The varied disruptions of imperialist ideology in “The Prisoner of the Caucasus”, “Ammalat-Bek” and “Izmail-Bey” can be appreciated all the more through contrast with largely obscure Russian littérateurs who unreservedly underwrote war against the tribes. Concentrated in the 1830s, these little orientalizers discursively coincided with Pushkin, Bestuzhev-Marlinsky and Lermontov in many respects (cross-cultural encounters, the rhetoric of dread and glory, the preoccupation with wild liberty, violence and eros). But this body of secondrate and purely hack literature entertained no doubts about boundaries between Russia and Asia. Intent upon demonstrating the Caucasus' savage alterity, the little orientalizers administered une thérapeutique du Différent by reducing the tribesman to barbarism and depravity, they sought to assert what Russians were not in order to lend the conquest “European” legitimacy. The romantics' noble primitives with their Homeric machismo, emotional authenticity, ritual hospitality and native songs were thus expelled by the Asian wild man conceived as a repellent animal. In the meantime, though, the Caucasian tribeswoman held her ground as an erotic ideal.

Literary apologetics for imperialism in this period were surely encouraged by the steady rise of the Murid resistance movement under the three imams, Gazi-Muhammed, Hamzat-Beg and Shamil. Like the famous Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, lesser Russian writers in uniform produced literature in this context of intensifying warfare. Alexander Polezhaev and Pyotr Kamensky, for example, were campaigners who conveyed ill will toward the enemy. The ferocity of the fight, the degeneracy of the Muslim warriors and the justness of Russia's cause became standbys in this literature. A lack of biographical information makes it impossible to say if certain authors served in the army.