Imperial Grotesque: Reimagining the Kazakh Steppe

• In Event: Literature and “Ethnographic Primitivism” in the Russian Empire/Early USSR

Abstract

In the 1870s, when Russia was busy with a full-scale conquest of Central Asia and accounts of the steppe nomads proliferated in the press, Nikolai Leskov produced his masterpiece, The Enchanted Wanderer. This tale features the Kazakh horde which Leskov encountered in his youth and which he subsequently read extensively about as Russia solidified its control over the Kazakh steppe. This paper seeks to show that in his portrayal of the horde Leskov playfully engaged with, and radically deviated from, contemporary ethnographic accounts of this group. In doing so, he offers a grotesque rendition of Russia’s imperial policies and questions the assumptions underlying the ethnographic discourse of the era regarding the colonizer/colonized divide.

Author

• Olga Y. Maiorova, U of Michigan