Theo – Der Fuchsdämon (Sulta-Trilogie 3) (German Edition)

Go to dixieland in The Oxford Companion to Music 1 rev ed. Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles begins publication in serial form. Go to Hound of the Baskervilles, The: Yeats heads a group of writers and directors in establishing the Irish National Theatre Society. Henry James publishes the first of his three last novels, The Wings of the Dove.

The tenor Enrico Caruso cuts his first phonograph records in Milan, beginning an immensely successful recording career. Go to Caruso, Enrico 25 Feb. Vanderbilt drives the first internal-combustion car to win the land speed record, at 76 mph at Ablis in France. Go to internal-combustion engine in A Dictionary of Physics 6 ed. Brooklyn shopkeepers Morris and Rose Michtom have a huge success with their presidential 'Teddy's Bear'. Go to teddy bear in A New Dictionary of Eponyms 1 ed. The first Aswan dam, at this time the world's largest, is completed on the Nile. Joseph Conrad publishes a collection of stories including Heart of Darkness , a sinister tale based partly on his own journey up the Congo.

The English painter G. Watts is made a founding member of the Order of Merit. Cuba is forced to accept a permanent US military presence in Guantanamo Bay. Lenin's supporters become known as the Bolsheviks 'majority' as opposed to the Mensheviks 'minority' after a split at the party's Second Congress. Go to radiotherapy in A Dictionary of Physics 6 ed. Gertrude Stein leaves the USA to share with her brother an apartment in Paris that soon becomes a literary and artistic salon.

Go to Stein, Gertrude 3 Feb. Go to Pankhurst, Emmeline b. Erskine Childers has a best-seller in The Riddle of the Sands , a thriller about a planned German invasion of Britain. King Alexander and Queen Draga of Serbia are murdered in their palace by army officers. In a paper to a congress in Madrid, on the 'psychology and psychopathology of animals', Ivan Pavlov announces his discovery of the conditioned reflex. Henry James publishes The Ambassadors , the second of his three last novels written in rapid succession.

Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy identify the phenomenon of radioactive half-life. Go to half-life in World Encyclopedia 1 ed. Go to cinema in World Encyclopedia 1 ed. Giuseppe Sarto is elected pope and takes the name Pius X. Moore publishes Principia Ethica , an attempt to apply logic to ethics. Go to Moore, G. A US warship appears off the coast of Panama in support of rebels declaring an independent republic. William Harley and three Davidson brothers begin the commercial production in Milwaukee of motorcycles, but complete only three by the end of the year.

Go to Du Bois, W. Dutch physiologist Willem Einthoven invents the galvanometer, or electrocardiograph, for recording the electrical impulses within the heart muscle. The Pit , the second volume of an uncompleted trilogy by US novelist Frank Norris, is published posthumously. Go to Pit, The: The first World Series is played between nine leading baseball teams from the National League and the American League. Britain's first national motor show is organized at the Crystal Palace, moving two years later to Olympia.

The USA is granted exclusive control in perpetuity of a ten-mile corridor across Panama, suitable for a canal. Work begins on England's first garden city, at Letchworth, based on the theories of Ebenezer Howard. Orville Wright travels 40 yards in the first successful powered flight, at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina. The annual Prix Goncourt is established in France, in accordance with the will of Edmond de Goncourt. Anton Chekhov's last play, The Cherry Orchard , is staged by Stanislavsky just a few months before the author's death. Finnish architect Gottlieb Eliel Saarinen wins the competition to build Helsinki's railway station.

Charles Stewart Rolls, a keen driver, meets electrical engineer Henry Royce in a historic encounter in Manchester. John Christian Watson becomes Australia's first Labor prime minister, leading a minority government that survives for only four months. Joseph Conrad publishes his novel Nostromo , about a revolution in South America and a fatal horde of silver. France and Britain sign an Entente Cordiale, resolving several colonial disputes and laying the foundation for a new alliance. Go to entente cordiale in A Dictionary of World History 2 ed.

The German general Lothar von Trotha drives Herrero people to slow death in the Kalahari desert. Henry James publishes his last completed novel, The Golden Bowl. Constantine Cavafy prints fourteen of his poems in a pamphlet for private distribution. British troops under Francis Younghusband enter Tibet's holy city of Lhasa.

Theodore Roosevelt wins the US presidential election in his own right. US inventor King C. Gillette receives a patent for a disposable safety razor. Go to safety razor noun in Oxford Dictionary of English 3 ed. Under the pseudonym Saki, H. Munro publishes Reginald , his first volume of short stories.

Australian soprano Nellie Melba makes the first of a great many recordings. Gwen John makes her home in Paris, where she becomes Rodin's model and mistress. Troops fire on a demonstration in St Petersburg, in the event which becomes known as Bloody Sunday. Industrial Workers of the World with its members later known as Wobblies is founded in Chicago as a radical union initiative. Albert Einstein explains the photoelectric effect as a flow of discreet particles quanta of electromagnetic radiation.

Go to photoelectric effect in World Encyclopedia 1 ed. More than , Norwegians vote to end the union with Sweden, with only against. English engineer Herbert Austin sets up a factory to manufacture cars at Longbridge, south of Birmingham. Kaiser Wilhelm II visits Tangier in support of Moroccan independence, causing a diplomatic crisis with the colonial powers France and Britain.

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German biologists Fritz Schaudinn and Erich Hoffmann discover the micro-organism Treponema pallidum which causes syphilis. Go to syphilis in A Dictionary of Public Health 1 ed. Two thirds of the Russian fleet is sunk after being ambushed by Japanese warships in the Tsushima Strait. The largest diamond yet known is found in a South African mine belonging to Thomas Cullinan. In his special theory of relativity Albert Einstein reconciles the apparent clash between relativity and electromagnetic theory.

Go to special theory of relativity in A Dictionary of Astronomy 2 rev ed. French psychologists Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon develop a scale by which to measure the 'mental age' of children. Go to mental age n. Pablo Picasso's palette becomes warmer as Blue evolves into Rose. Alberta and Saskatchewan join the Canadian confederation, completing the 'prairie provinces'.

Karol Szymanowski and other Polish composers form a group that soon becomes known as Young Poland. Edith Wharton publishes the novel that brings her fame and fortune, The House of Mirth. The first boat to be powered by a combustion engine, the ton vessel Venoga , is launched on Lake Geneva. A complaint about maggoty meat on the Russian battleship Potemkin leads to thousands of deaths after troops fire on a demonstration.

English physiologists William Bayliss and Ernest Starling coin the word 'hormone' for glandular secretions into the bloodstream. The first German submarine, or U-boat, is constructed in a programme to catch up with Britain and France in this area. Go to Tirpitz, Alfred von b. The German commander in east Africa uses famine as a means of ending the Maji-Maji rising. Hitler moves to Vienna, hoping to be a painter, but is twice rejected as a student by the Academy of Fine Arts.

Aristide Maillol has his first major success with a large sculpture at the Salon d'Automne in Paris. Britain's Automobile Association is founded, with patrol-men on bicycles to assist drivers. Claude Debussy completes the three symphonic sketches forming La Mer. Matisse, Derain and others, exhibiting in Paris their shockingly colourful new works, are dubbed fauves "wild beasts" by a critic. The first soviet "council" of workers is set up in St Petersburg, introducing a word of great significance in Russian Communist history.

Tsar Nicholas II reluctantly signs the October Manifesto, authorizing an elected duma or legislature. Percival Lowell predicts the existence of an unknown planet, almost exactly where Pluto is discovered 25 years later. Gustav Mahler's cycle of five songs, Kindertotenlieder , is its first performance in Vienna. The monk Grigory Rasputin exercises a powerful influence over the Russian empress Alexandra.

Conservative prime minister Balfour resigns and Henry Campbell-Bannerman forms an interim Liberal government in Britain. Richard Strauss's Salome , based on Oscar Wilde's play, has wide success in spite of censorship difficulties. Henry Campbell-Bannerman leads the Liberals to a massive election victory in the UK on a promised programme of reform. Britain's Labour Party achieves its first electoral success, winning twenty-nine seats at Westminster.

Britain launches HMS Dreadnought , the first of a massive new class of battleship. Upton Sinclair publishes The Jungle , a hard-hitting novel about the Chicago meat-packing industry. More than French miners die in an underground explosion in the district of Calais. Go to mine safety in A Dictionary of Public Health 1 ed. English biologist William Bateson uses the word 'genetics' to describe the phenomenon of heredity and variation. An international conference at Algeciras effectively gives France informal control of Morocco. The Grain Growers' Grain Company is established, soon becoming an important element in Canada's grain market.

Frederick Soddy observes his first examples of chemically identical elements with differing atomic weights, to which he later gives the name isotopes. Go to isotope in A Dictionary of Astronomy 2 rev ed. Fire destroys much of San Francisco following the most violent earthquake in the city's history. Go to San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. The Liberals win a majority in election for Russia's new duma and press ahead with proposals for land reform. Go to Stolypin, Piotr Arkadievich b. Istanbul cedes the Sinai Peninsula to British-controlled Egypt.

