New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. 298 p.*

David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, a professor of Russian history at Brock University, Ontario, and the author of the well-known Western monograph "Towards the Rising Sun: Imperial Ideologies and the Path to War with Japan," has published an interesting work on Russia's attitude to the East, or more precisely, to Asia, before 1917. The book was highly praised by the author's American colleagues, who said that it "brilliantly reveals how one Eastern nation looks at its Eastern subjects and the Eastern world beyond", that it is "a solid study of the connoisseur, full of surprises", and, finally, "an insightful and beautiful essay that shows how the world is located in the Middle East." how the Russian view of the East is close to the norms of European Oriental studies and how it differs from them." It is interesting that almost all American reviewers contrast this book with the" contradictory " work of Edward Said 1, who tried to break the stereotypical ideas about the East that are common in the West, and about Western Oriental studies itself.

Schimmelpenninck admits that during his youth in Rotterdam, during the Cold War, he believed that " Asia begins right after the Cold War... German border", but "has long since overcome such stereotypes". However, as the epigraph to his work, he chose Stalin's phrase: "I am also Asia", without specifying where it came from. However, it is not so important whether it was actually uttered or the author was the victim of someone's hoax, it is important that with this quote (possibly unreliable), he seems to predetermine his idea of the" Orientocentrism "of Russia and its"Asiaticity". And this is interesting, if only for the fact that his entire research is a fairly detailed, sound and conscientious analysis of the opinions of Europeans and Russians about Russia and the East. Some inaccuracies (such as naming Academician Barthold either Vasily or Vladimir on page 251) are extremely rare.

Schimmelpennink believes that Europe "discovered" Russia in the sixteenth century, when geographers even in Krakow, not to mention the more western capitals, still called Muscovy "Scythia" or "Sarmatia", however, "not entirely alien to the medieval West". He sees the reason for this in the fact that Teutonic knights, Swedes, Poles, and even Italian architects and artists who visited Novgorod and Moscow did not tell almost anything about it when they returned to their homeland. Therefore," Muscovy really entered the consciousness of educated Europeans "only in the sixteenth century, when such" inquisitive and impressionable people as the Habsburg diplomat Sigismund von Herberstein and the English Sir Richard Chancellor and Giles Fletcher " began to write about it (pp. 1-2).

Later, however, the West was dominated by "fantastic" and "false" descriptions of Muscovy, mostly coming from "many Poles who fought with Russia". In an effort to gain allies in the West, especially in the Catholic world, the Poles tried to denigrate their opponent, presenting him as a "pagan Turk". During the Renaissance, Russia was credited with an "Asian identity", imagining it "no less Eastern than Persia or China", which was facilitated by the "exotic costumes" of Moscow's representatives and rumors of "unprecedented despotism of its rulers". In the atlas of the Flemish geographer of 1570 "the Russian tsar

* D. Schimmelpenninck van der Oye. Russian Oriental Studies. Asia in the Russian sense from Peter the Great to emigration. New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2010, 298 p.

1 For the work of Edward Said, see L. A. Berezny's article " Postmodernism and Problems of Orientalism. Notes on a discussion by US sinologists" (Vostok / Oriens. 2004. N 3, 4).

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he was depicted in a Mongolian yurt." 40 years later, a French officer named Jacques Margeret2, "who has traveled extensively in Russia," complained that many Europeans "don't seem to realize that Christianity exists east of Hungary." In Shakespearean England, "Muscovite strangers" and "Scythian monsters" became stage characters. In Germany, the fear of them was caused by the" terrible omnipotence "of the tsar, who seized"a significant part of Livonia."

All these cliches lasted quite a long time. Even in 1839, the Marquis Astolphe de Custine wrote about the alleged "cunning and deceitful view of Asiatics" and "the oriental despotism of their aristocratic government". I remembered Schimmelpennink and Karl Marx with his definition of tsarist Russia as "semi-Asian", and the famous sinologist Wittfogel, who believed that the USSR had "Eastern roots". There is still a widespread belief in the United States that " Russia can go the Asian way."

