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

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jun 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526166227

Book preview

Russian Orientalism in a global context

SERIES EDITORS

Amelia G. Jones, Marsha Meskimmon

Rethinking Art’s Histories aims to open out art history from its most basic structures by foregrounding work that challenges the conventional periodisation and geographical subfields of traditional art history, and addressing a wide range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present.

These books will acknowledge the impact of recent scholarship on our understanding of the complex temporalities and cartographies that have emerged through centuries of world-wide trade, political colonisation and the diasporic movement of people and ideas across national and continental borders.

To buy or to find out more about the books currently available in this series, please go to: https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/series/rethinking-arts-histories/

Russian Orientalism in a global context

Hybridity, encounter, and representation, 1740–1940

Edited by

Maria Taroutina and Allison Leigh

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2023

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 6623 4 hardback

First published 2023

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or any third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover: Vasili Vereshchagin, A Eunuch before the Door of the Harem, c.1870. Regional M. Vrubel Art Museum, Omsk/Bridgeman Images.

Typeset

by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire

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

Vera Tolz

Introduction

Maria Taroutina

1Western or non-Western? The case of Russian art

Allison Leigh

2Perceptions of China and Russian chinoiserie under Empress Elisabeth Petrovna

Ekaterina Heath and Jennifer Milam

3The picturesque Caucasus of Grigorii Gagarin and Vasilii Timm

Andrew M. Nedd

4From the Alhambra to St. Petersburg: Karl Rakhau’s Orientalizing interiors

Katrin Kaufmann

5The Orient estranged: Vasilii Vereshchagin’s Blowing from Guns in British India

John Webley

6The man in the purple coat: art and empire in Ilia Repin’s Reception of Volost Elders

Nikita Balagurov

7How the Orient was Russianized: texts, images, and the popular imagination from Eruslan Lazarevich to Ruslan and Liudmila

Hanna Chuchvaha

8From Zen Buddhism to the zero of form: exoticism, mysticism, and the East in Kazimir Malevich’s early works

Maria Taroutina

9Pavel Kuznetsov’s distant and strange agricultural laborers

Marie Gasper-Hulvat

10 Soviet propaganda posters and Islamic art: mobilizing artistic heritage in 1920s Uzbekistan

Mollie Arbuthnot

Afterword: Peripheral horizons: Russian Orientalism in a global context

Mary Roberts

Selected bibliography

Index

Plates

1Ivan Argunov, Portrait of the Kalmyk Girl Annushka , 1767, oil on canvas, 62 × 50 cm. Kuskovo Estate Museum, Moscow. Photo © The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo.

2Aleksei Grekov, Drawing of a Vessel of the Chinese Moon-Flask Type , Russia, 1736, watercolor, ink, and gold. State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo © State Hermitage Museum; photograph by Vladimir Terebenin.

3Figurines (The Chinese) , Russian Imperial Porcelain Factory, 1752–60, between 18.2 × 12.2 × 6.4 and 19 × 7.7 × 6.9 cm. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo © State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

4Grigorii Gagarin, Battle of Akhatla between Russians and Circassians on May 8, 1841 , 1841–42, oil on canvas, 124 × 142 cm. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo © DeA Picture Library / Art Resource, NY.

5Karl Rakhau and Karl Kol’man, La Tour des Infantes à l’Alhambra. Restaurée. Coupe transversale , 1863, ink, watercolor and gilding on paper, 150 × 119.7 cm. Scientific-Research Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts (NIMRAKh), St. Petersburg. Inv. no. A-13382. Photo courtesy of NIMRAKh.

6Vasilii Vereshchagin , Crucifixion by the Romans , 1887, oil on canvas, 300.9 × 401.3 cm. Private Collection. Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images.

7Vasilii Vereshchagin, A Gun (study for the painting Suppression of the Indian Revolt by the English ), 1882–83, oil on wood, 22.5 × 28 cm. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo © State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

8Ilia Repin, Reception of Volost Elders by Alexander III in the Courtyard of the Petrovsky Palace in Moscow , 1886, oil on canvas, 292.7 × 490 cm. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photo © State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

9Ilia Repin, Delegation of Volost Elders in front of Alexander III , 1884, oil on wood, 40.5 × 55.5 cm. Museum of Art in Lodz. Photo © Museum of Art in Lodz.