Go to Sinai in World Encyclopedia 1 ed. Go to Nicholas II b. In Charles Ives' composition The Unanswered Question the trumpet repeatedly asks 'the perennial question of existence'. German immunologist August von Wasserman develops a diagnostic test to reveal the presence of the syphilis spirochaete in the blood. The Naturalization Act provides definitive requirements for naturalization as a US citizen. Nesbit publishes The Railway Children , the most successful of her books featuring the Bastable family. The Simplon rail tunnel, the longest in the world 20 km , is opened between Switzerland and Italy.

Go to railway in World Encyclopedia 1 ed. In direct response to Britain's new Dreadnought , Germany increases the production of battleships. The first Grand Prix of motor-racing is held near Le Mans over a mile course. Go to motor racing in World Encyclopedia 1 ed. Pablo Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein prefigures cubism in its mask-like treatment of her face.

Go to Pure Food and Drug Act. Alfred Dreyfus is reinstated in the army after the French supreme court overturns his conviction for treason. Belgian physiologists Jules Bordet and Octave Gengou identify Bacillus pertussis , the bacterium causing whooping cough.

Tsar Nicholas II summarily dismisses Russia's new duma when it has been sitting for only three months. Stuart Blackton, introduces the concept of the animated cartoon. Go to animation in A Dictionary of Media and Communication 1 ed. The Cunard company launches the Lusitania on the Clyde as a sister ship to the Mauretania. A large retrospective exhibition in Paris gives Paul Gauguin a growing posthumous reputation. Mahatma Gandhi, confronted by racial discrimination in South Africa, launches a programme of passive resistance satyagraha.

Go to satyagraha in A Dictionary of World History 2 ed. A paediatrician in Vienna, Clemens von Pirquet, describes a condition for which he coins the term 'allergy'. Go to allergy in Food and Fitness: A Dictionary of Diet and Exercise 1 ed. German physicist Walther Nernst establishes the Third Law of Thermodynamics, dealing with temperatures close to absolute zero.

Ethel Smyth's most successful opera, The Wreckers , is premiered in Leipzig. Roald Amundsen and his crew are the first to achieve the Northwest Passage, in a journey lasting three years in a ft fishing boat. The German neuropathologist Alois Alzheimer identifies physical symptoms in the brain of a dead woman who had presenile dementia. The Russian prime minister Pyotr Stolypin introduces land reform. The Story of the Kelly Gang , produced in Australia, is the first feature-length film, with a running time of nearly an hour. Transvaal is given the self-governing status promised in the treaty ending the Boer War.

Synge's Playboy of the Western World provokes violent reactions at its Dublin premiere. Go to Montessori schools in A Dictionary of Education 1 ed. President Roosevelt sends marines to protect US property during political unrest in Honduras. Edmund Gosse publishes Father and Son , an account of his difficult relationship with his fundamentalist father, Philip Gosse. Go to petroleum industry in The Oxford Companion to the Earth 1 ed. US philosopher William James publishes Pragmatism: Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev presents five concerts of Russian music in Paris.

Gertrude Stein meets Alice B. Toklas, who becomes her secretary and lifelong companion. A separatist party in Spain, Solidaridad Catalana, makes electoral gains in Catalonia. Go to Catalonia in World Encyclopedia 1 ed. Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , a violent transition into cubism, is a turning point in western art.

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Go to detergent in Oxford Dictionary of English 3 ed. Austrian scientist Clemens von Pirquet discovers a diagnostic test to identify tuberculosis in a patient. Go to tuberculosis in Concise Medical Dictionary 8 ed. James Joyce completes the 15 short stories eventually published in as Dubliners. A fossilized human jaw, probably at least , years old, is found near Heidelberg in Germany.

Go to Homo in A Dictionary of Biology 6 ed. Collapse of trust companies causes panic and financial crisis in USA. The world's first custom-built motor-racing track opens at Brooklands, near Weybridge in Surrey. Go to motor racing in A Dictionary of British History 1 rev ed. The Deutscher Werkbund is founded in Munich as an association of architects, designers and industrialists.

Samuel Simon, working in Manchester, takes out a patent for the use of silk to support a stencil. The Harvester Judgement establishes a minimum wage in Australia. Swedish playwright August Strindberg publishes The Ghost Sonata , which has its first performance in Stockholm the following year. New Zealand becomes independent as a self-governing dominion. Go to dominion in A Dictionary of World History 2 ed. The British liner Lusitania sets a new record for the Atlantic crossing, on the first of four such occasions.

A Midwest region, including what remains of the reserved Indian Territory, is included in Oklahoma when it joins the Union as the 46th state. President Roosevelt sends a fleet of warships on a goodwill tour of the world that also demonstrates US power. Robert Baden-Powell publishes Scouting for Boys , the success of which leads to the establishment of the Scouts. Go to France, Anatole — in World Encyclopedia 1 ed.

The Young Turks of Salonika organize a successful uprising against the autocracy of the Ottoman sultan. UK prime minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman resigns because of ill health and is followed as Liberal leader and prime minister by Herbert Asquith. David Lloyd George becomes chancellor of the exchequer in Asquith's new cabinet. The Liberal government in Britain introduces an old-age pension, albeit only five shillings a week. Ernest Shackleton, leading an expedition to the Antarctic, locates the south magnetic pole.

International outrage at Congo atrocities forces Belgium to annexe King Leopold's private colony. German physicist Hans Geiger, working in England with Rutherford, develops an instrument that can detect and count alpha particles. Go to Geiger counter in A Dictionary of Physics 6 ed. Go to Nijinska, Bronislava 8 Jan. After first being discussed at the Berlin Radiotelegraphic Conference in , SOS is formally ratified as the international distress signal.

Swiss chemist Jacques Brandenberger patents cellophane, a flexible transparent film made from cellulose. Parliament in Australia chooses Canberra as the site of the nation's new capital. Go to Canberra in World Encyclopedia 1 ed. Go to cash crop in A Dictionary of Business and Management 5 ed. George McJunkin, near Folsom in New Mexico, sees the bones of an extinct giant bison, partially exposed after a flash flood, with an ancient spear point embedded in the skeleton.

Modernist architect Adolf Loos attacks architectural ornament in Ornament and Crime. Arnold Schoenberg abandons tonality in his String Quartet No. Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria declares his country's independence from Ottoman rule and calls himself Tsar Ferdinand I. Go to Ferdinand — in World Encyclopedia 1 ed. The last Manchu emperor, Puyi, is placed on the throne at the age of two on the death of his uncle, the Guanxu emperor.

Go to Cixi c. Europe's worst earthquake, centred on the Strait of Messina, kills up to , people in Sicily and southern Italy. Go to earthquake in A Dictionary of Environment and Conservation 1 ed. William Howard Taft, the Republican candidate, is elected to follow Roosevelt as president.

Go to Taft, William Howard b. The French critic Louis Vauxcelles describes Braque's latest landscapes as being composed of cubes, resulting in the term cubism.

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The Welsh poet W. Davies has a success with The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp , his account of life on the road and in dosshouses. Go to Davies, W. Bernard Leach moves to Japan to study oriental traditions in the graphic arts. The opera Elektra , the first collaboration between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, has its premiere in Dresden.

Michel Fokine becomes the choreographer for the ballet company that Sergei Diaghilev is taking to Paris. Rugby Union acquires new headquarters and a state-of-the-art stadium at Twickenham. Alexandre Benois becomes the first artistic director of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Arnold Schoenberg composes his opera for a single voice, Erwartung , which remains unperformed until in Prague.

Leo Baekeland announces his discovery of Bakelite, calling it 'the material of a thousand uses'. National delegates from the four provincial parliaments draw up a draft constitution for a South African union. Go to South Africa in World Encyclopedia 1 ed. French biologist Charles Nicolle discovers that epidemic typhus is transmitted by the body louse. Mary Pickford begins her film career at sixteen, when she is hired by D.

Diaghilev presents the first season of Ballets Russes in Paris, with Pavlova and Nijinsky in the company. Go to Diaghilev, Serge 31 Mar. Fokine's ballet Chopiniana is revised and given a new name, Les Sylphides. Jack London publishes his most autobiographical novel, Martin Eden. The heroine of H. Wells' novel Ann Veronica is a determined example of the New Woman.

US physicist Robert A. Millikan devises an oil drop experiment that determines the charge of an electron. Go to Millikan's oil-drop experiment in A Dictionary of Physics 6 ed. The written evidence about attitudes to the East in the Muscovite era, however sketchy, likewise suggests antagonism, particularly to Islam. Meanwhile, what little Russians knew about Asia tended to come from Byzantium until the West exposed them to a more secular outlook. If the church did not portray the Muslim East in a favorable light, neither did it monopolize Russian attitudes. More important, Russians were relatively late in developing a sense of national identity.

In consequence, their sense of race tended to be much weaker than among western Europeans. It is no coincidence that the Russian noun for peasant, krestianin, comes from khristianin Christian. But this loyalty was to the triple-armed Orthodox version, not the simpler Latin one. The Catholic nemets western foreigner was just as alien as the Mus- lim basurman. The German philosopher and mathe- matician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz had long been fascinated with China.

Like many of his contemporaries, he had read the favorable accounts of Jesuits who por- trayed the Qing dynasty as the apotheosis of reason and toleration, and he came to see its civilization as the equivalent of his own. The basic idea of the latter was hardly original. But if these Elizabethan explorers saw Muscovy as a potential commercial conduit, Leibniz envis- aged it as the channel for knowledge and wisdom. Leibniz had long been a proponent of associations of learned men that, with the patronage of a monarch, would gather and dis- seminate knowledge for the betterment of humanity, like the Royal Soci- ety in London.