According to the author, who does not share this belief, " since the adoption of Christianity... many Russians don't want to be Eastern." On the contrary, they consider themselves "defenders of the Cross from the steppe pagans." And in general, he writes, "educated Russians are more likely to agree with Mikhail Gorbachev," who said:: "We are Europeans "(pp. 2-3). At the same time, the author recalls the pre-Mongol Rus ' ties with Europe and Asia, and the era of the Golden Horde, which interrupted Russia's ties with the West and left it isolated from the rest of Europe for a long time after that. Resistance to Peter's reforms as the penetration of the "Western Latin culture cursed by the Orthodox", Slavophilism, Alexander Blok's line "Yes, we are Scythians, yes, we are Asians", the speeches of Princes Ukhtomsky and Meshchersky against "Western materialism and liberalism" - all this, according to the author, led to the idea of "a special Eurasian continent that combines the two worlds". "Asian and European elements" (pp. 3-4).

General Skobelev's conquest of the Turkestan sands... for the glory of the tsar and the fatherland "is characterized by the words of Fyodor Dostoevsky as having given the "main way out" to our future destiny [Dostoevsky, 1984, pp. 32-36]. At the same time, Schimmelpennink points out that "many Russians, considering themselves Europeans, do not feel antipathy to Asia." This is followed by a review of the Western literature on the relations between Russia and the East against the background of a simultaneous analysis of E. Said's criticism of the very concept of "Orientalism", which, according to the latter, now implies not Oriental studies and not the school of painting of such artists of the XIX century as Delacroix or Fromentin, who admired colonial exotics, but "an important weapon from the arsenal of Western imperialism". For Said, "the scientific apparatus of Western studies of the East is a means of enslaving the latter," because in the West they believe that the East is "Alien", it is "mysterious, feminine, malicious and dangerous... rival in the field of culture " (p. 5).

Schimmelpennink draws a direct parallel between the views of E. Said, the subject of the works of the first Soviet Orientalists of the 1920s and 1930s, M. Pavlovich and N. Svirin, and the famous Egyptian sociologist of the 1960s and 1970s. Anwar Abd al-Malik. Without losing sight of Said's numerous critics, he also mentions his supporters, who are also quite numerous. Pointing out that E. Said limited himself to criticizing only Orientalists in the United States, England, and France, the author notes that the activities of many Russian Orientalists, who did not set themselves the task of helping the colonial actions of the Russian tsars, serve as the best refutation of Said's theses. At the same time, not only orientalists themselves are mentioned (V. V. Grigoriev, N. P. Ostroumov, I. Bichurin, A. Kazembek, D. Banzarov), but also writers who wrote about the East (A. S. Pushkin, A. S. Griboyedov, M. Yu. Lermontov, A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, L. N. Tolstoy). A little later, the author corrects himself, noting the connections of I. Bichurin and O. Senkovsky with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Empire, as well as the stay of V. V. Grigoriev in the civil service in Orenburg. A special place is reserved for military generals-K. P. Kaufman, M. D. Skobelev, M. G. Chernyaev, the famous traveler Nikolai Przhevalsky (pp. 8-10).

2 Captain Jacques (in Russia - Yakov) Margeret did not just "travel" around Russia, but served for a long time as a foreign mercenary under tsars Fyodor Ioannovich and Boris Godunov, fought on the side of the latter against False Dmitry, then became one of the chiefs of the impostor's guard and was present at his coronation. In 1606, he went to France, where he published his memoirs, then returned to Russia again, served the "Tushinsky thief", participated in the suppression of the Muscovite uprising by the Poles in March 1611, and in the robbery and arson of Moscow. After the expulsion of the Poles from Moscow, he left with them, having received the refusal of Prince Pozharsky to accept him again into the Russian service. His memoir "The State of the Russian State and the Grand Duchy of Moscow" is repeatedly referred to by SM. Solov'ev [Solov'ev, 1960, p. 4]. 341, 379, 421, 677, 678].

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The author emphasizes that for two centuries from the reign of Peter I to February 1917, Russia looked at Asia "through many lenses." For his research, he chose only two of them - Oriental studies and culture, realizing from the very beginning the difficulty of the task before him, since "Russians do not hold a single opinion about Asia", "the Russian Empire geographically belonged to two continents", its relations with the rest of Europe "were contradictory", and clashes with Asia they were more than complex, which gave rise to fragmentary ideas about the East among her people. "To paraphrase a stereotype from Motyl's 1969 film White Sun of the Desert," the author writes, "Russian orientalism is a delicate matter" (p. 11).

