Black Sea (16 page)

Randsborg believes that Graeco-Roman city-states, as they prospered and increased in population, raped the fragile soil around them until its agricultural capacity collapsed. 'A politically developed society . .. could therefore only maintain its centre in a particular area for... a couple of centuries at a time.' In the Roman Empire, this meant that wider regions had to be exploited. First Gaul and Spain, then Tunisia and the Levant began to supply wheat, wine and oil for the old central regions and to grow rapidly in population. The consequence was disaster for the 'non-classical' world to the north.

The greater Europe outside the boundaries of the Greek and Roman Empires had developed a complex network of long-range trade routes and exchange connections stretching from the Black Sea and the Baltic to the Atlantic. A decentralised but common culture reached across the continent, in balance with its own natural resources and living on infinitely more productive soils than the populations of the Mediterranean 'core'. Now, though, this system and culture were to be torn apart. The Roman imperial expansion into north-western Europe, the Balkans and the Levant drew a fortified frontier between the inner and outer sectors of this common culture. The old Iron Age Europe was sundered: its economic and social unity was disrupted, and its loose political balance overthrown. The 'barbarian invasions' which followed should be seen, in Randsborg's perspective, as a natural attempt by the outer periphery to rejoin the inner. The differences, the unevennesses of development, which the Roman Empire had created between regions of this once-united Europe were so great that those on the outside were almost sucked inwards, as if by the updraught of a fire.

For Randsborg, the force which drew invaders into the Roman Empire was pull, not push. And what he calls the Migration Period (the 'barbarian invasions') should be understood not as an intrusive disaster but as a necessary pause in a process of development. After nearly a millennium of expansion to compensate for repeated economic failure, this process had brought 'powerful centres' to the point at which they had devastated the whole natural and political world around them. 'The picture of the barbarian as destroyer of civilisation,' cries Randsborg, 'should rather be turned on its head.'

Settled people fear moving people, but they also envy and admire them. In envying and admiring, they are inventing the sort or travelling people they want - once again, holding up a mirror to examine themselves.

The Greek tragedians, when they had invented the barbarians, soon began to play with the 'inner barbarism' of Greeks. Perhaps part of the otherness of barbarians was that, unlike the civilised, they were morally all of a piece — not dualistic characters in which a good nature warred with a bad, but whole. The 'Hippocratic' authors - the unknown writers of the Greek medical treatises wrongly attributed to the physician Hippocrates - asserted in
Airs, Waters, Places
that Scythians and all 'Asians' resembled one another physically, while 'Europeans' (meaning essentially Greeks) differed sharply in size and appearance from one city to another. Barbarians were homogenous; civilised people were multif' ... and differentiated. The Greek tragedians thought this might be true about minds as well as bodies. If it was, they were not sure that the contrast between Greek and barbarian psychology - the first complex and inhibited, the second supposed to be spontaneous and natural - was altogether complimentary to the Greeks.

Somewhere here begins Europe's long, unfinished ballad of yearning for noble savages, for hunter-gatherers in touch with themselves and their ecology, for cowboys, cattle-reivers, gypsies and Cossacks, for Bedouin nomads and aboriginals walking their song-lines through the unspoiled wilderness. When Euripides began to write, the Athenian dramatists were using the 'otherness' of their new composite barbarian as a mirror for inspecting Greek virtues. But by the time that he came to write
Medea,
in 431 BC, the mirror was being used to show Greek vices as well, or at least to put in question orthodox Greek morality. That play, already, has a chorus of Corinthian women who watch the fearful eruption of Medea's passions with feelings that are mixed: pity and horror at the crimes of this barbarian princess from Colchis, but also a dry regret that we Greeks — inhibited by our
miden agdn
principle of 'nothing in excess' - no longer know how to let our feelings free. The chorus shows no sympathy for the chill orthodoxy of Jason, Medea's husband, when he rebukes her:

Allow me, in the first place, to point out That you left a barbarous land to become a resident Of Hellas; here you have known justice; you have lived In a society where force yields place to law ...

Herodotus thought the Scythians were the youngest nation on earth. Las Casas fancied that in the Americas the invaders had found not so much a new world as the old world in a sort of arrested infancy. With the presumption of collective youth went the presumption of collective innocence. Much later, after several centuries of European speculation about human origins and the state of nature, Romantic young men in imperial uniforms began to fall in love with the natives they were conquering. From the Aures Mountains in North Africa to the peaks of the Khyber Pass, sulky young officers went hunting other men whom they supposed to be better and more natural human beings than they were.

Pushkin, Tolstoy and Lermontov all served in the Caucasus, officers in the Russian Army which for two generations campaigned to subdue the Islamic mountain peoples. These writers-in-arms projected onto their enemy all the virtues that St Petersburg seemed to lack: utter conviction and certainty of purpose, wholeness of feeling, asceticism in material needs.

At about the same time, English and Scottish intellectuals were passing through comparable storms of self-disgust, and making similar transferences. As the nineteenth century proceeded, these conquerors were to fall in love with the men of Arabia or the North-West Frontier. Indeed, the first of these passions had already blossomed within the north-western frontiers of the British State itself. The Scottish Highlanders had been finally defeated in the pre-Romantic 1740s, a time when the English officer James Wolfe could propose recruiting their beaten clans into the king's service with the words: They are hardy, intrepid, accustom'd to a rough Country and no great mischief if they fall.' But by the 1820s such sentiments had become unspeakable, if not quite unthinkable. The Highlander had become an emblem of simple candour, of selfless valour, of indifference to vulgar commerce and lucre and to most of the other virtues which metropolitan London fancied it had lost as the price of 'polish'.

