In the Shade of the Phantom Cranberry Tree: Alexandre Dumas’s Romantic Encounters and Literary Extractivism in the Caucasus

Abstract

This article argues that the travelogue and fiction produced by Alexandre Dumas following his 1858 journey to the Caucasus constitute a form of literary extractivism: the mining of Russian romantic texts for material that he could repurpose and sell to French readers as authentic glimpses into the Russian Empire. It traces how Dumas absorbed and displaced the work of Alexander Bestuzhev‐Marlinsky—the Russian romantic writer whose stories of the Caucasus Dumas published under his own name—reducing Marlinsky from fellow author to romantic character and erasing his prior claim to narrative authority over the region. It then turns to the Russian critical response, showing how writers and satirists from across the political spectrum mocked Dumas’s pretensions and plagiarism, revealing a tension between lingering Russian insecurity about France’s cultural condescension and a growing confidence in the authority and maturity of Russian national literature. The persistence of Dumas’s romantic Caucasus long after its origins have been uncovered raises broader questions about how literary authority is established and maintained: not through accuracy or originality but through the self‐perpetuating momentum of stories that have already found their audience.