Imperial Russia and Its Orient: The Renown of Nikolai Przhevalsky

Abstract

The Russian Empire raised grandiose monuments to its heroes. One of these, standing over fifteen feet tall in the very center of St. Petersburg, is dedicated to the memory of Nikolai Przhevalsky, the explorer of Inner Asia. At his death in 1888, his admirers and colleagues in the Imperial Russian Geographical Society launched a public subscription for the construction of what they originally intended to be a lifesized bust in front of the building housing the society. Within two years they had collected thirty thousand rubles from thousands of contributors throughout the country, a response to rival that of the subscription for the Pushkin monument a decade earlier. As support grew, so did the sculpture, ultimately placed in the Alexandrovsky Park (see Figure 1). Like other great works of public art of that age, the monument tells a story as much about those who backed the commemorative project as about the explorer himself.1 Imperialism enjoyed widespread popular support in postreform Russia. Who it appealed to and how Przhevalsky's exploits managed to arouse such an enthusiastic response from the Russian public is the subject of this essay. Western expansion into vast territories of Africa and Asia in the nineteenth century constitutes an important chapter in the history of European imperialism. Its study has evolved substantially, however, from the period when historians examined this subject primarily in terms of military conquest and colonial domination. The peoples of both colonies and metropoles have new roles to play in our expanded history of empire-building in the modern era. Cultural history offers a fruitful new approach to the encounters, real and imagined, between imperialists and subject peoples. This cultural approach has increased our appreciation of the power of popular images of colonialism to legitimate imperial rule in a manner peculiar to each Western country, and to perpetuate the demeaning stereotypes of colonial peoples. In exploring the production of these images, historians have examined an array