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.

Keywords:

• Russian Orientalism
• imperialism
• nationalism
• decolonization
• historiography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a discussion, see Taroutina (2021).

2 For a detailed discussion of the public and critical reception of Christ and the Adulteress, see Gatrall (2010).

3 For a discussion of Vereshchagin’s unorthodox Orientalism, see Webley (2023) and Chernysheva (2014).

4 For a discussion of eighteenth-century Russian Orientalism and Chinoiserie, see Ekaterina Heath and Jennifer Milam (2023) and Leigh and Taroutina (2023).

5 This phrase was originally formulated in French as “Grattez le Russe et vous trouverez le Tatare.” It has been variously attributed to de Maistre, Napoleon Bonaparte, and even Madame de Staël.

6 On self-orientalization or “internal” Russian Orientalism, see Kobrin (2008) and Kurbanovskii (2011).

7 A kokoshnik is a semi-circular traditional Russian headdress worn by women and girls. It was typically constructed from light metal or heavy paper and decorated with golden thread, sewn crystals, pearls, and glass beads.

8 For example, see Sharp (2006), Warren (2013), Marten-Finnis (2013) and Christensen (2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National University of Singapore: [grant number A-0007143-00-00].

Notes on contributors

Maria Taroutina

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 (2018), which was awarded the 2019 University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies. Taroutina has also co-edited three volumes: Byzantium/Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity (2015); New Narratives of Russian and East European Art: Between Traditions and Revolutions (2020); and Russian Orientalism in a Global Context: Hybridity, Encounter and Representation, 1740–1940 (2023), in addition to a guest issue of the journal Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture (2019). She is currently working on two new book projects: a monograph on Mikhail Vrubel and a study of Russian Orientalist painting.