Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture

Description

What can Russian images and  objects—a tsar’s crown, a provincial  watercolor album, the Soviet Pioneer Palace—tell us about the Russian people and their culture? This wide-ranging book is the first to explore the visual culture of Russia  over the entire span of Russian history, from ancient Kiev to contemporary, post-Soviet society. Illustrated with more than one hundred diverse and fascinating images, the book examines the ways that Russians have represented themselves visually, understood their visual environment, and used visual images in social and political contexts. Expert contributors discuss images and objects from all over the Russian/Soviet empire, including consumer goods, architectural monuments, religious icons, portraits, news and art photography, popular prints, films, folk art, and more. Each of the concise and accessible essays in the volume offers a fresh interpretation of Russian cultural history. Putting visuality itself in focus as never before, Picturing Russia adds an entirely new dimension to the study of Russian literature, history, art, and culture. The book enriches our understanding of visual documents and shows the variety of ways they serve as far more than mere illustration. Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments 1 Seeing into Being: An Introduction 2. Dirty Old Books 3. Visualizing and Illustrating Early Rus Housing 4. The Crosier of St. Stefan of Perm 5. Sixteenth-Century Muscovite Cavalrymen 6. Blessed Is the Host of the Heavenly Tsar: An Icon from the Dormition Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin 7. The Cap of Monomakh 8. Church of the Intercession on the Moat / St. Basil’s Cathedral 9. Mapping Serfdom: Peasant Dwellings on Seventeenth-Century Litigation Maps 10. From Tsar to Emperor. Portraits of Aleksei and Peter I 11. The Russian Round Table: Aleksei Zubov’s Depiction of the Marriage of His Royal Highness, Peter the First, Autocrat of All the Russias 12 An Icon of Female Authority: The St. Catherine Image of 1721 13. Conspicuous Consumption at the Court of Catherine the Great: Count Zakhar Chernyshev’s Snuffbox 14 Moving Pictures: The Optics of Serfdom on the Russian Estate 15. Neither Nobles nor Peasants: Plain Painting and the Emergence of the Merchant Estate 16. Circles on a Square. The Heart of St. Petersburg Culture in the Early Nineteenth Century 17. Alexander Ivanov’s Appearance of Christ to the People 18 Lubki of Emancipation 19 Folk Art and Social Ritual 20 Personal and Imperial 21 Shop Signs, Monuments, Souvenirs 22 The Storming of Kars 23 A. O. Karelin and Provincial Bourgeois Photography 24 European Fashion in Russia 25 The Savior on the Waters Church War Memorial in St. Petersburg 26 Workers in Suits 27 Visualizing Masculinity 28 Pictographs of Power 29 Visualizing 1917 30 Looking at Tatlin’s Stove 31 Soviet Images of Jehovah in the 1920s 32 National Types 33 Envisioning Empire 34 The Visual Economy of Forced Labor 35 The Cinematic Pastoral of the 1930s 36 Portrait of Lenin 37 The Moscow Metro 38 The Soviet Spectacle 39 Motherland Calling? 40 Visual Dialectics 41 Soviet Jewish Photographers Confront World War II and the Holocaust 42 The Morning of Our Motherland 43 The Pioneer Palace in the Lenin Hills 44 Mikhail Romm’s Ordinary Fascism 45 Solaris and the White, White Screen 46 After Malevich–Variations on the Return to the Black Square 47 Imagining Soviet Rock 48 Keeping the Ancient Piety 49 Viktor Vasnetsov’s Bogatyrs 50 Landscape and Vision at the White Sea–Baltic Canal Chronology of Russian History Selected Bibliography Contributors Illustration Credits Index