Russian Orientalism in a global context

Hybridity, encounter, and representation, 1740–1940

Maria Taroutina, Allison Leigh, Maria Taroutina, Allison Leigh

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781526166234
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526166227
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This volume features new research on Russia's historic relationship with Asia and the ways it was mediated and represented in the fine, decorative and performing arts and architecture from the mid-eighteenth century to the first two decades of Soviet rule. It interrogates how Russia's perception of its position on the periphery of the west and its simultaneous self-consciousness as a colonial power shaped its artistic, cultural and national identity as a heterogenous, multi-ethnic empire. It also explores the extent to which cultural practitioners participated in the discursive matrices that advanced Russia's colonial machinery on the one hand and critiqued and challenged it on the other, especially in territories that were themselves on the fault lines between the east and the west.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of plates
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Note on stylistic conventions and transliteration
• Foreword: Accounting for human diversity: the experience of Imperial Russia
• Introduction
• 1 Western or non-Western? The case of Russian art
• 2 Perceptions of China and Russian chinoiserie under Empress Elisabeth Petrovna
• 3 “The picturesque Caucasus” of Grigorii Gagarin and Vasilii Timm
• 4 From the Alhambra to St. Petersburg: Karl Rakhau’s Orientalizing interiors
• 5 The Orient estranged: Vasilii Vereshchagin’s Blowing from Guns in British India
• 6 The man in the purple coat: art and empire in Ilia Repin’s Reception of Volost Elders
• 7 How the Orient was Russianized: texts, images, and the popular imagination from Eruslan Lazarevich to Ruslan and Liudmila
• 8 From Zen Buddhism to the “zero of form”: exoticism, mysticism, and the East in Kazimir Malevich’s early works
• 9 Pavel Kuznetsov’s “distant and strange” agricultural laborers
• 10 Soviet propaganda posters and Islamic art: mobilizing artistic heritage in 1920s Uzbekistan
• Afterword: Peripheral horizons: Russian Orientalism in a global context
• Selected bibliography
• Index
• Plates