Abstract
Chapter one serves as an extended introduction to the book. It opens with Nikolai Karazin’s life credo expressed as advice to his daughter: “All you need for happiness is to know how to make other people around you happy.” It was inscribed on the back of a painting, reproduced for this book’s cover, which symbolizes his life’s passion. The painting shows a lonely pine tree covered in snow perched on an icy rock. Out of the dark coldness of the northern night appears a fantastic vision – an elegant palm tree glittering with warm light. The painting was inspired by the famous free translation by Mikhail Lermontov of a poem by Heinrich Heine about a lonely pine tree dreaming of a lovely palm tree, the embodiment of the East, enchanting and inaccessible.
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Notes
- 1.
Larisa Deshko, “Kartina,” in Osnova. Karaziny (Kiev: Vidavetz Androshchuk P. S., 2014), 142, http://dspace.univer.kharkov.ua/handle/123456789/12892 (accessed 14 June 2018). All translations from Russian in this book are made by the author, unless stated otherwise.
- 2.
http://wikilivres.ru/The_Pine_Tree_(Lermontov) (accessed 14 June 2018).
- 3.
In the context of the dilemma of Russia’s position between “East” and “West,” “just as ‘East’ included lands and peoples in Russia and Asia but also an elaborate imaginaire, so the ‘West’ meant not only the countries of Europe… but also shifting ideas about the Western world as a construct.” “Russia’s Orient, Russia’s West,” introduction to Michael David-Fox et al., eds., Orientalism and Empire in Russia, Kritika Historical Studies 3 (Bloomington: Slavica, 2006), 3.
- 4.
Natal’ia Usenko and Tat’iana Bakhmet, “ ‘Na severe dikom…’: pis’mo schast’ia,” in Deshko, Osnova, 145. They also point out that Nikolai Karazin was influenced by the painting Na severe dikom… (In the wild north) by Ivan Shishkin. See Usenko and Bakhmet, “ ‘Na severe dikom...,’” 145.
- 5.
Turkestan was a unit formed in 1867, which included two oblasts, Semirechie and Syr-Darya, with the Transcaspian area added in 1897. According to the current Encyclopedia Britannica, Turkestan is the area in Central Asia between Siberia in the north; Iran, Afghanistan, and Tibet in the south; the Caspian Sea in the west; and the Gobi Desert in the east. https://www.britannica.com/place/Turkistan (accessed 22 February 2019).
- 6.
P. A. Korovichenko, “Karazin, Nikolai Nikolaevich,” in K. E. Velichko, ed., Voennaia entsiklopediia, vol. 12 (St. Petersburg: T-vo I. D. Sytina, 1913), 376.
- 7.
Biobibliograficheskii slovar’. Khudozhniki narodov SSSR, vol. 4, book 2 (St. Petersburg: Gumanitarnoe agenstvo Akademicheskii proekt, 1995), 208.
- 8.
E. V. Nogaevskaia, “Nikolai Nikolaevich Karazin, 1842–1908,” in A. I. Leonov, ed., Russkoe iskusstvo. Ocherki o zhizni i tvorchestve khudozhnikov. Vtoraia polovina deviatnadtsatogo veka II (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1971), 358.
- 9.
Niva 49 (1901): 742.
- 10.
A. A. Sidorov, Istoriia oformleniia russkoi knigi, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Kniga,” 1964), 328–29, 348; Idem., Risunok russkikh masterov (vtoraia polovina XIX v.) (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1960), 364; V. Shumkov, “Master illiustratsii,” Knizhnoe obozrenie, 9 July 1976. Karazin was the first Russian book illustrator who followed the famous French illustrator Gustav Doré in drawings with his brush directly on the wooden boards and by doing so he created new methods of toned wood engravings. He also was praised for his artistic design of both open pages as an art work. Sidorov, 328–29. According to an article in Niva, “they call N. N. Karazin ‘Russian Doré,’ thinking that this is an honor for him. But Doré has nothing to do with it. N. N. has his own ‘self’ and his own artistic face…”; Niva 50 (1906): 803. Shestimirov claims that in the 1870s, Karazin traveled to Paris to study with Doré. Alexander Shestimirov, Zabytye imena. Russkaia zhivopis’ (Moscow: Belyi gorod, 2001), 220. Karazin’s adventure novels were also compared to those by Mayne Reid: K. Sh. Kereeva-Kanafieva, Russko-kazakhskie literaturnye otnosheniia (vtoraia polovina XIX – pervoe desiatiletie XX v.) 2nd ed. (Alma-Ata: “Kazakhstan,” 1980), 138. The goal was similar – to praise the Russian artist by comparing him to the famous European artists.
