The romantic era's intensified preoccupation with national identity gave “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” immense interest as a textual encounter with Asia. First awakened in the latter third of the eighteenth century, Russian national consciousness surged high on the wave of patriotism produced by victory over Napoleon. In this context the westernized elite took a newly respectful view of the Russian peasantry as the key to a shared national spirit. The borderlands of the empire also attracted increased attention, as reflected in travelogues and ethnographic studies. Like the Caucasus in Bronevsky's book, the Crimea, Siberia, Central Asia, the Urals and Ukraine all came under scrutiny as geographically and culturally distinct areas which could clarify the relatively Europeanized life of the Russian capitals. The depiction of Circassian culture in “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” was absorbed into this wave of self-interested curiosity about indigenous peoples of the empire's periphery.

The romantic engagement with the national peasantry as well as primitive cultures gave special import to the mutually conditioned poles of “civilization” and “savagery” implied in Pushkin's poem. Labeled a “European” in relation to the Circassians, Pushkin's captive from the beau monde represented enlightenment understood as a western achievement in which the upper classes of nineteenth-century Russian society sought to participate. In the eyes of readers of the 1820s, civilization' benefits encompassed the arts and sciences, the rule of law, amenities of daily life and the manners of polite society. But Russia's Europeanization had also spelled a twofold cultural dissociation. To recall Vasily Kliuchevsky's famous analysis, the occidentalized Russian nobles of Catherine's era remained foreigners abroad, yet felt increasingly like strangers at home. Alexander Griboedov strikingly conveyed the abiding, double alienation in his domestic récit de voyage “A Trip to the Country” (1826).