Further, the author carefully traces how the attitude of Russians to the East and its natives was formed and changed, and not from the era of Peter, but from the time of the struggle of Kievan Rus with the Khazars, Bulgars, Pechenegs, Polovtsians, Mongols, Turks of the Golden Horde and post-Horde states (see the chapter "Forest and Steppe", pp. 12-30).. Moreover, contacts with all these peoples are analyzed on the basis of not only Russian and foreign historiography (V. Barthold, G. Vernadsky, N. Baskakov, N. Karamzin, P. Tolochko, etc.), but also primary sources (Herodotus, the Lavrentiev and Ipatiev Chronicles, the Novgorod First Chronicle, "The Tale of the Destruction of Ryazan by Batu", the Russian Orthodox Church, etc.). chronograph, texts of epics," Walking across the Three Seas " by Afanasy Nikitin, etc.). Schimmelpenninck analyzes some sources, such as The Tale of Igor's Regiment, in detail, comparing it with the Old French epic The Song of Roland ("Unlike the fate of Roland, Igor's failure had a happy ending"). After studying the "Word", the author concludes that there are no sharply negative characteristics of the Polovtsians, defined not as "diabolical power", but as "a dangerous opponent, nothing more". He even points out the presence in the text of the Word of traces of "magic of pre-Christian gods and other pagan elements" (p. 17).

According to Schimmelpenninck, the Orthodox Church, which under the Mongol yoke, taking advantage of the religious tolerance of the Khans and the tax privileges received from them, became "the main fighter for Russian national identity", benefited most from the orders introduced in Russia by the Golden Horde. He draws attention to the "ideology of silence" that emerged in Russia after the arrival of the Mongols. Their ruinous campaigns were described much later, sometimes centuries later, because the church (and the chronicles were written by monks), and the princes also tried not to quarrel with the khans. In addition, Byzantium - the "spiritual patron of Russia" - was on good terms with the Golden Horde (Nogai, a temporary worker who ran the Horde, married the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII in 1273).

It makes no sense to list all the aspects of interaction and mutual influence (and mutual repulsion) of Russia and the Golden Horde. They are well studied in the Russian literature, partially used in the peer-reviewed monograph. But its author is not limited to this. He tries to thoroughly study the mechanism of Russian-Horde relations, to identify their differences from the Horde's ties with China, Central Asia, and Iran. Moreover, by the end of the 13th century, the originally established regime of control by the Baskaks was actually replaced by direct cooperation with the Khans of "more independent ""Russian princes".

Much attention in the book is paid to the Horde heritage in Russia in politics, economy, and management structure (judging by the author's references, this issue has been carefully studied in Western literature). Naturally, the author did not ignore the questions of the Horde origin of many Russian surnames, mentioning at the same time, along with Karamzin, Kurakin, Kochubey and Ushakov, the poet Anna Gorenko, who adopted the surname of her ancestors from the maternal side of the Akhmatovs (p. 22).

Russia's relations with the East, of course, were not limited to the Golden Horde. Therefore, Schimmelpenninck also examines the testimonies of Russian pilgrims to the Holy Land (Palestine) or Constantinople (Byzantium), especially focusing on the notes of Abbot Daniel (XII century) and, to an even greater extent, on the many-year journey to India of the Tver merchant Afanasy Nikitin, who also visited Iran. Although in the 15th century and later, other Russian travelers visited the countries of Islam, primarily Iran and the Ottoman Empire, Russians 'acquaintance with Islam before the reign of Peter I was very superficial, limited to "an inaccurate description of Islamic customs", which was influenced by "historical traditions about the struggle of Russians with the Basurmans" (p. 26).

After the fall of the Golden Horde and the conquest of the post-Horde khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan by Moscow, the tsars of Moscow, according to Schimmelpenninck, "did not follow the example of Spain after the fall of Granada in 1492", i.e., they did not start a polemic against Islam and did not go to any other place.-

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forced baptism was prescribed to Muslims (p. 28). However, the author is not entirely accurate here. Tolerance towards Islam and the right of Muslims to freely practice it was not established immediately, finally-only in 1773, under Catherine P. And before that, for more than two hundred years, the policy of Moscow, and then St. Petersburg in the Muslim question was inconsistent and contradictory. On the one hand, the Muslim nobility was persecuted, ruined and restricted in their rights, on the other hand, they were entrusted with the management of entire regions and command posts in the army, which accepted tens of thousands of "serving Tatars" who remained loyal to Islam. On the one hand, Boris Godunov and Mikhail Romanov patronized prominent Muslims; on the other hand, Bishop Luka Kanashevich of Kazan destroyed 418 out of 536 mosques on the territory of the former Kazan Khanate in 1740-1755 alone (Malashenko, 1998, p.26). And although the Empress soon personally arrived in Kazan and actually equalized the rights of Muslims and Orthodox Christians, Kanashevich's " art " was not forgotten by the adherents of Islam.

