standard inimical to that of the mountaineers, whose ethics are shaped by their relationship to their physical environment. Colonial rule legitimates its violence in part through the artifice of language. By contrast, as Tolstoy reflected in a diary entry composed in 1906, the contemplation of nature instills an “awareness of the unity with everything that is hidden from us by time.”29 Human artifice crafts differences among humans that otherwise would pass unnoticed, while nature merges these differences into a holistic experience of the sacred.With more ambivalence than in his later antiwar fiction, which tends to rely more on discursive statements than on the poetics of indirection, in his early stories about the Caucasus, Tolstoy conveys the brutality of war primarily through the juxtaposition of images. The narration of one particularly brutal attack, in which, as the narrator of “The Raid” makes clear to the reader, he did not participate, concludes with a revealing comparison. “The spectacle was truly magnificent,” the narrator begins in language suffused with admiration (31). However, the image that follows subtly puts to rest any lingering admiration on the reader's part for imperial conquest. “Only one thing spoiled the general impression for me,” the narrator states, which was “that this movement and the activity that attended it, along with the screams, was entirely unnecessary” (31). The comparison that follows goes even further in damning the gratuitous destruction of the physical environment effected by imperial warfare. In watching the “magnificent spectacle” of war, the narrator is involuntarily () reminded of “a man swinging his arms vigorously to cut the air with an ax” (31). Implicitly, this comparison makes the soldiers' cutting of wood a metonymy for the large-scale forest clearing that attended the conquest of the Caucasus.Not coincidentally, the image of a man wrecking destruction with an ax that features in “The Raid” is the dominant motif in “The Cutting of Wood,” a story published soon after “The Raid,” and to which it is juxtaposed in most collections of Tolstoy's short fiction. Compared to “The Raid,” “The Cutting of Wood” is less obviously an indictment of the destruction of the natural landscape effected by the tsar's troops. However, the very fact that its dominant motif is anticipated in Tolstoy's earlier story places it within a lineage of Tolstoyan texts that frame the conquest of the Caucasus within an anticolonial ecocritical sublime that critiques of prior representational canons.“The Cutting of Wood” is called “Рубка леса” in Russian, “pубка” meaning “cutting” and “леса” “wood.” “Rub-ka,” the title's first two syllables, resonates throughout the entire text. At one juncture, in the midst of a panoramic description of the sun rising over the mountains, we are told that “beyond the cut woods, a large field opened ahead.”30 The abnormality of the vacant plains is further accentuated by the “black, murky white, and purple smoke” that generates “fantastic shapes of white misty clouds floating above the plain” (60). This unnatural and uncanny emptiness is the result of the tsar's army having enthusiastically implemented Ermolov's slash-and-burn strategies. Later, in the neutral voice that marks Tolstoy's early stories about the Caucasus, the narrator reports that, in retribution for the mountaineers having killed one of their soldiers, the tsar's army “slashed” (“вырубили”) three versts of forest (roughly two miles) and “wiped away” (“очистили”) the place so thoroughly that it became “impossible to recognize” under its changed visage (72). Following the “successful” clearing away of three versts of forests along the mountains, the Caucasus landscape is denuded of human habitation. “Instead of the formerly visible borders of the forest,” writes Tolstoy, “stretched a large field covered with smoking bonfires and cavalry and infantry marching back to camp” (72–73).In describing the clearing of the forests by tsarist troops in “The Cutting of Wood,” Tolstoy tellingly uses a variant of the verb “очистить” (“to cleanse”). Tolstoy's verb choice is revealing because it literally evokes the opposite of what in fact transpired. “Zachistka” (derived from the verb “зачистить,” “to clean up”) currently describes the “cleansing operations” whereby Russian soldiers destroyed specific Chechen villages during the Russo-Chechen wars of the 1990s and 2000s, and thus it almost seems as if Tolstoy's verb choice anticipates the course of a conflict that has spanned two centuries. While “zachistka” is in this sense a contemporary coinage that describes the Russian military's human rights violations in Chechnya, Tolstoy's early ironic usage of a variant of “очистить” suggests that nineteenth-century colonial conquests similarly engendered euphemisms associated with cleansing to describe colonial warfare.31 Tolstoy's exposure of the mendacity of the colonial state's language links tsarist imperialism with later Soviet and post-Soviet strategies of conquest.Decades later, in his posthumously published Hadji Murat, Tolstoy wrote of how the brutal techniques of ecological destruction practiced by the tsarist army backfired, resulting in the deaths of Russian soldiers. He describes how two companies from the Kura regiment embarked on a “wood-felling expedition” similar to those that drive the narratives of “The Cutting of Wood” and “The Raid.” As they advanced toward the Chechen village they were planning to “cleanse,” a group of mountaineers caught sight of them and moved to attack the soldiers. As a result of this altercation, Tolstoy writes, “two privates were slightly wounded and one killed.” Meanwhile, among the mountaineers “about a hundred were killed and wounded.”32 True to his modus operandi of engaging with all sides of the conflict, Tolstoy emphasizes that the causalities on the mountaineers' side were greater than the loss to the tsar's army, even when the mountaineers were the aggressors.Whereas Russian romantic poets sought freedom from the autocratic state in a bare alpine landscape that had first to be tamed and cleared by imperial instruments of war, Tolstoy's more prosaic anticolonial poetics found in the mountains freedom from civilizational hypocrisies, with the institution of language constituting for him one of this corrupted civilization's most promiscuous signifiers. Neither the romantic nor the Tolstoyan approach could avoid being implicated in the very institutions they criticized, in the first instance, with Pushkin and others, by glorifying colonial power, and in the second instance, with Tolstoy, by looking to language rather than action to resolve the conflict. Additionally, neither literary approach was able to fully reconcile the environmental imagination stimulated by contact with the Caucasus with the paradoxical allure of the state's monopoly on violence and its methods of conquest.Even when Tolstoy describes the shortcomings of mountaineer warriors such as Imam Shamil, the reader is never allowed to forget that it is the tsarist forces, not the mountaineers, who spoiled the physical landscape of the Caucasus through their techniques of waging war. Tolstoy's varied representations of the imperial conquest of the physical and human geography of the Caucasus, the early short stories as well as the lengthier prose narratives, inspired an entire generation of non-Russian, and above all Chechen, writers, to produce their own complex narratives of colonial rule. It is appropriate that Tolstoy's influence has been concentrated in Chechnya, since this was a place he came to love as a second home.33 In the third and final section of this article, I take up the literary genealogy leading from Tolstoy's condemnation of tsarist conquest to the new ecocritical sublime elaborated in the Chechen poetry of Magomet Mamakaev