Mikhail Piotrovsky: The East is a study in the different. Different does not mean alien.
Photograph provided by the Rossiyskaya Gazeta
In response to intensifying discussions about a “turn to the East”, I would say that Russia has always been turned both to the East and to the West. The Hermitage too.
Although the public does still often perceive the Hermitage above all as a museum of European culture, far less as an image of Russian culture, or as a museum of Eastern culture.
Still, we are, of course, also a museum that tells about the East. In my book The Hermitage. Director’s Choice, of the 33 masterpieces that I selected nine are connected with the East. And the Hermitage’s oriental collections are not simply some remarkable objects and pictures, but also an image of world culture and, in a way, a mission. My choice in that book was also dictated by a desire to remind people of that. Go and look – they are just as much masterpieces as the Dutch paintings…
However, when speaking of a “turn to the East” we need to soberly recollect that in the East, as in the West, with us and with them, there are difficult chapters of history that no-one will forget. In history, there is always the experience of confronting one another. It can be overcome, but it is something one needs to be prepared for.
When colleagues or journalists share with me the feeling that the Near East,, alongside India, is more sincere and in sympathy with us, I explain that we have practically no “wars of memory” with those places. There was only the issue of the Holy Land, but Russia always settled matters in favour of the local inhabitants. In the colonial era, we did not have any wars or frontiers there. We arrived there after the Second World War, but in the Middle East in doing so we were a great help to the Arab countries in their confrontation with the British and Americans. Without us they would not have held up, and they remember all that well. They have a good experience of interaction with both Soviet and tsarist Russia. So, things really are more comfortable for us in the Arabic East…
The Persian Gulf, Syria and Oman are also places where we have established cultural ties, including museum ones. Now we need to do some more serious joint things there, like in Syria with Palmyra, or in Abu Dhabi, or Bahrain…
Let’s not forget that the very concept of the East is changing all the time. For some, we are also the East. In Italy, for example, whether it’s the Vatican or "L'Orientale" University in Naples, Russia is included in the concept of the East. The thing is, though, that the East is also a study in the different. If we are the East to someone, that means that to them we are different.
It’s also a fluctuating thing: what is East and what isn’t. Take Israel – is that East or West? Turkey is unclear too. These are interesting matters: familiar or alien? To what degree alien? I think that in point of fact, Russia is a sort of centre of the world… And even Africa is not alien to us.
Let’s not forget that the East is also our own East. We have our Islam, our Buddhists. We have Chinese traditions too. And that East exists within us, just as Europe also exists within us.
We devoted to the theme of the East the exhibition “Alexander the Great. The Road to the East” that opened in Kazan. Frescoes from Central Asia, Bactrian silver, a Quran, Persian manuscripts, including Nizami – Alexander’s campaign was also a turn to the East.
The theme of the East was also strongly present in the Hermitage’s exhibitions for the Year of Peter the Great. They touched upon relations with China, his Caspian Campaign and contacts with Iran. Peter’s history with Turkey was also a turn to the East. Then came Catherine, the Crimea…
Regarding the present turn to the East, it is important that it is taking place in the context of a fresh wave of decolonization in the West. We do have something to say in that connection. We already went through decolonization once – in the Soviet era. We had a far more successful experience of decolonization than the current Western one. We did not force the oppressors to their knees, we culturally elevated the oppressed.
One more important point: in turning to the East, we absolutely must preserve oriental studies as a specialist field of learning.
Against the background of fields that have specialized to the point of becoming political science and conflictology, oriental studies look like scholarship of a different kind. But such early –encyclopaedic – provinces as oriental studies are now acquiring a new significance. This is the much sought-after “juncture of different fields”.
They have not lost the sense, characteristic of the 18th century, of some syncretic general study of the humanities, full of a fascination with the “alien”, and a desire to make sense of it.
It is upon this that a dialogue is constructed. The study of the alien turns into a study of dialogue. And in oriental studies there is the experience of such a dialogue.
This material was published on the website of the Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper. The Russian-language original can be found here.
