Mikhail Prishvin and the Kazakh Steppe: Problems of the Evolution of Russian Orientalism During the Late Empire

Abstract

The article, based on the material of the Siberian Diary (1909), as well as the travelogues “Adam and Eve” (1909) and “The Black Arab” (1910), examines the features of the images of the Kazakh steppe in Mikhail Prishvin’s early works. All these texts are based on the materials of one journey, which the writer made from May to December 1909. The article attempts to understand the place of Prishvin’s steppe narrative in the discourse of Russian Orientalism in the late imperial period, when the attitude towards residents of the Asian outskirts in Russian literature underwent certain changes. The main question is whether Prishvin preserved the strategies of Russian Orientalism of the 19th century in his descriptions of the steppe and its nomadic and sedentary inhabitants, or he developed new principles for describing and inventing the inner East of Russia. Speaking about Russian Orientalism, the authors of the article proceed from the idea that this discourse is a product of an imperial culture that seeks to “discover the world” under the conditions of an imaginary division of the world into the colonizing West, the colonized East, and Russia, which is both the subject and object of colonization. Analyzing Kazakh travelogues in the context of Prishvin’s biography and works, as well as the cultural context of the colonial policy of the Russian Empire, the authors come to the conclusion that the writer does not create a special discourse about the East but continues the traditions of classical Russian literature of the 19th century. Describing the inhabitants of the steppe (Russian colonists, the imperial administration, as well as the nomadic and sedentary Turkic population), Prishvin bases on the fundamental oppositions of Russian Orientalism, which help to raise questions about Russia, the Russian character, the goals and means of the Russian expansion to the East: Russian/Asian, wild/civilized, real/imaginary. The specificity of Prishvin’s travelogues also lies in the fact that they were created at the intersection of many - scientific, journalistic, artistic, and administrative - discourses that make up Russian Orientalism. For this reason, a complex and largely contradictory position of the author is formed in the travelogues. Prishvin performs many contradictory roles: he is a humanist philosopher who sympathizes with the patriarchal world of the Kazakhs and the desire for freedom of the Russian people; he is an ethnographer scrupulously recording everything that he sees along the way; he is a romantic ready to dress up in oriental clothes and imagine the magical land of the East, which does not exist; he is an enlightened writer who observes the primitive culture and cruel customs of the Kazakhs and the Russian colonists. Prishvin made a great contribution to the design of a new evolutionary round of Russian Orientalism in the late empire: thanks to his essays of the Kazakh world, the imaginary literary map of Russia at the beginning of the 20th century received a new impetus for a detailed and multifaceted cultural development of the steppe frontier, without which a Russian person trying to determine their place in a world divided into the West and the East is already unthinkable.