10 Vasilii Masiutin, Ruslan , 1922, from Alexander Pushkin’s Ruslan i Liudmila: poema v shesti pesniakh , Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Trimag, 2014, lithograph. Artwork © Izdatel’stvo Trimag. Photo: Hanna Chuchvaha.

11 Kazimir Malevich, Holy Shroud or Entombment , 1908, gouache on cardboard, 23.4 × 37.3 cm. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photo © Alinari Archives / Art Resource, NY.

12 Kazimir Malevich, Tree of Life with Dryads , 1908, watercolor and gouache on cardboard, 17.7 × 18.5 cm. Vladimir Tsarenkov Collection. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

13 Pavel Kuznetsov, The Crimean Collective Farm , 1928, oil on canvas, 176 × 145 cm. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / UPRAVIS, Moscow.

14 Pavel Kuznetsov, Grape Harvest , 1928, oil on canvas, 178 × 142.5 cm. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / UPRAVIS, Moscow.

15 Unknown artist, Woman Worker, Peasant, Worker’s Wife! Hurry to the Delegate Elections! , late 1920s, lithograph, 72 × 110 cm. Text in Russian and Uzbek (Arabic script). Central State Museum of the Contemporary History of Russia (GTsMSIR), Moscow. Photo © GTsMSIR.

16 Unknown artist, Without the Active Participation of Women in Production We Cannot Establish the Republic’s Economy , early 1920s, lithograph, 71.5 × 55 cm. Text in Russian and Uzbek (Arabic script). Mardjani Foundation, Moscow, Inv. no. IM/p-88. Photo © Mardjani Foundation.

Figures

0.1 Jean - Léon Gérôme, Snake Charmer , 1879, oil on canvas, 82.2 × 121 cm. The Clark Art Institute, Williamsburg, MA, Inv. no. 1955.51. Image courtesy Clark Art Institute (clarkart.edu). Public domain.

0.2 Map showing the evolution of the Russian Empire from 1533 to 1965. Image provided by Wikitree. Public domain.

0.3 Vasilii Vereshchagin, Selling a Slave Boy , 1872, oil on canvas, 123 × 92.4 cm. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photo © State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

1.1 US and Canadian dissertations on Russian and Soviet Art (completed and in-progress) located by Subject Category from 2010–2020; according to the College Art Association as of January 2022.

1.2 CAA book reviews by geographic area subjects as of March 2021.

1.3 J. F. Horrabin, The World According to Herodotus , 1923, from H.G. Wells’ The Outline of History . Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

1.4 Unidentified artist, Christ Pantocrator , 1839, tempera on wood with silver and enamel, 26.7 × 22.1 cm. Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens, Washington DC. Photo © Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens; photograph by Terrence D. McArdle.

1.5 Unidentified artist, Parsuna Portrait of Prince Mikhail Vasilievich Skopin-Shuisky , c. 1630, limewood, egg tempera, and gesso on linen, 41 × 33 cm. State Historical Museum, Moscow. Photo © Album / Alamy Stock Photo.

1.6 Vasilii Koren, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse , 1693, from Koren Picture-Bible, pl. 22. State Pushkin Museum, Moscow. Photo © Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo.

1.7 Kazimir Malevich, The Black Square , 1915, oil on canvas, 79.5 × 79.5 cm. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

2.1 Johannes Engelbrecht and Gottfried Jakob Mayr, Tea service and stand , c. 1725–32, Meissen porcelain on a silver-gilt stand. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Public domain.

2.2 Moon flask , China, late sixteenth to early seventeenth century, bronze, enamel, gold plate. Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), St. Petersburg, MAE collection no. 671–20. Photo © Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences.

2.3 Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli, Décoration de la Salle du milieu du palais de Sarskezelau ornè de porcelaine du Japon, dont les l’ambris ont etez faitte à la chine du réigne de l’empereur Piere Premier , 1753, watercolour and ink. Biblioteka Narodowa, Warsaw. Photo courtesy Polona digital library. Public domain.

