It may seem surprising and even outright doubtful at the first glance that the three key works of nineteenth-century Russian literature, set in the Caucasus, seem to be so different yet reveal so much structural similarity in their narrative design. A question which suggests itself, therefore, is whether indeed a common feature of liminality underlies the three works by Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tolstoy, or whether reading them in this way is merely tendentious.
I do believe otherwise strongly, and I suggest that discovering the shared quality of liminality in these works really lies at the surface and is justified by several reasons.