As we exchange remarks about the impetus and impact of time & place in the generation of ecocritical discourse, I am reminded of Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope. There is a certain imbrication of time, place and person and the question, for me, of who has access to the ecopoetical sublime and when. I wonder if the literary theory derived from Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope might provide a further intriguing dimension to the comparative arguments deployed in the analysis of the literature of the Caucasus. A quick look at the Wikipedia entry on “chronotope” nets references to the work of Timo Müller including “The Ecology of Literary Chronotopes” which suggestively visits varying valorizations in Bakhtin: novel over poetry, time over space, linear over cyclical time, cultural chronotopes over chronotopes derived from nature. I wonder if these contrasting valorizations can be seen as contested in the language moves you identify in Tolstoy (e.g. the interpretation of self-reflexive verb structures as indicative of subject-object relations) and in Mamakaev’s universe where rocks speak. Of course, Bakhtin’s relevance may be offside and merely a pretext to asking about temporality at play in the topographies: do Mamakaev’s rocks speak from beyond time — from a before to a future — whereas Tolstoy is circumscribed by history and cannot articulate a future out of the past?