Leibniz, who died in , did not live to see the establishment of the academy nor did Peter, who succumbed to illness in January Most glaring was the absence of much pedagogy. While there would be a secondary school, it was always a poor relation of the more illustrious research institution. Eager to attract the Prussian polyglot, the academy offered him three possible chairs: Bayer chose the latter, and he would remain in Russia until his death in Many subsequent orientologists would follow in his steps, thereby contributing to an intellectual current whose ultimate outcome would be Eurasianism some two hundred years later.

Peter had set up the Kunstkamer in in his Summer Palace, accord- ing to the custom of every self-respecting German prince of his day. Peter continued to add to his various collections. One of the more valuable additions toward the end of his life was a group of manu- scripts he looted during his Persian expedition in As for Kehr, Russians have regarded his scholarly accomplishments somewhat more highly than those of Bayer. None of these were published during his lifetime, although they would prove invaluable to scholars in the nineteenth century.

Neither Bayer nor Kehr left a particularly deep imprint on Russian ori- entology. Aside from a handful of young interpreters whom Kehr taught at the College of Foreign Affairs, they had no students. Despite his remarkable talent for lan- guages, Bayer never even deigned to learn Russian. The discipline of orientology would have to wait until the nineteenth century for more propitious circumstances. The unfortunate crew now faced a new peril as native Koriaks, who had only recently come under Russian rule, promptly took them prisoner.

Since Dembei had already learned Koriak from his captors, the pair managed to converse with the help of an interpreter. Atlasov listened with great interest to tales of a fertile land rich in silver and gold, which he took to be India. The recent conquest of Kamchatka had brought Russia temptingly close to the archipelago, and the time seemed ripe to test the Dutch commercial stranglehold. However, the tsar had no subjects who could speak Japanese. Peter met the castaway in January , and he immediately made plans to put his involuntary guest to work. On the same day the tsar decreed that Dembei would remain in Moscow and learn Russian.

Once again, scholars are unsure whether any lessons were actually given. But with the death of Demian Pomortsev three years later in , the courses came to an end, and it would take until the late nineteenth century for Japanese in- struction to be resumed at any academic institution in the capital. There were also foreigners who offered their services to the tsar. One of the best sources abroad for Near East experts consisted of the Greeks, Serbs, Romanians, and other Orthodox nations then under Turk- ish rule. While many were willing to do so, others found the vigorous young monarchy of their Muscovite coreli- gionists more appealing.

Chief among the latter was the Moldavian Prince Dimitrie Cantemir. Poet, satirist, and diplomat, Prince Antiokh Dmitrievich Kantemir was one of the leading lights of the Petrine Enlightenment. His con- siderable talents ranged from the natural sciences, philosophy, and history to architecture and literature. And Turks still hold his musical composi- tions in high regard. It was not a harsh sentence. Initially housed in the Moldavian princely palace, young Dimitrie took a distinctly different path by devoting his enforced idleness to more cerebral pursuits. During the two decades Cantemir spent on the Bosporus as a young man assiduously pursuing his studies, his outlook was accord- ingly shaped by the three great intellectual legacies of Byzantium, the Ital- ian Renaissance, and Islam.

The fullness and emptiness of heaven and earth wane and wax in the course of time. How much truer is this of men. Stretching like a giant crescent from central Europe through the Near East and into northern Africa, their realm was one of the most formidable of its day. At the same time, a recent military campaign into central Europe that had taken Janissaries to the very gates of Vienna in ended disastrously with the Treaty of Karlowitz sixteen years later, effectively ending the Turkish military threat to Christendom. Although Turkey opened the hostilities, Russia went on the offensive.

Hoping to rely on the sympathies of their two Orthodox hospodars, Peter the Great marched his forces south into the Romanian principalities. While the other temporized, Cantemir threw his lot in with the tsar. When he confronted vastly larger Turkish forces on the Prut River three months later, Peter met with defeat and was forced to sue for peace. As in Constantinople, Cantemir devoted much of his energy to scholarship. Some of his efforts focused on his homeland. The Berlin Academy of Sciences, which elected him to membership in , asked him to write a Description of Moldavia, and he began a Chronicle of Romanian Wallachians and Moldovans.

Another treatise, A Study of the Nature of Monar- chy, called on Peter the Great to carry on his struggle with Turkey to as- sume his rightful place as the universal sovereign uniting East and West. Published in Russ- ian two years later, it repeated many traditional Christian arguments against Islam: On the pretext of deeming his sources to have been inadequately cited, it refused to print the book. Encyclopedic in scope, with extensive biographical, geographical, re- ligious, and ethnographic notes, the History chronicled the Ottoman dynasty from its fourteenth-century origins until the early s.

What set Cantemir apart was his ex- tensive and evenhanded reliance on Turkish chronicles, to the point of repeating their interpretation of confrontations with the Christian powers. Of course, unlike the latter, in the eighteenth century the Ottoman Empire was still very much alive. However, as the prince stressed, it was already well into its dotage, and the end was utterly inescapable.

Edward Gib- bon and Voltaire both relied on it for their works, and Byron mentioned the prince twice in his verse tale, Don Juan. The estates and the generous pension Peter had granted him enabled the exile to continue the life of a grandee. Above all, Peter relied on him for his knowledge of the Near East. In , as the tsar began a campaign of conquest against Persia in the Caucasus, the prince joined him as a lead- ing counselor. By virtue of their ge- ography they had long had direct contact with the East.

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Historians of orientology in Russia therefore often attribute his initiatives in this regard as motivated by political and commercial aims. Yuri Slezkine once remarked that seventeenth- century Muscovites had not shown much curiosity about the outside world. This was an equally important legacy of the Petrine dawn. I thought to sleep, my eyes barely shut for the night, When, with ears stopped, he did roar with all his might.

Oh, miracles of God! Who amongst my kin of yore Slept calmly, free from the khans and the hordes? And disturbed from my sleep amidst Bakhchisarai By tobacco smoke and cries. Is this not paradise? Among the more important guests of the tsarina and her current favorite, Count Aleksandr Dmitriev-Mamonov, were the French, British, and Austrian ministers to her court. Here the group halted for three months to await the spring thaw so that it could proceed downriver on the Dnieper. Despite their still being some kilometers from the former khanate, to some the Orient already seemed very much in evidence.

No less sump- tuous than their winter transport, seven gold and scarlet galleys unobtru- sively crewed by some three thousand oarsmen, guards, and attendants cruised majestically until the cataracts at Kaidak made further travel by river impossible. These spec- tacular displays of exotic militaria were more than a theatrical caprice. The French ambassador recalled a conver- sation he had had with the Austrian emperor on the eve of their entry into the Crimea.

Encamped just north of Perekop, the narrow isthmus that joins the peninsula to the mainland, the pair took a leisurely stroll in the warm twilight. Some camels passed in the distance. It is altogether a new page of history. As recently as the seventeenth century, Crimean Tatars had staged destructive raids deep into the Russian heartland. Vassals of the Ottoman Empire, they had remained a threat to the rich farmlands of the southern frontier until Catherine annexed their peninsula in During latter decades of the eighteenth cen- tury, Russian culture had taken a distinctly Grecophile turn.

The em- press and her travel companions all employed Asian tropes in their many letters and reminiscences of the trip. Military humiliation in the s would, of course, give the Crimea a distinctly dif- ferent connotation in the minds of subsequent generations of Russians. And it is in this sense, as an object of whimsical curiosity, that Russians came to see the East more generally during the century of their rapid Westernization.

Catherine could imagine traveling from her capital on the Neva to the Crimea as a journey from Europe into Asia. Petersburg, despite its distinctly Western architecture, struck him as quasi-Oriental. Con- tinental boundaries were a case in point. Thus, from antiquity until the eighteenth century, Asia was variously believed to begin at the Don or Volga rivers, or even farther west. This would begin to change when Catherine the Great seized the throne in a palace coup in Nevertheless, the Catherinian age marked the beginnings of a more so- phisticated understanding of the East.

After her reign, as before, the two never met, or they failed to recognize each other. Without question the man most responsible for shaping the attitudes of Catherinian St. Petersburg about the East was the French philosophe Voltaire. Meanwhile, Catherine gained an enthu- siastic propagandist who helped burnish her reputation in Europe as the model enlightened despot. Disillu- sioned with the politics and culture of his native France, Voltaire saw in the Chinese many of the virtues that seemed to be lacking in his compatriots.

First, he profoundly respected the Con- fucian ethic. At times commercial disputes, bor- der clashes, and competition for the loyalty of nomadic Kalmyks and Zun- gars severely strained relations between St. Early in her reign, Catherine even contemplated war with her Eastern neigh- bor. Le Roi de la Chi, i, i, i, i, i, i, ne Quand il a bien bu, u, u, u, u, u, u, Fait une plaisante mi, i, i, i, i, ne! Thus her comic opera Fevei, originally written as a didactic story for her grandsons Alexander and Con- stantine in , described a good ruler of Chinese ancestry.

