«Свои» – «чужие»: образ Туркестанского края в дневнике священника В. Иларионова

Introduction. The article explores the potential of sources of personal origin in constructing the image of the Asian periphery of the Russian Empire. Goals. The present work aims to reveal the perceptions of church ministers about Turkestan Krai based on the personal text of priest V. Ilarionov, who represents Turkestan in the system of coordinates and categories ‘own’ / ‘foreign’, which are the basis for the reception of the region in the power and socio-political discourse. Materials and methods. The work focuses on the priest’ diary of published in 1906–1911 by the Turkestanskie eparkhial'nye vedomosti (‘Turkestan Diocesan Newsletter’). The personal diary as a source, mastered in the article by the method of disourse analysis and widely used in modern source study, opens prospects for a more complete description of imperial projects of development across the eastern peripheries, as well as dynamically changing perceptions of the authorities and society about administrative tasks in Turkestan Krai and some ways of their implementation. Results. Rev. V. Ilarionov’s certain perceptions of Turkestan in the early twentieth century have been revealed: markers used by the author of the diary to identify and separate the ‘own’ from the ‘strange’; signs of these categories in the reception of the Russian Orthodox Church figure. The components of the image of Turkestan, in the representations of the priest’s diary, as well as the factors that influenced the construction of the image of the region in a long-term perspective have been determined. Conclusions. The research establishes that the basis of V. Ilarionov’s representations of Turkestan is the then image of Turkestan. Rev. Ilarionov’s perception of Turkestan Krai was based on the inertial perception of the region in the rhetoric of enlightenment-progressive ideologies, which implied ‘reading the other’ as an uncivilised subaltern with regard to which active cultural regression be possible. At the same time, the immersion in the problems of administrative, economic and socio-cultural everyday life in Turkestan led to the reformatting of ideas about territorial organisation, population, and communicative practices within the boundaries of the Russian Empire. The image of Turkestan created by the author went beyond the categorical imperative ‘own’ / ‘foreign’, acquired features of dynamism, transformed into a multilayered and contradictory intellectual construct, which is largely indicative of the ambiguity of the Orientalist approach in assessing the eastern policy of the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century.

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