Ink, Paint, and Blood: India and the Great Game in Russian Culture

Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Slavic Languages and Literatures

First Advisor

Brunson, Molly

Abstract

This dissertation reinterprets the Great Game as a cultural formation that shaped Russian representations of India across the long nineteenth century. It moves beyond the familiar view of the Great Game as a geopolitical rivalry between Britain and Russia to show that this competition also structured Russia’s aesthetic and ideological engagement with British India. Russian artists, writers, and collectors treated India as a representational field through which to examine empire, critique colonial authority, and articulate their own imperial ambitions. At the center of this project is the concept of a hermeneutics of competition. I argue that this term captures the interpretive framework Russian cultural figures developed in response to British imperial and representational dominance. Rather than observe from a distance, Russians engaged directly with Britain’s visual, textual, and material strategies of rule in India. One result of this triangulated cultural engagement was the emergence of what I call counter-epistemologies. Russian cultural producers responded to the systems that structured British imperial knowledge—cartography, ethnography, museology—by reworking them through artistic means. They did not reject the production of imperial knowledge entirely; instead, they challenged its claims to authority and proposed alternative ways of understanding and representing India. I begin from the premise that empires are multimedia formations, which function as much through political and military systems as through visual, textual, and material practices that shape how power is imagined, represented, and enforced. For this reason, my project adopts a transmedial approach to trace how artistic and literary forms, including travelogues, paintings, architecture, weapon collections, and spiritual texts, enabled Russians to engage with British imperial discourse and to articulate competing visions of empire. This methodology foregrounds the aesthetic dimensions of inter-imperial rivalry and provides a fuller account of how cultural producers navigated overlapping systems of power, knowledge, and representation. Each chapter centers on a distinct medium or group of objects to examine how Russians mobilized form in response to the epistemological, political, and visual authority of the British Empire in India. The chapters unfold chronologically and thematically to show how distinct but interconnected media contributed to Russia’s aesthetic and ideological engagement with India. The first chapter establishes the foundations of Russia’s imperial imaginary by examining early efforts to understand India through British and European representational codes. It explores how figures like Peter Pallas and Gerasim Lebedev anticipated later aesthetic rivalries by linking trade, science, and performance to imperial knowledge-making. The second chapter turns to Prince Aleksei Saltykov, whose letters, lithographs, and collecting practices develop a visual and diplomatic mode of engagement that combines political critique with an elegiac aesthetic for India’s bygone glory. The third chapter examines travel writing as a form of literary cartography, showing how Russian authors retraced and reconfigured colonial itineraries to challenge British spatial control. Chapter four analyzes the painter Vasilii Vereshchagin, who transformed the tropes of surveillance and reconnaissance into a visual strategy, undermining Britain’s claim to representational and epistemological mastery of the subcontinent. The conclusion moves into the spiritual and esoteric domain, focusing on Helena Blavatsky and Nicholas Roerich, whose works reimagine imperial rivalry as a sacred and aesthetic mission. Across these case studies, the dissertation demonstrates how Russian creators responded to the representational systems of the British Empire not by rejecting them outright, but by reworking their logic through form. Each chapter builds toward a cumulative argument about inter-imperial aesthetics, showing how artistic media became sites of political imagination and epistemological contest.

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