Black Prometheus by Jared Hickman

Author:Jared Hickman [Hickman, Jared]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-09-27T18:30:00+00:00

Imam Shamil, or the Modern Prometheus of Caucasus

The Caucasian fight for sovereignty afforded writers an ideal discursive detour from the black Prometheus, from the recognition of slave rebellion as the most foundation-shaking act of revolution. In much of the commentary on Shamil’s resistance, Prometheus was deployed as the obvious, indeed, local, genius of this—most literally—Caucasian defense of liberty.

Travelers in the Caucasus during the period of Shamil’s resistance sought traces of the Prometheus myth in the region—these are the sources on which the London correspondent of The National Era drew for his discussion of slavery in Russia. Lascelles Wraxall’s English compilation of two German travelers’ accounts of Shamil’s Caucasus recites the Prometheus myth and suggests that it “still lives in the memory of the inhabitants [of the Caucasus], who narrate it with a very few unimportant variations.”50 (Modern folklorists of the Caucasus often make the same move when noting the virtual indistinguishability of ancient Greek myths of Prometheus and the titans from local legends about the originary North Caucasians—the giant Narts who embody “the spirit of rebellion and heroism.”)51 The 1837 English edition of Edouard Taitbout de Marigny’s Three Voyages in the Black Sea to the Coast of Circassia offers one such local variant of the Prometheus myth. Marigny relays the report of German traveler M. Tausch regarding a certain mountain in the Caucasus that gave off “noxious exhalations” and contained “a frightful gulf, where sometimes loud sounds of chains and groans are heard. The Abazes relate that a man of their tribe said, that he had descended into it, and had there found a huge giant, who said to him, ‘Oh, thou, inhabitant of earth … what is going on above? Is the grass ever verdant there? Does peace reign in the families …’ The Circassian having replied in the affirmative, he said, ‘It is well; I am doomed to dwell here yet a long time.’ ” Such a fantastic tale can only leave Marigny to state the obvious: “This fable has a certain affinity with that of Prometheus, the traces of which I have been glad to find in the very country where the poets of antiquity had placed it. It proves to us that personage must have had an historical origin, on which it would, perhaps be possible to throw some light by carefully visiting the high chain of the Caucasus.”52 The London correspondent for The National Era, in his digest of work on the Caucasus, cites this passage, so it made its way directly to an abolitionist audience (“No. IV”). Ditson is even more specific: “I had heard … that I would find howling horrors in the region of the Kasbek, provoked by the restless spirit of Prometheus, who was still chained there, with none of Io’s race to set him free,” a detail the National Era correspondent also adopts (“No. IV”).53 Notably, Mount Kazbek loomed over the Georgian-Military-Highway that provided “Russia’s lifeline to its possessions in Transcaucasia” and thus was a focus of guerilla action.54 Ditson thus

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