ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth century, the artistic traditions of Russia began to profoundly merge with those of Western Europe in unprecedented ways, creating hybrid traditions of native and nonnative styles and subjects. Neither fully Western nor traditionally Eastern, these artworks became examples of “Russian Occidentalism,” a merging of conceptual zones that shows how terms seeking to demarcate native traditions are inherently relative and unstable. This essay explores the binaries scholars associated with this kind of cultural contact by investigating Karl Briullov’s Bathsheba (1832), a painting with links to the European Orientalist genre, but with peculiar signs of difference. Analysis of this work, among others by the artist, shows that what we call East and West or Orient and Occident is actually the site of vibration between mutual displacements and contingent interests, at the heart of which lies a fundamental instability produced by the attempt at cultural self-definition itself.
