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Russia's Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (Oxford Studies in Medieval European History) by Vera Tolz is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Russia's Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (Oxford Studies in Medieval European History) about?

Russia's own Orient examines how intellectuals in early twentieth-century Russia offered a new and radical critique of the ways in which Oriental cultures were understood at the time. Out of the ferment of revolution and war, a group of scholars in St. Petersburg articulated fresh ideas about the relationship between power and knowledge, and about Europe and Asia as mere political and cultural constructs. Their ideas anticipated the work of Edward Said and post-colonial scholarship by half a century. The similarities between the two groups were, in fact, genealogical. Said was indebted, via Arab intellectuals of the 1960s who studied in the Soviet Union, to the revisionist ideas of Russian Orientologists of the fin de siècle. But why did this body of Russian scholarship of the early twentieth century turn out to be so innovative? Should we agree with a popular claim of the Russian elites about their country's particular affinity with the'Orient'? There is no single answer to this question. The early twentieth century was a period when all over Europe a fascination with things'Oriental'engendered the questioning of many nineteenth-century assumptions and prejudices. In that sense, t

Author

Vera Tolz

Publisher

OUP Oxford

Published

2011

Language

EN

ISBN

9785444800584

Subjects

History, Sociology, Humanities

Rating

4.3 / 5 (10 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14