CHACHA: Kisljarka: Armee-Wodka mit sanftmütigem Charakter. Von Dmitri Suchodolski (russland-heute.de)

(russland-heute.de) Dagestans Kisljarka spiegelt die Vielfalt des Kaukasus wider. Der Wodka, der weder aus Weizen noch aus Roggen destilliert wird, vereint den Charakter von Grappa und edlem Whiskey auf einzigartige Weise.

In der Familie der russischen Wodkasorten gibt es einen Sonderfall, der eigentlich gar kein Wodka ist, obwohl er die Bezeichnung trägt. Im Unterschied zu seinen Namensvettern, die aus Weizen oder Roggen destilliert und mit Quellwasser auf trinkbare Stärke verdünnt werden, ist der „Kisljarka" – ähnlich dem Grappa – eine hochprozentige Spirituose (45 Vol. %) aus Traubentrester.

Vom „Dienst"-Schnaps des russischen Heeres bis in die klassische russische Literatur

Wie diese südliche Schönheit in die Wodka-Familie der Nordlichter geriet, ist eine interessante Geschichte. Der Kisljarka hat seinen Namen von der dagestanischen Stadt Kisljar, einer Ansiedlung im Kaukasus mit einer jahrhundertealten Geschichte.

An einer günstig gelegenen Uferstelle des Terek, an der man über den Fluss übersetzte, ließen sich zuerst persische Kaufleute nieder. In der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts tauchte eine Einheit der russischen Palastgarde auf, die die wichtige Handelsader bewachen sollte. Bereits hundert Jahre später bestand die Stadt aus acht verschiedenen ethnischen Stadtvierteln: Außer dem russischen und persischen gab es das armenische und das georgische Viertel, eine kleine Gemeinde getaufter Kaukasier, ein Viertel für die Tschetschenen-Akinzen, die der russischen Zarenkrone dienten, und die Viertel der Tataren und Tscherkessen.

Dieses Bevölkerungsgemisch, das sich hauptsächlich mit Handel und Armeedienst beschäftigte, verfügte über ähnliche Sitten und Bräuche. Insbesondere wurde gern gezecht, wobei die ansässigen Muslime den Christen in nichts nachstanden. Die Weinherstellung war den Bewohnern des heutigen Dagestan von alters her bekannt und sie zeigten eine liberale Haltung den Gesetzen der Scharia gegenüber.

Im 19. Jahrhundert begann die Industrialisierung der bisher auf den Bauernhöfen in der Umgebung von Kisljar praktizierten privaten Weinherstellung. Französische Rebsorten wurden in einem für den Weinbau ideal geeigneten Tal angebaut. Aus den Abfallprodukten, die bei der Weinproduktion entstanden, brannte man massenhaft hochprozentigen Schnaps.

Er galt als firmeneigener Wodka der dort lebenden georgischen Fürstenfamilie Zizianow, die dem russischen Reich, welches das Branntweinmonopol besaß, eine spezielle Lizenz abgekauft hatte. Die Produktion, die bis heute läuft, ist jedoch dem Armenier David Saradschew zu verdanken, der in Westeuropa zum Doktor der Chemie und Handelsberater ausgebildet wurde und in ganz Südrussland als Wohltäter bekannt war.

An den von Saradschew eröffneten Produktionsorten wird der Kisljarka auch heute noch hergestellt, wiewohl die Produktion der lokalen Brennereien schon seit Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts einen wohlverdienten Bekanntheitsgrad erworben hatte. Da gab es den „Dienst"-Schnaps für das russische Heer, das den Kaukasus kolonisierte. Über den dort erworbenen Ruf gelangte der Kisljarka in die klassische russische Literatur. Er findet Erwähnung in den Werken von Lew Tolstoi und Nikolai Leskow.

Französische Winzer nutzen vermehrt kaukasische Qualitätsprodukte

Im Vergleich zu anderen Grappa-Sorten hat der Kisljarka einen sehr weichen, ausgewogenen Geschmack mit einer stark ausgeprägten Vanillenote, die der kaukasischen Bergeiche zu verdanken ist. In den aus ihr hergestellten Eichenfässern lagert er zwischen sechs Monaten und einigen Jahren.

Der Kaukasus ist Russlands natürliche, exotische Orangerie: die einheimischen subtropischen Wälder und Bergalmen sind berühmt für ihre biologische Vielfalt. Hier wachsen einige Eichenarten, aber für die Eichenfassherstellung eignen sich vor allem zwei: die Traubeneiche und die Stieleiche. Wie gut ihr Holz für die Weinlagerung geeignet ist, kann man an zwei Fakten erkennen: Das einheimische Material für die Fässer wird immer häufiger von französischen Winzern aufgekauft, die Dauben aus Limousin-Eichenholz mit der kaukasischen Traubeneiche verflechten.

