«...In a tattered waggon, amid chickens and kind Bashkirs»: Leo Tolstoy inverts Western Orientalism (creation and life-creation in the Bashkir steppe)

The paper is prepared within the integration project of the UrB RAS "Formation of National Art Systems of Perm Literatures in the Sociocultural Landscape of Russia at the end of the 19th - in the first half of the 20th centuries". In the time of Alexander II's Great Reforms the Russian settlers' advance in the regions of the Volga and the southern Urals presupposed the inclusion of territories, where Bashkirs were leading their nomadic life, into the regimes of administrative distribution and buy / sell operations. The takeover of these lands was permitted by a special Order that was issued on Feb. 10, 1869. Hence, the frontier spaces which by that time had been submitted to the special forms of imperial control were now equated with the so called "internal governorates". However, the whole process was slow and full of contradictions because of numerous violations that were accompanying the substitution of the "natural" way of life with administrative compulsion and cruel economic rationalism. Tolstoy's comprehension of these realities was directed along two ways: firstly, to the artistic representation (the novel Anna Karenina and a number of short stories based on the Bashkir theme) and, secondly, to the elaboration of the symbolic gesticulation of a man who was systematically practicing summer voyages, unexpected in the cultural context of the time, to the steppe for medical treatment with kumis and, as Tolstoy himself put it later, for living a "zoological life". This preoccupation with "zoological life" was represented as a procession of theatrical scenes overtly directed to the external observer who could see the situations of changing dress with the following confusion of social statuses and experiments with corpo-rality expressed in physical competitions with the Bashkirs (wrestling, swimming, horse race). The introduction of the Bashkir experience into the narrative was regulated by the general understanding of colonization as an impersonal "relocation" ("obtaining places is the only purpose of history") of peoples when the role of the authorities was symbolically abolished by the author. The embodiment of this ideological concept in the narrative of Anna Karenina, firstly, brought into action one metatextual device that had already been noticed by literary scholars - discredit of a character who is adherent to writing, scripting, "paper affairs" which are juxtaposed to the "affairs of life". Secondly, in the semiotic perspective the question is about Tolstoy's polemics with the very principle of how sign forms conceived by the novelist as "reflections of life" are produced. The entwining of the theme of aborigines who live in the concocted "Zaraysk Governorate" (which never existed in reality) with this philosophic and aesthetic discussion, the immersion of Alexei Karenin, the main incarnation of power in the novel, in the problems of nomads - all this converts a number of corresponding episodes of the narration into situations that resemble postcolonial writing and its pivotal themes - seeking an authentic identity, experiencing hybridisation, collision of diverse social and behavioural languages.

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