The Crimea of Prince de Ligne
Khrapunov Nikita
This article addresses the image of the Crimea invented by Charles-Joseph de Ligne in his Letters to Marquise de Coigny. Allegedly written during a travel to the Crimea in 1787 in the retinue of Empress Catherine II, these “letters” were created several years later, as sections of the pseudo-epistolography work first published in 1801. Although the document has been the subject of many researches, the subject of their analysis was almost always restricted to the discourse, not taking into account the information from other sources uncovering the local context. This article provides a comparative analysis of de Ligne’s accounts and Crimean realities reconstructed by more objective sources. The result shows how the prince’s imagination transformed and reinterpreted the places, persons, events and phenomena he saw. It has been shown that de Ligne translated the stereotypes he had learned long before his Crimean tour as a part of his own culture. The article has been analysed the following subjects: the localization of de Ligne’s estate, the so-called “Parthenizza”; pseudo-geography of the Crimea created by a talented man of letters; the legend of the “Balaklava Amazons”; the search for “oriental pleasures” in the Taurida as a part of European orientalism and symbolism of Catherine II’s reaction; the study of Oriental (Crimean Tatar) psychology; the discourse of the “Tatar laziness”; the stereotype of “optimistic perspectives” of Crimean businesses. The article has revealed the influence of de Ligne’s works on the Russian culture and particularly on the fact that, during the most part of the nineteenth century, the Crimea was associated with the “Russian Orient” rather than with the “origins of Russian Christianity”; it became the “Russian Alhambra” despite the pressure of the state ideology.
This work was financially supported by the Russian Ministry of Education and Science, megagrant project No. 075-15-2022-1119.
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