Description

This lecture examines the applicability of Edward Said’s theories to Russia about “Orientalism”
as a hegemonic device. The focus will be a painter and a composer whose works were created in
the late nineteenth century, at a time of tsarist conquest in Central Asia. After a brief survey of
how Russian Orientalism fits into the broader framework of Said’s ideas about culture and
colonialism, I will examine the war painter Vasilli Vereshchagin’s “Turkestan Series,” a group
of canvases executed in the early 1870’s, shortly after the artist participated in the campaign
against Samarkand. I will contrast Vareshchagin’s portrayal of tsarist small wars against the
Islamic khanates with Aleksandr Borodin’s opera Prince Igor. While based on a thirteenthcentury
medieval epic about an unsuccessful campaign against steppe nomads, the opera can also
be read as a metaphor for the tsarist march into Turkestan. The lecture will be accompanied by
slides as well as musical clips.

David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye is Professor of Russian history at Brock
University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. His research interests focus on
18th- and 19th-century Russian cultural, intellectual, diplomatic and military
history. Schimmelpenninck is the author of, among other, Toward the Rising Sun:
Russian Ideologies of Empire and the Path to War with Japan (DeKalb, IL: Northern
Illinois University Press, 2001) and Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind
from Peter the Great to the Emigration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
He is currently writing a book about tsarist expansion into Central Asia.
After a childhood in the Netherlands, Schimmelpenninck was educated at the
University of Toronto Schools and at Yale College. He spent ten years as an
investment banker in Toronto and the City of London before returning to Yale,
where he completed a doctorate in history in 1997. He has been awarded
fellowships by Harvard University’s Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, the
National Humanities Center, SSHRC and a Brock University Chancellor’s Chair
for Research Excellence.