2.4a Table snuffbox , Russia, probably Velikiy Ustyug, c. 1745–50, gilded silver, niello, and partly polished green turban shell, 5.7 × 10.5 × 6.4 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Bequest of Emma A. Sheafer, by exchange, and Rogers Fund, 1995. Public domain.

2.4b Table snuffbox (interior view), Russia, probably Velikiy Ustyug, c. 1745–50, gilded silver, niello, and partly polished green turban shell, 5.7 × 10.5 × 6.4 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Bequest of Emma A. Sheafer, by exchange, and Rogers Fund, 1995. Public domain.

2.4c Table snuffbox (with a carving based on a print designed by Jacques de Lajoue), Russia, Velikiy Ustyug, c. 1745–50, gilded silver, niello, and partly polished green turban shell, 5.7 × 10.5 × 6.4 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Bequest of Emma A. Sheafer, by exchange, and Rogers Fund, 1995. Public domain.

3.1 Vasilii Timm, Shamil, Painted From Life, St. Petersburg October 6, 1859 , 1859, from Russkii khudozhestvennyi listok , St. Petersburg: V Tip. N. Grecha, no. 32, color lithograph, 52 × 35.3cm. New York Public Library, New York. Public domain.

3.2 Grigorii Gagarin, Chirvan, Bayadères de Chemakha , 1847, from Le Caucase pittoresque dessiné d’après nature par le prince Grégoire Gagarine; avec une introduction et un texte explicatif par le comte Ernest Stackelberg , Paris: Plon frères, pl. XLI, lithograph, 37 × 52 cm. New York Public Library, New York. Public domain.

3.3 Grigorii Gagarin, The Meeting of General Klüke von Klügenau and Imam Shamil , 1849, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photo © HIP / Art Resource, NY.

3.4 Vasilii Timm, Some of the Deputies of the Asian Peoples, Subject to Russia, Who Were in Moscow on the Occasion of the Sacred Coronation in 1856 , 1857, from Russkii khudozhestvennyi listok , no. 16, lithograph, 52 × 35.3 cm. New York Public Library, New York. Public domain.

3.5 Vasilii Timm, Views of Dagestan and the Types of People Who Live There , 1859, from Russkii khudozhestvennyi listok , no. 34, lithograph, 52 × 35.3 cm. New York Public Library, New York. Public domain.

3.6 Vasilii Timm, Shamil in Saint Petersburg , 1859, from Russkii khudozhestvennyi listok , no. 32, lithograph, 35.3 × 52 cm. New York Public Library, New York. Public domain.

4.1 Portrait of Karl Rakhau , 1882, from Zodchii , pl. 1. National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg. Photo courtesy National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg.

4.2 Karl Rakhau, Nasrid Sebka ornamentation (Alhambra), 1860–61, pencil and watercolor on paper, 32 × 24 cm. Scientific-Research Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts (NIMRAKh), St. Petersburg, Inv. no. A-22767. Photo courtesy of NIMRAKh.

4.3 Karl Rakhau, Draft of a wall of the neo-Moorish cabinet at San-Galli Villa in St. Petersburg, c. 1870, pencil on paper, 30 × 20 cm. Dom Arkhitektora, St. Petersburg. Photo by Katrin Kaufmann.

4.4a Muqarnaṣ in the oriel of the neo-Moorish cabinet at San-Galli Villa in St. Petersburg. Photo by Katrin Kaufmann.

4.4b Niche with peacocks in the neo-Moorish cabinet at San-Galli Villa in St. Petersburg. Photo by Katrin Kaufmann.

4.5 Workshop of Rafael Contreras, Model of a door in the Alhambra (Granada) , mid-nineteenth century, plaster, paint, and wood, 42.9 × 24.8 × 2.5 cm. Scientific-Research Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts (NIMRAKh), St. Petersburg, Inv. no. AM-498. Photo courtesy of NIMRAKh.

5.1 After Vasilii Vereshchagin, Blowing from Guns in British India , 1890, photogravure print, dimensions unknown. Library of Congress, Washington DC. Photo © The American Art Association of New York, original painting lost or destroyed.

5.2 Vasilii Vereshchagin, Hanging in Russia , 1884–85, oil on canvas, 285 × 398 cm. State Museum of the Political History of Russia, St. Petersburg. Photogravure reproduction made in 1890 by the American Art Association of New York. Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Online Virtual Archives.

5.3 Death of Major Skene and His Wife at Jhansi , 1860, from Charles Ball’s History of the Indian Mutiny , London: London Printing and Publishing Company. Photo courtesy of Princeton Theological Seminary.

5.4 Blowing Mutinous Sepoys from Guns , 1860, from Charles Ball’s History of the Indian Mutiny , London: London Printing and Publishing Company. Photo courtesy of Princeton Theological Seminary.

5.5 Execution of Mutineers at Peshawur: Blowing from the Guns, etc. , October 3, 1857, from Illustrated London News , issue 881, page 329, wood engraving. Wellcome Collection, London. Public domain.

6.1 Of Different Governorates , 1883, from Group Photographs of the Elders Participating in the 1883 Coronation Celebrations , albumen print on mat, 21.6 × 32.6 cm. Russian National Library. Public domain.

6.2 Ilia Repin, Annual Meeting in Memory of the French Communards at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris , 1883, oil on canvas, 38.5 × 61.2 cm. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photo © State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

6.3 Bread and Salt to our Father the Tsar, the Peasants of Arkhangelsk Governorate , 1883, from Group Photographs of the Elders Participating in the 1883 Coronation Celebrations , albumen print on mat, 21.6 × 32.6 cm. Russian National Library. Public domain.

6.4 Ilia Repin, Reception of Volost Elders by Alexander III in the Courtyard of the Petrovsky Palace in Moscow , 1885, oil on canvas, 35.2 × 47.5 cm. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photo © State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

7.1 Unidentified artist, Eruslan Lazarevich , before 1766, from Russkiia narodnyia kartinki , sobral i opisal D. A. Rovinskii (St. Petersburg: Ekspeditsiia zagotovleniia gos., 1881), woodcut. Slavic and East European Collections, Rare Book Division, New York Public Library, New York. Public domain.

7.2 Vasilii Masiutin, Chernomor , 1922, from Alexander Pushkin’s Ruslan i Liudmila: poema v shesti pesniakh , Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Trimag, 2014, lithograph. Artwork © Izdatel’stvo Trimag. Photo by Hanna Chuchvaha.

7.3 Sergei Maliutin, Fight of Ruslan and Chernomor , 1899, from Alexander Pushkin’s Ruslan i Liudmila: poema v shesti pesniakh , (2014), Moscow: Izdanie A.I. Mamontova, watercolor. Amherst College, Center for Russian Culture. Photo courtesy Amherst College, Center for Russian Culture.

7.4 Sergei Chekhonin, Abduction of Liudmila , 1923, illustration from Alexander Pushkin’s Ruslan i Liudmila: poema v shesti pesniakh , reproduced in Abram Efros and Nikolai Punin’s S. Chekhonin , Moscow and St. Petersburg, Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1923. Yale University Library. Photo by Hanna Chuchvaha.

8.1 Vasilii Vereshchagin, Three Main Gods in a Chingacheling Buddhist Monastery in Sikkim , 1875, oil on canvas, 28.2 × 40.8 cm. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photo © State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

8.2 Attributed to the workshop of Andrei Rublev, Lamentation (Entombment) , 1425–27, Moscow School, tempera on wood, 88 × 68 cm. Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, Sergiev Posad, Russia. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

8.3 Unidentified Japanese artist, Shaka (Shakyamuni), the Historical Buddha, with Two Attendant Bodhisattvas and Sixteen Arhats , late fourteenth century, ink, color, gold, and cut gold on silk, 236.9 × 87 cm (overall with mounting). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain.

8.4 Tosa Yukihiro, Parinirvana , fifteenth century, Japan, ink and color on silk, 158 × 108 cm. Collection of Dora Wong on loan to the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida. Photo couresty Norton Museum of Art.

