Mirza Kazem-Bek and the Kazan School of Russian Orientology

“Mirza Kazem-Bek and the Kazan School of Russian Orientology” examines the rise and fall of Kazan University’s section of Oriental Letters (razriad vostochnoi slovesnosti), Imperial Russia’s most important academic institution for the study of Asia in the early nineteenth century. Focusing on the university’s prominent Persianist, Mirza Aleksandr Kasimovich Kazem-Bek, the article argues that in Russia scholars of the East did not always adhere to the Saidian schema of orientalism as inherently hostile to the subject of its study.