In parallel with the problems of religion, Schimmelpennink examines the problems of science, including the history of the formation of the Academy of Sciences and scientific Oriental studies, the difficulties of this formation, including the criticism of the famous Arabist I. Y. Krachkovsky of the" false Norman theory " of Gottlieb-Siegfried Bayer, one of the first members of the Russian Academy of Sciences invited from abroad and its first Orientalists. Bayer undertook to write the history of Russia, using documents in Old Norse, Arabic, Mongolian, Chinese, even in Sanskrit, but not in Russian! And despite the objections of many, despite Krachkovsky's testimony about Bayer's "superficial dilettantism" as a connoisseur of the Arabic language and his apparent lack of preparation for such a responsible work, which was based on "both translations and compilations," Bayer's translations "had a significant impact on early Russian historiography" (p.251). Georg-Jakob Ker, another German native who started his career in Russia as a translator and teacher of foreign languages, was later recognized as the true "first Orientalist of Russia". He studied the collection of 4 thousand Tatar coins stored in the Kunstkamera, translated the tables of Persian astrologers and the history of Central Asia written by the Khiva Khan of the XVII century Abu-l-Ghazi Bahadur.

The first Russian academicians in 1745 were Mikhail Lomonosov and the poet Vasily Trediakovsky. But Orientalists were recruited mainly from Orthodox Greeks, Serbs, and Moldovans. One of them was Dimitri Cantemir, the former ruler of Moldavia, a great connoisseur of three cultures-Byzantium, the Italian Renaissance and Islam. Elected a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1714, he became the author of "Descriptions of Moldavia", "Chronicles of the Wallachians and Moldovans", "Studies on the Nature of the Monarchy". The Latin original of his most significant work, Histories of the Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Empire, has not been published. However, his son, the famous poet Antiochus Cantemir, as ambassador in London, translated the manuscript and published it in English. This was also followed by versions in French and German. The book had a great influence on the European historiography of the Ottomans and even on the work of Byron. It is noteworthy that the book used the Muslim chronology. Peter I, who highly valued Kantemir, even intended to make him the first president of the Academy, but did not have time - Kantemir died in 1722, accompanying the tsar in the Persian campaign.

Despite the best efforts of Peter I and even Catherine II, Russia was still perceived in Europe as a kind of "Scythia". This can be seen at least in the perception of foreign diplomats, especially the French Ambassador Count de Segur, of Catherine II's trip to the Crimea in 1787, when, according to the count, she was greeted by Cossacks "richly dressed in Asian fashion", Tatars, Georgians, Kirghiz and "wild Kalmyks who resembled the real Huns". And the count compared meetings with Prince Potemkin to "an audience with the vizier in Constantinople, Baghdad or Cairo." Segur called the trip of the Empress accompanied by "Chinese - like Kalmyks" "a performance of the Arabian Nights", and when he entered the premises of the khan's harem in Bakhchisarai, "he indulged in Oriental luxury and enjoyed the inactivity of a real pasha" (pp. 45-47).

And all this was written and said (in particular, in conversations between the count and the Emperor of Austria Joseph II, who also accompanied the tsarina), despite the fact that Catherine then "fell not into "Orientophilia", but into "Grecophilia"", recalled that the Kievan Prince Vladimir was baptized in Kherson in 988, called the Crimea Taurida, Dnieper-Borysthenes, taken from the Turks by Hadjibey-Odessa in honor of Odysseus, the hero of Homer. But Segur was not affected by anything: he considered even St. Petersburg, with its purely Western architecture, "almost eastern". Ironically, this happened during the reign of the Empress, who was fond of Plutarch and Tacitus, revered Voltaire, Diderot and Montesquieu, and also proclaimed in the 1st chapter of her "Mandate"

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1767, that "Russia is a European state". Nevertheless, Schimmelpenninck attributes it to a "flirtation with the East", especially "in architecture and decorative arts", referring this, however, to "Chinatomism", of which he also blames Voltaire, "who idealized China". Later, the author corrects himself: "In the XVIII century, Russia learned to look at the East through the eyes of the West" (p. 51).

