Through Vasily Vereshchagin's Eyes: Constructing Russia's Imperial Identity
Natasha Medvedev
Department of Art History
UCLA
A pyramid of sun-bleached human skulls, some bearing the marks of saber blows, forms an integral part of the surrounding wasteland. Ravens continue their futile efforts to feed on the skeletal remains, while a great city lies in ruins. Today, this painting, dedicated by the artist “to all great conquerors, past, present and future,” confronts the viewer as an anti-war manifesto. In 1874, when exhibited along with several others under the unified title “Barbarians,” this work served to rationalize war as a necessary evil – part of the “white man’s burden” to eradicate “Oriental” barbarism.
These paintings were used to justify the colonization of Central Asia through the rhetoric of the civilizing mission and advance Russia’s identity as a Western empire. More than a century later, how can we understand the process by which visual representation of Russia’s Eastern subjects shaped and, in turn, was shaped by the construction of an imperial identity? I explore the possible answers to these questions by examining a set of paintings by Vasily Vereshchagin (1842-1904) completed during the conquest of Central Asia and by positioning them within the framework of Russian colonialism. Previous scholarship has considered these works only in the context of generic war, not colonial conquest.
A student of Jean-Léon Gérôme, Vereshchagin was groomed in the long tradition of French orientalist painting. A tireless voyager, he journeyed widely throughout the various regions of Russia, visited nearly every country in Europe, and traveled to India, Palestine, the United States, and Japan. As a military artist and soldier, he participated in the Turkestan War (1867-1870), the Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878), and the Russo-Japanese War (1904). This paper focuses on Vereshchagin’s “Turkestan Series” (1868-1873), which, I argue, uniquely reflects Russia’s imperialist agenda. Commissioned by Governor General of Turkestan Konstantin P. Kaufman, these works glorify the Russian military and justify the Russian conquest of Central Asia by acquainting the “civilized” public with various sordid aspects of life in Turkestan.
By graphically depicting “oriental barbarism,” they rationalize the “pacification” and “civilizing” of the “Asiatics.” The images in this study portray the “Oriental” others, making it appropriate to analyze them within the theoretical framework of “Orientalism” evaluated and critiqued by Edward Said (1978). Russia has long accumulated knowledge about its neighbors, whose representation in Russian art is imbued with the expansionist agenda. Like its Western analogues, Russian nineteenth-century discourse on Asia was predicated on an assumption of cultural superiority and interwoven with an array of orientalist tropes denoting the exoticism, deviousness, laziness, despotism, and depravity of the Asiatic “other.” I argue, however, that Russian Orientalism is a complex, nuanced, and contradictory phenomenon. Therefore the Saidian model, founded on a Manichean dichotomy between the East and the West, can only be applied to the Russian case with great care. A triptych model – the West, Russia, and the East – fits Russian Orientalism more accurately. And only when analyzed within this revised framework, can Vereshchagin’s Turkestan paintings be understood as effective tools in the creation – and justification - of Russian imperial identity.