The spiritual escape route devised by Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov, poet and novelist, tunnelled under the whole continent from Scotland to the Caucasus. Descended from a Learmonth of Balcomie, a Scottish mercenary officer who had served the Polish king and then the tsar, Lermontov imagined for his own roots a Scotland of frowning steeps and lonely heroes which was much like the Daghestan and Chechnia around him. When he went to fight in the Caucasus in the late 1830s, he carried with him a Russian translation of Ossian. The Ossianic poems were eventually exposed as forgeries, confected by James Macpherson and flavoured with ground-up extracts from genuine traditional Gaelic poetry, but Ossian seemed to Lermontov a sort of passport, not only to a special intimacy with the Caucasus but to a second identity which was un-Russian, untamed.

In his poem 'A Wish', Lermontov became a 'steppe raven' and flew to Scotland where the fields of my ancestors flower, Their forgotten dust reposes.

He ended in a crescendo of exquisite self-pity:

The last descendant of brave warriors

Expires among alien snows.

I was born here, but
1
am not of here in my soul —

O why am I not a raven of the steppe?

And these two elements, the vision of a Caucasian Scotland and the dualistic longing to be a person who was two persons, join again in his brief 'Tomb of Ossian':

Under a curtain of mist,

Under a sky of storms, in the midst of a plain,

Stands the grave of Ossian

Among the mountains of my Scotland.

My lulled spirit flies towards it

To breathe my native wind,

And from this forgotten grave

To begin my life over again.

Balcomie, where the Learmonths came from, is not at all an Ossianic or Caucasian place. The house, now a jumble of ancient towers and modern farm buildings, stands not in the Highlands but on a flat Fife promontory battered by salt winds from the North Sea. And yet, if this Lermontov-Learmonth had known it, his sense of doubleness was at the very heart of a Scottish literary tradition about divided selves and the sense of dual personality. A few years earlier, in 1824, the Scottish writer James Hogg had published his
Confessions of a Justified Sinner
about a man whose two selves were not a Russian and a Scot but a man and a demon.

But Lermontov was at once dualist and duellist. He did not find time to read Hogg. Instead, he 'expired among alien snows' in the Caucasus in 1841, victim of an absurd duel which he had both provoked and — in his cruel, perfect novel
A Hero of Our Time —
prefigured. Their seconds had persuaded both men to fire into the air. Lermontov went first and did so. But as he pulled the trigger he said suddenly and loudly: 'At such an imbecile, I will not shoot!'

Enraged, his opponent lowered his aim and put his bullet through Lermontov's chest.

Ossian in contrast died slowly. In the Irish tales, Ossian (Oisin) was supposed to be the son of Finn MacCumhal, leader of the band of heroes whose anglicised name is the 'Fenians'. He was their bard, charged to put all that was done by the Fenians into words and melody which would never be forgotten. In the Ossian stories (which are a sort of sequel added to the main body of the Fenian myth-cycle, as if the listeners could not bear the tale to end), he has survived all his comrades and is living into a Methuselan old age — last of the race of giants. St Patrick comes often to visit Ossian, rebuking him gently for his pride in the old world of pagan violence and freedom which has passed away. But the old giant, unrepentant, curses the new world of conformist midgets and jeers at the Christian ethic of peace and submissiveness of spirit. He longs only to go hunting for one last time with Finn and the other heroes by the falls of Easaidh Ruadh.

There is a compassion, a balanced sense of time's cruelty, in those tales which is extraordinary. Euripides would have liked them. But when James Macpherson re-invented Ossian in the eighteenth century, in the 'epic lays' of a 'Scottish Homer', he left out all that mature irony, as he left out that special joy in the natural world of running deer and rowan trees in berry which gives the best Gaelic literature its quality. Some strange re-inventions have happened to Lermontov, too. He hung a lot on the word
zabvenniy
- 'alone, in oblivion'. Pechorin, Lermontov's 'hero of our times', walked by himself asking for neither love nor pity. Yet I have met Lermontov as the life and soul of a family party.

One evening I came to Anapa, a little port in the north-eastern corner of the Black Sea which had been a station in Lermontov's wanderings about this coast. I was there to see the excavations of the Greek colony of Gorgippia which lies underneath it, but I arrived late, and I found the museum director in her best bronze-coloured dress about to set off for a party. She invited me to come too.

We passed through the palm court of what had been a hotel, now a home for wounded Russian veterans of the Afghan war, and found ourselves in a hall full of tables, noise and people. This was the reunion of the Lermontovs. Some sixty people aged from nine to ninety had assembled from all over the world: from Russia and Ukraine, from France and the Americas, even from Scotland - there was a bearded Learmonth, now resident in Luxemburg, and a Procurator-Fiscal from Dundee who organises a society for the preservation of Balcomie.

They had already begun on the vodka and Kuban champagne, and children clutching lumps of cake were twirling on the dance floor or scrambling under the tables. They made me welcome to this celebration of.. . what precisely? Not Lermontov the writer, for in all the toasts and speeches of the night, there was not a word about literature. This was, instead, a clan gathering, a celebration of
Rod
— kinship and lineage.

Mikhail Lermontov never married and, as far as I know, had no children. His mother died when he was two, his father ignored him, and his only source of affection was a grandmother. Never mind! He had been famous, and around his fame distant relations and indirect descendants had assembled themselves into an enormous, affectionate, uproarious family with Mikhail Yurevich invisibly installed at the head of the table. Perhaps it was true that the great ancestor had been deficient in family feeling, a bit of a loner. But he was forgiven now.