Summing up the" century of Catherine", Schimmelpennik concludes: "The elite of Russia saw the East as amazing, funny and beautiful. But she had no doubt that Russia was very different from Asia. It was only in the next century, when the question of relations with Europe arose, that the opinion about Asia became less clear" (p.59). And it is clear why: Russia got to know the East better and thanks to this, as well as more intensive contacts with Europe, it understood itself better, primarily through its literature, poetry, music, philosophy, in other words, through culture.

According to Belinsky, " Pushkin discovered the Caucasus." Although others wrote about the East before him, it was the southern poet who made Asian topics popular for the Russian reader, for which many considered him the "Russian Byron". The author dwells in detail on the biography of Pushkin and his genealogy, recalling that the Pushkin family is mentioned 28 times in Karamzin's "history of the Russian State", and in the course of the presentation analyzes "southern poems" and other works related to the East, in particular "journey to Arzrum", which he considers "an epitaph for romantic flirting with the East in the future". Russian literature" (p. 74). Speaking about the motives of "orientalism" in Russian painting, Schippelpennink writes that they came from the West, from Eugene Delacroix, but practically analyzes only the work of Vasily Vereshchagin, which, according to many (including the writer of these lines), has nothing to do with Delacroix's painting, moreover, in what way-he even polemics with her.

A large chapter is devoted to the school of Oriental studies that has been established in Kazan since the beginning of the 19th century. Describing its successes and achievements, while comparing them with the more modest successes of Orientalists in Moscow and Kharkov, the author also pays attention to the struggle within the Kazan school, which is not always connected with purely scientific disagreements. He names the founders of the study of Oriental languages and the East in general, Johann-Gottfried Behrendt and Bernhard Dorn in Kharkov, Alexey Boldyrev (a student of the famous French linguist Sylvester de Soli) in Moscow, Christian-Martin Fren and Franz Erdmann in Kazan. Despite the subsequent criticism of all these immigrants from Germany (Boldyrev, by the way, also studied in Germany), who did not know Russian realities and the Russian language very well (Fren and Erdmann even taught in Latin, and Behrendt was a Lutheran pastor in general!), Schimmelpennink believes that they laid a good foundation for the further development of Oriental studies, especially learning oriental languages. In addition, they also created an interest among their students in the "Asian influence" on Russian culture, which remains a constant topic of discussion in Russian history to this day. The tone was set by Mikhail Magnitsky, who headed Kazan University in 1819, who sought to turn it into a purely "Russian" and "Christian" university, and even demanded that Erdmann "downplay the achievements of Islamic civilization" and reduce its origins to "ancient Greek thought". He rejected from university publications "passages about Genghis Khan and Tamerlane because of their potentially dangerous impact on the Tatar minorities of the empire" (p. 100).

Oriental studies in Kazan literally revived after the replacement of Magnitsky in 1826 by M. Musin-Pushkin and the appointment of Alexander Kasimovich Kazem-Bek as a professor. He was, in his own words, "a subject of the Russian Empire of Persian origin "(his real name is Muhammad Ali), but - "a follower of the Protestant Church and a teacher of Turkic-Tatar literature." His name is associated with the rise in the study of Arabic, Persian and Turkic languages in Kazan and St. Petersburg. Since 1845, he was Dean of the Faculty of Oriental Studies, since 1829 - a member of the British Royal Asiatic Society, since 1835 - a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, later - a member of the Oriental societies of Paris, Berlin and Boston. He is the author of the Turkic-language "History of the Crimean Khans "(1832) and" Turkic Grammar "(1839) in Russian and German," Mukhtasarat al-Vikaya " (summary of warnings) - an Arabic-language textbook of jurisprudence for Russian Muslims. One of his students in Kazan was Leo Tolstoy.

