Grigor'ev in Orenburg, 1851-1862: Russian Orientalism in the Service of Empire?

Abstract

In December 1851, Vasilii Vasil'evich Grigor'ev, one of Russia's foremost specialists on the history and languages of Central Asia and the Near East, set off from St. Petersburg to build a new career as an administrator in the turbulent borderlands around the city of Orenburg. Grigor'ev's reasons for leaving Petersburg were both professional and personal. Unable to find an acceptable position in either the educational system or the state bureaucracy, Grigor'ev, formerly a professor at the Richelieu Lycee in Odessa, had subsisted for several years as assistant editor of the journal of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and by 1851, with little prospect for advancement, he was willing to look further afield for employment. Grigor'ev's biographer also alludes to personal problems—a painful conflict with a close friend that made his presence in St. Petersburg unpleasant if not unbearable.

13. Russian Perspectives on Eurasian Pasts

“… Tolz 2011.  On Grigor'ev, see Knight 2000a. advocated for the development of a specifically Russian approach to the East in a theoretical, scholarly sense. 84 But he also harnessed his knowledge about the borderlands in service of the empire, becoming an imperial administrator in the Orenburg region near the modern Russian-Kazakh border.…”

Geography, Race and the Malleability of Man: Karl von Baer and the Problem of Academic Particularism in the Russian Human Sciences

“…Scholars outside the field of physical anthropology also spoke out directly and forcefully against Western European notions of racial determinism. The orientalist, V. V. Grigor'ev in the early 1860s specially invented the character of a learned Kazakh nomad, Sultan Mendali Piraliev, in order to write a series of essays in which he considered and firmly rejected the notion that race could place any obstacles on the capacity of individuals or peoples to develop (Knight, , pp. 96–97; Remnev, ).…”

Matthias Alexander Castrén’s notes on Nenets folklore

“…The development of ethnography and folklore studies in Russia has been seen as having its own specifi c traits that are nevertheless keenly related to European discussions. (Tokarev 1966;Clay 1995;Knight 2000;Knight 2009. ) In this respect, I have found it important to sketch M. A. Castrén's fi eldwork among the northern and Siberian minorities of Russia from the point of view of international, or European, development of ethnography and folklore studies, which is closely related to the scientifi c conquest of the North and Siberia.…”