- 11.
Shestimirov, Zabytye imena, 220; Idem., “Otkrytki khudozhnika Karazina,” Antikvariat, nos. 1–2 (January–February 2004).
- 12.
Shestimirov, Zabytye imena, 220–21.
- 13.
See also Elena Andreeva, “Discourse of Empathy: Images from Central Asia in the Works of Nikolai Karazin (1842–1908),” in Orientality: Cultural Orientalism and Mentality (Milano: Silvana Editoriale S. p. A., 2015).
- 14.
John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, theory and the arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), xviii.
- 15.
The term “Orient” in relation to Russia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is even more ideologically loaded than “East” and more often than not is seen in connotation to the concept of Orientalism formulated by Edward Said in his 1979 book of the same name. The Russian Orient is defined at least as vaguely as the Orient in the West European context. Russian intellectuals usually positioned the Orient/the East (vostok) in the east, south, southeast, and even in the north (Siberia) of the Empire, in the territories inhabited predominantly by Muslims. The case of Crimea and the Caucasus was especially complicated: their assignment to Asia or the Orient was highly controversial already in the nineteenth century: “Like the allegedly civilized West, the Russian Orient included territories that, if we follow Said, were parts of the ‘good old Orient.’ This was the Orient that had flourished once, but degenerated over the centuries. This holds not only for China, Japan, or the Holy Land, but also for the present-day regions of Armenia and Georgia in the South Caucasus, once a stronghold of early Christianity.” Kerstin S. Jobst, “Where the Orient Ends? Orientalism and Its Function for Imperial Rule in the Russian Empire,” in James Hodkinson and John Walker, eds., Deploying Orientalism in Culture and History: From Germany to Central and Eastern Europe (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013), 193.
- 16.
Margaret Dikovitskaya, “Central Asia in Early Photographs: Russian Colonial Attitudes and Visual Culture,” in Uyama Tomohiko, ed., Empire, Islam and Politics in Central Asia. Slavic Eurasian Studies 14 (2007): 104–5.
- 17.
Delo 11 (1874): 5.
- 18.
A. A. Sidorov, Russkaia grafika nachala XX veka. Ocherki istorii i teorii (Moscow: “Iskusstvo,” 1969), 53.
- 19.
Alison Smith, David Blayney Brown, and Carol Jacobi, eds., Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past (London: Tate Publishing, 2016), 10.
- 20.
Willard Sunderland, “Shop Signs, Monuments, Souvenirs: Views of the Empire in Everyday Life,” in Valerie A. Kivelson and Joan Neuberger, eds., Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 104.
- 21.
Katya Hokanson, Writing at Russia’s Border (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 13.
- 22.
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 14–15, 23–24, quoted in Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 9.
- 23.
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), xiii.
- 24.
Jonathan Arac, “Introduction,” in Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo, eds., Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1991), 1, quoted in Layton, Russian Literature and Empire, 9.
- 25.
Eleonora Shafranskaia, Turkestanskii tekst v russkoi kul’ture: Kolonial’naia proza Nikolaia Karazina (istoriko-literaturnyi i kul’turno-etnograficheskii kommentarii) (St. Petersburg: Svoe izdatel’stvo, 2016), 21.
- 26.
David Lambert and Alan Lester, eds., Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 6–14.
- 27.
Zoe Laidlaw, Colonial connections 1815–45: Patronage, the information revolution and colonial government (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 15.
- 28.
Vera Tolz’s definition of “Russia’s own Orient” includes the Caucasus, Turkestan, and the non-European communities of western and eastern Siberia and the lower Volga region, as well as the “Oriental” societies bordering the Russian Empire. Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 9.
- 29.
For such analysis, see Elena Andreeva, Russia and Iran in the Great Game: Travelogues and Orientalism (London: Routledge, 2007).
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Andreeva, E. (2021). Introduction. In: Russian Central Asia in the Works of Nikolai Karazin, 1842–1908. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36338-3_1
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