Description
Book SynopsisA collection of essays by eleven scholars of Russian history, art, literature, cinema, philosophy, and theology that track key shifts in the production, circulation, and consumption of the Russian icon from Peter the Great's Enlightenment to the post-Soviet revival of the Orthodox Church.
Trade Review“This elegant volume, replete with full-color plates and multiple illustrations, demonstrates that far from falling into ‘decline,’ ‘decay,’ or ‘loss’ from its encounter with modern aesthetics, the Russian icon continues to serve its ‘intermedial,’ ‘liminal’ function, remaining a phenomenon of the paradoxical ‘living tradition’ that is Orthodoxy. By definition both material and spiritual, the icon finds a place in museum or poem as well as church, marketplace as well as film. And, as elucidated here, the obraz serves itself up as a subject for scholarly investigation as easily as an object of religious devotion. Kudos to the authors, editors, and publisher.”
—Judith Deutsch Kornblatt,University of Wisconsin–Madison
“This groundbreaking book will be necessary reading for anyone invested in the icon—not only those concerned with its history in Russia but also those concerned with its widest ramifications in modernisms of the East and West. The essays examine from diverse viewpoints the largely unexplored centrality of the material icon in the imperialist Russian period as well as in the twentieth century. Not a passive object or simple mirror, the icon was an agent in these centuries that worked simultaneously for tradition and the avant-garde, for individual craftsmanship and mass production, for church devotion and museum ideologies, and more. These essays demonstrate not icons’ gradual disappearance and displacement, but rather the indispensability of the icon for any understanding of Russian culture, of its conflicting and complicated modernisms.”
—Glenn Peers,University of Texas
“Well illustrated and designed, this book is a significant contribution to the study of Russian culture.”
—W. C. Brumfield Choice
“Icons can have profound political and social implications, and while the focus of the eleven chapters in this book is on the icon in modernity, there is enough material outlining the icon’s journey from medieval to the early modern to be of interest to any scholar of historical trends over the past millennium. . . . As many other reviewers have noted, this book is ground-breaking for its analysis of the traditional as well as innovative role of icons during a period where they were in danger of being eclipsed by the state apparatus. . . . After reading this work icons will never look the same.”
—John D’Alton Parergon
Table of ContentsContents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Jefferson J. A. Gatrall
Part I: Empire of Icons
1. Strength in Numbers or Unity in Diversity? Compilations of Miracle-Working Virgin Icons
Elena Boeck
2. Between Purity and Pluralism: Icon and Anathema in Modern Russia, 1860–1917
Vera Shevzov
3. Nicholas II and the Russian Icon
Robert L. Nichols
Part II: Curators and Commissars
4. Anisimov and the Rediscovery of Old Russian Icons
Shirley A. Glade
5. Moments in the History of an Icon Collection: The National Museum in Lviv, 1905–2005
John-Paul Himka
6. How America Discovered Russian Icons: The Soviet Loan Exhibition of 1930–1932
Wendy R. Salmond
Part III: Intermedial Icon
7. Polenov, Merezhkovsky, Ainalov: Archeology of the Christ Image
Jefferson J. A. Gatrall
8. Avant-Garde Poets and Imagined Icons
Sarah Pratt
Part IV: Projections
9. Florensky and the Binocular Body
Douglas Greenfield
10. Florensky and Iconic Dreaming
John Anthony McGuckin
11. Tarkovsky and the Celluloid Icon
Robert Bird
Afterword
Vera Shevzov
Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Index
