On the threshold of the Black Sea: Intersecting discourses of identity and empire in the paintings of Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky

This dissertation examines the relationship between the visual arts and the imagination and construction of identities and spaces. It focuses on Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky (1817-1900) within a cross-cultural network of meaning, in particular addressing the manifold functions of the visual arts in nineteenth-century Russian society, while attending to a diverse range of voices within, and beyond, Russian culture. This study examines how art and material culture were used to construct imperial, national, and social identities in the nineteenth-century Russian Empire and its southern coasts, and how these ways of making sense of the world interacted. Combining iconographic analysis of selected paintings, the context of nineteenth-century artistic milieus, and the biography of the artist, my research illuminates how the art of Aivazovsky was used to mediate critical stages in the relations of the nineteenth-century Black Sea world. It also shows how artistic and material contexts clarified the emergence of specific possibilities of national identity and their extension to the imperial. Analyzing Aivazovsky's oeuvre thematically, in Ottoman and Armenian as well as Russian contexts, while retaining the artist's intersecting identities (Russian, Russian-Armenian, and Armenian), facilitates a more nuanced understanding of nineteenth-century visual culture and cultural diplomacy involving Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Armenia. Thus, art is shown to have functioned simultaneously as a process of building contextual cultural identifications and an instrument for cross-cultural and cross-imperial dialogue. Going beyond another round of national struggle for cultural ownership, the thesis investigates the complexity of context, artist, and oeuvre that emerged before the cultural hegemony of the nation. By contextualizing Aivazovsky as "in-between" and "across," rather than as embedded in the nation (or any given empire), this dissertation revises our understanding of his influence. A focus is placed on the function of the artist in respect of the histories, cultures, and politics of the peoples around the Black Sea and recalling of an older, more deeply rooted, artistic and intellectual cultural mapping of this region. By analyzing not only the ever-shifting state policies with respect to the Black Sea region but also the varying aspects of the Black Sea topography (and specifically the Crimean region) in the Russian imagination, I offer intriguing perspectives on the shifting sense of "Russianness" itself as the nation looked to move form a land-based (supposed backward) territorial empire to a maritime (forward-looking) imperial power. Locating in his creative works the features of his "national" character as a Russian imperial citizen, the expressions of the ancient culture of the Armenians, and his passion for the natural beauty of the Black Sea, my new approach views Aivazovsky as a painter, subject, and citizen operating simultaneously within, beyond, and across imperial borders and national imaginaries.