Eros and Empire in Russian Literature about Georgia

Bibliographic Data

ID4215548
AuthorsSusan Layton (Institut des Mondes Africains, corresponding author)
Year1992
Volume51
Issue2
Pages195-213
Publication date1992-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSlavic Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0037-6779 • E-ISSN: 2325-7784
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2499527
OpenAlexW2321031142
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited2

In recent years a growing body of studies has analyzed the discursive practices used by Europeans to constitute the Asian, African and American Indian as the less civilized other. A most influential contribution has been Edward Said'sOrientalism.Although Said deals essentially with western responses to the Islamic east, his work contains many insights germane to nineteenth century Russian literature stimulated by tsarist expansion into the Caucasus. The Russian case, however, presents interesting variations on Said's model. Russia itself was only semi-europeanized, so that it was more problematic to build constructs of Asiatic alterity. The sense that there was no absolute division between "us" and the "Asiatics" produced extraordinarily ambivalent representations of Caucasian Muslim tribesmen in Russian literature. In "Ammalat- Bek," for example, Alexander Marlinskii defended the tsarist conquest of the tribes as a European civilizing mission and yet expressed intense self-identification with the freedom and machismo of the Caucasian wild man

Alterity · Ambivalence · Ancient history · CONQUEST · Empire · Islam · Orientalism · Theology · Cultural, Linguistic, Economic Studies · History · Philosophy · Soviet and Russian History

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