ABSTRACT
For Dostoevsky, Asia was exemplified by Muslim Central Asia rather than by Buddhist East Asia, because he regarded the Christian struggle against Islam and the opposition to the British world hegemony as Russia’s legitimate aspirations. However, an extremist branch of frustrated Slavophiles appeared on the scene during the 1880s and turned their attention more exclusively to East Asia. Called the Vostochniki (“Easterners”), they preached that Russia’s holy mission could no longer be accomplished in the regions of the traditional Pan-Slavist ideology, that is, in predominantly the Balkans and Eastern Europe, but rather in the opposite direction, in faraway Inner and East Asia.
