ORIENTALISM REVERSED: RUSSIAN LITERATURE IN THE TIMES OF EMPIRES

Abstract

Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, paperback version 2005; first edition 1994)

Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003)

In the last decades of the Russian Empire, Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire made for favorite reading among the intelligentsia. Today imperial themes have become increasingly important in American academia; historians and literary scholars who study Russia are no exception. The two studies under review explore the spirit and the letter of the Russian Empire in the moment of boom and glory preceding its collapse. Published in 1994, Susan Layton's Russian Literature and Empire was the pioneering study of the subject. Published in 2003, Harsha Ram's The Imperial Sublime is so different from Layton's book that the differences, rooted in the American rather than the Russian imperial experience, deserve reflection in their own right. While Layton looked at the world through the emancipatory optic of postcolonialist and feminist movements, Ram manifests a different kind of sensibility, one which is alert to the scale and beauty of the victorious power. In a sad but understandable way, Susan Layton's ethical concerns give way to Harsha Ram's aesthetic ones.