Obverse and Reverse of the Imagology: a New Monograph by St. Petersburg Orientalists on Peter the Great’s Image in East Asia, and Vice Versa

Abstract

This publication aims to review and conceptually evaluate the collective monograph “The Image of Peter the Great in East Asia countries”, published in the year of the 350th anniversary of the first Russian Emperor and representing a new milestone in Russian science. The monograph prepared by a group of well-known St. Petersburg orientalists testifies to the significant development of comparative Imagology in Russian Oriental studies, caused by the rapid rapprochement of Russians and Asian peoples, the growing number of scholars, as well as the relevance, quantity and quality of their research in this field. The new book can be put on a par with the “Leo Tolstoy and the Orient” (1971) — a landmark book for Russian historiography, while the topic “Peter the Great and the Orient” is comparable in scale to the Oriental Space of the great Russian writer and serves as a unique refraction of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” paradigm, which is extremely complicated, meaningful and interesting for academic study. As the review of the monograph reveals, during the study of Peter the Great’s image in the East Asia countries, the authors surpassed the title theme in quite a positive and creative way. But, considering the fundamental immensity of such theme as “Peter the Great’s Image in the Oriental countries”, it seems necessary to issue the second more expanded edition, enriched by the new countries and peoples of Asia and Africa, just like the “Leo Tolstoy and the Orient” monograph. The imagological research work could be also continued in the foreseeable future (before 2037) by the new fundamental international study, such as “Pushkin and the Orient: A. S. Pushkin’s Image in the Oriental countries and the Orient in the masterpieces of the great Russian poet”. The groundwork for such an academic project already exists in Russian Orientology for a very long time.