The Experience of Employing the Slave Narrative Genre in Describing the History of the Caucasus

Abstract

The genre of the slave narrative is unique, and is essential to African-American culture. Yet, up to now, personally written stories describing the journey to freedom traveled by “heroic slaves”, writings that could well qualify as nonfiction, have received little attention outside of the US and UK. This makes all the more interesting the attempt by prominent Russian historian A.A. Cherkasov to employ the slave narrative genre in describing the history of the Caucasus, undertaken in his collection of documents “Circassian Slave Narratives”. This review of the collection attempts to analyze the phenomenon of the slave narrative and determine the degree to which it could be transposed to Russia. It is shown that, while a portion of the documents published by A.A. Cherkasov, specifically interviews with slaves who escaped from Russia to Circassia, do seem to fit in with the slave narrative genre in theme, most of the Russian-Circassian slave narratives are completely different from classic slave narratives in content and style. These are not publicistic memoirs written for abolitionist purposes but documentation maintained to keep records of fugitives. In the end, the author draws the conclusion that it is impossible to have an exact analogue of the slave narrative for Russian history, as the figure of the heroic slave is not something that is typical for Russian history. Accordingly, despite the fact that fugitive slaves’ testimonies were widely written down at the time, as was the case in Circassia, the outcome was a completely different type of writing typologically. However, if the slave narrative is viewed in a broad sense, as an aggregate of first-hand slave accounts that can help provide the reader with a comprehensive documentary picture of the life of actual slaves, ‘Circassian Slave Narratives’ may well be considered a worthy representative of the genre. A.A. Cherkasov provides 180 interviews with slaves and over 1,000 thematically contiguous record-keeping documents, which offer a unique insight into Circassian slavery specifically. Consequently, while it is hardly possible to use the classic slave narrative in describing Russian history, there may be considerable potential in its creative reconceptualization, as has been well substantiated by A.A. Cherkasov.

Keywords:

slavery, slave narrative, publication of documents, Caucasian War, Circassia