The Baroque Strategy of Representing the “Caucasian Text” in the Novel by V.T. Narezhny Black Year, or The Mountain Princes

V.T. Narezhny's Black Year, or The Mountain Princes (1829) was perceived as a social satire and fell out of the imagological context of the Caucasian theme. Narezhny witnessed and participated in the events of Georgia's annexation to Russia, which influenced his novel. It was Narezhny, who switched the political novel of the 18th century to the reality in its familiarly reorganizing intentions. The life of Caucasian peoples is portrayed through a “carnival” culture. Black Year is a popular-laughable overture of the Baroque type of Caucasian text. The explication of the historical and cultural concreteness of space allows playing with the real, fictional, and metaphorical, for which Narezhny employs various forms of the “street theatre”, Little Russian Nativity plays, the baroque effects of emblemisation, the rococo theatricality and the ideological edification of the Enlightenment theatre. The metaphysical component of the local text makes religious motives important for Narezhny's novel. The real historical “liminality” of the national life in the Caucasus being annexed to Russia is sublimated into the hero as an “internal plot”: his choice and search correspond to the choice of Caucasian nationalities on the threshold of world politics. The writer's position is influenced by his direct participation in the events that initiate the novel. He is a representative of the empire with regard to the “material” and “context” of the novel; however, he is a representative of Ukraine. Socially, he is to execute the emperor's will to local peoples, while, on the other hand, he is a “poor official”, “little man”. These attitudes are opposite and contradictory in their combination, with one giving a view from above, and the other from the inside. The hero, striving for selfidentification, paradoxically corresponds to this narrative. As an individual and a “sovereign”, personifying his national space, the hero suffers from a deficit of his cultural place, experiencing a moment of self-alienation. In the Baroque vein, this leads to self-assertion through the “other” (the Baroque “I” self-estrangement in roles imposed by fate). Narezhny's system of power-subordination includes social status, nationality, and religious views. The person begins to arbitrarily use them as play forms of self-identity. The plot contains a baroque-like explication of repeated motives of rise and fall. In the context of the “mountainous” homeland, it begins to condense into the metaphor of the “stony path” as an ordeal. The novel contains a metaphorical code associated with the “mountains”. In the final, the description of the life order fits into cosmological coordinates, and the theme of the “family” of the ruler and subjects is based on the tradition of national-tribal communication, which is a moral authority for the Caucasian peoples.