Image of the Turkestan Region of the early ХХ century in the Diary Entries of Priest V. Ilarionov

Abstract

The article explores the potential of sources of personal origin in constructing the image of the Asian periphery of the Russian Empire. The aim of this paper is to reveal the perceptions of church ministers about the Turkestan region based on the ego-text of priest V. Ilarionov, who represents Turkestan in the system of coordinates of the categories “own”/“foreign”, which are the basis for the reception of the region in the power and socio-political discourse. The source base of the work is the diary of a priest published in 1906–1911 on the pages of the journal ‘Turkestan Diocesan Vedomosti’. The personal diary as a source, mastered in the article by the method of disourse analysis, widely used in modern source study, opens up prospects for a more complete description of imperial projects of colonisation of the eastern suburbs, as well as dynamically changing perceptions of the authorities and society about the administrative tasks in the Turkestan region and the ways of their implementation. In the course of the research, we have revealed priest V. Ilarionov's perceptions of the Turkestan region in the early twentieth century: markers used by the author of the diary to identify and separate the ‘own’ from the ‘strangers’; signs of these categories in the reception of the Russian Orthodox Church figure. The components of the image of Turkestan, in the representations of the priest's diary, as well as the factors that influenced the construction of the image of the region in a long-time perspective are determined. It has been established that V. Hilarionov's representations of Turkestan are based on the image of Turkestan. Ilarionov's perception of the Turkestan region was based on the inertial perception of the region in the rhetoric of the enlightenment-progressive ideology, which implied ‘reading the other’ as an uncivilised subaltern with respect to which active cultural regression is possible. At the same time, immersion in the problems of administrative, economic and socio-cultural everyday life in Turkestan led to the reformatting of ideas about territorial organisation, population, and communicative practices within the boundaries of the Russian Empire. The image of Turkestan created by the author went beyond the categorical imperative of ‘own’ / ‘foreign’, acquired features of dynamism, transformed into a multilayered and contradictory intellectual construct, which largely testifies to the ambiguity of the Orientalist approach in assessing the eastern policy of the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century.