Picturing Russia

Explorations in Visual Culture

Claire Jean Kim

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9780300145175
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• 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