8.5 Kazimir Malevich, Portrait of a Woman , middle to second half of the 1900s, paper, colored paper, ink, gouache, and sticker, 7.7 × 7.7 cm (image), 15.9 × 15.7 cm (overall with mounting). State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo © State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

8.6 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White , 1918, oil on canvas, 79.4 × 79.4 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

9.1 Pavel Kuznetsov, Evening on the Steppe , 1912, oil on canvas, 96.7 × 105.1 cm. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / UPRAVIS, Moscow.

9.2 Cover of the State Tretyakov Gallery’s Vystavka Kartin Zasluzhennogo Deiatelia Iskusstva Prof. Zhivopisi Pavla Kuznetsova , 1929. André Savine Collection, Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill. © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / UPRAVIS, Moscow.

9.3 Pavel Kuznetsov, Tobacco Growers , 1925–26, oil on canvas, 97 × 107 cm. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / UPRAVIS, Moscow.

9.4 Pavel Kuznetsov, Shepherd’s Rest , 1927, tempera on canvas, 106 × 124 cm. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / UPRAVIS, Moscow.

10.1 Unknown artist, Fundamental Instructions for Village Soviet and District Executive Committees , 1926–27, lithograph, 71.6 × 53.5 cm. Text in Uzbek (Arabic script). State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), Moscow, Archival Fund no. GA RF. F. R-3316. Op. 48.D. 85. L. 16. Photo © State Archive of the Russian Federation.

10.2 Unknown artist, The Prophet’s Mosque in Medina , 1913, lithograph, 54.8 × 72.5 cm. Mardjani Foundation, Moscow, Inv. no. IM/Sh-103. Photo © Mardjani Foundation.

10.3 Kamal al-din Bihzad, Layla and Majnun , c. 1490, from Boris Denike’s Iskusstvo Vostoka: ocherk istorii musul’manskogo iskusstva , Kazan: Kombinat izdatel’stva i pechati ATSSR, 1923. Photo courtesy Russian State Library.

10.4 Unknown artist, The Domestic Recluses and the Working Women of Turkestan! , early 1920s, lithograph, 71.4 × 55 cm. Text in Uzbek and Kazakh (Arabic script). Mardjani Foundation, Moscow, Inv. no. IM/p-82. Photo © Mardjani Foundation.

10.5 Usto Mumin [aka Alexander Nikolaev], Untitled Poster , 1933, lithograph, 69.6 × 105 cm. Text in Russian and Uzbek (Latin script). Mardjani Foundation, Moscow, Inv. no. IM/p-15. Photo © Mardjani Foundation.

Contributors

Mollie Arbuthnot is a junior research fellow in history and Slavonic studies at Jesus College, University of Cambridge. She specializes in visual and material culture in the Soviet Union—including mass media, propaganda, and theories of viewership—with particular interest in the cultural history of the Soviet national republics, especially Uzbekistan. She received her PhD from the University of Manchester, and taught at Durham University, before joining Cambridge in 2021.

Nikita Balagurov is a visiting doctoral researcher at Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki and a PhD candidate at Lund University. His dissertation examines practices of preservation, narrativization, and display of royal objects and interiors in the nineteenth-century Russian Empire. Balagurov is a co-organizer of the monthly 19v Art History Seminar hosted by the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University.

Hanna Chuchvaha is Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary. Hanna’s research focuses on the history of graphic design, word and image, print culture, art reproduction, arts and crafts, women art collectors, and the art of trauma. Her first book was titled Art Periodical Culture in Late Imperial Russia (1898–1917): Print Modernism in Transition (Brill, 2016). Currently she is working on a monograph devoted to women collectors in late Imperial Russia. This project was awarded the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant for 2021–23.

Marie Gasper-Hulvat is Associate Professor of Art History at Kent State University at Stark. Her research interests include early Stalinist art, visual culture, and exhibition practices as well as the pedagogy of art history. She is currently working on a monograph on the multiple identities of Kazimir Malevich during the early Stalinist era. Her work has been published in Print Quarterly and The Space Between, amongst other journals, and in edited volumes from Routledge and Bloomsbury Academic.

