Russian Orientalism in a global context: Hybridity, encounter, and representation, 1740-1940

Russian Orientalism in a global context examines the various ways in which Russia’s artistic praxis was affected by encounters – both real and imagined – with the cultures and representational and material traditions of the so-called East or Vostok.

Following the Napoleonic wars, the Russian Empire’s expansionist campaigns led to the annexation of new lands in the Caucasus and Central Asia, resulting in the assimilation of religiously and ethnically diverse groups of people. However, given the country’s perpetually conflicted self-identification as neither fully European nor Asian, the demarcations between “self” and “other” remained ambiguous and elusive, resulting in an Orientalist mode that was prone to hybridity, syncretism, and even self-Orientalization.

This volume reconsiders the relationship between Russia and its non-Western neighbors, looking at how artists, architects, and designers engaged with this relationship from the mid-eighteenth century until the 1930s. 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 and cultural identity. The volume also explores the extent to which cultural practitioners participated in both the advancement and the critique of Russia’s colonial machinery, especially in territories that were on the fault lines between the East and the West.