From the beginning the Chechen conflict has in essence been an armed revolt against the Russian Federal authorities by one of the country's ethnically based autonomous republics, which in 1991 declared unilaterally that it was seceding from Russia and setting up an independent state. Similar armed conflicts in the form of ‘wars for self-determination’ emerged at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s in several regions of the former USSR (in Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan, in South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia, in the Transdniestria region in Moldova). Almost all of these ended in a victory of sorts for the separatists, but not one of these conflicts has produced an independent state, nor has a political solution to them yet been found.

Context

The federal authorities' attempt to put an end to the separatist regime in Chechnya by force spilled over into the drawn-out and destructive military campaign of 1994–96, culminating in the withdrawal of troops from the republic and the signing of peace agreements in August 1996 and in May 1997. According to official figures, in the first Chechen campaign the federal forces and police alone lost around 4,000 dead. The 1994–96 war in Chechnya led to enormous human and material losses: around 35,000 people were killed, more than one third of the republic's population (almost 450,000, including those who had left before the war) became forced migrants and refugees, while Grozny and many other places suffered severe destruction.

There have always been differences in Western policy towards the war in Chechnya, but among Western governments, at least, the differences have been in emphasis rather than substance. Thus throughout the crisis Western governments have always publicly backed Moscow's policy on Chechnya. The West has refused to recognize Chechnya's claim of independence, and has accepted Moscow's right to defend its territorial integrity, if necessary by force (jus ad bellum). On the other hand, the West has occasionally spoken out against Russia's conduct in the war and the violation of human rights by the Russian authorities (jus in bello), but it has always been reluctant to back such rhetoric with any kind of meaningful sanction. Post-9/11, the West has also become more willing to accept Moscow's argument that Russia's struggle in Chechnya has become a war against militant Islamism as much as a war against separatism. As such, Western leaders have stressed the need for an end to terrorism before any political solution might be viable.

The Western media, on the other hand, tend to portray the Chechen conflict as primarily a war of national liberation. Although rarely spelled out in these terms, the implication of much of the coverage is that the Chechen cause is just. The Chechens have been oppressed by the Russians for the last two hundred years and deserve their independence. The use of force by the Russian authorities is heavily criticized, with the media focusing in particular on the war crimes and human rights violations perpetrated by the Russian forces in Chechnya.

When asked in early 2004 by a journalist about the road to peace in Chechnya, president Putin retorted combatively: ‘Russia does not negotiate with terrorists, we destroy them’. Putin's public eschewing of negotiations with Chechen insurgents is reminiscent of the assertions by past leaders of imperial regimes, and of contemporary democratic Western leaders, most recently in Iraq. The Russian-Chechen war is undoubtedly one of the most protracted, most bitter and bloodiest of the post-Soviet conflicts, involving terrorist acts such as those by Chechen extremists at the Budennovsk hospital, the Dubrovka theatre, and the Beslan school, and by the Russian military's terror-bombing of Grozny and massacre at Samashki. It is also a conflict, however, that involves a complex peace process which has engaged the main protagonists in periodic attempts to reach a settlement through dialogue and negotiations. The peace process in the conflict in Chechnya is littered by a ‘truce’, a ‘treaty’ and several ‘agreements’, though a final peace ‘settlement’ to the conflict remains elusive. While the key issue at the centre of the conflict is sovereignty for an independent Chechnya, the dynamics of the conflict have developed through several different phases, alternating between military conflict and negotiations. By examining these dynamics we can track how the mutual interaction of the military conflict and the peace process has shaped the parameters of a potential agreement. What might have been the basis for compromise and a settlement at one stage of the conflict may over time become redundant as new issues and new protagonists emerge, and new events transform the nature of the conflict and negotiation.

In December 1994, the Russian federal authorities launched their first attempt to suppress Chechen separatism by military action. After fierce fighting, the Russian army brought practically the whole territory of the republic under its formal control. It was at this point, however, that a guerrilla war started, and the Russian forces began to suffer defeats and considerable losses. According to official figures (probably understated), the military action of 1994–6 cost the lives of more than 30,000 Chechens, and 5,300 Russian soldiers. This war, the economic cost of which is estimated at $5.5 billion (not including the cost of rebuilding the ruined Chechen economy and social sector), was among the main causes of the Russian economic crisis of August 1998, when the state found itself unable to honour its immense debts.