Ekaterina Heath is a research associate at the University of Sydney. She has published essays on Russian eighteenth-century art and gardens. Her recent articles include Grand Tour Memories in Maria Fedorovna’s Pavlovsk Park, St. Petersburg, 1782–1825 (with Emma Gleadhill), Giving Women History: A History of Ekaterina Dashkova Through her Gifts to Catherine the Great and Others, and Sowing the Seeds for Strong Relations: Seeds and Plants as Diplomatic Gifts for the Russian Empress Maria Fedorovna. With Jennifer Milam, she is working on a project on women’s patronage of art and garden design in eighteenth-century Russia.

Katrin Kaufmann is an art historian and research associate at the Vitrocentre in Romont. She specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Swiss stained glass. She is currently preparing a monograph on the Paris-based stained glass artist Gaspard Gsell (1814–1914). Previously, she worked for the Canton of Berne’s Department of Historic Preservation and received her PhD from the University of Zurich in 2019 with a dissertation on neo-Moorish Russian architecture and interiors (1830–1917).

Allison Leigh is Associate Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture I at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She is a specialist in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian art and the author of Picturing Russia’s Men: Masculinity and Modernity in 19th-Century Painting (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020). A recipient of the ATLAS Grant (Awards to Louisiana Artists and Scholars) from the Louisiana Board of Regents, she is currently completing a book project tentatively titled Misogyny and Modern Art from Delacroix to Picasso.

Jennifer Milam is Professor of Art History and Pro Vice Chancellor at the University of Newcastle in Australia. She has published essays on Russia’s engagement with China and chinoiserie art forms under Peter I and Catherine II. Her books include A Cultural History of Plants in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Bloomsbury, 2022), Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century (University of Delaware Press, 2021, coedited with Nicola Parsons), Beyond Chinoiserie: Artistic Exchanges Between China and the West during the Late Qing Dynasty (Brill, 2018, coedited with Petra Chu), Historical Dictionary of Rococo Art (Scarecrow Press, 2011), Fragonard’s Playful Paintings: Visual Games in Rococo Art (Manchester University Press, 2007), and Women, Art, and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Routledge, 2003, coedited with Melissa Hyde). With Ekaterina Heath, she is writing a book on women’s patronage of art and garden design in eighteenth-century Russia.

Andrew M. Nedd is Professor of Art History at the Savannah College of Art and Design specializing in Russian art of the late Imperial period. He has published essays in anthologies dealing with art, war, and empire in Russia. He recently served as guest editor of a special issue of the journal Arts titled World War, Art, and Memory: 1914 to 1945.

Mary Roberts is Professor of Art History, University of Sydney. Working at the intersection of Modernism and Orientalism, she pursues global networks that inform nineteenth-century European and Islamic art. Her books include Istanbul Exchanges (University of California Press, 2015), awarded AAANZ’s Book Prize and translated into Turkish, and Intimate Outsiders (Duke, 2007). She co-edited The Poetics and Politics of Place: Ottoman Istanbul and British Orientalism (University of Washington Press, 2011), Edges of Empire (Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), Orientalism’s Interlocutors (Duke University Press, 2002), and Refracting Vision (University of Washington Press, 2000). She has held fellowships at the Getty, CASVA, YCBA, and the Clark. Her next book is titled Four Thresholds: Orientalist Interiors, Islamic Art, the Aesthetics of Global Modernities.

Maria Taroutina is Associate Professor of Art History at Yale–NUS College in Singapore and specializes in the art of Imperial and early Soviet Russia. She is the author of The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival, which was awarded the 2019 University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies. Taroutina has also co-edited two volumes, Byzantium/Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity (Brill, 2015) and New Narratives of Russian and East European Art: Between Traditions and Revolutions (Routledge, 2019). She is currently working on two new book projects: a monograph on Mikhail Vrubel and a study of Russian imperial visual culture, tentatively titled Exotic Aesthetics: Art, Race, and Representation in Imperial Russia.

Vera Tolz is Sir William Mather Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. She has published widely on various aspects of Russian nationalism and the relationship between intellectuals and the state in the imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods. Her books include Between Professionalism and Politics: Russian Academicians and Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), Russia: Inventing the Nation (Bloomsbury, 2001), Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Nation, Ethnicity and Race on Russian Television (Routledge, 2015). From 2012 to 2016, Tolz was co-director of the UK’s Centre for East European Language-Based Area Studies. She is an elected Fellow of the UK’s Academy of Social Sciences.

