Kalmyk Echoes: Between Two Poets of Empire

土爾扈特的回歸,普希金的流放: 詩人,帝國,遊牧民族的命運

(AILC/ICLA International Forum, Shenzhen, July 2019)

Pushkin’s self-epitaph “Exegi monumentum” imagines that his voice will live on in the many tongues of the Russian empire; post-mortem, he will be spoken anew by the Poles, the Finns, and by “the Kalmyk, friend of the steppes.” Pushkin knew a bit about the edges of empire, having been exiled to the Caucasus for irreverent speech. In his travels he had encountered members of the nomadic Mongol lineage known as the Kalmyks. Sixty years earlier, Ji Yun had been summoned by the Qianlong Emperor to compose an extempore ode on the return of the Torghuts, another branch of the same lineage that had wandered west, settled on the banks of the Volga, and eventually migrated back to China in order to resettle the frontier areas of Xinjiang depopulated by Qianlong’s campaign against the Zunghars. Taken together, these examples of “frontier poetry” stage a quasi-encounter in verse between the imaginations of the expanding Russian and Qing empires, at the expense of nomad groups that could hardly find recognition except as vehicles of that expansion.