The two-year military operation ended with the signing of the so-called Khasavyurt agreement in August 1996, which allowed for presidential and parliamentary elections in Chechnya. The Russian authorities recognized the winner of the presidential elections, Aslan Maskhadov, as the legitimate head of a Chechen Republic as part of the Russian Federation; this was confirmed by a raft of legislation. In March 1997 Maskhadov went to Moscow and signed a treaty with the President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, by which both sides committed themselves to seeking only peaceful solutions to disputes arising between the Russian Federation and the Chechen Republic.

For Carlyle the contrary of history is not fiction but oblivion, the unraveling of the collective human memory that holds civilization together. History is not a record of civilization; it is civilization itself, the past speaking to the present and to the future through the voice of the historian. Without that animating voice, we would have neither history nor elegy – only gibberish and unmarked graves.

History and the human voice, life and speech, are virtually one in Carlyle's mind. His moving reminiscence of his stonemason father, begun while the body still lay above ground and finished just after it was laid in the grave – an elegy so spontaneous as to be the diary of the mourner as well as a portrait of the dead – is above all a tribute to James Carlyle's powers of speech. ‘Never shall we again hear such speech as that was,’ Carlyle writes, the purest ‘of all the dialects I have ever listened to,’ a ‘full white sunlight.’

James Carlyle died in 1832; three years later, on the occasion of another loss that Carlyle took at least as hard, his father returned to him in a dream. Carlyle had gone to sleep late on the night of 6 March, 1835, after John Stuart Mill, pale and shaken, had told him that the entire first volume of The French Revolution, which Mill had been reading in manuscript, had been inadvertently burnt.

The city is at once an organism and an idea. As an organism, it flourishes and fades, presenting a different aspect to the beholder at each moment in its history. As an idea, the city has haunted the human imagination with a fixity equaled perhaps only by the idea of time or of God. The new industrial towns of the nineteenth century were probably as unlike the early cities of the Fertile Crescent as hell is from heaven, yet we still apprehend and describe cities in archetypal patterns that predate ancient Babylon or Tyre. Even the literature of the modern city, like modern man himself, is haunted by recollections of the gods and by the ghosts of the fallen cities they once founded.

The earliest cities were believed to be sacred in origin and to have come into being as the terrestrial counterpart of a celestial model. The golden city that the Evangelist sees at the end of the Apocalypse might stand as the type of all urban foundations: ‘And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband’ (21:2). The vision still dazzles, but the mode of thought is elementally archaic.

Swinburne is a poet not of natural objects but of natural energies – of winds and surging waters. His scale is macrocosmic, his focus less upon the small celandine than upon the spines of mountains, less upon things seen than upon forces felt. At times he is nearly a blind poet, all tongue and ear and touch. His poetry moves away from the art of painting and, in Pater's phrase, aspires to the condition of music; after reading Swinburne one retains not an image but a tonality and a rhythm.

Traditionally, the English poet has prided himself on particularity, which the New Critics exalted as the clearest sign of genius. Donne's ‘bracelet of bright haire about the bone’ has dazzled readers for nearly a century. Our very conception of poetry has been shaped by the practices of the metaphysical poets and by Keats's dictum that the poet must have ‘distinctness for his luxury.’ We are at a loss in reading a poet who, like Swinburne, is diffuse not by default but by design.

From the perspective of Keats's principles, Gerard Manley Hopkins is in the mainstream of nineteenth-century verse and Swinburne is the eccentric. For Hopkins's attempt to etch in words the dappled individuality of things was as much a cultural as a personal preoccupation.

