The Seljuks came to the Armenian Highland on horseback. They even recorded the process for posterity in ceramic—this jug, of the twelfth or thirteenth century, is in the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art and Ethnography, housed in the Yakutiye Medrese in Erzurum.
Alexander Pushkin arrived the same way. He came in 1829, tagging along with the Russian army in its war against the Ottomans, and left an account of it: A Journey to Arzrum, one of his few pieces of travel prose, and available in English. He also drew himself en route, in a Caucasian felt cloak and armed with a spear, putting the Turks to flight.
The picture, one gathers, was somewhat more heroic than the reality. He was thirty, recently refused permission to travel abroad, and had gone east essentially because it was the only direction still open to him.
But there was a business plan behind it, and it had an English author.
Pushkin was the first Russian to live by his pen—no estate worth the name, no salary, and a settled conviction that literature ought to pay. He put it in verse himself, in 1824: inspiration is not for sale, but a manuscript may be sold.
And he had before him the most spectacular commercial proof of the age. Byron had gone travelling, written it up, and woken one morning to find himself famous; The Corsair shifted ten thousand copies on the day of publication, a figure that had simply not existed in publishing before. The formula was plain: go somewhere dangerous and foreign, be a poet in it, come home and sell the book.
So when Pushkin—refused a passport for Europe, short of money as usual, and steeped since his twenties in Byron—attached himself to an army heading for Erzurum, he was not only striking a pose. He was following a proven format into the one exotic destination the authorities would let him have.
Whether it worked is another matter. A Journey to Arzrum did not make him rich, and Byron, who had died at Missolonghi five years earlier having gone off to fight for Greek independence, had rather raised the bar on the ending.
If I had been obliged to travel like that, I suspect I should have done an Oblomov and never got off the sofa at all. (Goncharov’s hero spends the first hundred and fifty pages of his novel deciding whether to stand up. He gave the Russian language a word for it.)
So: three cheers for technical progress. And Erzurum is only the beginning. Stay tuned.
