Authors

Discussion

Dostoevsky saw Central Asia with his own eyes in the 1850s during his years of exile in the Kazakh steppe. Once allowed to go back to European Russia and resume his career as a writer, however, Dostoevsky never undertook a full-scale artistic engagement with the colony. Only in the late 1870s, toward the end of his life – and only in his journalism – did Dostoevsky become passionately preoccupied with Russia’s colonial war in Asia. This presentation seeks to address the following questions: Why did it take him so long to turn his attention to Central Asia and what prompted him to do so? What was his approach to this colony, and how did he imagine the Asian Other? And the most general question: in what terms did he understand Russia’s empire-making overall?