A lover of beauty in all of its forms, but especially of the male figure, Walter Pater suffered the misfortune of being incarnate in an ungainly body surmounted by a large, unlovely head. His contemporaries were invariably struck by the disparity between Pater's unprepossessing person and his finely wrought prose, in which he celebrates a beauty which no mirror could ever return. Pater ends the most artful of his Imaginary Portraits – of Watteau, the ‘Prince of Court Painters’ – with a sentence that might serve as his own epitaph: ‘He was always a seeker after something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all.’

Such a temperament is intrinsically elegiac, fixated on the fleeting – the heady scent of roses the moment before they fade or on the handsome faces of the freshly dead. These ‘still lifes’ are artfully planted throughout Pater's writings, perhaps most memorably at the end of Emerald Uthwart, the most self-illuminating of his imaginary portraits. Two schoolboy companions, their friendship patterned on the ‘Greek’ model, enlist in the army, serve heroically, but are court-martialed for an unspecified crime. The elder is shot before a firing squad, the younger discharged in disgrace. Emerald returns to his birthplace, where he dies of an old gunshot wound and is buried amidst a riot of richly scented roses.

The August 1872 issue of Fors Clavigera opens with a beautifully crisp frontispiece captioned, all in one long line, ‘Part of the Chapel of St. Mary of the Thorn, PISA, as it was 27 years ago.’ Centered directly below the line and completing the caption in almost pained brevity stand the words: ‘Now in Ruins.’ Drawing and caption are emblems of what is to come in the body of ‘Benediction,’ the most remarkable of the ninety-six public letters that comprise Fors Clavigera.

Ruskin's drawing of the chapel, done in his mid-twenties, depicts a Gothic idyll in stone, a delicate filigree of pinnacles and sculptured arcades, rosewindows and shaded gables all bathed in brilliant morning light. Frontispiece, caption, and ensuing text trace a continuous arc from felicity to enraged despair, the letter ending as Ruskin stares in incredulous horror while a Pisan stonemason sets to work demolishing the chapel. ‘Now in Ruins’ is Ruskin's summary judgment upon the fall of a Gothic paradise and the rise in its stead of the aggressively secular, industrialized Europe he detested. But the caption also carries a more private significance. For the long course of years between Ruskin's first drawing the chapel and witnessing its destruction1 also saw the wreckage of his own hopes of ever gaining mastery over his disordered life. His books were becoming increasingly fragmentary and idiosyncratic.

Late in life, from the chilling perspective of a posthumous self, Charles Darwin wrote a brief account of his own origins. ‘I have attempted to write the following account of myself, as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life.’ Darwin pushes the act of self-objectification to its theoretical limits: he gazes into the autobiographer's mirror and sees, staring back, not Charles Darwin but an aged instance of the species homo sapiens. Writing of himself as a dead man is not at all difficult, he tells us, ‘for life is nearly over with me.’ The central activity of his life had been the collecting and interpreting of natural phenomena. Now, believing himself to be at life's end, he collects himself, a specimen dispassionately impaled on the keen pin of his selfobservation.

Darwin began his Recollections of the Development of my Mind and Character late in May of 1876, when he was sixty-seven years old. He wrote quickly and casually and, except for some later additions, completed the work in ten weeks. Twice in the opening paragraph he refers to the Recollections as a 'sketch,’ with all the rapidity and informality the word implies. In no sense a full-scale selfportrait, the Recollections constitute a discontinuous narrative, by turns anecdotal and reflective, that captures the features of an old man in search of his formative self and desirous of preserving his past for his progeny.

Forty years ago, at an exhibition of Ruskin memorabilia, I was drawn to a large cardboard sheet covered with irregular pencil lines. Seen up close, the halting hand, once exquisitely controlled in drawing the spring of a Gothic arch or a wayside thistle, struggled to form two proper names: the lowest and the last of Ruskin's attempted signatures dropped off the edge of the page.

