Picturing Russia S Men

Winner of the Heldt Prize for Best Book in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Women's and Gender Studies 2021 There was a discontent among Russian men in the nineteenth century that sometimes did not stem from poverty, loss, or the threat of war, but instead arose from trying to negotiate the paradoxical prescriptions for masculinity which characterized the era. Picturing Russia's Men takes a vital new approach to this topic within masculinity and art historical studies by investigating the dissatisfaction that developed from the breakdown in prevailing conceptions of manhood outside of the usual Western European and American contexts. By exploring how Russian painters depicted gender norms as they were evolving over the course of the century, each chapter shows how artworks provide unique insight into not only those qualities that were supposed to predominate, but actually did in lived practice. Drawing on a wide variety of source material, including previously untranslated letters, journals, and contemporary criticism, the book explores the deep structures of masculinity to reveal the conflicting desires and aspirations of men in the period. In so doing, readers are introduced to Russian artists such as Karl Briullov, Pavel Fedotov, Alexander Ivanov, Ivan Kramskoi, and Ilia Repin, all of whom produced masterpieces of realist art in dialogue with paintings made in Western European artistic centers. The result is a more culturally discursive account of art-making in the nineteenth century, one that challenges some of the enduring myths of masculinity and provides a fresh interpretive history of what constitutes modernism in the history of art.

List of illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- 1: Seeing into being: an introduction / Valerie A Kivelson and Joan Neuberger -- 2: Dirty old books / Simon Franklin -- 3: Visualizing and illustrating early Rus housing / David M Goldfrank -- 4: Crosier of St Stefan of Perm / A V Chernetsov -- 5: Sixteenth-century Muscovite cavalrymen / Donald Ostrowski -- 6: Blessed is the Host of the Heavenly Tsar: an icon from the Dormition Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin / Daniel Rowland -- 7: Cap of Monomakh / Nancy Shields Kollmann -- 8: Church of the Intercession on the Moat / St Basil's Cathedral / Michael S Flier -- 9: Mapping serfdom: peasant dwellings on seventeenth-century litigation maps / Valerie A Kivelson -- 10: From tsar to emperor: portraits of Aleksei and Peter I / Lindsey Hughes -- 11: Russian Round Table: Aleksei Zubov's depiction of the marriage of his Royal Highness, Peter the First, autocrat of all the Russias / Ernest A Zitser -- 12: Icon of female authority: the St Catherine image of 1721 / Gary Marker -- 13: Conspicuous consumption at the Court of Catherine the Great: Count Zakhar Chernyshev's snuffbox / Douglas Smith -- 14: Moving pictures: the optics of serfdom on the Russian estate / Thomas Newlin -- 15: Neither nobles nor peasants: plain painting and the emergence of the merchant estate / David L Ransel -- 16: Circles on a Square: the heart of St Petersburg culture in the early nineteenth century / Richard Stites -- 17: Alexander Ivanov's appearance of Christ to the people / Laura Engelstein -- 18: Lubki of emancipation / Richard Wortman -- 19: Folk art and social ritual / Alison Hilton -- 20: Personal and imperial: Fyodor Vasiliev's in the Crimean Mountains / Christopher Ely -- 21: Shop signs, monuments, souvenirs: views of the empire in everyday life / Willard Sunderland -- 22: Storming of Kars / Stephen M Norris -- 23: A O Karelin and provincial Bourgeois photography / Catherine Evtuhov -- 24: European fashion in Russia / Christine Ruane -- 25: Savior on the Waters church war memorial in St Petersburg / Nadieszda Kizenko -- 26: Workers in suits: performing the self / Mark D Steinberg -- 27: Visualizing masculinity: the male sex that was not one in Fin-de-Siecle Russia / Louise McReynolds -- 28: Pictographs of power: the 500-ruble note of 1912 / James Cracraft -- 29: Visualizing 1917 / William G Rosenberg -- 30: Looking at Tatlin's stove / Christina Kiaer -- 31: Soviet images of Jehovah in the 1920s / Robert Weinberg -- 32: National types / Francine Hirsch -- 33: Envisioning empire: veils and visual revolution in Soviet Central Asia / Douglas Northrop -- 34: Visual economy of forced labor: Alexander Rodchenko and the White Sea-Baltic Canal / Erika Wolf -- 35: Cinematic pastoral of the 1930s / Emma Widdis -- 36: Portrait of Lenin: carpets and national culture in Soviet Turkmenistan / Adrienne Edgar -- 37: Moscow metro / Mike O'Mahony -- 38: Soviet spectacle: the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition / Evgeny Dobrenko -- 39: Motherland calling? national symbols and the mobilization for war / Karen Petrone -- 40: Visual dialectics: murderous laughter in Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible / Joan Neuberger -- 41: Soviet Jewish photographers confront World War II and the Holocaust / David Shneer -- 42: Morning of Our Motherland: Fyodor Shurpin's portrait of Stalin / Mark Bassin -- 43: Pioneer Palace in the Lenin Hills / Susan E Reid -- 44: Mikhail Romm's Ordinary Fascism / Josephine Woll -- 45: Solaris and the white, white screen / Lilya Kaganovsky -- 46: After Malevich-variations on the return to the Black Square / Jane A Sharp -- 47: Imagining Soviet rock: Akvarium's Triangle / Polly McMichael -- 48: Keeping the ancient piety: Old Believers and contemporary society / Roy R Robson and Elena B Smilianskaia -- 49: Viktor Vasnetsov's bogatyrs: mythic heroes and Sacrosanct borders go to market / Helena Goscilo -- 50: Landscape and vision at the White Sea-Baltic Canal / Michael Kunichika -- Chronology of Russian history -- Selected bibliography -- List of contributors -- Illustration credits -- Index

