Colonialism, Eurasianism, Orientalism: N. S. Trubetzkoy's Russian Vision

Abstract

To begin with, a brief story, perhaps strange for a Slavic and East European Journal review, but relevant to the subject at hand. Since I am neither a Russianist nor a Sovietist, but rather a scholar of the contemporary African and more broadly post-colonial worlds, my first voyage to Russia was both recent and brief. But despite that trip's brevity my time there revealed an oddly familiar occidentocentric, even colonized mindset. Of course St. Petersburg, the city I visited, is Russia's most Western location, and that city's quasi-namesake was Russia's great Westerizer, yet neither I nor my tour-group (a diverse set of academics from five continents) were prepared for the exo-centricity we met. The city itself is glorified as either Russia's Amsterdam or its Venice, and Peterhof its Versailles. Buildings are noted for their Italian or French architects, and restoration of the city's fine library was deemed crucial since it held manuscripts not by the likes of Dostoevsky or Pushkin, but Diderot and Voltaire. Such issues, I suspect, will be familiar to readers of the Slavic and East European Journal, as yet more evidence of the longstanding tug between East and West in Russian culture. They were familiar to me, however-an Africanist largely ignorant of Russia-for different reasons: because this exocentricity, this West-directed other-identification and part-denial of self was characteristic for me not of Russia but of nations and peoples in that great range of societies formerly termed Third World but now called post-colonial, especially in those many places where Western European culture had been dominant or prestigious, had passed for universal, or had been imperfectly digested.

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