РУСИЈА У ОЧИМА МАРКИЗА ДЕ КИСТИНА
RUSSIA IN THE EYES OF MARQUIS DE CUSTINE

Summary/Abstract: The publishing of the abridged Serbian edition of Marquis de Custine’s book Russia in 1839 is one of the main motivations behind this review of Custine’s work. In the interpretation of Custine’s book, the author uses the frames of current debates on “symbolic geography” and the processes of “mental mapping”. Using theoretical insights about both the different ways of representing the “Other” and “Otherness” and the discursive practices of “orientalisation” (Said, Wolff, and Todorova), Custine’s work is an adequate illustration for a long lasting practice of “exoticising” and “essentialising” Russia as the opposite of “Europe” or the “West”. Simultaneously, the author argues that one of the main axes of the Russian culture itself, was the similarly constructed polarity between Russia and the West (Chaadaev, the Russian Slavophilism, Westerners, etc). As a consequence of the strong impact of this dual model of thinking, Custin’s work was able to reach such a broad recap-tion and popularity for such a long period of time. Numerous Custine’s characterizations of Russians as “slaves” who “adore their tyrants” and Russia as the “Orient without a sun” were repeatedly describing the Soviet Union during the Cold War period.

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