How Russia's Writers Saw the Caucasus

Catherine Brown, Senior Lecturer at New College of the Humanities, analyses how Russian writers saw the Caucasus and how it influenced their works.

Sochi, where the 2014 Winter Olympic Games opened this week, has been twinned since 1959 with the genteel English town of Cheltenham. The mind boggles at first, but then begins to see the similarities: both spa towns, both fashionable 19th-century resorts, both destinations for monarchs and presidents, both provincial centres of affluence, and so on.

Similarities exhausted, the differences come flooding back. Sochi is not only subtropical, coastal and three times the size of Cheltenham, it is also in the Caucasus - a region for which Britain has no real equivalent. Catherine Brown, Senior Lecturer at New College of the Humanities, analyses how Russian writers saw the Caucasus and how it influenced their works.