Since 1849, Kazem-bek lived in St. Petersburg, where he combined teaching with various administrative posts, and since 1862 - in the rank of privy councilor. He wrote extensively about the Koran, the rebels in Dagestan, and the Babid sect in Iran. But as his scientific authority grew, so did dissatisfaction with him among conservatives who suspected him of sympathizing with Islam, but also among Muslims who rejected the intervention of an" apostate " in their affairs. Some people don't like it-

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It was also confirmed by the fact that Kazem Beg saw in the contemporary world of Islam the features of " stagnation, corruption and despotism." At the same time, in numerous articles, he wrote very objectively about Islam, in particular, drawing a portrait of the Prophet Muhammad as an outstanding person with "an exceptional memory, a powerful intellect, a reserved and attentive person." He opposed the opposition of the East to the West, and Islam to Christianity, emphasizing that the Enlightenment era in Europe "had two sources-Florence and Andalusia." At the same time, the West, in his opinion, "cannot revive the enlightenment in the East... Only those who were born in the East, in their own countries, can carry out reforms there."

In addition to Kazem-Bek, the book also deals with other orientalists of Kazan, among whom stood out Father Iakinf Bichurin, the Dutchman Schmidt (a specialist in Mongolia and Tibet), Osip (Jozef) Kovalevsky, the son of a Uniate priest from Grodno, a friend and associate of Adam Mickiewicz, who became a prominent expert in Arabic, Greek, Tatar and Mongolian After his stay in China, he also mastered Chinese, Manchu, and Tibetan to a "certain extent". It is worth noting that the famous mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky, who was the rector of the University of Kazan for 15 years, contributed in every possible way to the successful work of Kazan Orientalists.

Schimmelpenninck did not pass by the so-called missionary Oriental studies. In 1845, a special missionary department was organized at the Kazan Theological Academy, consisting of sections that studied the languages and religions of the Eastern minorities of the empire: "the autocracy wanted to assimilate minorities through spiritual Russification" (p. 124). Schimmelpennink believed that tsarism could have limited itself to this for "demographic" reasons, since Muslims in Russia by the end of the XIX century made up no more than 10% of the population, and almost all non-Muslims (Chuvash, Cheremis, and others), as well as some Muslims ("newly baptized"), were already converted to Christianity by this time.

But this is not entirely true. First, like the Moors of sixteenth-century Spain and the Huguenots of seventeenth-century France, the Muslims of Russia were deprived of their lands and even driven abroad under Ivan the Terrible (in the Volga region), Nicholas I, and even Alexander II (in the Caucasus). Therefore, the experience of Russia was not so different from the experience of France and Spain, as the author of the reviewed book believes. Second, in Spain and France, the proportion of these "undesirable" minorities was either no higher or even less than the proportion of Muslims in Russia. The reasons were not "demographic", but historical-political and economic-geographical: 1) the unpopulated and undeveloped large territory of the vast Russian Empire, i.e. historical Eurasia, within which Russia used to coexist with the Great Steppe; 2) recognition by the majority of the inhabitants of the former Golden Horde of the legitimacy of the White Tsar's power (Ak-Padishah) as the heir of the Horde khans (this important point Schimmelpennink for some reason does not touch at all); 3) the establishment of the most diverse and diverse (political, military, business, socio - cultural, personal and even consanguineous) ties between the Russian and Muslim nobility even in the era of the Golden Horde, which later only strengthened (sometimes to the point of complete interpenetration and mutual influence). even mergers); 4) integration into the economic and cultural, and then into the social life of Russia, not only the main part of the Muslim nobility, but also many of its co-religionists-military and civil servants ("serving Tatars"), entrepreneurs, the most "Europeanized" faction of the new intelligentsia, and other strata at the turn of the XIX-XX century.They quickly found a common language with Russian workers and peasants in the course of mass demonstrations and movements of a revolutionary and semi-revolutionary nature.

Missionary work was supposed to consolidate all these connections and processes. However, if it achieved any relative success in the XVIII-early XIX centuries, then by the end of the XIX century. it was actually forced to admit bankruptcy, despite the strong support of the Chief Prosecutor of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev. Thus, the large expenditures of the state and the presence among the missionaries of such educated, talented and even highly respected Orientalists as Iakinf Bichurin and Nikolai Ilminsky (whose activities Schimmelpennink attaches, in my opinion, clearly exaggerated importance) were not justified.

The St. Petersburg School of Oriental Studies, which emerged simultaneously (in 1819) with the University of the northern capital, owes much to Sergei Uvarov, the future count and Minister of Education, who, in the author's opinion, was not at all a reactionary, as it was considered in our country in Soviet times. A European-educated Westerner, he corresponded with Goethe, but did not disown his Tatar ancestor, Minchak Kosaev, who left the Horde in the early 15th century. As a diplomat in Vienna, he became close to the well-known French emigrants Madame de la Vie.

