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.

Foreword: Accounting for human diversity: the experience of Imperial Russia
Vera Tolz
Introduction
Maria Taroutina
1 Western or non-Western? The case of Russian art
Allison Leigh
2 Perceptions of China and Russian chinoiserie under Empress Elisabeth Petrovna
Ekaterina Heath and Jennifer Milam
3 "The picturesque Caucasus" of Grigorii Gagarin and Vasilii Timm
Andrew M. Nedd
4 From the Alhambra to St. Petersburg: Karl Rakhau's orientalizing interiors
Katrin Kaufmann
5 The Orient estranged: Vasilii Vereshchagin's Blowing from Guns in British India
John Webley
6 The man in the purple coat: art and empire in Ilia Repin's Reception of Volost Elders
Nikita Balagurov
7 How the Orient was Russianized: texts, images, and the popular imagination from Eruslan Lazarevich to Ruslan and Liudmila
Hanna Chuchvaha
8 From Zen Buddhism to the "zero of form": exoticism, mysticism, and the East in Kazimir Malevich's early works
Maria Taroutina
9 Pavel Kuznetsov's "distant and strange" agricultural laborers
Marie Gasper-Hulvat
10 Soviet propaganda posters and Islamic art: mobilizing artistic heritage in 1920s Uzbekistan
Mollie Arbuthnot
Afterword: Peripheral horizons: Russian Orientalism in a global context
Mary Roberts

Index

Editors

Maria Taroutina is Associate Professor of Art History at Yale-NUS College in Singapore

Allison Leigh is Associate Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art and Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette