Imperial Aesthetics: Art, Identity, and Representation in Russia in the Age of Empire interrogates the complexities of race, ethnicity, imperialism, and their visualization in Russia from the late eighteenth century to the early Soviet period. Through an exploration of a dynamic triadic model involving Europe, Russia, and Asia, the book considers how the so-called “Orient” became an important discursive site from which Russia’s own political, social, and cultural shortcomings could be recognized and critiqued. It likewise aims to excavate the lived experiences of the ethnically diverse peoples and marginalized communities in Russia’s imperial orbit. One of the key driving questions of the book is to ascertain the degree to which nineteenth-century Russian visual culture was complicit in systems of power and oppression on the one hand and to what extent it advanced anti-imperial and anti-autocratic discourses on the other, especially in territories that were themselves on the fault lines between the East and the West. Lastly, the book investigates the parallels and divergences between distant and intra-imperial racialized identities and the varying ways in which these evolved from the Tsarist to the early Soviet periods.
Mikhail Vrubel: Life and Work provides an in-depth overview of the life and work of the turn-of-the-century Russian artist, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel (1856-1910). Adopting a roughly chronological structure, the book charts the formation and elaboration of Vrubel’s artistic vision and creative output across a range of diverse media, beginning with his student years at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg in the late 1870s and ending with his untimely death in 1910. Over the course of four chapters various stages of Vrubel’s career are analyzed against the backdrop of important artistic, cultural, political, and historical events, all of which shaped his evolving aesthetic, social, and philosophical views. His oeuvre is situated within a wider comparative framework and is discussed in relation to burgeoning French modernism, German and Austrian Jugendstil, British Arts and Crafts, international Art Nouveau, and the neo-Russian and Slavic revivalist movements. The fifth and final chapter of the book examines the myriad ways in which subsequent twentieth-century artists and critics espoused Vrubel’s art as a mythical origin or starting point for the Russian avant-garde project. Leading Russian critics, such as Alexandre Benois, Nikolai Punin, and Nikolai Tarabukin argued that Vrubel not only anticipated, but enabled many of the formal and conceptual innovations of the twentieth century, paving the way for canonical modernists such as Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich, Vasily Kandinsky, Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin, and Naum Gabo, among others.
Articles and Book Chapters
"From Zen Buddhism to the Zero of Form: Exoticism, Mysticism, and the East in Kazimir Malevich’s Early Works"
Focusing on Kazimir Malevich’s early works from 1907 and 1908, and especially his enigmatic painting, Holy Shroud (1908), this chapter interrogates the artist’s fusion of native and exotic visual vocabularies and themes and his incorporation of elements from Indian material culture and the Buddhist pictorial canon. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Malevich eschewed a purely exoticizing or othering stance and moved beyond the predictable pan-European nexus of Orientalist and Theosophical cross-currents to produce a number of elusive and idiosyncratic artworks, defined by hybridity and syncretism. Around the same time, Malevich expressed an interest in Swami Vivekananda’s writings, which appear to have informed the artist’s idea of pure geometry, the absolute, and the illusory nature of the three-dimensional universe. In addition, throughout the 1910s and 1920s Malevich continued to reference Buddhism in his various treatises and essays, leading prominent Malevich scholar, Aleksandra Shatskikh, to conclude that Malevich’s Suprematist teachings were substantially informed by “Eastern mystic traditions” and “above all zen Buddhism”—influences which to date have rarely been discussed in Malevich scholarship.
Focusing on Kazimir Malevich’s early works from 1907 and 1908, and especially his enigmatic painting, Holy Shroud (1908), this chapter interrogates the artist’s fusion of native and exotic visual vocabularies and themes and his incorporation of elements from Indian material culture and the Buddhist pictorial canon. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Malevich eschewed a purely exoticizing or othering stance and moved beyond the predictable pan-European nexus of Orientalist and Theosophical cross-currents to produce a number of elusive and idiosyncratic artworks, defined by hybridity and syncretism. Around the same time, Malevich expressed an interest in Swami Vivekananda’s writings, which appear to have informed the artist’s idea of pure geometry, the absolute, and the illusory nature of the three-dimensional universe. In addition, throughout the 1910s and 1920s Malevich continued to reference Buddhism in his various treatises and essays, leading prominent Malevich scholar, Aleksandra Shatskikh, to conclude that Malevich’s Suprematist teachings were substantially informed by “Eastern mystic traditions” and “above all zen Buddhism”—influences which to date have rarely been discussed in Malevich scholarship.
"Empress of the Turks and Tatars: Catherine the Great’s Conquest of Crimea"
This chapter examines Catherine the Great’s annexation of Crimea in 1784, which became known as Russia’s “First Orient.” Since parts of the Crimean coast had been ancient Greek colonies, the newly annexed territories were renamed Tauris discursively positioning Russia as the rightful heir to ancient Greek civilization and its classical heritage, which had important political implications both for Russia’s ongoing conflict with the Ottoman Empire and its aspirational kinship with Western Europe. This chapter analyzes both the ubiquitous representations of the initial conquest of the Crimean Peninsula and the rich visual and material culture that it generated in Russia in the subsequent two decades, which coincided with the rising popularity of Oriental fashions in European literature, culture and art. Catherine systematically incorporated Orientalist motifs and themes in her palace interiors, garden pavilions, and decorative art objects as a means of domesticating the newly conquered “Orient” and promoting her standing as the uncontested ruler of a new ascendant Empire, which straddled Europe and Asia. In so doing, she forcefully asserted Russia’s growing dominance over its Asian and Eastern European neighbors—and by extension—its status as a major Western power with symbolic links to ancient Greece.
