Russian Central Asia in the Works of Nikolai Karazin, 1842–1908

“This book provides a deep reading of Nikolai Karazin’s works and his relationship with Central Asia. Elena Andreeva shows how Karazin’s prolific creations have much to tell us about Russian imperialism, colonial and local society as well as Russians’ self-identity as colonizers and Europeans.  The work offers an original contribution to the scholarship on Russian imperial history and that of Central Asia, and Russian literary history also.  Karazin’s importance—at the time and now—is appropriately highlighted.” 

“Elena Andreeva’s book resurrects a vital if forgotten figure from the Russian past: Nikolai Karazin, Russia’s Kipling, a multifaceted participant in Russian imperial expansion, whose fiction, journalism, ethnography and visual representations may well have done more than any agent of the Russian state to represent and popularize Russia’s conquest of Central Asia to a newly literate Russian public beyond the educated elites. Archivally based and carefully argued, Andreeva’s study of Karazin reveals the absence of any singular logic to Russian imperial expansion. In her analysis Karazin emerges as a vernacular enthusiast of empire who was able to reconcile a skeptical attitude towards tsarist autocracy with an idealized view of Russia’s 'civilizing' mission in the East.”

-       Harsha Ram , Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley, USA

This book is dedicated to the literary and visual images of Central Asia in the works of the popular Russian artist Nikolai Karazin.  It analyzes the ways Karazin’s discourse inflected, and was inflected by, the expansion of the Russian empire – and therefore sheds light on the place of art and culture in the Russian colonial enterprise.  It is the first attempt to interpret Karazin’s images of Central Asia within Russian imperial networks and within the maze of the Russian national identity that informed them.