Ernest A. Zitser, “A Full-Frontal History of the Romanov Dynasty: Pictorial ‘Political Pornography’ in Pre-Reform Russia”
This profusely illustrated article expands the chronological and evidentiary basis of Boris Kolonitskii’s argument about the role of scurrilous rumors and sexual innuendo in the desacralization of the Russian monarchy and demonstrates the complexity of the processes of reception, re-appropriation, and subversion of imperial “scenarios of power.” It does so by offering a close reading of what is arguably the earliest-known example of the genre of pictorial “political pornography” in Russia: a set of five, unique watercolors from the collection of the New York Public Library depicting eighteenth-century Russian emperors and empresses in flagrante delicto. The author presents evidence that suggests that this anonymous series of “folded” or “double pictures” (skladnye or dvoinye kartinki) was created in the first half of the nineteenth century by means of a subversive repurposing of Russian popular broadsheets, French revolutionary pornography, and official Russian royal portraiture. He argues that this artifact of male salon culture is the product of a deliberate attempt to create nothing less than an alternative, unexpurgated history of the House of Romanov: a sexually explicit, full-frontal assault that takes pleasure in exposing the “mysteries of state” that nineteenth-century royal apologists sought to conceal in official histories of the dynasty, which presented the children of Paul I and Maria Fedorovna as epigones of family values and models for the nation.
Shane O’Rourke, “‘The Mother Benefactress and the Sacred Battalion’: Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, the Editing Commission and the Emancipation of the Serfs”
This article argues that Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna made a decisive contribution to the Emancipation of the Serfs through the political battles she waged from 1855 to 1861. Using her position as a Grand Duchess, her salon and her relationship with her nephew Alexander II, Elena was able to provide support and guidance for Alexander’s desire for emancipation and for those who wished for real as a opposed to a nominal emancipation of the serfs. Elena’s contribution has gone largely unnoticed because the gendered conception of politics in imperial Russia had no place for a woman. That ideology, however, did not reflect the complete reality of politics in imperial Russia which revolved around the person of the emperor both in his capacity as an autocrat and as a man in the centre of a network of personal relationships of which royal women were an important, but unacknowledged, part. Elena’s position close to the throne, her exception skills and abilities, and her desire to help the process of emancipation allowed her to take an active part in that fight. She provided an organizing centre for all those on the Editing Commission who shared her view, was able to arrange access for them to the emperor in a context in which he willingly engaged with them on the emancipation, and finally she used her own growing influence over Alexander to ensure his continued support for the Commission and its work. This article in reconstructing Elena’s role in the political sphere gives due recognition to her unjustly neglected contribution to the emancipation and broadens our understanding of politics in imperial Russia.
Steven Maddox, “These Monuments Must be Protected! Stalin’s Turn to the Past and Historic Preservation during the Blockade of Leningrad”
This article analyzes the methods employed to preserve and restore Leningrad’s historic monuments during the 900-day blockade of World War II. Over the course of the blockade, which lasted from September 9, 1941, until January 27, 1944, city authorities and preservationists instituted measures to protect imperial monuments from enemy bombardment. During this period, nearly one million people died from bombings, extreme cold in the winters, and Hitler’s policy of starving the city into submission. As bombs rained down on the city and dystrophy began to affect all people trapped within the blockade ring, Leningraders risked their lives to camouflage golden spires, evacuate museum exhibits from areas threatened with German occupation, take measurements of monuments for future restoration, assess damage, and provide emergency conservation where possible. The article argues that the Stalinist turn to the past in the 1930s endowed the country’s historic monuments with ideological significance. Due to their newfound importance as embodiments of the “glorious past,” monuments were afforded protection, even in a state of total war.
Jacob Emery, “Art Is Inoculation: The Infectious Imagination of Lev Tolstoy”
Tolstoy's most cogent and focused statement on aesthetics, the 1896 treatise What is Art?, answers the question posed by its title with the blunt statement that “art is infection.” This paper observes that a consistent system of metaphors of infection is central not just to What is Art?, but to every stage and genre of Tolstoy's writing—polemical, autobiographical, and literary works, early journals and late-life rantings. Arguing that the complex of disease metaphors running through the entirety of Tolstoy's work affords the reader one way of conceptualizing Tolstoy's massive oeuvre as a single coherent corpus, the essay reads specific moments from a range of Tolstoyan texts in order to sketch out infection's relation to the themes of mortality, morality, and the artistic imagination that loom most largely in Tolstoy's thought. Reexamined in this light, the apparently strained relationship between the aesthetic and ethical aspects of Tolstoy's artistic theory turns out to be more nuanced, compelling, and more resonant with the Kantian aesthetic tradition than previously recognized.
Julie W. de Sherbinin “The Dismantling of Hierarchy and the Defense of Social Class in Anna Karenina”
Since the publication of Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina, critics have periodically objected to Tolstoy's defense of aristocratic privilege in the character of Konstantin Levin. These critiques, however, have rarely been performed with reference to the literary fabric of Tolstoy's text, that is, his "labyrinth of linkages." This essay closely examines images of hierarchy in the novel-with particular reference to heights and depths, the prefix of ascent (voz-/vos-) and a corollary mark of descent (unizhenie, or humiliation), the epithets "tall" and "short," and the frequent appearance of staircases which are associated with falls. The essay begins by charting in detail the ways in which Tolstoy understands the dangers of vertical thinking--epitomized by Vronsky and Anna; and how he views the dismantling of worldly hierarchies to be a prerequisite for the discovery of meaningful emotional and spiritual values--epitomized by Kitty and Levin's family life at the end of the novel. Disturbingly, however, Tolstoy leaves one obvious worldly hierarchy intact: distinction through social rank. The last part of the essay discusses the paradoxes inherent in Levin's doctrine of the superiority of the nobility with reference to images of hierarchy and to contemporary theory on class and race. Paul Schervish's notion of the "moral biographies" of the wealthy helps to frame Tolstoy's inconsistent thinking, as does an analogy between Levin's borrowings from peasant culture and so-called "White Negroes" in the United States, who have appropriated African American culture to their own benefit while leaving the basic structures of racial hierarchy untouched. The aim of this exercise is not to diminish the novel, but rather to complicate its seemingly straightforward messages--messages that, if not carefully examined, encourage privileged young American readers to identify with Levin's sense of moral elevation without taking into account the privilege of economic advantage.
Dunja Popovic, “A Generation That Has Squandered Its Men: The Late Soviet Crisis of Masculinity in the Poetry of Sergei Gandlevskii”
The present paper explores the role images of masculinity play in the work of the contemporary Russian poet Sergei Gandlevskii. Gandlevskii’s treatment of masculinity, the paper argues, serves as a vehicle for commentary on the historical situation of the late Soviet era, as well as providing an outlet for the poet’s reflection upon his own life path and, at times, for an implicit moral self-judgment within the context of a general condemnation of Soviet society. Gandlevskii’s poetry, the paper attempts to show, reflects what the sociologists Elena Zdravomyslova and Anna Temkina have termed a “crisis of masculinity” characteristic of late Soviet society: it associates a masculine life-path with the notions of futility, moral failure and existential impasse. At the same time that Gandlevskii treats Soviet-era paradigms of masculinity with skepticism and distance, however, he also does engage to some extent in fantasies of masculine autonomy and agency as possible even within the context of Soviet society. This ambivalence is preserved in Gandlevskii’s work through the poet’s use of various masculine personae (some more distant than others from his biographical self), as well as by the abundance of quotations from other poets and from official Soviet discourses.