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Кавказский пленный
Кавказский пленный - тонкая вариация литературного мифа о Кавказе, берущего начало от произведений Лермонтова и Толстого. Владимиру Маканину удалось невозможное: живо и интересно рассказать о злободневных проблемах языком романтика и мечтателя.
Эта книга - не о том, что нас разъединяет, а о том, что объединяет всех людей в мире, независимо от их расы, возраста и религии. Она - о любви и красоте.
Эта книга - не о том, что нас разъединяет, а о том, что объединяет всех людей в мире, независимо от их расы, возраста и религии. Она - о любви и красоте.
190 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 2004
About the author
Vladimir Makanin
68 books17 followersVladimir Makanin (Russian: Владимир Маканин) is a writer of novels and short stories. He graduated from Moscow State University and worked as a mathematician in the Military Academy until the early 1960s. In 1963 he took a course in scriptwriting, and then worked in the publishing house Sovietskiy Pisatel (The Soviet Writer). Makanin's writing style may be categorized as realist. His forte lies in depicting the psychological impact of everyday life experiences.
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October 21, 2026Read in the 1990s. The translation was in some journal or other, I do not remember which. And the story has stayed with me since then, and another one by Makanin, because he turned up to speak at university.
He told us that he had been born in the Urals close to the 'border' between Asia and Europe. So close in fact that he lived in Europe and went to school in Asia, which amused him as he was growing up.
There are stories with the same title by both Pushkin and Tolstoy, in which a Russian man falls in love with a local girl from the Caucasus (ie a non-white, non-Russian) who for various reasons is disguised as a boy. This kind of story offers to the reader both a mild transgressive thrill with a reasuring safe hetreosexual ending. The author decided that this was all a lot of nonsense requiring some convoluted narrative to account for the male presentation and that he would be better off cutting the whole dressed as a boy bit, and just having the love interest being a boy which was a lot simpler from a narrative point of view. Plus it was the 90s and a Russian author could write and publish something queer, not that he said that.
The premise was that two Russian soldiers were on a peacekeeping, or as I would say today a 'peacekeeping', mission in the Caucasus. There is this local boy with them. Inexplicably, local people (apart from the boy) are rather (read - extremely) hostile to the soldiers and in control of the lowlands. The soldiers are keeping their heads down in some kind of dug out on high ground.
As far as I recall, the author did not discuss with us Imperial, or post-imperial readings. Which really suggest themselves ever more powerfully with the ongoing war in Ukraine.
The premise of conquered native girl falling in love with the Imperial aggressor, is not a subtle one afterall. That she is dressed as a boy makes it even better: native deviance asimulates itself into a 'natural', nay, inevitable, patriarchal order. We might obsrve that love makes it all worse, the conquered accepts the conqueror on his own terms and validates him. Sexual and military adventure, as Ovid already observed in his love poetry, are one. Of course being in love with your conqueror does not make you safe though. Spoiler alert (both literary and historical) cough, cough, cough.
The other story, which I liked more, was called in English something like 'the safety valve' (or maybe the pressure valve) and it concerned two men in a sexual and romantic relationship with the same woman. The men find out about each other, decide that sharing is not caring and confer between themselves to determine who shall have sole possession of the woman (her opinions are not asked for, which I suppose makes for a thematic link with "the prisoner of the Caucasus", as far as I recall she is entirely at ease having a relationship with both men.
Anyway, I liked this story because I had observed something very like it while a student in Russia. My landlady was a grand young woman with a sturdy child, separated from her sleazy alcoholic belorussian husband, now with a boyfriend, who as we say sometimes in British English, was built like a brick shithouse. The ex-husband made my skin crawl, but apparently his mother had taught my landlady everything she knew about making Borscht - and such knowledge is not to be sniffed at particularly when it is in a bowl on front of you at the table.
Anyway, one evening, I saw the two men discussing the situation over the kitchen table, not unlike the way the story played out. Though I hope my landlady had a bit more input into the process.
He told us that he had been born in the Urals close to the 'border' between Asia and Europe. So close in fact that he lived in Europe and went to school in Asia, which amused him as he was growing up.
There are stories with the same title by both Pushkin and Tolstoy, in which a Russian man falls in love with a local girl from the Caucasus (ie a non-white, non-Russian) who for various reasons is disguised as a boy. This kind of story offers to the reader both a mild transgressive thrill with a reasuring safe hetreosexual ending. The author decided that this was all a lot of nonsense requiring some convoluted narrative to account for the male presentation and that he would be better off cutting the whole dressed as a boy bit, and just having the love interest being a boy which was a lot simpler from a narrative point of view. Plus it was the 90s and a Russian author could write and publish something queer, not that he said that.
The premise was that two Russian soldiers were on a peacekeeping, or as I would say today a 'peacekeeping', mission in the Caucasus. There is this local boy with them. Inexplicably, local people (apart from the boy) are rather (read - extremely) hostile to the soldiers and in control of the lowlands. The soldiers are keeping their heads down in some kind of dug out on high ground.
