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Here, the author examines Russian thinking about the Orient before the Revolution of 1917. He argues that the Russian Empire's bi-continental geography and the complicated nature of its encounter with Asia have all resulted in a variegated understanding of the East among its people.
The West has been accused of seeing the East in a hostile and deprecatory light, as the legacy of nineteenth-century European imperialism. In this highly original and controversial book, David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye examines Russian thinking about the Orient before the Revolution of 1917. Exploring the writings, poetry, and art of representative individuals including Catherine the Great, Alexander Pushkin, Alexander Borodin, and leading orientologists, Schimmelpenninck argues that the Russian Empire’s bi-continental geography, its ambivalent relationship with the rest of Europe, and the complicated nature of its encounter with Asia have all resulted in a variegated and often surprisingly sympathetic understanding of the East among its people.
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.
A groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East that is—three decades after its first publication—one of the most important books written about our divided world. "Intellectual history on a high order ... and very exciting." —The New York Times In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as "other than" the occident. This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding.
Orientalism – the idea that the standpoint of Western writers on the East greatly affected what they wrote about the East, the "Other" – applied also in Russia and the Soviet Union, where the study of the many exotic peoples incorporated into the Russian Empire, often in quite late imperial times, became a major academic industry, where, as in the West, the standpoint of writers greatly affected what they wrote. Russian/Soviet orientalism had a particularly important impact in Central Asia, where in early Soviet times new republics, later states, were created, often based on the distorted perceptions of scholars in St Petersburg and Moscow, and often cutting across previously existing political and cultural boundaries. The book explores how the Soviet orientalism academic industry influenced the creation of Central Asian nations. It discusses the content of oriental sources and discourses, considers the differences between scholars working in St Petersburg and Moscow and those working more locally in Central Asia, providing a rich picture of academic politics, and shows how academic cultural classification cemented political boundaries, often in unhelpful ways.
This book examines the Russian explorers and officials in the nineteenth and early twentieth century who came into contact with Iran as a part of the Great Game. It demonstrates the development of Russia's own form of Orientalism, a phenomenon that has previously been thought to be exclusive to the West.
Draws on recently declassified and unpublished sources to provide an original and in-depth analysis of Russian and Soviet Iranian studies.
The Groninger Museum has established a reputation for its successful exhibitions about nienteenth-century Russian art. This is the fifth major exhibition that the Groninger Museum has devoted to Russian art in recent years, continuing the series of exceptional presentations of Ilya Repin's oeuvre, Russian landscapes, the circle around Diaghilev and the exhibition on 'Russian legends, folk tales and fairy tales', which was highly popular with families. In this exhibition the Groninger Museum turns the spotlight on the symbolic, aesthetic and moral aspects of Russia's orient. Exhibition: Groninger Museum (19.12.2010-8.5.2011).
Russia's own Orient examines how intellectuals in early twentieth-century Russia offered a new and radical critique of the ways in which Oriental cultures were understood at the time. Out of the ferment of revolution and war, a group of scholars in St. Petersburg articulated fresh ideas about the relationship between power and knowledge, and about Europe and Asia as mere political and cultural constructs. Their ideas anticipated the work of Edward Said and post-colonial scholarship by half a century. The similarities between the two groups were, in fact, genealogical. Said was indebted, via Arab intellectuals of the 1960s who studied in the Soviet Union, to the revisionist ideas of Russian Orientologists of the fin de siècle. But why did this body of Russian scholarship of the early twentieth century turn out to be so innovative? Should we agree with a popular claim of the Russian elites about their country's particular affinity with the 'Orient'? There is no single answer to this question. The early twentieth century was a period when all over Europe a fascination with things 'Oriental' engendered the questioning of many nineteenth-century assumptions and prejudices. In that sense, the revisionism of Russian Orientologists was part of a pan-European trend. And yet, Tolz also argues that a set of political, social, and cultural factors, which were specific to Russia, allowed its imperial scholars to engage in an unusual dialogue with representatives of the empire's non-European minorities. It is together that they were able to articulate a powerful long-lasting critique of modern imperialism and colonialism, and to shape ethnic politics in Russia across the divide of the 1917 revolutions.