Negotiating between East and West: The Case of Russian Orientalism

Abstract

This article examines Russian Orientalist visual and material culture and its entanglement with, first, imperialist ambitions and racial ideologies and, second, institutional critique and anticolonial resistance. Given the country’s perpetually conflicted self-identification as neither fully European nor Asian, the demarcations between the ‘self’ and the ‘other,’ first theorized by Edward Said, remained ambiguous and elusive in the Russian context, resulting in an Orientalist mode that was prone to hybridity, syncretism, and even self-Orientalization. Through close readings of several representative artworks by Vasilii Vereshchagin, Ilia Repin, and Mikhail Vrubel, among others, the article argues that the instability and rupture inherent in Russian Orientalism open up new modes of studying art in the age of empire that hold important implications for current calls to decolonize art history. Finally, it provides a brief overview of the historiography on Russian Orientalist art and concludes with a discussion of the latter’s ongoing relevance to contemporary Russian culture and politics.