Ethnography as a Colonial Enterprise in 'The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar'

• In Event: Shades of Russian Orientalism: Comparing Imperial Russian Entanglements with Islamic and Buddhist Easts

Abstract

Among Yuri Tynianov’s insights on the cultural politics of colonialism is his parodic depiction of ethnographic inquiry as a tool and simultaneously a product of imperial domination in his novel The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar. In his article “O parodii” (On Parody, 1921). Tynianov argues that moving a textual element from one system to another changes its meaning and function. In The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, instances of ethnographic observations betray their colonial nature when Tynianov transplants them into the new system of his novel. Tynianov’s critical view of ethnography anticipates the approach of such an important academic movement as postcolonial studies that became prominent four decades after the publication of The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar.

Tynianov’s novel critically reevaluates the era of the nineteenth-century romantic nationalism and the role that his favorite authors, Pushkin and Griboedov, played in legitimizing imperial projects. Through parody of their “ethnographic observations,” Tynianov shows how they perpetuate colonial power imbalance between the observer and the observed, the colonizer and the colonized, who is portrayed as “primitive,” “ancient” and in need of civilizing guidance. Contrasting the nineteenth-century textual allusion with references to ethnographic writings of authors of his own time, formalist Viktor Shklovsky and futurist Velimir Khlebnikov, Tynianov reveals a fundamental shift toward negative evaluation and criticism of imperialism and Eurocentric point of view among representative of the Russian avant-garde. Both the formalists, including Tynianov, and the futurists made their anti-colonialist stance clear in their writing and tried to avoid or to counter the Orientalist tropes in their depictions of the Islamic Orient as well as Orientalized Russian folk traditions.

Author

• Anna Valeri Aydinyan, Kenyon College