Eastern Encounters: Ilia Repin's Orientalist Aesthetics Abroad and at Home

This essay examines Ilia Repin's sustained engagement with European Orientalist painting and its impact on his oeuvre. Through close readings of three major works, Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom (1876), Ivan Terrible His Son (1885), Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Letter to Turkish Sultan (1880–91), it argues that Repin deployed Eastern motifs order unsettle entrenched East/West self/other binaries were prevalent Russian imperial context. A celebrated figure national school, was born raised Ukraine, frequently turned Ukrainian themes subjects art. Considering Russia's turbulent political atmosphere 1880s 1890s, evolving separation identities during this time, posits harnessed idiom as means critique state, articulate an anti-imperial anti-autocratic position.