Russia's imperial expansion peaked in the late nineteenth century and was accompanied by a variety of texts that imagined the peoples inhabiting the nation's “peripheries.” These works typically vindicate the nation's “civilizing” mission by depicting the Indigenous and local peoples as backward, barbarous “others,” and thus in need of Russian intervention. While scholars have examined the imperial gaze in works by Russia's canonical male writers, little, if any, attention has been given to the writings of women authors and travelers who catalogued the southern and eastern borderlands. Katya Hokanson's compelling new book fills this significant lacuna through careful and convincing analysis of source texts largely forgotten or overlooked by scholars. A Woman's Empire illustrates how gender and colonial difference intertwine in ways that complicate our reading of the imperial project and thus challenge the notion of empire as a masculinist endeavor.
As Hokanson masterfully shows, women contributed to the imperial project and believed themselves an integral part to its success, even when questioning its foundations. Part One of her study begins with writings “from within” the empire-building project. The first chapter analyzes the memoirs of Varvara Dukhovskaia, an affluent noblewoman who documented her travels across the Russian empire as she accompanied her husband, a prominent governor-general, to various posts in the Caucasus, the Far East, and Turkestan from the late 1870s until his death in 1901. Whether in Vladivostok or Tashkent, Dukhovskaia normalizes Russian power, particularly through her descriptions of military and religious ceremonies, which asserted the legitimacy of imperial rule. The second chapter continues the examination of writing “from within” through the analysis of Elena Apreleva's Central Asian stories, which draw upon her seventeen-year stay in Turkestan, from 1889–1906. Apreleva, who published under the pseudonym E. Ardov, adopts de-personalized narratives to help elucidate the ills brought by Russian colonialism. The tales “Dr. Kallinik” and “Kapitan Narkizov” stand out as testament to the “conqueror's recognition that the work of empire is destructive not only to the local people, but to one's fellow soldiers, betraying a savagery on the part of Russians” (87).
The Great Game rivalry and how Russia viewed its relationship to “the East” is the focus of Part Two, which begins in Chap. 3 with an analysis of Elena Blavatskaia's travel narratives. Blavatskaia decries British colonial rule in India and offers, instead, the example of Russian expansion in Central Asia as an enlightened progression of world order. To support her argument, Blavatskaia makes use of a widespread belief that domination of India by the Moghuls (a group originating in Central Asia) led to the country's current political and social ills. According to this line of imperialist thinking, which Blavatskaia promulgated in her writings, Russian control of Central Asia would “re-civilize” the region, “much as the culture and wisdom of ancient India ought to be re-established on the subcontinent” (149). Chap. 4 moves to the Pamir Mountains, in present-day Tajikistan, as represented in Iuliia Golovnina's published account of her time in the region. Like Dukhovskaia, Golovnina accompanied her husband on his expeditions, but the focus of the Pamir trip was mostly ecological, as she and her fellow travelers collected specimens for the Moscow University Zoological Museum and hunted the elusive Ovis polii, or Marco Polo sheep. Not unlike other works published in the period, Golovnina's book blends genres as she shifts between scientific study, travel writing, and hunting story, but also adds photography to accompany her descriptions.
Part Three provides a detailed account of several prominent women who took part in scientific or exploratory expeditions not only to Central Asia, but also Mongolia, Tibet, and China. These “scientific practitioners of empire” (191) began their careers as assistants to their husbands, but eventually assumed positions of authority and notoriety. Hokanson's engaging analysis of contributions by the botanist and artist Ol΄ga Fedchenko, the ethnographer Aleksandra Potanina, the archeologist Praskov΄ia Uvarova, and the traveler-writer Anna Rossikova all illustrate the intersection between knowledge production, gendered perceptions of the self and Other, and the formation of empire.
A Woman's Empire is a compellingly written, methodically researched, and persuasive study of empire. It provides insightful readings of lesser-known texts and paints an engaging picture of how women contributed to colonial discourse by upholding the legitimacy of Russian rule in Central Asia and beyond, while at times critiquing their own unequal status and the failures of imperial expansion. Hokanson's impressive study is an essential book for historians, literary scholars, and students of gender studies, postcolonial studies, and travel writing.
