Англо-руски сукоб у књижевном делу Радјарда Киплинга: имаголошко-идеолошка перспектива
ANGLO-RUSSIAN ANTAGONISM IN THE LITERARY OEUVRE OF RUDYARD KIPLING: AN IMAGOLOGICAL AND IDEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

Summary/Abstract: This article explores the topic of the 19th-century Anglo-Russian conflict in Asia in three works by Kipling – his story “The Man Who Was”, his poem “The Truce of the Bear”, and his novel Kim. Herein, the respective images of the English and the Russians are studied (which is the imagological aspect of the article), as are the political ideas present in these texts (the article’s ideological aspect). When it comes to the imagological aspect of this article, the conclusion is reached that Kipling’s portrayal of the English, that is, British is very positive (the English as benign hegemons, as virtuous knights and protectors of natives in South Asia and parts of Central Asia), and that the portrayal of the Russians is very negative (the Russians as malign hegemons, unscrupled expansionists and oppressors of South Asian and Central Asian natives), so it is clear that the works analysed herein reflect Kipling’s personal support for British imperialism. When it comes to the ideological aspect of this article, the conclusion is reached that such a biased imagological representation of the British and Russians advocates Anglo-Saxonism as a 19th-century racist ideological concept supportive of the idea of British-American global hegemony, and, also, such an essentially Russophobic representation is brought into connection with Edward Said’s orientalism. As argued in the paper, in Kipling’s opus the Russians are portrayed as an oriental people, but not as a people that is childishly or femininely weak and in need of being ruled by masculine, superior Westerners (the British). The Russians are actually portrayed as a people that threatens to take over Britain’s colonial possessions, and, as Kipling would argue, to the detriment of the colonised Asian peoples themselves. Beause Kipling’s portrayal of Russians is an unusual orientalist discourse (unusual because it is not in accordance with the basic Saidian definition of orientalism) and because the negative, stereotypical portrayal of Russians has been very commonplace in Western culture over the last two centuries, the author of this paper suggests that a separate imagological and theoretical concept be invented for the image of the Russians, a concept which, as the author proposes, following the model of Said’s orientalism and Maria Todorova’s balkanism, could be termed “russianism”.

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