Authors

Discussion

In 1847, Prince Grigorii Gagarin published a widely read and lavishly illustrated book titled The Picturesque Caucasus which was based on his extensive travels in the region from 1840 to 1855. It portrayed the Caucasus as an idyllic, paradisiac space and cast Russian colonization as benign and constructive. Some fifteen years later, the celebrated academician Ivan Aivazovsky (Hovhannes Ayvazyan) likewise traveled to the Caucasus and produced majestic, sweeping views of its rugged mountainous terrain. However, as an ethnic Armenian from Crimea, Aivazovsky had a regionally embedded and locally inflected perspective on Caucasian spaces, histories, and ethnically and religiously diverse inhabitants that significantly departed from Gagarin’s imperialist hegemonic gaze. Through comparative close readings of a number of Aivazovsky’s and Gagarin’s representative depictions of the Caucasus, this paper explores how such images oscillated between exoticizing Orientalism, a domesticated colonial picturesque, and a tacit anticolonial sublime—on the one hand ​​actively perpetuating a Russian imperialist agenda, and on the other hand, subtly resisting and subverting it.