Catherine was not alone in playing with Eastern motifs in their prose and poetry. On the Northern throne, we see Confucius. I assiduously endeavored to ensure that all justice throughout my realm was fair, that all people were contented and tranquil, and that the state grew stronger. In he published a translation of Da Xue, a Confucian text that stresses the obli- gations of the ruler toward his subjects. Kitaishchina, as chinoiserie was known in Russian, had already made its appearance at the turn of the eighteenth century. Yet it was entirely in keeping with the northern European taste at the time for the Baroque exotic.

The statesman Count Jacob Bruce, for one, amassed an impressive collection of over two hundred Chinese pieces. Porcelain production boomed as entrepreneurs like Francis Gardner opened private factories to help meet growing demand. Both Rinaldi and Cameron were largely following the conventions of the jardin anglo- chinois, a style of landscape design that had been developed in England in the mid-eighteenth century as a reaction against the strict geometric for- malism of French parks.

Here is a theatre, there a swing, Beyond, an Eastern pleasure-dome. Hark how the Muses on Parnassus sing While creatures fated for the hunt do roam. While attitudes toward the Near East were more ambivalent, even then the images it evoked in St. Meanwhile, traditional hostility toward the faith tended to fade in light of the diminished threat posed by the Ottomans and other Muslim foes on the imperial frontier. Nevertheless, the empress carefully distinguished be- tween the Ottomans, who ruled despotically and had destroyed Byzan- tium, and their religion. There is a happy ending, as the hero ultimately succeeds in his quest.

This is my wish: That he who has any objection may express it freely. It would take some time for Russians to grasp this truth. However, as educated Russian soci- ety became more thoroughly westernized, its interest in the East began to be aroused. Like all Romanov sovereigns, Catherine had military, diplomatic, and commercial dealings with the Asian powers on her borders, such as the Ottomans, Persians, and Chinese. Like the intellectu- als of the West she could praise the Chinese for their adherence to reason and their banishment of fanaticism, and for establishing the most durable empire in history.

At the same time, as a political head of state, she could declare her aggressive ambition to have one day broken the insolence of China. Petersburg than anything Ilarion Rossokhin could ever expect to write. As Widmer suggests, academic study of Asia hardly made an impact on Catherinian thought. Throughout the eighteenth century, the discipline, such as it was, remained a foreign import, largely alien to intellectual life in St. At the same time, they had no doubt that Russia was fundamentally distinct from Asia. It was only in the next century, as many began to question the relationship with Europe, that at- titudes toward Asia likewise became more ambivalent.

Within three weeks of landing at Alexandria, his troops routed Mamluk forces at the Battle of the Pyramids and were soon in possession of Cairo. The whole continent inclines to the East. Along with others, these writers stressed the primacy of emotion, intuition, spontaneity, and the mystical.

In rebelling against Hellenism, the German Romantics also looked to al- ternative sources of wisdom, especially to their own medieval past and the East. The Orient was particularly appealing. He did have antecedents, such as Gavrila Derzhavin, Nikolai Novikov, and Empress Catherine II, who had already invoked the East with their quills in the late eighteenth century. For one thing, their biographies bore many resemblances. Slavists often cringe at comparing their verse too closely, and Pushkin would eventually come to disown the Englishman as a model.

The tsar took a shine to little Abraham. You are a clever enough fellow in your own right. According to the imprecise geography of the day, Africa was almost as Oriental as Asia. Meanwhile, many of the characteristics the Romantic imagination considered to be typically Oriental—unbridled passion, savagery, indolence, and despotism —were both southern and eastern. This imprecise demarcation between east and south was doubly true in the Russian mind.

A glance at the map showed that Constantinople lay west of St. To Pushkin, there- fore, his African blood was quasi-Oriental—as the noun he used to label his great-grandfather, arap, suggests. As a result, the lad could also indulge in his own pursuits, such as writing verse, in which he proved to be remark- ably gifted. His dreams of joining them when he completed his studies in were dashed when his father pointed out that he could not afford the expense of supporting a cav- alry subaltern and proposed a distinctly less glamorous career in the infantry instead.

It also offered the important perquisite of beginning work in the im- perial capital. Petersburg in June at the ripe age of eighteen. He also indulged in less re- spectable pursuits. A verse he penned on the spot during an evening out with some friends nicely conveys his days as a young man-about-town in St. We drank—and Venus with us Sat sweating at the table. When shall we four sit again With whores, wine and pipes?

A fairy tale in verse set in ancient Rus, this fantasy playfully combined many exotic ele- ments in the French classical manner. Instead, he was punished with a transfer to the southwestern frontier in May Although Pushkin chafed at the provincialism of his new environs, the banishment came as a blessing to his nascent literary career. He also had the good fortune of being assigned initially to an indulgent superior who was not overly alarmed at having a disgraced poet on his staff.

The next few months were an idyllic time as Pushkin enjoyed the company of the Raevskii clan, which included four charming daughters. Held in their camp, the prisoner wins the love of a Circassian maiden. Brokenhearted, the girl drowns herself as her beloved returns to the safety of the Russian lines. Like earlier authors of the genre, the poet initially describes the foe as savage: The idle Circassians sit. They recall the former days Of raids that could not be repulsed Of the treachery of sly leaders, Of the blows of their cruel sabers, And of the accuracy of their arrows that could not be outrun, And of the ash of destroyed villages.

Yet as the prisoner watches the highlanders behead slaves for their amuse- ment at a feast, his thoughts take him back to the equally violent pastime of dueling back home. The prisoner recalls its Despised vanity, And double-tongued hostility, And simple-hearted slander. Meanwhile, the longer the Russian is their involuntary guest, the more he comes to admire his captors: We must hope that this conquered land.

The Captive of the Caucasus, in turn, was a seminal work in Russian let- ters. At the same time, Pushkin blurred the boundaries between European and Asian. Aleksandr Bestuzhev, who penned a number of popular tales about the mountains under the pseudonym Marlinskii in the s, had been exiled there as a common soldier for his participation in the abortive coup of December Mikhail Lermontov, a Life Guard hussar subaltern of Scottish descent who dabbled in Romantic poetry, was also banished to the campaign against the Islamic insurgents.

Much later in life the increasingly rebellious aristo- crat penned a savage indictment of the tsarist small war against the Mus- lim highlanders with his novel of , Hadji Murad. According to Belinskii, it was so popular that, twenty years after its publication, most educated Russians could still recite its description of the Circassians from memory. Indeed, many read The Captive not just for its aesthetic merits but also as a source of information about a little-known region. After their stay in Piatigorsk, the Raevskii family and Pushkin sailed to the Crimea, where the poet spent what he later described as the happiest pe- riod of his life.

One of their excursions on the peninsula took them to the old Tatar palace at Bakhchisarai. Like Catherine the Great during her ju- bilee tour of , Pushkin was enchanted, and the occasion moved him to write another well-known narrative poem, The Fountain of Bakhchisa- rai. Instead Pushkin portrays them as two sides of the same femi- nine coin. The reader ultimately feels sympathy for the lovesick Crimean chieftain. Translations of Near Eastern verse were a favorite of Romantic authors, and they inspired a number of simulations.

Pushkin explained his approach in a letter to Prince Viazemskii: Even when enraptured by Eastern splendor, the European must re- tain the taste and perspective of the European. Making matters worse, authorities intercepted a letter that appeared to espouse atheism. Already in Odessa he had begun to read the Koran, and he now deepened his study of the Islamic text.

Pushkin was particularly fascinated by Muhammad, whose persecution and exile seemed to parallel his own recent travails. They wisely avoided involving their hot- headed companion in their scheme. Their fondness for his verse was well known to the authorities, however, and he might well have been impli- cated in the plot had he not been languishing in rural solitude.

In September Nicholas summoned Pushkin to a remarkable meet- ing at the Moscow Kremlin, where the new tsar had been staying for his coronation. Although Pushkin freely admitted that he would have participated had he been given the opportunity, the tsar magnanimously forgave him and offered his protection and patronage. It proved to be a Faustian bargain. The new arrangement bound Pushkin tightly to his sovereign, restricting his freedom to express himself even more than under the previous reign.

While he was allowed to return to the capital and continued to write, he felt increasingly trapped. In , frustrated at the rejection of his marriage proposal to a young beauty, Natalia Goncharova, Pushkin took an unauthorized journey back to the south. Russia was once again at war with Turkey, and the poet wanted to visit his old friend Nikolai Raevskii at the front. Now we can say: Asian poverty, Asian swinishness, etc.

As tastes changed, by Pushkin was no longer at the forefront of Russian literary life. Ac- cording to D. When in late the poet began to be openly ridiculed as a cuck- old, the inevitable duel followed. By the s realism had replaced Romanticism, and writers turned their attention closer to home as the Russian peasant replaced the Circassian as the exotic other of their creative imaginations.

But Asia remained very much alive in other artistic domains. As in literature, interest in the East among Russian painters in the mod- ern age came initially from the West. The Islamic Orient had intrigued European artists since at least the Renaissance. At the turn of the six- teenth century, intimate contact with the Turks inspired Venetian artists such as Gentile Bellini to record Near Eastern scenes and statesmen. The seventeenth-century Dutch master Rembrandt drew on his extensive col- lection of imported props to execute portraits of individuals clad in sump- tuous Eastern silken robes and turbans.