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He was also influenced by the German Romantics, who were then interested in India and the "Eastern Renaissance". After returning to Russia, Uvarov presented the project of the "Asiatic Academy" in 1809. He believed that the knowledge of the East can be contrasted with" destructive new philosophies " in ideological terms. In practical terms, he insisted on training translators "necessary for our relations with Turkey, Persia, Georgia and China", as well as with India, "the most ancient, interesting and almost unknown". It is characteristic that 8 years before Uvarov, Count Jan Potocki, adviser to Alexander I, came up with the same project (p.156-157).

The project was not implemented, but Uvarov became a member of the Russian Academy in 1810, and in 1818 - its president. He introduced the teaching of Arabic and Persian languages, later Sanskrit, and in 1818 founded the Asiatic Museum with K.-M. Fren at its head. The museum became "the first institution of the Academy, engaged in the East." At the same time, both Fren and B. Dorn, who succeeded him in 1842, did a lot to train the first orientalists at the University of St. Petersburg, where Osip (Jozef-Julian) was still the main orientalist Senkowski, an impoverished Polish nobleman from Vilnius, is an excellent scholar of Arabic, Turkish, Persian,and Hebrew. Having traveled extensively in the Middle East and written a number of books, he was the head of the Arabic Department at the university for 25 years. He also has a more than original explanation of the alienness of the Polish gentry to the common people, its alleged origin from the Mongol newcomers of the XIII century.! Many of his works were published under the pseudonym "Baron Brombeus". Pushkin's friend Kuchelbecker included Senkovsky "in the top four writers of Russia."

After becoming Minister of Education in 1833, Count Uvarov continued to take care of Oriental studies, introducing the teaching of Mongolian, Tatar, and later Armenian, Georgian, and Azerbaijani languages along with previously studied languages. Kazem Bey, Mirza Jafar Topchinbayev, and Sheikh Muhammad Ayad Al-Tantawi, a professor at Cairo University, were invited to St. Petersburg. In 1854, the departments of Oriental studies were transferred from Kazan to St. Petersburg, where the Oriental faculty was established, whose activities Schimmelpennink associates with the names of the Sanskrit scholar F. I. Shcherbatsky, the Mongolian scholars-academicians S. F. Oldenburg, V. V. Radlov and others, who persuaded, in particular, the Prime Minister P. A. Stolypin to build a datsan (Buddhist monastery) in St. Petersburg. The faculty began teaching Japanese, Korean and Tibetan languages, Asian history, and Islamic jurisprudence. The first dean of the faculty, Kazem-Bek, proudly noted that " nowhere in Europe are so many Orientalists united in one academic institution as here." At the initiative of B. Dorn, the teaching of the Afghan language (Pashto) began in order to "shock the British", "who were afraid of the Russian advance in Central Asia" to the borders of India.

Many orientalists (Kazem-Bek, V. Grigoriev, I. Minaev, etc.) served as experts, officials, or teachers at the General Staff Academy during the wars in the Caucasus, Crimea, and Central Asia. In 1892, the Turkologist Velyaminov-Zernov criticized the teaching of Oriental languages at the university, which was focused not on practical mastery of one of them, but on the study of "historical connections" between them, as a result of which, for example, a specialist in the Middle East studied (inevitably "less deeply") Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Tatar at the same time. They did not break the system of teaching Oriental languages in St. Petersburg. Moreover, separate language teaching has been conducted at the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages in Moscow since 1814. Later, in 1896-1906. Practical study of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Mongolian and Tibetan languages was established at a special school in Vladivostok, which was later transformed into the Oriental Institute. In 1916, it graduated 300 civilian and more than 200 military specialists.

The book also contains rather voluminous essays on the life and works of the famous Sinologist V. P. Vasiliev and the already mentioned S. F. Oldenburg. And its last chapter - "Exotic Connection" - opens with an epigraph from Andrey Bely: "Russia is a Mongolian country. We have Mongolian blood in our veins." The content of the chapter is mainly an analysis of Oriental motifs in Russian music and poetry. The author considers works (including those that are little-known or unknown at all)through the prism of "orientalism". Mikhail Glinka, Vladimir Stasov, Alexander Borodin, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Alyabyev, Miliy Balakirev, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Valery Bryusov, Konstantin Balmont, Lev Tolstoy, Vladimir Solovyov, Alexander Blok, Vyacheslav Ivanov. This list could be expanded to include hundreds of names, including Gavriil Derzhavin.,

