ethnicities in Russian art music. As opposed to many other Russian composers, Balakirev actually had personal encounters with representatives of Caucasian peoples. This allowed him, according to Issiyeva, to create ‘a musical model for the representation of the Russian Orient’ (207) that she is able to outline in a number of close readings of the works of Balakirev and his circle. Issiyeva’s last chapter looks at a series of events called ‘Ethnographic Concerts’, pre- sentations of folklore music of peoples living in the realms of the Russian empire which took place in Moscow between 1893 and 1911. Issiyeva impressively demonstrates how the structure of these concerts as well as their musical means reflected the empire’s ideo- logical agenda, connecting sounding representations of ‘Russianness’ with stereotypical portrayals of ‘the other’ and a façade of scientificity, all within the framework of Western art music. In place of a conclusion, Issiyeva traces the developments of Russian-Asian musical encounters and ethnography into the Soviet era, highlighting a number of personal and methodological continuities. Her study is completed with two appendices, one containing a bibliography of collections of byliny, folk, soldier and children’s songs, another the collected programmes of all the Ethnographic Concerts analysed in Chapter 6. Representing Russia’s Orient is written in a fluid, easily understandable, but never simplistic style, making it a real joy to read. Issiyeva succeeds in carving out the complex, sometimes even contradictory, nature of the Russian musical encounter with its own ‘orient’, familiarizing the reader along the way with often previously unconsid- ered source material. She finds a careful balance between highlighting the colonial, chau- vinist viewpoint ethnic Russians often took in view of their own orient and a portrayal of a genuine Russian interest in understanding unfamiliar cultures. Issiyeva never represents these approaches in an ideological vacuum but attentively and knowledgeably embeds them in the respective historical and political contexts. Given the relative abundance of musical examples and music theoretical terminology (particularly in the second half of the book), musicologists might profit the most from Issiyeva’s work. But even without an in-depth understanding of musical minutiae, her book is a highly inspiring reading for all scholars of late tsarist culture, Central Asian and Caucasian (cultural) history, Russian music and orientalism. A. V. Ivanov, A Spiritual Revolution: The Impact of Reformation and Enlightenment in Orthodox Russia, 1700–1825, University of Wisconsin Press: Madison, WI 2020; 320 pp., 10 b/w illus.; 9780299327903, $79.95 (hbk) Reviewed by: James M. White, Laboratory for the Study of Primary Sources, Ural Federal University, Ekaterinburg, Russia The historiography on the Russian Empire has a problem, and it is a problem of the church. On the one hand, historians approaching ‘secular’ topics all too often sideline 592 European History Quarterly 51(4)