Ahmad Donish’s Discovery of Petersburg

• In Event: Writing the Self, Nation, and Empire

Abstract

In this paper, I analyze the writing of Ahmad Donish, a Bukharan poet and intellectual who made three trips to Petersburg as the personal secretary to the Bukharan Emir, beginning in 1850. I focus on Donish’s reflections on his travels and what aspects of life outside Bukhara he found especially compelling or confusing. By contextualizing Donish’s writing with Russian and European travelogues about Bukhara, as well as other descriptions of travel by indigenous Central Asians, I consider how Donish’s impressions of Petersburg affected his sense of himself and of Bukhara’s place in an increasingly globalized world after the Russian Empire’s conquest of Turkestan.

Author

• Hana Connelly Stankova, Yale U