John Webley is a doctoral candidate at Yale University in both Slavic Languages and Literature and History of Art. His dissertation examines the cultural discourse between Russia, South Asia, and Britain between 1856 and 1914. John was both a fellow for the Arts and Culture at the Stanford U.S.-Russia Forum and a Kathryn Davis Fellow for Peace at Middlebury College.

Acknowledgements

This volume grew out of a conference panel entitled Looking East: Russian Orientalism in a Global Context, which was held at the 107th Annual Conference of the College Art Association in New York in 2019. We are grateful for the support of the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA), which sponsored the panel, and to all of the contributors to the volume, whose pioneering scholarship sheds crucial new insights into the subject of Russian Orientalism. It has been a real pleasure and privilege to work with and learn from all of them.

We would also like to thank Marsha Meskimmon and Amelia Jones for including this volume in their boundary-pushing Rethinking Art’s Histories series, as well as all the staff at Manchester University Press for their superb assistance throughout the publication process. We are especially grateful to Emma Brennan, the Editorial Director and Senior Commissioning Editor, who remained steadfastly committed to this project from its inception to its completion and has been an absolute pleasure to work with at every stage. Likewise, we are indebted to the two anonymous peer reviewers for their feedback, which was invaluable in expanding our thinking on the various themes and topics addressed in the present publication.

Finally, we are infinitely grateful to our families for their continued encouragement, support, and steadfast enthusiasm for this project and beyond.

Note on stylistic conventions and transliteration

This publication follows the Chicago Manual of Style and adopts a modified form of the Library of Congress transliteration system. In the interest of readability and familiarity, we use the English variants of place names, names of rulers, and commonly established spellings for proper names, for example, Moscow instead of Moskva, Nicholas II rather than Nikolai II, and Alexandre Benois, not Aleksandr Benua. In general, Russian names are given without patronymics unless necessary to avoid confusion. Diacritical marks, accents, and hard signs are generally omitted with the exception of accepted spellings of proper names, and the titles of institutions, movements, and organizations, such as Jean-Léon Gérôme and Musée d’Orsay. Soft signs are indicated with an apostrophe, except in cases of frequently used spellings in western scholarship, such as Igor Grabar instead of Igor’ Grabar’ and Ilia Repin rather than Il’ia Repin. Terms such as the West, the East, the Orient, Orientalism, the Other, the Occident, and Asiatic are capitalized but not placed in quotation marks in order to acknowledge their widespread currency in art historical discourse without the ostensibly neutralizing effects of additional distancing through citation. Ukrainian, rather than Russian, spellings are used for all Ukrainian proper names, for example, Kyiv instead of Kiev, Dnipro rather than Dnieper, and Serhiy not Sergei.

The dates of artworks, exhibitions, important historical events, and the life and death dates for key figures are included in parentheses at first mention. Dates referring to events in Russia that took place before January 1918 are given in the Old Style. Subsequent dates conform to the post-revolutionary Gregorian calendar. The titles of artworks, exhibitions, books, and catalogues are italicized; titles of articles, chapters, and essays, however, are rendered in quotation marks. The names of societies, institutions, and associations are capitalized. All foreign titles are given in English with the original title transliterated in parentheses at first mention, except for recognized names and expressions, such as Exposition Universelle, Peredvizhniki, and Mir iskusstva. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Russian or any other language into English are by the respective author.

Foreword

Accounting for human diversity: the experience of Imperial Russia

Vera Tolz

A key aspect of our understanding of the world is how we make sense of human diversity and the categories we use to describe it. Today, as in the past, the issue dominates public discourses in many societies. This volume tells an important story of how inter- and intra-group difference was understood and represented across three centuries in imperial and early Soviet Russia, one of the most ethnoculturally diverse states that claimed this diversity to be both its major strength and challenge. Despite the obvious significance of Russia’s practices and discourses around an issue that was so central to its political and social existence, Russian experiences are still insufficiently accounted for in the academic literature that theorizes developments pertaining to the rise of a modern, global society.

