Russian travelers to Iran in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their travelogues.

摘要

This dissertation examines the travelogues produced by Russians who went to Iran in the 19th and early 20th centuries (ending in 1917). More than 120 Russian travelers published books and articles about their journeys; the number of these travelogues exceeds 200.;With very few exceptions, these accounts and their authors have received no attention from scholars in Russia, and they are almost unknown to Western scholars of the Middle East. Therefore, the Russian travelogues researched and presented here as a single entity may serve as a valuable source of information on the history of Qajar Iran and its relationship with Russia and encourage their broader use in scholarship.;There are two main topics explored in this work. (1) The travelogues written by the first-hand observers, many of whom officially represented the Russian colonial empire, are examined in the context of a comparative history of colonialism, as they reflect "the Great Game"---the struggle between Russia and Britain for dominance in the East, including Iran. An analysis of the Russian travelogues demonstrates the de facto partition of Iran into British and Russian spheres of influence long before 1907. As the appended map illustrates, the routes taken by the Russian travelers and the areas most covered by them are consistent with the way in which Iran was divided. (2) The travelogues provide a unique source for the study of the peculiar Russian type of Orientalism, which is presented in comparison with the Western European type of Orientalism.;Russian Orientalism as a distinctive phenomenon has been overlooked by the scholars. Since Orientalism has been viewed as a Western European phenomenon, numerous works on Orientalism deal with Western Europe only and ignore Eastern Europe, including Russia. It is necessary to do extensive research on the Russian variety of Orientalism in order to create a more comprehensive concept of Orientalism on the one hand, and to better understand the place of Russia in the West-East system and its relations with Oriental peoples on the other.