Außerdem ist die kaukasische Traubeneiche der nächste Verwandte der in England wachsenden walisischen Traubeneiche, die als Fassholz für die Whiskeyherstellung verwendet wird und besonders für ihre Vanillenote berühmt ist. Exotik-Liebhaber brauchen allerdings nicht bis ins ferne nördliche Dagestan zu fahren, um diese Spirituose zu probieren, die sich Wodka nennt und in der sich die Qualitäten von Grappa und Single-Malt-Whiskey vereinen.

Der Kisljarka, hergestellt in der 1880 eröffneten Fabrik Saradschews, wird in vielen großen russischen Städten verkauft. Man kann ihn leicht an seiner kräftigen Goldfarbe und an seinem Etikett erkennen, das mit dem Porträt des berühmten russischen Heerführers aus der Zeit der napoleonischen Kriege geschmückt ist: dem Fürsten Pjotr Bagration, dessen Geschlecht ebenfalls mit dem Ort Kisljar verbunden ist.

ARTICLE: Blood and Tragedy: The Caucasus in the Literary Imagination. By Alexander Nazaryan (newyorker.com)

(newyorker.com) At the beginning of “The Cossacks,” Leo Tolstoy’s early novel about imperial Russia’s military campaign in the Caucasus, the protagonist Olenin muses about the battles to come: “All his dreams about the future were connected with… Circassian maids, mountains, precipices, fearsome torrents and dangers.” He imagines, with predictable vigor, “killing and subduing a countless number of mountaineers.” Much less predictably, he identifies himself with the Central Asian people he is being sent to subjugate: “He was himself one of the mountaineers, helping them to defend their independence against the Russians.”
That subjugation of the Caucasus would continue for another two centuries, culminating in the two successive wars waged by Yeltsin and Putin. From somewhere within that region—it is not clear where, exactly—emerged the Tsarnaev family, immigrating (apparently) to the Boston area about a decade ago. On Monday, the two Tsarnaev brothers—Dzhokhar and Tamerlan—allegedly committed the first act of terror on American soil since 9/11.

