S§ SOCIAL SCIENTIST Europeanized. Aristotelian poetics. Cartesian logic and Hegelian dialectics become an integral part of Russian thinking just as the writings of Rousseau, Goethe or Byron. "Oriental themes" with their flavour of the exotic, the unknown and the "primitive' find their way into the works of the Romantics in an attempt to rid themselves of the rigidity of Neo-classicist rules. Pushkin follows in the footsteps of his mentor, Byron, by turning to the Orient (the Circassians in The Prisoner of Caucasus, The Gypsies^ The Fountain of Bakhchisarai). The Caucasus and its people are depicted by Lermontov. Zhukovsky's search into the nature of ideal love leads him to translate Nala and Damayanti, one story from the Mahabharata, in 1844. The Russian intelligentsia had access to the English, French and German works in the original. A point worth noting here is that most works on Orientalism to be initially translated into Russian were from the above mentioned languages. The first translation of the Bhagawafa Gita and the Koran into Russian in the 18th century was done from English and French respectively. Washington Irwing's English rendering of the Koran was translated into Russian in 1857. Russian Orientalist studies came up much later, i.e. in the latter half of the 19th century. Thus, initial Russian attitudes to the Orient were, to a large extent, predetermined by those of the French and English and later, German. "This examination of things Oriental", so succinctly put forward by Edward Said, "was based more or less exclusively upon a sovereign western consciousness."8 European nationalism and a supercilious attitude towards the Eastern cultural heritage mark V. Belinsky's review of Zhukovsky's translation of the Indian tale, Nala and Damayanti. European yardsticks of aesthetics are applied to an alien culture about which the Russian critic is misinformed. While acknowledging the need for such translations, Belinsky adds : "For us Europeans this poetry is interesting as a fact of the primitive world, but we cannot sympathize with its superstition and ugly poetics."9 He further maintains : "The individual is the base of the European spirit for whom, therefore, man is above nature."10 There is api ironical twist here. The Russian intellectual thinks like a European, sees himself as one and yet is not a European for the Europeans. The Russian critic was misinformed about India and Indians who, for him, were "a great tribe", believing in an amorphous matter which destroys man's individuality.11 It was more natural for Belinsky, given his background, to look upon The Iliad as the cradle song of civilization. More than ten years later another Russian critic, N. Dobrolyubov, in his article on The East India Company shares many of the English and French attitudes to India. Attempts at objective appraisals (as in the above case and in Dobrolyubov's review of the Koran) end up with the repetition of a colonial mentality.12 European attitudes towards the Orient were also more readily acceptable to the Russians ^because of their close encounter with the