The extent of young Tolstoy's failure to displace the inherited literary Caucasus became increasingly apparent in the postwar decades. Far from supplanting his predecessors, Tolstoy was overshadowed by them in this field. Following Shamil's defeat, The Cossacks, “The Raid” and “The Wood-felling” died away with virtually no echo. The works inspired no literary imitators and failed to win acceptance as corroborative material in histories of the conquest. In diametrical contrast, hapless versifiers and popular novelists such as Vasily Nemirovich-Danchenko (1844 or 1845–1936) emulated the romantic élan of Pushkin, Bestuzhev-Marlinsky and Lermontov after Shamil was vanquished. But even more significantly, “The Prisoner of the Caucasus”, “Ammalat-Bek”, “Izmail-Bey” and other romantic works were upheld as insightful illuminations of the past and selectively appropriated to constitute the history of the conquest as a civilizing mission.

Epigone belles-lettres and popular history violated romantic discourse by using it to apotheosize the imperialist ideology it had disrupted in its heyday. Young Pushkin, Bestuzhev-Marlinsky and Lermontov had appropriated the Caucasus for their own uses, to be sure. But their writings inscribed passions for revolt and left unresolved a panoply of ideologically unsettling questions about semi-Europeanized Russia's cultural and psychological relations to wild Asia. In the era of conquest history was still open for these writers and their contemporary readerships, uncertain about just how the battle against the tribes would turn out. The epigones who appropriated romanticism after Shamil's surrender had totally different political, cultural and psychological horizons.