European authors have often portrayed imperial power as male dominance over the feminized colonial realm. Writers in Russia during the reign of Nicholas I showed the same rhetorical bent. Rostopchina's poem “The Forced Marriage” (1847) allegorized tsarist repression of Poland as an “old Baron's” abuse of his rebellious young wife, wed against her will. The preeminent Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko repeatedly depicted his homeland as a woman ravaged by masculinized Russia, Poland or her own politically dislocated native sons. While preserving the same gender relations, Alexander Odoevsky contrived a contrary myth of powerful masculine seduction in “The Marriage of Georgia and the Russian Kingdom” (1838).

Although Georgia received such treatment more consistently than other regions of the Caucasus, the whole territory was drawn into a rhetoric of feminization and erotic interaction in Bestuzhev-Marlinsky's cycle of récits de voyage which were published separately between 1834 and 1836 and then collected among his “Caucasian Essays”. The Russian word Kavkaz (Caucasus) has masculine gender, but the territory was perceived at the time as the realm of untamed priroda (nature), a feminine noun. Since gender is imbedded in the language, priroda to the Russian ear does not automatically conjure a female personage. To underscore the point we need only to remember how Russian poets usually disregarded the feminine gender of gora (mountain) to favor tropes of masculinization for peaks (tsars, sovereigns, sentries, warriors and giants). Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, however, took feminine priroda as an invitation to personify the Caucasus as a woman, while repressing the grammatical femininity of Rossiia (Russia) itself.