‘Dear me! I seem to have forgotten how to write my own name,’ Ruskin apologized to an autograph collector who had travelled to Brantwood, his Lake District home in his later years (35:xxxix). Just before lapsing into his last, largely mute decade, in country hallowed by the great English poet of memory, Ruskin had completed the triumphant close of Praeterita, the last words he ever wrote for publication. He had struggled to complete twentyeight of an originally projected thirty-six chapters of his autobiography, issued irregularly between 1885 and 1889, in lucid intervals between ever more frequent and incapacitating attacks of madness. The most devastating occurred soon after he drew a black line at the bottom of the last page and wrote, ‘End / Brantwood. / 19th June, 1889.’ Thereafter, until his death on January 20, 1900, he lived an essentially posthumous existence under the benign custody of his Scottish cousin, Joan Agnew Severn, who appears as a young girl in the final chapter of Praeterita.

I cannot take my eyes from an old watercolor of Oxford, her many spires rising in the checkered sunlight above the lush verdure of meadows and hills. Pastoral landscape and ancient town are caught in perfect equipoise, the greens of the tree tops encircling the muted greys of the myriad towers and pinnacles of the University, ‘green shouldering grey,’ as Gerard Manley Hopkins phrased it.1 John Wycliffe, the great early translator of the Bible, called Oxford ‘the Vineyard of the Lord.’ For a millennium the town and the university which rose from its center have figured as a kind of urban Eden in the English imagination.

But by the mid-nineteenth century, Oxford had become an endangered Eden, increasingly blighted by industrialization and suburbanization, and fragmented as an ideal site where faith and reason, spirit and intellect, nature and architecture had once harmoniously joined in one spot. For successive generations Oxford had a way of profoundly and lastingly affecting her graduates, a disproportionate number of whom rose to high position in the Anglican Church and in government. In the world of literature, John Henry Newman, Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins all fell under Oxford's spell. ‘Beautiful city!’ Arnold apostrophized a quarter of a century after first seeing her spires:

In the first days of the century just passed, the British buried their Queen with an empire's lamentation. Plump but diminutive, aged and wasted by disease, Victoria was lowered into a casket crowded with memorabilia: bracelets, rings, lockets of hair, plaster casts of the hands of those she loved, the dressing gown of her long-mourned Albert. Her coffin was as cluttered as the mantelpieces of her subjects, whose compulsion to collect expressed their need to grasp at stability in a world in radical transformation.

The Victorians who speak to us most urgently today thought of themselves as living not in an age of peace or progress but, in John Stuart Mill's phrase, in ‘an age of transition,’ caught between a vanishing past and an uncertain future. Such an unsettled cultural climate provided rich soil for the flourishing of elegy. The Gothic Revival embodied this nostalgia in stone. When the ancient Houses of Parliament spectacularly burned to the ground on the night of 16 October 1834, the nation chose to rehouse its government in an edifice that looked back longingly to the Middle Ages. Oxford, the home of lost causes and itself a kind of medieval Eden of cloistered spires and chiming bells, gave rise to the Oxford Movement, which sought to revive the fervor and ancient rituals of the medieval Church, a movement that led in time to the conversion to Catholicism of two of our most greatly gifted elegists, John Henry Newman and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Within a week of his father's death, Tennyson slept in the dead man's bed, ‘earnestly desiring to see his ghost, but no ghost came.’ Years later, recalling his failed effort to conjure his father's spirit, he remarked that ‘a poet never sees a ghost.’ Tennyson's comment is at least as strange as his disquieting act. For it could be said that he saw nothing but ghosts; his greatest poetry is about absence rather than presence, about vanished persons and shadowy places, particularly the long and vivifying shadow cast over his life by the passing of Arthur Hallam.

Hallam and Tennyson met as undergraduates at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the four years of their friendship, until Hallam's death at the age of twentytwo, marked the ‘most emotionally intense period he ever knew.’ There is no reason whatever to doubt this judgment of Robert B. Martin, the best of Tennyson's modern biographers, or to question Sir Charles Tennyson's account of his grandfather's devastated response to the ‘brutal stroke [that] annihilated in a moment a love passing the love of women. The prop, round which his own growth had twined itself for four fruitful years, was suddenly removed.’

Hallam died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Vienna on 15 September 1833. The bad tidings reached Tennyson and his sister, Emily, to whom Hallam was engaged, in the first week of October.