West-Eastern Metamorphoses: (De)Constructions of the ‘Orient’ in European discourses about Russia Cover Image
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Westöstliche Metamorphosen: (De)Konstruktionen des ‚Orients‘ in europäischen Russland-Diskursen
West-Eastern Metamorphoses: (De)Constructions of the ‘Orient’ in European discourses about Russia

Author(s): Martina Stemberger
Subject(s): Cultural Essay, Political Essay, Societal Essay
Published by: AV ČR - Akademie věd České republiky - Slovanský ústav and Euroslavica

Summary/Abstract: This article, based on a corpus including travelogues, fiction, philosophical essays, political and journalistic reports, analyzes various (de)constructions of the ‘Orient’ in Western European – mainly French – discourses about Russia. As ‘European Orient’, as ‘Other Europe’, Russia played the role of one of Western Europe’s privileged ‘others’, essential for the contrastive conceptualization of an ‘occidental’ identity. But Russia always was a rebellious object of othering. The ‘oriental’ imagery these texts often recur to seemingly allows framing Russia’s disturbing yet inconceivable alterity in paradoxically familiar categories of picturesque strangeness. After the October Revolution, Western ‘Euro-Orientalism’, confronted with the ‘Orient marxiste’, the ‘Orient communiste’, acquires a new political dimension. This essay reflects on the complex interplay of autoand heterostereotypes in the discursive ‘orientalization’ of Russia; but it also shows how the stereotypical Orient/Occident-dichotomy is deconstructed by literary visions of “third spaces”, cultural and political spaces in-between, between East and West, Orient and Occident.

  • Issue Year: XXI/2010
  • Issue No: 1-2
  • Page Range: 3-26
  • Page Count: 24
  • Language: German