Political developments clearly played a role. Predominantly French, the artistic style featured scenes sup- posedly taken from daily life in the Islamic world. Some were indeed faith- ful genre paintings and ethnographic portraits, striking largely because of their exotic locale. At the same time, Orientalist artists often imagined scenes of excess sexuality, violence, cruelty, sloth, and other sins proscribed by Christian morality.

Luxurious harems, murderous tyrants, and somno- lent hashish addicts were favorite motifs. An Orientalist picture in a Victorian drawing room was a kind of escape. To our great-grandparents, these canvases were not only a reminder of a different world, of something picturesque and heroic, but they hinted at pleasures that were often taboo in Europe and titillated a secret taste for cruelty and oppression. Although industrious and intelligent, the cadet proved to be sickly. More alarming, his sensitive stomach could not withstand seafaring. He was also subject to a nervous and excitable temperament, which, ac- cording to his close friend the prominent art critic Vladimir Stasov, he had inherited from his half-Tatar mother.

As a boy Vasilii had shown a remarkable aptitude in making sketches, a talent his more dedicated art teachers at school recognized and encour- aged. When in his penultimate year at the corps the curriculum no longer included drawing classes, the cadet enrolled in the Society for the En- couragement of the Arts, which functioned as a preparatory school for the Imperial Academy of Arts. The instructors initially regarded him as some- thing of a dilettante. According to the conventions of the day, sketching was a perfectly ac- ceptable parlor amusement for a member of his class.

He later recalled their reaction: Vereshchagin enrolled in the Imperial Academy of Arts at a time of con- siderable turmoil for the venerable establishment. Founded nearly a cen- tury earlier by Empress Catherine the Great, and from a subsidiary of the Ministry of the Court, its function was to promote the arts along Eu- ropean lines. One of the guiding lights of the shestidesiatniki, the generation of the s, was Nikolai Chernyshevskii, a radical son of a priest from the provinces.

His novel of , What Is to Be Done? Led by Ivan Kramskoi, they struck out on their own by forming a cooperative workshop, follow- ing the model in What Is to Be Done? Although the venture eventually foundered, another effort at artistic emancipation in proved to be much more successful. Instead of pure, absolute beauty, modern art. He had begun his new schooling well enough and soon be- came particularly close to a young liberal professor, Aleksandr Beidemann, who took him along on a commission to decorate the new Russian cathe- dral of Saint Alexander Nevsky in Paris. His Oriental canvases were characterized by dramatic light and color, as well as highly realistic brushwork, all reminiscent of the Dutch Golden Age.

Over the course of six months, he produced numerous sketches of the region and its people, encyclopedically record- ing the various national types of the latter with photographic accuracy. Vereshchagin also wrote a detailed account that was soon published in the popular French monthly Le tour du monde Around the World.

This time Vereshchagin took the advice, and he began to work hard to acquire the new craft. There would be considerable hard- ship and danger, since Russian troops were still actively campaigning in the central Asian province. Nevertheless, Vereshchagin rushed to offer his services to the general. Instead of a Parisian garret or some room.

Petersburg], I would have a Kirghiz yurt. After some hurried preparations, Vereshchagin set out in August from Orenburg, a major trading center in southwestern Siberia on the central Asian steppe frontier. Aside from the typical discomforts of traveling in a largely untamed land, it was an uneventful journey. He did point out that things had been even worse before tsarist troops had captured the city a dozen years earlier, as there had also been thousands of slaves then.

While he occasionally detected undercurrents of hostility, Vereshchagin was convinced, like many of his compatriots, that most of the new Russian subjects were becoming reconciled to their new rulers. As the inhabitants of a suburb greeted him warmly, he mused: Allah alone, who knows their hearts, can say. Accompanied by two Cossacks and a Tatar trans- lator who claimed princely blood, Vereshchagin made his way southward along the upper Syr Darya to study the local Kirghiz and Sart communi- ties. About thirty kilometers from Tashkent, there were reports that Kauf- man was marching on the emir of Bukhara.

And so close to me, right here in central Asia! Vereshchagin hastened to the fabled city, but much to his disap- pointment it had already fallen the day before his arrival. After the siege had been lifted, he criticized Kaufman in front of his staff for not having done more to secure the fortress. He proudly wore it on his civilian jacket for the rest of his days. Fiercely jealous of his independence, the painter would refuse all other honors during his career, even a professorship at the Imperial Academy of Arts. Succumbing to a fever, he decided to travel to Paris to continue work on his paintings.

Hopes of organizing a show in the French capital did not materialize, although Le tour du monde once again printed his travel account. Early in the following year, the artist got word that Kauf- man was back in St. Might he be convinced to sponsor an exhibition? The general, who was eager to show off his central Asian do- main to the Russian public, readily gave his consent when Vereshchagin broached the question. Emperor Alexander II paid a visit on the opening day with Kaufman as his guide, and expressed his satisfaction.

When the tsar asked for the painter to be presented to him, however, the latter made himself scarce. There was also a photo of another oil, The Bacha and His Admirers. Although clearly in an Eastern setting, it struck the critic Andrei Somov as offering a more general comment about human degradation.

Kaufman now arranged an appointment for him at the civilian rank of collegiate reg- istrar on the staff of Major General Gerasim Kolpakovskii, his deputy as governor of the Semireche district in eastern Turkestan. Based in Tashkent, over the next year the artist traveled extensively throughout the province. He did not hesitate to seek out danger once again. Kaufman was clearly pleased with his painter. When Vereshchagin re- turned to St. Petersburg in , the general awarded him a three-year stay abroad to translate his central Asian experiences into art.

Because of the Franco-Prussian War, Paris was not an attractive option that year. The Bavarian capital also happened to be the home of a friend, the young Elisabeth Marie Fischer, whose hand he soon took. They would be sensations. While some were imag- inary, many were based on personal experience and observation. Yet some canvases also raised disturbing questions about the conquerors themselves.

A major theme in Western perceptions of the East at the time was the notion of stagnation and barbarism amid traces of greatness rooted in cen- turies long past. Vereshchagin captured the idea in two paintings that con- trast the Timurid Empire at its apogee with the miserable reality of the present. Gone too is the symmetry of the men; one of the paupers leans on his staff, while his companion is hunched in quiet sleep. Vereshchagin must have had a change of heart about the propriety of certain themes when he painted The Sale of the Child Slave In his tiny shop, a merchant slyly extols the quality of his ware to a wealthy, aged client, who lustfully eyes a nude boy while hypocritically counting his prayer beads.

Vereshchagin paid little attention to heterosexual motifs. Whereas harems and odalisques abounded in Western Orientalist art, they are en- tirely absent from his Turkestan series. Indeed, women almost never made an appearance in any guise whatsoever. Like Chernyshevskii, the artist advocated female emancipation, and his travelogues waxed indignant about sexual inequal- ity in central Asia: In the foreground a variety of spectators, from the emir and merchants on camel- back to beggars and feral dogs, watch the scene.

Separating the onlookers from the rest of the crowd is a straight line of ten tall poles with darkened tops, which on closer scrutiny prove to be the heads of Russian casualties. There is no god but God. Some effectively conveyed the excitement of combat. Likewise inspired by an episode the artist had witnessed, Mortally Wounded presents war in a distinctly minor key. An enveloping cloud of thick dust and smoke suggests his immi- nent departure from the living. The reviews for the exhibition, which opened in April , were almost universally positive.

The color of them, the cruelty of them! Petersburg the fol- lowing year. To paraphrase Dostoyevsky, what was central Asia to Vereshchagin? When he learned that Stasov was writing an article about his exhibition for the prominent St. Petersburg daily Novoe Vremia New Times , he dashed off a letter explaining his thinking behind the Turkestan series. The artist suggested that he could have focused on colorful Oriental costumes. But he really had a more serious aim in mind. If the Oriental was barbarous, the Occidental could be just as uncivilized.

There was no fundamental difference between East and West. War was the clearest proof. In his letter to Stasov about the Turkestan series, he concluded with this point: Given the proper circumstances, the East could reach the same level of development as the West. Europeans, including his own compatriots, had a duty to bring civilization to their Asian brethren, a task best accomplished by conquest and rule.

He never questioned tsarist ambitions in Turkestan. To him, the way painters traditionally had portrayed war was fraudulent. Kaufman was clearly pleased with his painter. When Vereshchagin re- turned to St. Petersburg in , the general awarded him a three-year stay abroad to translate his central Asian experiences into art. Because of the Franco-Prussian War, Paris was not an attractive option that year.

The Bavarian capital also happened to be the home of a friend, the young Elisabeth Marie Fischer, whose hand he soon took. They would be sensations. While some were imag- inary, many were based on personal experience and observation. Yet some canvases also raised disturbing questions about the conquerors themselves. A major theme in Western perceptions of the East at the time was the notion of stagnation and barbarism amid traces of greatness rooted in cen- turies long past.

Vereshchagin captured the idea in two paintings that con- trast the Timurid Empire at its apogee with the miserable reality of the present. Gone too is the symmetry of the men; one of the paupers leans on his staff, while his companion is hunched in quiet sleep. Vereshchagin must have had a change of heart about the propriety of certain themes when he painted The Sale of the Child Slave In his tiny shop, a merchant slyly extols the quality of his ware to a wealthy, aged client, who lustfully eyes a nude boy while hypocritically counting his prayer beads.

