The mirror trope is now so well established in Classics that it is easy to overlook its novelty when François Hartog first published his ground-breaking book, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History. Analysis of Herodotus’s literary representations – the ‘mirror’ of ethnographic inversions which he presented to his fellow Greeks – still resonates with Western societies accustomed to defining themselves by reference to imagined civilizational antitypes. Observing the way other moderns fashioned themselves in the mirror of ancient literary representation sheds important light on the complex sequence of metaphorical reflections and sideways glances through which they constructed their sense of identity. It also punctures the false sense of superiority which arises from the notion that the Western observer occupied the position of a disinterested spectator. In exploring Russia’s national self-identification in the mirror of Herodotean ethnography, nothing could be further off the mark than to presume that Western readers are less prone to wishful self-projection than their Russian counterparts. On the contrary, by engaging in the mode of self-conscious analysis, the goal is less to study the changing ways in which nineteenth-century readers understood Herodotus than to realize the potential their readings afford for changing how we understand our place in the world. With respect to Russian readers of Herodotus, I endeavour to show how their interpretations of Herodotean ethnography can help us confront not only their continuing struggles for a coherent identity but also our millennial contests with cultural pluralism, globalization and resurgent nationalism. One means of achieving such committed self-reflection is to frame Herodotus’s impact in the intellectual milieu of nineteenth-century Russia by focusing on the broader intellectual and ideological implications of the ancient text.