No cultural distance, no empire. In Russia, the metropolitan elite often perceived cultural distances in paradoxical ways, with subjugated peoples - Russians and non-Russians - imagined as endowed with higher culture or morals than the elite attributed to itself. Though the concept of orientalism is sometimes interpreted in an exclusively negative way, the colonial subject was frequently idealized as superior to the metropolitan observer. For many in the nineteenth century, "the Orient was a place of pilgrimage, an exotic yet especially attractive reality" (Said 1978: 168). Once embedded in the public imagination, the idea of difference became a double-edged mechanism, an ideological swing. When the ruling and writing elites attributed to "noble savages" and "simple peasants" the most improbable virtues, such as primordial equality, unselfish proficiency, and a love of suffering, such idealizations did not prevent native populations from being oppressed. In fact, these creative constructs supported exploitation in subtle and paradoxical ways. For those who enjoyed living off the income from their estates, it was comfortable to believe that peasants did not need private property because of their sublime beliefs. Some intellectuals are always able to convince themselves that peasants, or women, or Slavs, or students just love to suffer.
From the triumph of Peter I to the collapse of Nicholas II, the Empire was ceaselessly concerned with constructing, demonstrating, affirming, and re-affirming its cultural hegemony. It heavily invested in showing the world an inspired and inspiring face that would evoke loyalty among subjects, respect among friends, and fear among enemies. But the challenges of domination for this Empire proved to be easier than the challenges of hegemony. Building St. Petersburg was the most ambitious project of the imperial hegemony, but the cultural mythology of the city overflows with visions of flood, guilt, and apocalypse. Despite the large-scale programs of cultural import and ambitious technologies such as fireworks, the Empire constantly reverted to force in its dealings with the nationalism of non-Russians and the discontent of Russians. Against this backdrop, the truly successful institution of cultural hegemony in the Empire was Russian literature. While performing its crucial function of providing the dispersed subjects of the Empire with a common pool of cultural symbols, Russian literature became increasingly critical toward other imperial institutions. The prevalence of imaginative literature as a major institution of transformation, culture and anti-imperial protest expanded throughout the nineteenth century and then into the Soviet period. Playing this role, Russian literature attracted myriad fans both inside and outside Russia. However, its cultural power within the Empire demonstrated an uneasy dialectics. The more productive a literary text was in the machinery of hegemony, the more destructive it became to the hierarchy of domination.
Over three centuries, Russian literature created a saga of political dissidence and proof of the autonomy of culture. Populating the unexplored space between retreating imperialism, emerging nationalism, and ambitious utopianism, it created a paradigm for post-imperial humanity. Its central texts were applauded by colonial readers around the world.
Postcolonial theory, with its explicitly political way of reading, is important for the understanding of canonical Russian texts. In those cases where the canon is produced by the dominant culture, contemporary critics look to marginal texts in order to hear the suppressed parts of historical experience. In Russian literature, however, the canonical texts were created by those who suffered political persecution in its purest form, not necessarily accompanied by economic hardships. Sometimes deceiving imperial censorship and sometimes going into exile, many Russian writers were victims of their own country. These white, educated, and sometimes rich men belonged to an oppressed minority within their society. From their marginalized feelings emerged canonical texts. British admirers compared Gandhi to Tolstoy just as often as Franz Fanon or the writers of the Harlem Renaissance cited Dostoevsky. One group of writers belonged to an imperial elite, the other to the colonized peoples, but the similarities between them turned out to be more important than the differences. These were the similarities between external and internal colonization.
In France and Germany, the nationalization of agrarian culture was also similar to self-colonization: the "people," who were divided into classes, provinces, dialects, and sects, were transformed into a "nation" (Weber 1976). In Russia, this process took the tragic form of a series of catastrophes that the future historian will probably describe, with reference to Trotsky, as the permanent revolution. While the British sought oriental knowledge and pleasures overseas, the Russians sought them in the depths of their own country. In promoting state-sponsored nationalism and organizing ethnographic studies, the mid-nineteenth-century monarchy inadvertently sponsored the discovery of the Russian commune and its increasingly radical interpretations by Slavophiles, populists, and socialists. With the discovery of sects, German romantic cliches, French utopian ideas, and American dissident experience became applicable to the trivia of Russian life. Locked between the Empire that it failed to overthrow and the commune that it failed to preserve, Russian thought offered a brilliant, tragic, and deeply human lesson. As a result of this literature, serfs, sectarians, and other subaltern groups spoke and are still speaking to us. Written by the authors from higher classes, whose fate was sometimes different from and sometimes similar to that of their underprivileged characters, this literature became postcolonial not only avant la lettre but before its Empire collapsed.
Writing about "an intellectual historian of the year 2010, if such a person is imaginable," the anthropologist James Clifford (1988: 93-4) predicted that this historian would transcend the twentieth- century problematic of language and create a paradigm of "ethnographic subjectivity." In fact, even more has happened. After a period of fascination with ethnicity, scholars are developing non-ethnic concepts to apply to Eurasia (Hagen 2004; Kappeler 2009; Burbank and Cooper 2010). If the new paradigm transcends language, as Clifford correctly believed would happen, it also transcends ethnicity. But it is still mired in the conundrum of subjectivity. In the imperial context, the word "subject" has at least two meanings, subject as opposed to sovereign and subject as opposed to object. The English concept of the subject, with its derivatives of subjectivity and subjectness, retains this ambiguity; some other European languages, Russian included, have developed two different words for these two aspects of subject."[13]Subjectivity develops in relation to sovereignty, but surpasses it by far; it is this surplus of subjectivity over subjectness - hidden transcripts and much else - that makes imperial cultures so rich and so unstable. Michel Foucault (1997: 44) said "a sort of farewell" to the concept of sovereignty, as being insufficient for the analysis of power relations. The concept of subjectivity is equally one-sided, but the very oscillation of "subject" from its juridical to its epistemological meanings helps to address the problems of imperial power. Pressed between the sovereign, who is the super-subject of the domain, and the domain's usable and taxable objects (resources, products, etc.), the subjects develop their unique ways of life, love, and service. Upwards, this imperial subjectness ranges from identification with the sovereign to resistance and rebellion. Downwards, this imperial subjectivity confronts the variety of objects, from animals to landscapes, in circuitous attempts to conquer and explore, build and destroy, capture and exchange, forget and remember. Horizontally, this subjectification involves other subjects, those who are singular and those who are counted in the millions, with all their souls, bodies, and communities.