The German Roots of Russian Orientalism: Hafiz’s Poetry in Early-20th-Century Russian Song

The Russian arts were as fascinated by exotic languages, cultures, and locales as their Western European counterparts, and at first glance, Russian settings of the poetry of Hafiz appears to form part of the broader field of musical exoticism in general, and Russian orientalism in particular. This chapter begins by examining the relationship between empire and music, before setting out a rather different account of Russian musical orientalism, one marked by a complex transnational flow of literary and musical influences, as well as practices of translation, imitation, cultural appropriation, and cross-border artistic exchange. Whilst forming part of a broader tendency to imagine visions of a supposed ‘orient’ that had little to do with any documented anthropological, ethnographic, philological, or linguistic reality, Russian settings of Hafiz’s poetry are ultimately the result of the import of elements of German romanticism. Here, writers, translators, and commentators co-opted a range of ‘exotic’ literatures in an attempt to distinguish themselves from the dominance of French classicism and fashion an autonomous form of German nationalism, key elements of which were then incorporated into mid-nineteenth-century Russian culture (as in the case of Afanasy Fet’s translations of Georg Daumer’s well-known ‘versions’ of Hafiz). Accordingly, Hafiz figures not so much as the object of orientalist representation (although there is certainly a strong element of that to the songs discussed here), but as an exemplary figure within a complex network of literary mediation.