As far as I recall, the author did not discuss with us Imperial, or post-imperial readings. Which really suggest themselves ever more powerfully with the ongoing war in Ukraine.
The premise of conquered native girl falling in love with the Imperial aggressor, is not a subtle one afterall. That she is dressed as a boy makes it even better: native deviance asimulates itself into a 'natural', nay, inevitable, patriarchal order. We might obsrve that love makes it all worse, the conquered accepts the conqueror on his own terms and validates him. Sexual and military adventure, as Ovid already observed in his love poetry, are one. Of course being in love with your conqueror does not make you safe though. Spoiler alert (both literary and historical) cough, cough, cough.
The other story, which I liked more, was called in English something like 'the safety valve' (or maybe the pressure valve) and it concerned two men in a sexual and romantic relationship with the same woman. The men find out about each other, decide that sharing is not caring and confer between themselves to determine who shall have sole possession of the woman (her opinions are not asked for, which I suppose makes for a thematic link with "the prisoner of the Caucasus", as far as I recall she is entirely at ease having a relationship with both men.
Anyway, I liked this story because I had observed something very like it while a student in Russia. My landlady was a grand young woman with a sturdy child, separated from her sleazy alcoholic belorussian husband, now with a boyfriend, who as we say sometimes in British English, was built like a brick shithouse. The ex-husband made my skin crawl, but apparently his mother had taught my landlady everything she knew about making Borscht - and such knowledge is not to be sniffed at particularly when it is in a bowl on front of you at the table.
Anyway, one evening, I saw the two men discussing the situation over the kitchen table, not unlike the way the story played out. Though I hope my landlady had a bit more input into the process.
January 4, 2018
I have to be upfront here and say that I've only read Kavkazskii plennyi, not the rest of the stories in this collection, so I can only judge that. But anyone interested in the development of contemporary Russian literature and its relationship with its illustrious past will definitely want to read Kavkazskii plennyi, which let's translate as something like "Captive of the Caucasus" or "POW of the Caucasus" (more on that later).
I was very sorry to hear of Makanin's recent passing, so soon after I'd discovered him as an author. I originally found out about him when I saw the movie Plennyi (English title "Captive"), directed by Aleksey Uchitel, which you can stream on Amazon and which I highly recommend doing. Intrigued, I sought out the original story.
Anyone with any familiarity with Russian literature at all will guess that Makanin is deliberately working in the tradition begun by Pushkin and continued by Lermontov and Tolstoy, all of whom wrote some version of the "Prisoner of the Caucasus" tale. Makanin sets his version of the action in 1994, as things were heating up in Chechnya, and inverts the story, so that it is not a Russian soldier taken prisoner by Chechens, but a Chechen rebel taken prisoner by Russian soldiers. He also makes the very daring decision to make the Chechen male rather than female, but keep the romantic and erotic tension between him and his Russian captor. This could be unbearably sordid, but Makanin's lyrical prose style, and his clever juxtaposition of the attraction Rubakhin, the hardened Russian soldier, feels for his captive with the brutalities of war and the thoughtlessness of his partner Vovka the Sniper, makes their brief relationship, such as it is, touching and tender. If you know how the "Prisoner of the Caucasus" story goes, you will probably be able to guess, more or less, how this particular version of it ends; otherwise, I won't spoil it for you. Suffice to say that the story gently but insistently explores the theme of rape, both literal and figurative, with the Russian soldiers finding themselves in the position of aggressors without ever consciously intending to and in fact abhorring, on one level, the acts in which they find themselves complicit. Like all the "Prisoner of the Caucasus" narratives, Makanin's paints a picture of Russian and masculine exploitation that is self-aware enough to regret what it does, but not enough to stop doing it. While this may sound off-putting, especially to Western sensibilities, it is a story and a theme that demands being told, and, in the "Prisoner of the Caucasus" tradition, it is told with heartfelt lyricism and compassion for human frailties alongside its condemnation of human cruelties. And the "Plennyi" (Captive) to which the title refers--is that the Chechen boy taken prisoner by the Russians, or the Russian soldier captivated by his beauty? Rubakhin himself is in a way also a captive of war and the Caucasus, unable to give up soldiering, return to Russia proper, and take up a civilian life.
Sadly, to my knowledge this book and this story have not been translated into English. If you can't enjoy it in the original, or if you want to experience it in film form as well, which I highly recommend, do watch Aleksey Uchitel's 2008 cinematization of it, which transposes the action from 1994 and the beginning of the first Chechen war to 2000 and the beginning of the second Chechen war. Uchitel's version also downplays, although does not completely do away with, the erotic tension between Rubakhin and Jamal (the Chechen captive's name in the movie) in favor of a more brotherly camaraderie, and gives Jamal's backstory in more detail, eliciting sympathy for an unfortunate teenager caught up in political and psychological events beyond his control. Like the story, it is not a typical war movie as Westerners would envision it, with almost no combat action to speak of, which heightens rather than minimizes the drama. Very different from what Westerners generally watch, but a must-see for anyone interested in contemporary Russian cinema or the Chechen wars.
I was very sorry to hear of Makanin's recent passing, so soon after I'd discovered him as an author. I originally found out about him when I saw the movie Plennyi (English title "Captive"), directed by Aleksey Uchitel, which you can stream on Amazon and which I highly recommend doing. Intrigued, I sought out the original story.
Anyone with any familiarity with Russian literature at all will guess that Makanin is deliberately working in the tradition begun by Pushkin and continued by Lermontov and Tolstoy, all of whom wrote some version of the "Prisoner of the Caucasus" tale. Makanin sets his version of the action in 1994, as things were heating up in Chechnya, and inverts the story, so that it is not a Russian soldier taken prisoner by Chechens, but a Chechen rebel taken prisoner by Russian soldiers. He also makes the very daring decision to make the Chechen male rather than female, but keep the romantic and erotic tension between him and his Russian captor. This could be unbearably sordid, but Makanin's lyrical prose style, and his clever juxtaposition of the attraction Rubakhin, the hardened Russian soldier, feels for his captive with the brutalities of war and the thoughtlessness of his partner Vovka the Sniper, makes their brief relationship, such as it is, touching and tender. If you know how the "Prisoner of the Caucasus" story goes, you will probably be able to guess, more or less, how this particular version of it ends; otherwise, I won't spoil it for you. Suffice to say that the story gently but insistently explores the theme of rape, both literal and figurative, with the Russian soldiers finding themselves in the position of aggressors without ever consciously intending to and in fact abhorring, on one level, the acts in which they find themselves complicit. Like all the "Prisoner of the Caucasus" narratives, Makanin's paints a picture of Russian and masculine exploitation that is self-aware enough to regret what it does, but not enough to stop doing it. While this may sound off-putting, especially to Western sensibilities, it is a story and a theme that demands being told, and, in the "Prisoner of the Caucasus" tradition, it is told with heartfelt lyricism and compassion for human frailties alongside its condemnation of human cruelties. And the "Plennyi" (Captive) to which the title refers--is that the Chechen boy taken prisoner by the Russians, or the Russian soldier captivated by his beauty? Rubakhin himself is in a way also a captive of war and the Caucasus, unable to give up soldiering, return to Russia proper, and take up a civilian life.
Sadly, to my knowledge this book and this story have not been translated into English. If you can't enjoy it in the original, or if you want to experience it in film form as well, which I highly recommend, do watch Aleksey Uchitel's 2008 cinematization of it, which transposes the action from 1994 and the beginning of the first Chechen war to 2000 and the beginning of the second Chechen war. Uchitel's version also downplays, although does not completely do away with, the erotic tension between Rubakhin and Jamal (the Chechen captive's name in the movie) in favor of a more brotherly camaraderie, and gives Jamal's backstory in more detail, eliciting sympathy for an unfortunate teenager caught up in political and psychological events beyond his control. Like the story, it is not a typical war movie as Westerners would envision it, with almost no combat action to speak of, which heightens rather than minimizes the drama. Very different from what Westerners generally watch, but a must-see for anyone interested in contemporary Russian cinema or the Chechen wars.
February 22, 2019
Русских в плен на Кавказе брали, теперь в плен взяли кавказца. Как на это смотреть? Прежде русских пленила красота кавказских женщин, те отвечали им взаимностью, случался побег, неизменно с упоминанием трагедии души. Теперь иначе. А иначе ли? Отчего нужно считать, будто времена изменились? И раньше двое мужчин могли иметь крепкую дружбу, не обращая внимания на косые взгляды, поскольку таковых не было, ибо всякий мог дружить, не изыскивая скрытых смыслов. Да и сами мужчины ничего не подразумевали, лишь уважительно относясь друг к другу. Они могли плакать без утайки, то не осуждалось. Наоборот, выражать эмоции – важное умение человека, за которое его нельзя порицать. Однако, времена всё-таки изменились. Теперь мужчины не могут проявить нежность друг к другу – это обязательно трактуется склонностью к гомосексуализму. Когда-нибудь произведение Маканина начнут понимать в истинном свете – пока же читатель сохраняет устойчивую позицию восприятия, выраженную упомянутым тут общественным осуждением.
(c) Trounin
(c) Trounin
October 23, 2026
Он хотел добавить: мол, уже который год! Но вместо этого сказал: “Уже который век!..” — он словно бы проговорился; слова выпрыгнули из тени, и удивленный солдат додумывал теперь эту тихую, залежавшуюся в глубине сознания мысль.
September 21, 2013
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October 14, 2024прочитано в рамках челленджа — хочу прочитать все ЛГБТ+книги на русском: https://linktr.ee/kvirklub
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