Vereshchagin paid little attention to heterosexual motifs. Whereas harems and odalisques abounded in Western Orientalist art, they are en- tirely absent from his Turkestan series. Indeed, women almost never made an appearance in any guise whatsoever. Like Chernyshevskii, the artist advocated female emancipation, and his travelogues waxed indignant about sexual inequal- ity in central Asia: In the foreground a variety of spectators, from the emir and merchants on camel- back to beggars and feral dogs, watch the scene.

Separating the onlookers from the rest of the crowd is a straight line of ten tall poles with darkened tops, which on closer scrutiny prove to be the heads of Russian casualties. There is no god but God. Some effectively conveyed the excitement of combat. Likewise inspired by an episode the artist had witnessed, Mortally Wounded presents war in a distinctly minor key. An enveloping cloud of thick dust and smoke suggests his immi- nent departure from the living. The reviews for the exhibition, which opened in April , were almost universally positive. The color of them, the cruelty of them!

Petersburg the fol- lowing year. To paraphrase Dostoyevsky, what was central Asia to Vereshchagin? When he learned that Stasov was writing an article about his exhibition for the prominent St. Petersburg daily Novoe Vremia New Times , he dashed off a letter explaining his thinking behind the Turkestan series. The artist suggested that he could have focused on colorful Oriental costumes. But he really had a more serious aim in mind. If the Oriental was barbarous, the Occidental could be just as uncivilized.

There was no fundamental difference between East and West. War was the clearest proof. In his letter to Stasov about the Turkestan series, he concluded with this point: Given the proper circumstances, the East could reach the same level of development as the West. Europeans, including his own compatriots, had a duty to bring civilization to their Asian brethren, a task best accomplished by conquest and rule. He never questioned tsarist ambitions in Turkestan. To him, the way painters traditionally had portrayed war was fraudulent. Petersburg even before his show at the interior ministry had ended.

In April he sailed with his wife to India, where he spent the next two years traveling through- out the immense colony. Vereshchagin never completed all the Indian paintings he had planned, since rising tensions in the Balkans between the Orthodox populations and their Ottoman overlords soon drew his attention. While he again fully supported St.

In the following three decades Vereshchagin took extensive sojourns in Palestine, the Philippines, North America, and Japan, all of which yielded more paintings. Is not the opposite really true? But they took a different course. If, like the great Romantic Lord Byron, the Russians also traveled to the East, they rarely did so by going abroad.

At the same time, their attitudes were not just shaped by the peculiarities of political geography. Bestuzhev put it well: Whether consciously or not, this recognition that the boundaries between Orient and Occident were much less distinct than for Germans, French, or English made Pushkin and his contemporaries more empathetic with the East. As a result, while Asia faded into the literary background during the rest of the nineteenth century, the Oriental theme would remain inextricably linked to this time of poetic greatness.

And it did not stay entirely dormant, particularly as Russians entered the twentieth century. At this bend it is joined by the Kama, whose headwaters originate in the Ural Mountains, thereby continuing the riparian path to Siberia. The strategic and economic importance of this juncture is clear: But whereas Kiev adopted the faith and culture of Christian Byzantium, dur- ing the tenth century the Bulgars converted to Islam.

In Batu Khan swept the Bulgar khanate into the dustbin of history. While its capital succumbed to the Mongol onslaught, some survivors mi- grated north and founded a town on a promontory overlooking the Volga and a tributary that joins it there. As the Eurasian balance of power began to shift from Islam to Christendom, and European gunpowder started to prevail over central Asian nomadic archery, Kazan came under increasing pressure from the expanding Mus- covite principality. In Tsar Ivan the Terrible forcibly joined the khanate to his dominions. Many nineteenth-century travelers were struck by the sharp contrasts between the elements of provincial Russia and the Islamic Orient that coexisted peacefully in what was now a major regional capital.

In short, [the city] is an astonishing panorama of para- doxes. During the eighteenth century there had already been sporadic Russian initiatives to study Asia in St. None of these, however, were systematic or sustained. Nevertheless, during the decades of its primacy, the Kazan school pioneered orientology in the Russian academy. With its sizable community of Tatars and its proximity to the Near East, Kazan, more than any other major center of orientology in late Imperial Russia, complicated the Saidian distinction between self and other.

At the same time, his decrees stressed the utilitarian imperative of producing bureaucrats, teachers, and physicians for the empire. The chair remained dormant for some two decades until a Leipzig graduate, Bernhard Dorn, was re- cruited in However, when in the foreign ministry lured him to its own Asian language school in St. Pe- tersburg, no successor was named. At Kazan the young German scholar enthusiastically busied himself with cataloguing coins and other antiquities from the region and began a lifelong effort to compile an Arabic dictionary.

His scholarly achievements eventually attracted the attention of St. Petersburg, he suggested that the university ap- point another Rostock graduate, Franz Erdmann, as his successor. The choice proved unwise. Like his compatriot, Erdmann had no command of Russian and was entirely unwilling to make the effort to learn it. Mean- while, by most accounts his teaching was stultifying and uninspiring.

By the professor did not have even a single student, and only the arrival two years later of a few Polish exiles who did know Latin replenished his enrollments. Although Erdmann remained at Kazan for twenty-six years, neither his scholarly nor his pedagogical accomplishments were notewor- thy. Nevertheless, along with their compatriots at other Russian institutions, these early German scholars left an imprint in two important ways.

First, they were students of an academic approach that emphasized philology, the secular study of ancient texts. More important, philology was strongly rooted in German Romanticism, with its fascination for the primeval and its dislike of the Greco-Roman rationalist heritage. However, if their Teutonic coun- terparts looked to ancient India of the distant past for traces of their ori- gins, Russians could detect much more tangible traces of the Eastern in- heritance in the cultural, political, and racial imprint of the relatively recent Mongol yoke.

Thus lectures in world history were obligated to stress the back- wardness and inadequacy of all heathen cultures. The conserva- tive superintendent detected the specter of godless revolution in much of the contemporary European academy, especially in the wake of student unrest in Germany in the late s. There the infection of unbelief and revolutionary principles, which started in England and gained additional strength in pre-revolu- tionary France, has been erected into a complete. On another occasion, Magnitskii even proposed that the university set up a branch in western Siberia to focus on Sinology.

Mirza Aleksandr Kasimovich Kazem-Bek. When during the Crimean War his Oriental attire drew negative comments in the St. Petersburg press as being an un- patriotic provocation, Kazem-Bek remained utterly unrepentant. Hoping that the boy would follow in his footsteps, the judge employed leading mullahs to train him in Arabic, logic, rheto- ric, and jurisprudence. At the age of seventeen he had already mas- tered Arabic so thoroughly that he precociously wrote a grammar, and the following year he circulated other compositions in the language to his friends.

At around this time misfortune struck. Together with a number of other local notables, Hadji Kasim was convicted by a military tribunal of con- spiring against Russian rule, and he found himself stripped of his property and banished to Astrakhan on the northern shore of the Caspian Sea. Lonely and old, Hadji Kasim was eventually allowed to summon his son, who joined him there in The learned judge liked the Scottish clerics, and he often invited them to his home to debate the rel- ative merits of their faiths.

Eager to defend his beliefs, his son soon joined these discussions as well. My faith began to succumb, my misgivings gave me no peace, and my fascination drew me further and further. This way of life and thinking now seemed to me to be too fanatical. He spent several years with them, immersing himself in writing religious tracts and learning English and Hebrew in the bargain. The young Persian ventured that he might like to be an in- terpreter at the foreign ministry in St.

Much to his chagrin, he was ordered instead to report to the dreary Siberian garrison of Omsk to teach Oriental languages at its local cadet corps military school. As luck would have it, at the time Kazan hap- pened to be looking for a new Tatar instructor. As early as he pro- posed setting up a separate faculty for Oriental letters at Kazan, and four- teen years later he suggested that the university establish an Asian lan- guage institute.

In , within two years of his appointment as superintendent of Kazan, the subject of Turkish was promoted to its own chair, joining Persian and Arabic letters. Musin-Pushkin even had plans to add Tibetan, Hebrew, and Kalmyk to the curriculum, but these remained unrealized when he left for St. Petersburg University likewise appointed an Egyptian and a Persian during the early nineteenth century.

Whereas in later years, under the more assimilationist regimes of Alexander III and Nicholas II, some Asians may have faced discrimination in the Russian academy, these ear- lier appointments generally suffered no such handicaps during their ca- reers. When in Franz Erd- mann was eased out of his post as professor of Arabic and Persian letters, Kazem-Bek was transferred to the more prestigious chair. That year his colleagues also voted him dean of his faculty.

The Royal British Asiatic Society elected him a corresponding mem- ber in , an honor the Russian Academy of Sciences would also be- stow upon him in Other leading orientological groups in Paris, Berlin, and Boston followed. In he edited an Arabic edition of the Mukhtasar al- wiqaya, an important manual of jurisprudence used by Tatars and other Turkic nationalities in Russia. At the same time, he was well aware that more conservative bureaucrats might object to his relatively positive as- sessment of Islamic law.

