Going Native.
One of the most ingrained ideas in the history of Russia is that its culture originated elsewhere; in the words of Etkind- “the fruits are national, the roots are foreign.”[1] National pride wasn’t really internally generated, but stemmed from associations with different tribes like Rurik’s Normans who had been part of Russia’s early history. So we have a phenomenon in which outsiders become naturalised and then try to colonise other scattered peoples across the great breadth of Russia. In the seventeenth-century the German-born Catherine the Great brought nomadic tribes of the Orenberg province (later named Kazakhs) under Russian sovereignty.[2] Catherine’s court was even viewed as Tartars, and this was part of an “orientalising process” in which Russians took on the appearance and characteristics of what were perceived as exotic peoples. The orientalising tendency can be seen in some of the portraits of the day, like the academic painter Karl Briullov’s double portrait of an officer with his servant which has a pronounced oriental ambiance (above). Something of this cultural osmosis is seen in the British in India, and in a similar way some Russians went “native.” From the writings of the poet and novelist Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841) (who was known as “the poet of the Caucasus”) through Pushkin with his interest in the exotic to Gogol with his travelling tales of the eccentric Russians in St Petersburg, Moscow and the Ukraine, intellectuals took more interest in the culture of native tribes and ethnic groups. Lermontov himself was a painter, and he tried his hand at a number of landscapes which are not important for their quality, but for what they betray about the poet’s interest in the local communities and customs of Russia.
[1] Etkind, Internal Colonization, 114.
[2] IN 1763, just after her coronation, Catherine issued her Manifesto “that invited foreign colonists to settle in Russia and promised substantial benefits to the immigrants, such as free agricultural land, exemption from military service, relocation subsidies, free loans, and tax immunity for thirty years” Ibid, 128.
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