Finding Bazorkin in the Caucasus: A Journey from Anthropology to Literature

This essay chronicles a journey through the Caucasus toward the end of the second Russo-Chechen war. It focuses in particular on the discovery of a little-known Soviet-era work of historical fiction by the Ingush author Idris Bazorkin (1910-1991). In introducing Bazorkin to the Anglophone reader, I examine the intertextual linkages between his fiction and indigenous Ingush traditions and thereby reveal the thematic and generic range of Ingush literary modernity. By yoking together literary and ethnographic approaches that are often severed from each other, Bazorkin suggests an alternative conception of the relationship between literature and anthropology. Through its writing method as well as its critical analysis, this essay introduces Bazorkin's anthropology of literature.