Petersburg in , Kazem-Bek assumed increas- ing administrative responsibilities that distracted him from scholarship. Shortly after his arrival, he was tapped by a government committee over- seeing the translation of liturgical texts into Tatar, as well as by another body that reviewed Islamic legal codes. Tatar scholars distrusted the involvement of an apostate into what they consid- ered to be their own affairs, while conservative Russians found him to be too sympathetic to Islam. Thus he wrote about the resistance to Russian rule in Dagestan, as well as concerning the Babis, a reformist sect in Persia.

Unlike his German predecessors at Kazan, he took the trouble to master Russian, which boosted his popularity as a lec- turer. While he claims to have been lonely and withdrawn during his early years at the uni- versity, his colleagues enjoyed his company. He was much sought after as a dinner guest, especially when prominent visitors came to town. According to a French biographer of his great-grand- son, the professor fathered four children out of wedlock in Russia. But, he quickly pointed out, the Orient did not have a monopoly on decadence, as the histories of Rome and Byzantium had amply proven.

It served all the caliphs in their conquests of various nations. Was not the name of Christ [invoked to purge] millions of heretics from the Church? He saw no fundamental divide between Orient and Occident. If the Per- sian and Ottoman empires were despotic, this was the result of their cur- rent stage of historical development. By implication, their people were just as capable of enlightenment as Europeans of the modern age. Although the more advanced Christian West had a duty to promote progress in the Muslim East, true emancipation could only be achieved from within: The West cannot restore enlightenment to the East.

Some Russian conservative editorialists of the day angrily suggested that his study of the Babis was a veiled critique of the Romanov autocracy, and in the follow- ing century Soviet authors more approvingly also detected a hidden hos- tility to tsarism. However, Kazem-Bek was anything but a revolutionary. When in Russian student unrest led to the tem- porary closure of St. At the time Russian higher education was still in its infancy, and adequately trained professors were scarce.

Even in Russia, which directly bor- dered on the Inner Asian realm, the discipline had barely been recognized. There was no embarrassment of riches. The only two reputable scholars in Russia with any knowledge of the language were Father Hyacinth the former head of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Beijing and Isaac Schmidt. Eventually settling in the capital, he became involved with the St. Petersburg Bible Society, translating liturgical texts into Mon- golian and Kalmyk, its close linguistic relative. Although he was elected to membership in the Academy of Sciences ten years later, Isaac Schmidt does not occupy a prominent place in the pan- theon of tsarist orientologists.

His accomplishments were respectable, in- cluding some important pioneering works in Mongolian and Tibetan philology. Petersburg to learn the lan- guage from Isaac Schmidt. While agreeing to the idea in principle, Musin- Pushkin and Lobachevskii devised an alternative more in keeping with the patriotic tenor of the times. Why look abroad, they wondered, when Kazan had perfectly good young scholars of its own? Six were sent to Kazan, where Kovalevskii and two of his comrades were ordered to study Eastern languages at the university.

Although he had little choice in the matter, Kovalevskii made the best of his new curriculum. He proved equally adept at mastering Arabic and Tatar as he had Greek. He wrote many for advice, including his compatriots Mickiewicz and Osip Senkovskii. Everyone urged him to take on the challenge. As a result, in the spring of the former classicist set off on the lengthy journey with a younger fellow stu- dent, Aleksandr Popov.

Again, Kovalevskii looked at the bright side. At the highest peak I shook off the Eu- ropean dust with a fond farewell. I am in Asia! An entirely new air rushed pass my face. Formal instruction would be supple- mented by extensive stays in the surrounding area and beyond for practice among the local population. Kovalevskii and Popov conscientiously obeyed their teachers, quickly mastering Mongolian and its more colloquial Buriat variant. The latter sojourn, which included permission to observe rituals, talk to the monks, and study the extensive collection of religious texts, sparked a lifelong interest in Buddhism.

He seized this rare opportunity to travel to the Chinese capital, where he spent a year perfecting his Mongolian and picking up some Manchu, Chinese, and Tibetan in the bargain. Kovalevskii and Popov returned to Kazan in early and were immediately ordered to St. Petersburg to be examined by the Academy of Sciences. Within two years of taking up his post, he published a gram- mar.

On the advice of Father Hyacinth, whom he had befriended in Irkutsk, the Pole had already begun compiling Mongolian words and ex- pressions during his Siberian sojourn. Upon returning to European Rus- sia he presented a 40,word vocabulary to the Academy of Sciences, which formed the basis of his subsequent lexicon. Published in three vol- umes between and , the work remains a standard reference to this day. However, the post of Academician would have entailed a move to St. Petersburg, and Nicholas I was apparently not prepared to re- lease the politically unreliable Pole from his banishment.

The tsar black- balled the honor. Nevertheless, the autocracy did recognize his abilities, appointing him rector of the univer- sity that year. Within a year of his arrival in Warsaw, Poles rose for a second time that century against their Russian masters. Aside from a lesson plan for his history survey at Warsaw, he published no more works during his lifetime.

All around is decay. Much like Kazem-Bek, Kovalevskii saw the Crusades as a good example of this phenomenon: There was a time when the haughty European looked down on Asia as a sanctuary of idleness and voluptuousness, populated by savage barbarians, a land of immense luxury and servility. Re- member how, under the banner of the Faith, innumerable masses of Christians rushed to the shores of Asia Minor, to extirpate their sworn enemies.

The knights of the Cross. How many secrets its rich lands conceal! By the same token, the West also had a great deal to teach the East. In addition to his pioneering works in Mongolian language and the history of Buddhism, Osip Mikhailovich had also taught some of the leading scholars of the next generation, including St. Perhaps his most gifted student was the young Buriat Dorzhi Banzarov. Founded in at the request of Tatar merchants, the latter possessed rare fonts in, among others, Arabic, Turk- ish, Tatar, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Sanskrit scripts.

Already in the emperor had ordered his education minis- ter to consider how Asian language training for future bureaucrats could be improved. He had long advocated setting up an Asian institute to centralize all teaching of Eastern languages in the empire. With its distinguished faculty, its many Asian minorities, and its proximity to the Orient, Kazan seemed to him to be the most logical home for such an entity. While it would take some time for the news to reach Kazan, by the decision to make St. Petersburg the new center for tsarist orientology had already been made. Petersburg University, entirely dis- solving the discipline at Kazan.

Thanks to the un- usual circumstances of his Asian upbringing and his subsequent European maturation, he combined broad Oriental knowledge with Occidental scholarship. Above all, Kazem-Bek championed a practical approach to the study of languages. And his more promising graduates were given further opportuni- ties for practice through carefully scripted study tours in the East. Petersburg, he would continue to stress the primacy of the practical in the face of con- siderable opposition from others on its faculty, who favored a more theoret- ical approach grounded in the traditions of German philology.

While Kazem-Bek considered the study of language important in its own right, he also saw a wider application. This is the sole path to true knowledge, hidden in the labyrinth of ignorance. In Catherine the Great had ordered Tatar to be taught at the First Gymnasium to train translators for government service. Another important characteristic of the Kazan school was its emphasis on the Islamic East. Intimacy with Asia did not inevitably translate into respect for its civi- lizations. In this way, the Kazan school bequeathed an important legacy, for it reminded Russians that they could learn from Asians just as they might from other Europeans.

Without such an intimate acquaintance any confrontation with its more able advocates is bound to lose much of its effect. There was a brief revival of instruction in Turkish, Arabic, and Persian during the s, but it soon foundered in the face of student apathy. Unlike its Western cousins, the Russian Church had long ago lost much of its missionary vocation. On occasion, however, pious monks had evangelized the various Finnic tribes in the wilderness beyond Novgorod. Inspired by the charismatic Saint Sergius of Radonezh, founder of the Holy Trinity Monastery near Moscow, scores of monks established their own communities and her- mitages in the remotest reaches of northeastern Russia.

Others renewed the campaign to take the Gospel to unbeliev- ers among the various peoples that inhabited the endless taiga. Born around to a sexton in the northern town of Ustiug, Stefan became fascinated as a boy with the language of the Komi, a Finnic minority living in the region. In- spired by this prophecy, Stefan moved to a monastery, where he studied to become a missionary.

At the time, spreading the word of God to the heathen involved a thorough knowledge of Greek, then the language of Orthodox theology. While Stefan soon mastered it, he also knew that the Komi would only listen to him if he preached in their tongue. Despite initial resistance, his zeal and his sensitivity to native ways attracted many followers. By preaching in the vernacular, Saint Stefan was fol- lowing in the hallowed tradition of Saints Cyril and Methodius, the ninth- century Macedonian brothers who had evangelized the Slavs by devising a written language for the liturgy in Slavonic.

On the day of his triumphal entry into the vanquished capital, Ivan ordered all Muslims expelled and laid the foundations for a cathedral as well as several monasteries. During his eight years as archbishop, an estimated 20, Muslims in Kazan accepted the sacrament of baptism. Over the next three hundred years, missionary efforts in the mid-Volga region followed an in- consistent course, sometimes aggressive, on other occasions hesitant and discreet. And they were never motivated by any particularly great evan- gelical fervor within the Orthodox Church itself.

Diplomacy also constrained them, since Moscow was re- luctant to anger the Turkish sultan by forcibly converting his coreligion- ists. As a result, until the twentieth century, such countries had overwhelmingly Catholic populations. Their attitudes about conversion and spiritual conformity were therefore closer to the Catholic ideal. Swayed by Enlightenment ideals of religious toleration, Cather- ine II largely dissolved the missionary apparatus her predecessors had es- tablished at Kazan. The empress even supported Islamic conversions of animists elsewhere in her realm, on the grounds that the monotheistic faith would help pacify them.

