Intellectual histories of Russian musical nationalism often turn to the closing act of Mikhail Glinka's 1842 opera, Ruslan and Lyudmila (Руслан и Людмила) as a symbolic point of beginning. The journey of the title characters through the fantastic lands of Aleksandr Pushkin's epic poem reaches a point of return to Kyiv in the final tableau, an affirmation of the unity of the motherland. Russian song, too, enters the narrative of musical nationalism in a new way at this point, opening on a consolidating soundscape of a nation in the century of its expansion to neighboring lands. The composers, ethnographers, writers, and intellectuals who fill this remarkable book by Adalyat Issiyeva were, however, notable for the ways they chart a different narrative for Russian musical nationalism, one of encounter with the inorodtsy, generally used in the book to signify “others,” but variously encompassing a combined sense of diversity and foreignness. When these later composers borrow from or make melodic reference to Ruslan and Lyudmila, as they, too, are wont to do, it is the journey in the epic, rather than the return to Kyiv, that provides the richest source of material. Rather than the music of the lovers’ reunion in Act 4, it is the set of “Oriental Dances” in the magical garden of Chernomor that so richly supplies them with the sound and sensibility of Russian nationalism.

Though the author expresses her indebtedness to Edward Said's work on Orientalism, she has not written a book that primarily adds a Russian chapter to the history of Orientalist discourse. Her primary concern is to follow the encounter with peoples and cultures that lay beyond the borders of a Russia whose art-music culture increasingly entertained western influences from the eighteenth century onward. Russia's musicians and intellectuals needed the Orient—Issiyeva retains this designation throughout—not only to distinguish difference, but also to clarify the dimensions of a Russian canon that also was independent from the nineteenth-century Romanticism of Europe's west.

The representation of Russia's Orient was thus crucial to the representation of Russia herself. Russian musicians and ethnographers did not simply borrow the exotic, but rather consciously sought to modify what they created as Russian. They relied on a codependence of “other” and “self” that formed a dialectical tension in the history of Russian musical nationalism from the 1820s through the final century of imperial Russia and would survive in the ideology of Soviet nationalities into the Stalin era and beyond. The tenacity of the self-other binary was further evident in the ways it was an index of Russian military expansion into lands inhabited by inorodtsy. War and occupation, international and local, seemingly opened a portal for increased representation of the music of those encountered in conflict, sometimes in openly derogatory forms, as in Muslim regions of Central Asia, at other times diversifying the larger repertory, especially with musics from the Caucasus. Music of the inorodtsy entered Russian musical practices across the full national spectrum, domesticated in folk song collections and arrogated to the voice of modernity in the compositions of the so-called Mighty Five, the Kuchka.

The “Orient” that encompasses the geographic and cultural landscapes of Issiyeva's book has many rather than fewer meanings. Geographically, the Orient includes lands along Russia's borders in the east and in the south. In early chapters, the eastern lands play a greater role in providing musical material for the bolstering of Russian selfness. It is in these chapters, too, that the activities of a new generation of ethnographers, folklorists, and linguists intensifies its studies of diversity. As the chapters progress through the nineteenth century, the Caucasus, especially, dominates the history of representation, which itself becomes increasingly one of accommodating selfness rather contrasting difference. Though the cases of individual evidence change over the course of her historical narrative, Issiyeva stresses the ways the production of that evidence remains in many ways continuous. Ethnography and ethnographers, especially, play a central role in the production of evidence, from the scientific journals at the mid-nineteenth century to the ethnographic concerts at the turn-of-the-century.

Although this important book appeared in a series of musicological monographs, its readership should extend across Slavic and East European Studies. Representing Russia's Orient is a work of intellectual history at its finest and most compelling.