Visual culture, which is the central focus of Russian Orientalism in a Global Context, offers us a particularly good lens through which to interrogate the ways in which global modernity dealt with human diversity, demonstrating how the modern understanding of personal and group identities was constructed in the process. In the second decade of the twentieth century, Russian cultural theorist Viktor Shklovsky observed that one of the main affective devices of the arts is an act of estrangement [ostranenie]. By complicating representational forms, artists increase the duration and complexity of perception, as the process of perception is, in art, an end in itself and must be prolonged.¹ Because of the specificity of what artists aim to achieve, the results of their creativity cannot be fully understood if seen as a mere reflection of political or socioeconomic structures of dominance. As Susan Layton, one of the first scholars to write about the depiction of the Orient [Vostok] in imperial Russian culture, pointed out, culture should be granted a vital measure of autonomy in our analysis.²

This approach, which the contributors to this volume also adopt, allows us to acknowledge that, through the process of estrangement, art is able to offer a particular multiplicity of meanings, which are inevitably contradictory, multifaceted, and fluctuating. Culture is thus understood as being a result of multi-directional encounters of diverse actors across boundaries, with the capacity to make these boundaries more porous.³ In the process of constructing meaning in relation to a cultural object, the role of the viewer/reader/listener is central and, arguably, more empowering than in the construction of meanings around mass media or strictly political forms of communication. In contrast to art, the latter usually aim to simplify and appeal to familiar stereotypes, rather than to complicate, defamiliarize, and disrupt consensus. Thus, it is through studying culture that we can learn a great deal about the hybrid and idiosyncratic ways by which identities are framed and how multiple levels of identification from the personal and local to the overarching imperial or national interact and play out. Visual culture makes it particularly difficult to obfuscate identities such as race, class, and gender, whose complex intersection directly impacts how communities are imagined.

The period with which Russian Orientalism begins was a time when Europe’s political and cultural predominance and superiority began to be taken for granted and so Eurocentrism became a key ideological underpinning of Russia’s modernization, which was initiated by Peter the Great at the turn of the eighteenth century. From the 1730s onwards, ideologically important narratives, such as the one advanced by the imperial statesman and historian, Vasilii Tatishchev, for the first time depicted Russia as a European empire consisting of a European metropole to the west of the Ural mountains and an Asiatic colonial periphery to the east. Tatishchev likened Russia’s political geography to that of England, the Dutch Republic, the Kingdom of Portugal, and the Crown of Castile, whose metropolitan areas were separated by seas from their possessions outside of Europe.⁴ An understanding that the land mass on which the Russian state was located was neatly divided into two contrasting entities, Europe and Asia, and that the boundary between these was politically and culturally meaningful thus entered Russia’s self-imagination. This imagining was a manifestation of what Edward Said termed Orientalism, a set of discursive practices of constructing European identities by representing the non-European Other as different and often inferior to Europe. As is the case with most umbrella terms, the application of the term Orientalism as an analytical tool can mask major differences between discourses and practices that are subsumed under it. The analysis of culture, and visual art in particular, allows us to avoid reductionism and simplifications and to reveal the multiplicity of ways the self engages with the other by not only creating, but also challenging, divisions at different times and in different settings.

Through its focus on visual art, this book sheds new light on the exclusion/inclusion dynamics in cultural representations of human diversity in Russia and its imperial domains, appropriately positioning the analysis within the wider context of Europe’s colonialism from the mid-eighteenth century to the 1930s. As we can see from the artwork discussed in this book, four concepts, all intellectual constructs inflected by power relations, were used by actors of the time to make sense of human diversity—empire, nationhood [narodnost’, natsional’nost’, narod and natsiia], national religion, and race [rasa and poroda]. Visual art highlights particularly clearly how modes of seeing the world in national terms, as divided into distinct ethnocultural communities, took shape within colonial empires, where the heterogeneity of the subject populations stimulated the attribution of cultural and political significance to perceived physical differences between people. Within the context of often discriminatory and violent domination by Europe/the West over large