Whether the two accused bombers had specific grievances about the plight of their native Chechnya is unclear. But as the details of their lives emerge, people will inevitably be searching for links between the two young men and the conflict-riven place they come from. It’s a conflict that started with the Cossack encroachments of the eighteenth century and continued with imperial invasions under Catherine the Great, mass deportations by Stalin, and the post-Soviet cruelties of the contemporary Kremlin.
And the Caucasus—a region loosely encompassing Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Dagestan, Ossetia, and Ingushetia—has always occupied a mystical place in Russian literature. It is a region of rough natural beauty but also a place of exile, where those who ran afoul of the tsar were sent to ponder their fealty to the empire. A place to conquer but also a place before which to stand in awe. If Russia has a cultural subconscious, it lies east of the Don River.
For Russian writers of the nineteenth century, being banished to the Caucasus was usually a sign that one was on the path to glory. Pushkin’s democratic poem “Ode to Liberty” earned him banishment to “the south” for the next three years, where he wrote “A Prisoner in the Caucasus.” Removed from his beloved Petersburg, he nevertheless found inspiration in this foreign land where, as the work’s dedication has it, “warlike raiders roam the hills / and a wild imagination / lies in ambush in the empty silence.”
It may be ironic that writers, like Pushkin, who badly wanted Mother Russia to catch up to her Western European neighbors could at the same time celebrate the unabashedly pre-modern ways of the mountains. There is Orientalism at work here, sure, but also something else—an anxiety about progress, a suspicion that the Caucasian way of life, with its horses, mountains, and wine, is somehow more true to the human condition.
After Pushkin died, the poet Mikhail Lermontov wrote “Death of the Poet,” in 1837, resurrecting some of the themes that Pushkin trumpeted, provoking the ire of Nicholas I, who sent him away to military service the Caucasus. This again proved auspicious: three years later, Lermontov published his greatest work, “A Hero of Our Time,” and briefly enjoyed his literary celebrity. Like his hero Pushkin, he became entangled in a duel, and was killed, in 1841.
The tale of a romantic officer, “Hero” is at its best in describing the landscape of the Caucasus and the people who live there. (However, Lermontov also repeated stereotypes of Caucasians as violent, lascivious tricksters. As one character says, “What a people…. They can’t even say ‘bread’ in Russian, but they’ve learned how to say ‘Officer, tip for vodka!’ ”) The land is the real hero: beguiling, alien, always faintly exuding death.
Of nighttime passage through the mountains, Lermontov writes, “To the right and left of us were gloomy, mysterious chasms, into which the mists crept down, billowing and writhing like serpents…. All was quiet in the heavens and on the earth, as it is in the human heart at morning prayer.” Reading the book today, I am reminded, oddly enough, of “Apocalypse Now,” of journeys that are as perilous within as they are without.
The morning prayer is a reference to Islam, which makes its appearance in Caucasian narratives less as a cultural force than as a descriptive trope, local color to paint characters with. Tolstoy—who went to the Caucasus willingly in the eighteen-fifties, as a soldier with the Cossacks to tidy up the remains of a dissolute youth—wrote in his novel “Hadji Murat” that the titular character possessed an “oriental, Muslim dignity.” In tales like “The Prisoner of the Caucasus,” he presents Muslim rites journalistically, as curiosities that are sure to pique the interest of readers in Moscow and Petersburg.
But for whatever simplicities he employed, Tolstoy understood the travails heaped upon the Chechens and their brethren better than the poets who came before him. In fact, as the New York Times noted, in 2009, he is probably the most revered Russian writer in Chechnya, where a museum (supported by Chechen authorities close to the Kremlin and thus eager to build the peace) to him stands. As a great-great-grandson of Tolstoy told the Times, “The Chechen people think that Tolstoy wrote most truthfully of the events that happened then and the character of the mountain peoples, their striving to be independent, for freedom, and their religious, ethnic and other particularities…Tolstoy, in spite of the fact that he was an aristocrat, a Russian count, was very democratic and open. He had friends among the Chechens.” Surely that arises in good part from Tolstoy’s ability to understand, and even sympathize with, Chechens’ animosity toward “those Russian dogs”—a sentiment that no amount of money can erase.
Ironically, it was when Russia was ruled by a Georgian—Stalin—that cruelty toward people of the Caucasus was most vehemently recrudescent. In 1944, he simply deported about a half a million of them eastward from land on which they had lived for centuries. The only reason this mass displacement is little remembered is because there were so many other atrocities taking place.
It is surprising, then, that one of the most sensitive portrayals of the region comes from that cruel age. “An Armenian Sketchbook” was published nearly a decade after Stalin’s death (and has recently been translated into English by the New York Review Classics), by Vasily Grossman, a writer who had suffered much during Stalin’s life, and was himself to shortly die from cancer. “Armenian Sketchbook” is a minor work—but that is only because Grossman’s major work, “Life and Fate,” is the twentieth-century equivalent of “War and Peace.”
Indeed, much like Tolstoy, Grossman understands the Caucasus as more than just the plaything of empires. Grossman cannot help but be astounded by the landscape, writing that “The whole of Armenia is awash with light.” And though the comity of the Soviet era was enforced by iron rule, he finds a hospitality that is absent in earlier narratives of the region: “What more do I need? On the street people greet me with a smile…. People share their stories with me; they tell me about their lives, about their sorrows…. It’s all right here. I’m accepted; I’m one of them.”
This kind of simplistic celebration of Armenians played unwittingly but conveniently into the Kremlin’s propagandistic purpose (even if Grossman was far from an establishment cheerleader himself). Maybe the saddest feature of all the literature about the Caucusus is that almost none of what is widely read and celebrated is written by Caucasians themselves.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union gave rise to the tumult that the Tsarnaev family apparently fled in hopes of a calmer life in the United States. The story of the Tsarnaev brothers—if they are indeed responsible for the bombing in Boston—spills well out of the boundaries of the Caucasian region. But it is tied to the stories of blood, lust, and tragedy that Russians have been writing about for centuries.
Alexander Nazaryan is on the editorial board of the New York Daily News, where he edits the Page Views book blog.
Photograph: Library of Congress

FILM: Prisoner of Caucasus. Film by Sergey Bodrov (with english subtitles) (youtube.com)

Prisoner of the Mountains (Russian: Кавказский пленник, Kavkazskiy plennik), also known as Prisoner of the Caucasus, is a 1996 Russian war drama film directed by Sergei Bodrov and written by Bodrov, Arif Aliyev and Boris Giller. The film is based on the Caucasian War-era short story "The Prisoner of the Caucasus" by the classic Russian writer Leo Tolstoy.

Director: Sergey Bodrov

Writers: Arif Aliyev, Sergey Bodrov, and 2 more credits

Stars: Oleg Menshikov, Sergey Bodrov Jr. and Susanna Mekhraliyeva

CULTURE: Leo Tolstoy and peace in the Caucasus (english.ruvr.ru)

Today members of the Russian PEN club are marking the upcoming 100th anniversary of the death of the Russian literary classic Leo Tolstoy with the opening of the Khadzhi Murat Stone.

The memorial is in the Tolstoy’s so-called “Pirogovo estates” some 40 kilometers from the writer’s famous Yasnaya Polyana museum. Because it was at Pirogovo that the idea of writing a story about one of the best-known leaders of Caucasus mountaineers’ resistance to the Russian expansion south first crossed Tolstoy’s mind. Initially a sworn enemy of Russia, Khadzhi Murat then became its best friend only to become an enemy again and ruthlessly destroyed. For Tolstoy, Khadzhi Murat is an epitome of selfless courage and perseverance.

The Russian PEN Club’s president Andrei Bitov says that the Khadzhi Murat Stone is a monument to both a literary work and a historical prototype, a person who really lived and fought in the mid-19th century.

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