Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration

Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration by Schimmelpenninck Van Der Oye, David. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780300110630.

The West has been accused of seeing the East in a hostile and deprecatory light as the legacy of nineteenth-century European imperialism. In this highly original and controversial book David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye examines Russian thinking about the Orient before the Revolution of 1917. Exploring the writings poetry and art of representative individuals including Catherine the Great Alexander Pushkin Alexander Borodin and leading orientologists Schimmelpenninck argues that the Russian Empires bi-continental geography its ambivalent relationship with the rest of Europe and the complicated nature of its encounter with Asia have all resulted in a variegated and often surprisingly sympathetic understanding of the East among its people.