Mutual Gaze: Russianness and Non-Russianness in Imperial Russia

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Recent scholarship has emphasized the constructed nature of identity and its role in shaping interactions between different regions and peoples, both within the Russian Empire and between different countries. This panel explores alternate ways in which conceptions of identity have shaped both political and social interactions in late Imperial Russia. David Rainbow examines the place of race and class in Siberian regionalist thinking. Exploring the notion that a new racial type, the Siberian, had emerged through intermingling of Slavs and indigenous peoples, he argues that regionalists viewed race as a fundamentally malleable category of human difference; moreover, the generally accepted premise that human bodies reflected the success or failure of imperial power allowed for critique of the state’s colonial policies in Siberia. Rebecca Mitchell explores how 19th-century church missionaries turned their attention to engaging the inner spiritual experience of Tatar apostates from Orthodoxy through (among other means) chant. Even as music was touted as a “Christianizing” and “Russifying” force, interaction with Tatar students at the Kazan School for Baptized Tatars led music scholar Stepan Smolenskii to seek to transform Russian Orthodox song, creating a controversial new school of church chant that aimed to revolutionize Russian religious practice. Pauline Fairclough offers a comparative analysis of music criticism in both England and Russia, exploring the conceptions of “Russian” and “English” that emerged simultaneously in both countries. By placing these reception histories side-by-side, we perceive where and how music criticism became a narrative for broader cultural attitudes between the two late-Imperial powers. 

Sub Unit

• History: Russian and Eurasian, 1800-1924

Chair

• Katya Ermolaeva, St. Andrews U (Scotland) / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland

Papers

• Siberia, Race, and Class in the Late Imperial Period - David Rainbow, U of Houston

• ‘Baptized Tatars’ in Orthodox Russia: Music, Conversion, and Identity - Rebecca Anne Mitchell, Middlebury College

• Exciting Russians, Boring English: Tchaikovsky in England, Elgar in Russia - Pauline Fairclough, U of Bristol (UK)

Discussant

• Marina B. Mogilner, U of Illinois at Chicago