I propose in this book to take a step back. Not only is the post- Soviet era postcolonial (though still imperial), the Soviet era was postcolonial too. The Russian Empire was a great colonial system both at its distant frontiers and in its dark heartlands. Employed by Bismarck, Lenin, and Hitler; mentioned by Weber, Foucault, and Habermas; and, with slightly different wording, developed by nineteenth-century Russian historians (see Chapter 4), the concept of internal colonization has a deeper genealogy than is usually assumed. To be sure, extending the postcolonial edifice, which has never been very coherent, to the immense space of the Russian Empire requires not just an "application" of the pre-existing ideas, but their deep refashioning. Doing so might help us to understand not only the Russian imperial experience, but also the unused potentialities of postcolonial theory.
Worldliness
Two very different authors, Hannah Arendt and Edward Said, relied on a rare concept that they used independently of one another. This concept was "worldliness." Writing about humanity in dark times, Arendt revealed how people respond to the collapse of the public sphere by pressing up against each other, mistaking "warmth" for "light," and escaping into the worldlessness, "a form of barbarism" (1968: 13). Also writing about dark times, Said protested against the popular idea that literature has a life of its own, a life that is separate from history, politics, and other worldly matters (see Ashcroft and Ahluwalia 1999: 33; Wood 2003: 3). Worldliness is important for reading Gogol, and no less so for Conrad or Kipling. But there are always many worlds on earth; during the Cold War, there were officially three.
Three Worlds
Writing during the Cold War, Edward Said defined "Orientalism" as the way in which the First World has treated the Third World. In this abstract formulation, he skipped the Second World entirely. In his introduction to Orientalism (1978), Said spoke of the Cold War, "an era of extraordinary turbulence in the relations of East and West," as the very first of historical circumstances that made his study possible. Indeed, the idea of three worlds came into being around 1955 and expressed western anxiety about the growing appeal of the USSR among the former colonies - the penetration of the Second World into the Third (Sachs 1976; Pletsch 1981; Moore 2001). In the 1970s, the USSR was relevant enough for Said to write: "No one will have failed to note how the 'East' has always signified danger and threat . . . even as it has meant the traditional Orient as well as Russia" (1978: 26). In this beginning of Said's work, the east embraced two major entities, the traditional Orient and the non-traditional one, which was Russia. The subsequent parts of Said's book exclusively discussed relations between the west and "the traditional Orient." The non-traditional part of the east was left for further consideration.
Speaking of an Orient that stretched from the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea to those of the Indian Ocean to the Southern Pacific, i.e. along the borders of the Russian Empire, Said showed that European policies toward this part of the east were accompanied by a public focus on captured territories and their inhabitants; that knowledge about colonial peoples defined the world of those who ruled them and the ways they were governed; and that the great texts of the western tradition were not "innocent" of imperialism but persistently alluded to the colonial experience. Said attacked traditional orientalism for imagining the east and the west as self-sufficient Platonic essences, which split the imperial mind into a "Manichean delirium."
Subsequent critics have corrected Said's arguments in many respects. Using British examples, David Cannadine (2001) showed that the cultural traffic between the capital and the colonies was actually reciprocal. The British who mimicked Indians and other colonials in food or spirituality comprised the rule rather than the exception. Even more importantly, Brits projected onto their subjects a presumption of affinity rather than difference, so that they could deal with familiar hierarchies rather than with exotic and dangerous disorder. Writing about German colonialism, Russell Berman (1998) showed that the cultural logic of orientalism changed its patterns when it worked in western empires other than the French and the British. In Berman's account, German missionaries and scholars were more attentive to the natives and did not deprive their informants of human agency to the extent that was typical of their British and French colleagues. Orientalism was a specific cultural pattern, variable in different situations. Homi Bhabha (1994) destabilized the Saidian opposition between the imperial masters and the colonial subjects by focusing on paradoxically creative dimensions of colonialism. With his work, cultural hybridization has made for a popular subject of postcolonial studies. While Frantz Fanon and Edward Said focused on "the Manichean opposition" between the colonized and the colonizers, it is the enormous "grey zones" and "middle grounds" that have become the focus of postcolonial scholarship (Cooper and Stoler 1997). Finally, Gyan Prakash has noted the connection between Said's arguments and the tripartite world map that he inherited from the Cold War. "Even as we recognize that three worlds have collapsed into a single differentiated structure, the demand for imminent criticism remains relevant," wrote Prakash (1996: 199).
Among European powers, the Russian Empire was distinguished by its liminal location between west and east; by a composite structure that was created of western and eastern elements; and by its self-reflective culture, which accounted for creative combinations of orientalism, occidentalism, and more. It is difficult to think about this historical phenomenon in terms of Platonic ideas of east and west. For many reasons, these ideas are awkward and difficult to handle. It would be better to imagine east and west as Heraclites' elements, which are free to mix in certain, though not in any, combinations. As elements, the west and the east sometimes need one another, like fire and air; sometimes displace one another, like water and fire; and sometimes - most frequently - coexist in complex, multilayered folds, pockets, and mixtures, like water and earth.
Following Said's footsteps, I will show that some of his protagonists, major British authors, documented their Russian fantasies or memories in a way that was simultaneously orientalist and "non- traditional," i.e. deeply different from what Said saw as the norm of western writings about the "traditional East." I will look at Defoe, Kipling, and Balfour, and leave Conrad for a separate chapter. I do not mean that similar readings can be applied to all or many of the protagonists of Said's Orientalism. But these four authors are, without doubt, important. At the end of this chapter, I will explore one source of Said's remarkable omission of Russia from his analysis.