Geopoetics and Geopolitics: Landscape, Empire, and the Literary Imagination in the Great Game, is a study of the imaginative literature which arose from Russia and Britain’s nineteenth-century contest for influence in Central Asia—a period which became popularly known in the Anglophone world as the Great Game. The dissertation offers a literary historiography of Central Asia during this time, tracking the region’s shifting meanings in Russia and England alongside evolving local responses to new imperial interests. I argue that the resulting literary archive worked in service of imperial strategic interests while also maintaining an autonomous aesthetic function: it in fact gave rise to an imaginative space independent of, or even in contradistinction to, the trappings of geopolitical power. Geopoetics and Geopolitics interrogates the Russian and English texts about Central Asia which purported to discover, but in fact helped to produce, the region. In doing so, it reveals how imperial ideologies “placed” Central Asia in a global system: an insistence on the region’s remoteness and peripherality paralleled its instrumental function as a buffer between empires. I furthermore historicize the appearance of a peripheral, interimperial buffer zone in the literature of the Great Game, arguing that at the moment when the entire globe had been fully mapped and accounted for by a system of imperial governance, the notion of a free space beyond empire’s bounds became an increasingly important aspect of the imaginative literature produced by each of the cultures invested in Great-Game era Central Asia. The multilingual, multigeneric literary construction of Central Asia’s emptiness, and the multivalent significances of that emptiness, constitute the region’s geopoetics.
The first chapter of the dissertation “The Great Game Travelogue: Fred Burnaby’s A Ride to Khiva and Colonel Grodekov’s Across Afghanistan” examines Russian and British travelers to the buffer zone. This chapter is a case study of the relationship between Central Asia’s literary function and its role in an emerging global political order—I show how European travelers learned to see the region’s flat, arid landscapes as a tabula rasa, allowing them to naturalize the “emptiness” required of a geopolitical buffer zone to the physical territory of Central Asia. This chapter establishes the relationship between political ideology, literary form, and landscape which the final two chapters examine in detail in relation to two of the best-known Great Game texts.
These remaining two chapters form a pair, focused on Great Game novels. In Chapter Two, “Steppe Realism: Nikolai Karazin’s Dvunogii volk (The Two-Legged Wolf)” I discuss a Russian novel, widely read in the late nineteenth century, which fictionalizes the Russian conquest and subsequent colonial settlement of Central Asia. In this chapter I argue that Karazin produces an “empty” and infinitely malleable Central Asian landscape meant to symbolize the new social mobility acquired by Russia’s popular classes after the abolition of serfdom, and a new Russian Empire in which every social class could feel ownership. The third and final chapter, “Cartographic Idealism: Central Asia in Kipling’s Kim,” analyzes Rudyard Kipling’s quintessential Great Game novel. Here I read Kim as an exemplar of Central Asia’s role in the British cultural imagination. At once a Bildungsroman and a picaresque novel, Kim produces a space which is both central and peripheral, charted and unknowable.
I conclude the dissertation by arguing that this impossible space sustained a fantasy regarding Central Asia which persists to this day, of a space that resists assimilation even as the central and peripheral territories of the world become ever more tightly knit. The dissertation ultimately assembles and analyzes a corpus of Great Game literature which, when read in comparative perspective, reveals the Great Game to be less a series of political events than a literary and discursive reaction to those events—a multigeneric, multilingual attempt to account for a newly interconnected world, and the loss of autonomy which European imperialism’s expansion entailed.