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Vasily Zhukovsky, Alexander Griboyedov, Pyotr Vyazemsky, Mikhail Kuzmin and many others. But we must pay tribute to Schimmelpenninck: the names he chose perfectly illustrate the connection between Russia and the East. And his analysis of the works of Borodin and Bely, as well as other composers and writers, would be the envy of professional musicologists and literary critics. Some of his theses (for example, on the connection of Russian poetry of the Silver Age with the East) may raise objections. But on the whole, the chapter intended as a philosophical and aesthetic reinforcement of the author's position was undoubtedly a success.

Summing up the results of his research, Schimmelpennink seems to define what Asia is in the understanding of Russians and what its place is in the awareness of Russians of their national identity. In his opinion, the First Philosophical Letter published by Pyotr Chaadaev in 1836 was a pessimistic assessment of both the past and the future of Russia. The resulting disputes between Westerners and Slavophiles did not concern Asia: The Slavophiles were for Europe, but "Orthodox-Slavic", not "Roman-Germanic". However, gradually, both in poetry and in practical life (especially those who saw the negative features of the West), sympathy for the East began to make its way, a desire to rely on it and on its civilization in opposition to the West, which after the reign of Peter I not only feared and distrusted Russia, but also schemed against it. After 1848, especially after the Crimean War of 1853-1856, many Russian Westerners, even emigrants like Herzen, moved away from"Westernism". The rise of patriotism only intensified after the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878 and the end of the conquests in Central Asia, where England, with the approval of all Europe, interfered with Russia as best she could. At the same time, the Russian Minister of War, General Kuropatkin, wrote in his diary in 1903 about the "grandiose plans" of Emperor Nicholas II to expand into Manchuria, Korea, and Tibet, and establish dominion over Iran, the Bosphorus, and the Dardanelles.3 It is known how these plans ended.

The attraction to the East, a kind of "Asiaticism", continued after the revolutions of 1917 among a part of the Russian emigration, which adopted the concept of "Eurasianism". Among the ideologists of "Eurasianism", the author names linguist Nikolai Trubetskoy, geographer Peter Savitsky, and historian George Vernadsky, whose works are given special attention. Schimmelpennink considers Alexander Prokhanov, Pavel Dugin, and even Gennady Zyuganov" neo-Eurasians " of modern Russia. He pays too much attention to the latter's views, especially his calculations on Russia's rapprochement with China. As for Lev Gumilev, who is in fact the main, if not the only consistent "Eurasian" in Russia, he is only briefly mentioned.

The author's final opinion on Russian "orientalism", by which he means not only the study of the East, the desire for it and its reflection in literature and art, but also the definition of a part of the Russian people of their ethno-cultural identity, is quite ambivalent. He quotes Nikolai Berdyaev (regarding the "Asian system" of the Russian soul), Gennady Zyuganov (regarding the" common historical fate " of Russia and China), but clearly refuses to speak about the question posed by Vladimir Solovyov to Russia about the choice "between Xerxes and Christ." He admits that " supporters of the Eastern nature of Russia have always been in the minority." But he is concerned that the "new world order led by the first power of the West" is provoking reactions from various right-wing and nationalist groups in Russia, appealing to the "Asian values" of autocracy," order, paternalism "and" racial attachment to the East " (p.239). The latter is clearly not observed in Russia. In this case, the author, having retreated from scientific positions to political ones, undoubtedly made a mistake.

In general, Schimmelpenninck's monograph deserves high praise. This is a well-founded historical and cultural study based largely on primary sources, which shows the author's rich erudition, good knowledge of the subject of study and, what is not so common among Western authors writing about Russia, the objectivity and, in general, the fairness of his assessments.

list of literature

Dostoevsky F. M. Polnoe sobranie sochineniy [Complete Collection of Works], vol. 27, Nauka Publ., 1984. Red Archive. 1922. N 2.

Malashenko A.V. Islamskoe vozrozhdenie v sovremennoi Rossii [Islamic Revival in Modern Russia]. Moscow, 1998.

Soloviev S. M. History of Russia since ancient times. Book IV. T. 8. Moscow, 1960.

3 The author cites the "Diary of A. N. Kuropatkin" from: [Red Archive, 1922, N 2, p. 31].

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