Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Shaykh: Border Crossers in the Historiography of the Modern Caucasus

Three scholars have recently taken up the challenge of traversing the seemingly insurmountable geographic and temporal boundaries of Caucasian historiography. Collectively, these authors invite us to find elements that define the Caucasus as a region. Rebecca Gould collects literary works from both the North and the South Caucasus and finds a common aesthetic vector of insurgency pointing from the mid-19th century to the Soviet period and beyond. Jeronim Perović crosses the temporal boundary of the 1917 revolutions, too, giving us a longer-scale perspective on state-society relations in the North Caucasus across regimes. Finally, Reinhard Nachtigal shows how new transportation infrastructure across physical barriers turned paths of local import into integrating networks that consolidated the Caucasus and connected the region to the Russian heartland. As this essay hopes to show, such scholarly border crossing helps make debates about colonialism, violence, and modernity in the Caucasus relevant for scholarship beyond the confines of area studies as well.