Description
Book SynopsisPicturing Russian Empire offers a new way to approach the history of Russia as an empire and as a state located in a world characterized by a churning, dynamic exchange of people, ideas, and practices. It presents readers with a visual tour of the lands and peoples that constituted the Russian Empire and those that confronted it, defied it, accommodated to it, and shaped it at various times in more than a millennium of history. Bringing together scholars and experts from across the world and from various disciplines, Picturing Russian Empire consistently raises big historical questions to stimulate readers to think about images as embedded in the diverse, lived worlds of the Russian empire. The authors challenge the reader to not only to see images as the creations of individuals, but as objects circulating among viewers in a variety of contexts, creating new impressions, meanings, and experiences.
Trade ReviewPicturing Russian Empire is a wonderfully original volume that is a welcome addition to the pedagogical tools we use to introduce students to Russia's empires. The book's paramount advantage lies in its much-needed presentation of tangible artifacts that bring ostensibly distant, perhaps abstract, topics closer to the students. This visual representation of Russian history enables students to appreciate, understand, and critique the narratives they have grown accustomed to analyzing from printed sources"- Stephen Riegg, Texas A&M University
Picturing Russian Empire's strengths include innovative ways of thinking about Russian/Eurasian history and its breadth of coverage and scholarship. The text is comprehensive and accessible, with helpful discussions about how to analyze visual sources in historical research."- Shoshana Keller, Hamilton College
This is a uniquely comprehensive and rich survey of more than a millennium of Russian history that makes use of visual images and their explication by expert specialists to give students and other readers a compelling perspective on the richness and complexity of that country's society and its experiences. While it would serve as an excellent complement to any existing textbook, it can serve as a text in its own right, by prompting discussion that the instructor can use to expand on or situate critical junctures or interpretative questions in Russian history."- David McDonald, University of Wisconsin-Madison
This is a rich, multi-faceted overview of the visual, non-verbal traditions and representations of the Russian empire, starting from the Kievan Rus', ending with the current realities of the Russian Federation. Taken together, the chapters explore the issues of identity, power, homogeneity, agency, reality, and perceptions in an accessible, yet thoroughly analytical way."- Natalie Bayer, Drake University
Picturing Russian Empire offers more than fifty essays written by scholars of history, film, literature, and art that together offer a guided visual tour of the peoples, landscapes, dilemmas, relationships, representations, and worlds of Russia's empires. * The Russian Review *
Table of ContentsI. Medieval Rus among the Empires 1. Monica White, Early Rus: The Nexus of Empires 2. Irina Konovalova, Placing Rus among World Empires in Tenth-Century Arab Geography 3. Sergei Kozlov, The "Imperial Mirage" of Sviatoslav (12th century) II. Muscovy and the Expansion of Empire 4. Nancy S. Kollmann, Empire and Culture: The Sixteenth-Century English Encounter the Samoyedy 5. Valerie A. Kivelson, Racial Imaginary and Images of Mongols and Tatars in Early Modern Russia (1560s-1690s) 6. Ekaterina Boltunova, Visual Polemics: The Time of Troubles in Polish and Russian Historical Memory (1611-1949) 7. Maria Grazia Bartolini, The Image of the Good Orthodox Ruler between Kyiv and Moscow (1660s) 8. Erika Monahan, Tents or Towns: The Limits of Sovereignty in the Russian North in the Late Seventeenth Century 9. Evgeny Grishin, Divine Creation and Russian Exploitation of the Environment in Siberia (circa 1700) III. Imperial Russia 10. Ernest A. Zitser, Re-visioning Empire under Peter the Great: How Muscovite Russia became Imperial 11. Gregory Afinogenov, Depictions of China from a Caravan Journal (1736) 12. Catherine Evtuhov, A "Complete" Atlas of the Russian Empire (1745) 13. Nathaniel Knight, What's in a Hat? Representations of Ethnicity