Russian Central Asia in the Works of Nikolai Karazin, 18421908

This book provides a deep reading of Nikolai Karazins works and his relationship with Central Asia. Elena Andreeva shows how Karazins prolific creations have much to tell us about Russian imperialism, colonial and local society as well as Russians self-identity as colonizers and Europeans. The work offers an original contribution to the scholarship on Russian imperial history and that of Central Asia, and Russian literary history also. Karazins importanceat the time and nowis appropriately highlighted. - Jeff Sahadeo, Associate Professor, Carleton University, Canada Elena Andreevas book resurrects a vital if forgotten figure from the Russian past: Nikolai Karazin, Russias Kipling, a multifaceted participant in Russian imperial expansion, whose fiction, journalism, ethnography and visual representations may well have done more than any agent of the Russian state to represent and popularize Russias conquest of Central Asia to a newly literate Russian public beyond the educated elites. Archivally based and carefully argued, Andreevas study of Karazin reveals the absence of any singular logic to Russian imperial expansion. In her analysis Karazin emerges as a vernacular enthusiast of empire who was able to reconcile a skeptical attitude towards tsarist autocracy with an idealized view of Russias 'civilizing' mission in the East. - Harsha Ram, Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley, USA This book is dedicated to the literary and visual images of Central Asia in the works of the popular Russian artist Nikolai Karazin. It analyzes the ways Karazins discourse inflected, and was inflected by, the expansion of the Russian empire and therefore sheds light on the place of art and culture in the Russian colonial enterprise. It is the first attempt to interpret Karazins images of Central Asia within Russian imperial networks and within the maze of the Russian national identity that informed them.