Over the coming decade, however, the rising tide of Kriashen apostasy began to worry the increas- ingly nationalist autocracy. Developments elsewhere further fueled anxieties about Islam. Neither the Missionary Division nor the Theological Academy itself had en- joyed an easy birth. Thus in Empress Anna, who was par- ticularly keen to assimilate her Asian minorities, expressed her wish that the seminary train priests to tend to inorodtsy, although it is uncertain whether this desire actually materialized into language classes or other specialized in- struction during the eighteenth century.

Petersburg , the Kazan Theological Academy was responsible both for training seminary faculty as well as for supervising all education by the Orthodox Church in the sees under its jurisdiction. Since none were yet com- petent to do so, however, two instructors, Mirza Aleksandr Kazem-Bek and Aleksandr Popov, were brought in from the outside for the time being. Even here the administration bungled. Unwilling to admit this mistake to their superiors in St.

Yet, if the impetus for setting up the Mission- ary Division had been growing concerns about Islam, most of its resources were soon deployed to prepare for campaigns against the Old Believers, the descendants of dissident Russian Orthodox who had refused to adopt the liturgical reforms of the seventeenth century. Twentieth- century assessments were equally mixed.

By all accounts he was popu- lar and gifted. The encounter marked the start of a fruitful collaboration. In early he was asked to join Kazem-Bek in supervising a committee at the academy to commission translations of Orthodox texts into Tatar on order of the tsar.

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The young professor also found that earlier efforts by mis- sionaries to shore up the Orthodox faith among the Kriashen were en- tirely ineffective. On the contrary, we must adopt a Muslim perspective, accepting its religious worldview and conception of the past. He was also to study history and Islamic theology, both by reading classical texts as well as by visiting ancient temples and archaeological sites. A major center of Islamic learning, the ancient city had the added advantage of being in Egypt, which was by then only nominally subject to the Porte.

This would prove particularly useful for the Russian visitor at a time of growing Ottoman-Romanov tensions on the eve of the Crimean War. Moving in with a scholar, Sheikh Ali El-Barrani, he devoted his days to reading literary works and grammars, while receiving personal in- struction from his host every evening in Arabic, as well as in Muslim the- ology and law. He took long walks throughout Cairo, visiting its many mosques, monuments, bazaars, and schools, and indulged himself in a cruise on the Nile River to the ruins at Wadi Halfa in upper Nubia.

Much to his chagrin, all such expectations were dashed when in early October Turkey declared war on Russia, forcing a hasty return home. Yet despite its premature conclusion, the trip had been useful. More recently, however, zealous Western inter- lopers were proving increasingly successful in their attempts to attract the Orthodox to their versions of the Christian faith. With the help of a Tatar instructor, he initially focused on language training.

He also made an effort to introduce his students to Islam through reading assignments and lively tales about his own travels. Although technically his appointment now was as professor in anti- Muslim polemics, Nikolai Ivanovich did not pay any attention to this subject, having already deemed it irrelevant. Compared to the twenty-nine who matriculated in the anti—Old Believer curriculum in September , only twelve entered his anti-Islam department another three enrolled in the anti-Buddhist de- partment and twelve in Chuvash-Cheremis.

Even then, the aspiring clerics did so on the condition that they receive a regular salary and not be forced to become monks. Although the synod eventually rescinded this rebuff to its ablest mis- sionary teacher, by then it was too late. Much of his attention focused on assimilating Kazakhs through conversion to Orthodoxy. When Kazan University managed to reestablish a chair in Turkic letters in , it invited him to take up the post, which he would hold until While he tirelessly, if unsuccessfully, campaigned for a proper restoration of orientology there, his teaching duties remained light; the professor rarely attracted more than a handful of students, and on occasion none dared to take his gruel- ing subject.

Still reluctant to have anything to do with anti-Muslim polemics, he accepted the offer on the condition that he return on half pay at a junior rank and only teach language. In Vasilii Timofeev, a devout Kriashen who had helped him translate Christian texts into Tatar, took in a few boys from his village and began to teach them at home.

Although his earlier contributions to orientology won him elec- tion to the Imperial Academy of Sciences in , he declined the honor to avoid having to leave Kazan. Given the ultimate aim of their efforts—combating Islam and converting its followers to Christianity—the men who held the anti-Muslim chair rarely approached their subject with scrupulous objectivity.

In he boosted the Missionary Department by doubling the faculty devoted to its anti-Islamic and anti-Buddhist sections to four.

20th century: - - Oxford Reference

Petersburg Uni- versity, the academy remained a backwater for scholarship of the East until the new Bolshevik government shut it down in Petersburg intellectual and literary circles, the exotic monk left his imprint outside of academe as well, even inspiring several novels and a play. Four years later the two empires signed the Treaty of Nerchinsk, which still marks much of the boundary between eastern Siberia and Manchuria. Kangxi hospitably treated the Albazintsy, as his Cossacks came to be known. He personally welcomed them when they arrived in Beijing, paid them the same wage as his own bannermen, and allowed them to take Chinese wives.

But in , eager to secure Russian permission for his embassy to the Kalmyks, an Inner Asian people who had migrated to the steppes around the lower Volga, Kangxi relented and agreed to a mission, headed by Archimandrite Illarion Lezhaiskii. The missions were primarily charged with saving the souls of the Albazintsy. Unlike their Catholic or Protestant counterparts, the Orthodox fathers tended not to seek new converts among the Chinese. It refrained from proselytizing, interfering in politics, in- triguing at the court, or promoting commercial goals. Petersburg, few Chinese had any illusions about Russian motives.

During the Boxer uprising of , a violent anti- European popular reaction in northern China, neither Orthodox converts nor establishments were exempt from the xenophobic fury. They were an unruly lot, and a fair number perished from drink or disease. The clergy did not always set the best example. The head of the third mission, Archimandrite Illarion, was given to drunkenly parad- ing about the Beijing compound in drag. The University of Kazan had al- ready established a chair in Chinese philology in , and the University of St.

Petersburg soon followed suit. Meanwhile, the establishment of for- mal diplomatic relations between China and Russia in freed the fa- thers in Beijing from any diplomatic responsibilities. As the promising son of a cleric, Nikita was enrolled in the Kazan Sem- inary. He proved to be an excellent student.

Within a year he was tonsured as a monk, taking the name Hyacinth. Two years later he found himself appointed archimandrite of a monastery in Irkutsk and rector of the local seminary. It was too rapid an ascent. At the tender age of twenty-four, Father Hya- cinth proved incapable of maintaining discipline among the rowdy semi- narians. Although in disgrace, Father Hyacinth got a lucky break. Shortly after his arrival at the western Siberian city, he met Count Iurii Golovkin, a diplomat who was on his way to Beijing to negotiate better trade links with the Middle Kingdom.

The count was traveling along with the new ninth mission, which was about to begin its term in the Chinese capital. When he became acquainted with the cleric, Golovkin thought him the perfect candidate to head the mission. The archimandrite arrived at his new posting in January and would spend the next fourteen years in China.

Yet it must have seemed that keep- ing the Orthodox faith alive among these assimilated descendants of sev- enteenth-century Cossacks was a hopeless task. As his predecessor, Archimandrite Sofronii of the eighth mission, had reported back to the Holy Synod in St. As he labored over this work, he was troubled by the absence of a proper Chinese-Russian dictionary.

The best reference was a Chinese-Latin dic- tionary that Catholic priests at the Portuguese mission had lent him. Within four years, Father Hyacinth had compiled his own lexicon, which he continued to supplement over the course of his stay. At the same time, Father Hyacinth paid close attention to political developments.

When Lin Qing, the son of a humble clerk, led his abortive Eight Trigram rebellion against the dynasty in , the archimandrite sent an eyewitness account of the unrest back to St. Upon returning to St. The religious calling was contrary to his character, and he had answered it quite by accident. If Father Hyacinth thoroughly managed to alienate his superiors in the Holy Synod, he also had some important patrons.

James Jones:

Despite several efforts to be freed from his vows, however, Father Hyacinth remained a monk. Lauded by critic and orientologist Osip Senkovskii, among others, it was quickly translated into French. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. The following year saw the ap- pearance of four more works: Shortly after returning from China, Father Hyacinth had also made the acquaintance of the future De- cembrist conspirator Nikolai Bestuzhev. Fond of high society, champagne, and cigars, Father Hyacinth was more boulevardier than ascetic. The stout and stern German traveler—Baron Schilling.

Krylov, Zhukovskii, and Viazemskii were always there too. The foreign ministry had ordered Schilling to study the local population as well as the China trade. The lat- ter goal was particularly important. Petersburg along with the previous Beijing mission per- sonnel. Three more books soon followed: The History of Tibet and Koko- nor from B. Based on both Russian and Chinese sources, the work told the story of the last major westward Inner Asian nomadic migration, whose descendants settled the steppes around the lower Volga.

He took his duties seriously and also found time to write articles about such subjects as Chinese statistics, as- tronomy, education, and regional government, among others. Never- theless, life in a frontier town held little appeal for the cosmopolitan cleric, and after repeated appeals to the foreign ministry he was allowed to return to St.