Russian culture discovered its first "Orient" in the late 18th century when Catherine II extended the boundaries of her empire to Southern Ukraine and the Crimea. While Russians had interacted for centuries with their Asiatic neighbors, they had not systematically characterized them as Oriental "others" until Catherine's reign. 1 The 1783 conquest of new territory on the shores of the Black Sea, which coincided with the rising popularity of Oriental fashions in West European literature and culture, provided an opportunity to do so. Accordingly, these southern borderlands were the first landscapes in the empire to be elaborately imagined according to the Western parameters of Oriental stylization. 2 An especially powerful stimulus to representations of the Crimea as an "Eastern" or "Oriental" territory was Catherine II's trip to the Crimea in 1787. Commentary on the journey, written by the empress herself, members of her entourage, and her various correspondents, illustrates the initiatory formulation of an exotic Crimean imaginary-a year before Byron's birth and 12 years before Pushkin's. This was not yet the full-fledged Orientalism of Said's classic model. 3 A concerted institutional effort at the political and cultural control of colonial territories would develop only in the 19th century, largely in response to the Russian empire's conflicts further south and east with the peoples of the Caucasus. 4

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract