‘Self-Colonization’ as a Cultural Strategy. Konstantin Korovin’s Image of Russian Northern Peripheries

This chapter considers how the process of visual nation-building unfolds in two case studies, the ‘Far North’ Pavilion of the Nizhny Novgorod 16th All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition held in 1896 and the ‘Borderlands Pavilion’ of the Exposition Universelle hosted in Paris in 1900. Konstantin Korovin played a leading role in designing the pavilions’ architecture, by actively collaborating as an organizer, artist, collector, and curator. Korovin’s representation of the Russian ‘inner East,’ particularly the Far North and the Siberian visual mythology and its influence on the cultural processes of national image construction suggests a sort of complex Russian variation of European Orientalism. Comparing the exhibitions raises questions regarding the relationship between the identity construct of the central imperial power and its periphery. The pavilion exhibition space also reveals the influence of colonial thinking. It becomes clear that contemporary arts and material culture were instrumentalized to reduce a geographical space and cultural plurality to a saleable image. The artistic choices made by the pavilions’ organizers, art directors and curators, portray a precise, though sometimes contradictory, image of fin-de-siècle Russia. Korovin’s celebration of “a wonderful land, the wild North” played a key role in Russia’s image-building process.