A Captive of the Caucasus

Russians visit the Caucasus with a sense of homecoming, Andrei Bitov--one of the Soviet Union's most gifted stylists--has remarked. They find there a world familiar from the moral and philosophic landscapes of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tolstoy. In Lessons of Armenia, the first of the two personal memoirs that constitute this book, Bitov explores the way Pushkin's confines of boundless Russia seem never to be truly escapable. Though held in thrall by Armenia, a captive of the Caucasus, Bitov the traveler is a captive, however alienated, of his homeland, too. Bitov's works characteristically proceed from and comment on one another, and the realization of captivity leads to a different journey; the second account, Choosing a Location, an entertaining impressionistic record of his travels in Soviet Georgia, is Bitov's quest for his own place and time. Compellingly conceived and spectacularly crafted, A Captive of the Caucasus is an intellectually spirited inquiry into the persistent idea of homeland and the individual's identity, cultural and creative. When Lessons of Armenia first appeared in the Soviet Union in 1969, censors deleted its subtitle, Journey Out of Russia, and made numerous small cuts. This translation restores all the deletions. Choosing a Location could not be published in the Soviet Union.