Keywords
The Trans-Siberian Railway
The Chinese Eastern Railway
Manchuria
The Russo-Japanese War
Travelogues
The Frontier
Ethno-Religious Communities
Orientalism
Imperial Discourse
How to Cite
Abstract
This article offers a comparative analysis of the railway travelogues written by Russian participants in the 1904–1905 military campaign in Manchuria, who described their journey from European Russia to the Far East, including their travel on the Transsib and the CER, and their crossing of the border with China. The aim of the study is to compare the narrators’ perceptions of the ethno-confessional composition of the imperial space as a whole and of the Far Eastern imperial frontier. The outbreak of war coupled with the resurgence of the “Yellow Peril” narrative gave a powerful impetus to the emergence of such texts, which remained in demand and were reprinted in book form in the immediate post-war years. A discursive analysis is tested on selected examples, suitable for a prospective, comprehensive study of the full corpus of similar sources. Particular attention is paid to the specifics of observing those who are ethnically and religiously “other” in the communicative context of travel-related mobility, which lends a new perspective to traditional imperial discourse. Preliminary conclusions reveal, alongside the presence in the texts of traditional stereotypes of Russian Orientalism, a significant ambivalence in the authors’ conceptions of the “civilising project” of the Far Eastern vector amidst the vagueness and variability of the mutual correlation between geographical and ethnographic objects. This study may be of interest to specialists in the social sciences and humanities focusing on issues of imagology, on the study of mass consciousness and the communication environment, and on the history of transport routes.
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