Pechorin's Ghost: A Critique of Kaplan's Eastward To Tartary
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«Why did fate have to throw me into the peaceful lives of honest smugglers Like a stone hurled into the placid surface of a pond I had disturbed their tranquility, and like a stone had nearly gone to the bottom myself!»i Like Mikhail Lermontov's fictional account of Pechorin's encounter with smugglers in «Taman» in A Hero of Our Time, I am not certain if one could legitimately label Robert D. Kaplan in Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus, or any number of politicians, border guards, and professors he interviews, a victim. In Lermontov's «Taman», the seducer, Pechorin, unwittingly becomes the pawn and victim of a «supple», singing smuggler, and then a boy thief steals his saber and dagger. Kaplan might lose a little cash obtaining a visa on his running interview from Hungary to Armenia, but his interviewees always steal an opportunity to tell their respective tales. I would like to believe Kaplan orchestrated his interviews as cunningly as he organized his itinerary from one storied city to another, but like Lermontov, whose realistic portrait of the depraved Pechorin is nearly lost among his sordidly colorful characters and the enchanting Caucasus itself, Kaplan reveals a cramped world full of crooks and despots.
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