"The sense of estrangement felt by men during the nineteenth century has been called many things - a crisis in masculinity, the mal de siècle, even a psychological disorder known as neurasthenia - but as a phenomenon, such masculine discontent has gone largely unexplored outside of the western European and American contexts. In this ground-breaking new investigation, Allison Leigh explores how Russian painters sought to depict the new psychological struggles associated with modernity and the implications such visual manifestations of anxiety had for masculinity at the time. Drawing on a wide variety of source material, including previously untranslated letters, journals, and contemporary criticism, Leigh investigates how men's lives changed as they experienced the cultural upheavals of the nineteenth century. In so doing, she introduces readers to Russian artists such as Pavel Fedotov, Karl Briullov, Il'ia Repin, and Ivan Kramskoi, all of whom produced masterpieces of realist art in dialogue with paintings made in European artistic centers at the time. The result is a more culturally discursive account of art-making in the nineteenth century, one that challenges some of the enduring myths of masculinity and provides a fresh interpretive history of what constitutes modernism in the history of art"--

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.

Between 1945 and 1965, the catastrophe of war—and the social and political changes it brought in its wake—had a major impact on the construction of the Soviet masculine ideal. Drawing upon a wide range of visual material, The Fate of the New Man traces the dramatic changes in the representation of the Soviet man in the postwar period. It focuses on the two identities that came to dominate such depictions in the two decades after the end of the war: the Soviet man's previous role as a soldier and his new role in the home once the war was over. In this compelling study, Claire McCallum focuses on the reconceptualization of military heroism after the war, the representation of contentious subjects such as the war-damaged body and bereavement, and postwar changes to the depiction of the Soviet man as father. McCallum shows that it was the Second World War, rather than the process of de-Stalinization, that had the greatest impact on the masculine ideal, proving that even under the constraints of Socialist Realism, the physical and emotional devastation caused by the war was too great to go unacknowledged. The Fate of the New Man makes an important contribution to Soviet masculinity studies. McCallum's research also contributes to broader debates surrounding the impact of Stalin's death on Soviet society and on the nature of the subsequent Thaw, as well as to those concerning the relationship between Soviet culture and the realities of Soviet life. This fascinating study will appeal to scholars and students of Soviet history, masculinity studies, and visual culture studies.

Co-winner of the 2009 SUNY Press Dissertation/First Book Prize in Women's and Gender Studies, Imagining Russia uses U.S.–Russian relations between the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 as a case study to examine the deployment of gendered, racialized, and heteronormative visual and narrative depictions of Russia and Russians in contemporary narratives of American nationalism and U.S. foreign policy. Through analyses of several key post-Soviet American popular and political texts, including the hit television series The West Wing, Washington D.C.'s International Spy Museum, and the legislative hearings of the Freedom Support Act and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, Williams calls attention to the production and operation of five types of "gendered Russian imaginaries" that were explicitly used to bolster support for and legitimize U.S. geopolitical unilateralism after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, demonstrating the ways that the masculinization of U.S. military, political, and financial power after 1991 paved the way for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

"More Russian Picture Tales" by Valerian Viliamovich Karrik (translated by Nevill Forbes). Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

The idea that morally, mentally, and physically superior 'new men' might replace the currently existing mankind has periodically seized the imagination of intellectuals, leaders, and reformers throughout history. This volume offers a multidisciplinary investigation into how the 'new man' was made in Russia and the early Soviet Union in the first third of the 20th century. The traditional narrative of the Soviet 'new man' as a creature forged by propaganda is challenged by the strikingly new and varied case studies presented here. The book focuses on the interplay between the rapidly developing experimental life sciences, such as biology, medicine, and psychology, and countless cultural products, ranging from film and fiction, dolls and museum exhibits to pedagogical projects, sculptures, and exemplary agricultural fairs. With contributions from scholars based in the United States, Canada, the UK, Germany and Russia, the picture that emerges is emphatically more complex, contradictory, and suggestive of strong parallels with other 'new man' visions in Europe and elsewhere. In contrast to previous interpretations that focused largely on the apparent disconnect between utopian 'new man' rhetoric and the harsh realities of everyday life in the Soviet Union, this volume brings to light the surprising historical trajectories of 'new man' visions, their often obscure origins, acclaimed and forgotten champions, unexpected and complicated results, and mutual interrelations. In short, the volume is a timely examination of a recurring theme in modern history, when dramatic advancements in science and technology conjoin with anxieties about the future to fuel dreams of a new and improved mankind.