Forms of imperial knowledge

This chapter presents the frontier city of Orenburg as a cultural contact zone around 1830. Drawing on the examples of Alexander von Humboldt, Sergei Aksakov, and Alexander Pushkin, it demonstrates how a new generation of expeditioners produced new forms of imperial knowledge about the geography, ecology, and history of the region by using indigenous knowledge as an epistemological source and by experimenting with new forms of writing. This episode in cultural history sheds new light to the emergence of Russian realism and the cultural economies of the Orenburg frontier.