and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia 14. Alison K. Smith, Annushka, the Kalmyk (circa 1767) 15. Erin McBurney, "If fate had not given her an Empire...": Catherine the Great and the Optics of Power (1783) 16. Anna Graber, Depicting Expertise and Managing Diversity in the Urals Mining Industry (1773-1818) 17. Willard Sunderland, Father Hyacinth's Chinese Portrait (Early Nineteenth Century) 18. Richard Wortman, Vignettes of Empire: "Asiatic Peoples" at Nineteenth-Century Imperial Russian Coronations 19. Nadja Berkovich, The Women of Empire Strike Back (1856) 20. Bart Pushaw, The Peasant and the Photograph: Gender, Race, and the Sunlight Picture in the Baltic Provinces (1866) 21. Olga Maiorova, Severed Heads on Display: Visualizing Central Asia (1868-1872) 22. Sarah Badcock, The Cautious One: Identity and Belonging in Late Imperial Russia (1877) 23. Fedor Korandei, Siberian Travelogues: Images of Asiatic Russia during the Transport Revolution (1860s-1890s) 24. Maria Taroutina, "To the Caucasus": Representations of Empire in the Visual Arts at Abramtsevo (1870s-1890s) 25. Louise McReynolds, Archeological Imagery Colonizes the Caucasus 26. Alison Rowley, Chained to a Wheelbarrow: Hard Labor on an 1890s Picture Postcard from Siberia 27. Rosalind P. Blakesley, Siberian Roots in an Imperial Space: Ermak's Conquest of Siberia by Vasily Surikov (1895) 28. Anna Kotomina, Alexander Borisov and Tyko Vilka: Two Artists Who Made Worlds of Their Own from the Arctic Wilderness 29. Galina V. Lyubimova, Yermak from Yenisei Province: A Peasant Painting from the Early Twentieth Century 30. Katherine M. H. Reischl, Imperial Color in the Present Tense: The Photography of Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky IV. The Revolutionary Era 31. Naomi Caffee and Robert Denis, "Go Be Russian:" Political Caricature and the Tbilisi Press After the 1905 Revolution 32. Ronald Grigor Suny, In the Claws of the Imperial Eagle: Finland, Georgia, and Joseph Stalin (1906) 33. Laura Engelstein, Agit-Empire: Bolshevik Civil War Art 34. Angelina Lucento, Breakfast in Suuk Su: The Rise of Visual "Tatarism" (1917-1923) V. The Soviet Union: Introduction 35. Mollie Arbuthnot, Propaganda in Translation: Imagined Muslim Viewers in Early Soviet Posters (circa 1926) 36. Craig Campbell, Two Laws: The Image of the Tungus in Soviet Dreamworlds (1920s) 37. Oksana Sarkisova, Views from the Roof of the World: 1920s Film Expeditions to the Pamir Mountains 38. Emma Widdis, A Shared Soviet Space: Filming the Caucasus in the 1920s-1930s 39. Helena Holzberger, Socialist Orientalism: Picturing Central Asia in the Early Soviet Union (1920s-1930s) 40. Nick Baron, "Fascist Colors": Stalinist Spatial Ideology, Cartographic Design, and Visual Learning 41. Robert Weinberg, Representing Jewishness in the Red Zion: The Jewish Autonomous Region in the 1930s 42. Charles Shaw, Love Letters to O'g'ulxon: Photography and Imperial Intimacy in the Second World War 43. Nikolai Vakhtin, From Ethnographic Reality to Socialist Realism: Illustrations in Soviet Primers for the Indigenous Minorities of the North 44. Erika Wolf, The Stalinist Imperial Body Politic: Photomontage in a Soviet Poster 45. Stephen M. Norris, Caricatured Empire: Cold War Political Cartoons 46. Yana Skorobogatov, "Where the Sun Begins its Path Over our Soil": El'dar Riazanov's Documentary Sakhalin Island (1954) 47. Olessia Vovina, Crafting the Art of Tradition: Chuvash Embroidery Reframed 48. Erik Scott, The Imperial Iconography of the Georgian Table (1900-1980s) 49. Jessica Werneke, Representations of Women in the Soviet Periphery: Tartu Photography Exhibitions in the 1980s VI. The Post-Soviet Era: Introduction 50. Yulia Mikhailova, Competing Nationalisms in Russia's Empire and Its Aftermath: Sviatoslav of Kiev and the Diorama of His Last Battle 51. Evgeny Manzhurin, Return of the Sables: Interpretations of the Symbol of Imperial Siberia (Seventeenth Century to Today) 52. Karen Petrone, Soviet War Memorials in Post-Soviet Spaces 53. Elizabeth A. Wood, Crimea in my Heart: Visualizing Putin's Resurgent Empire in 2014 54. Joshua First, The Maidan: Anti-Imperial Modes of Mythmaking in Documentary Film (2014-2015) 55. Olga Shevchenko, The Post-Soviet Body Politic: Media, Diaspora, and Photographs in the Immortal Regiment 56. Joan Neuberger, Photo Essay: Picturing Wartime 2022
