Russian artists and publicists created a symbolic language of revolution in left-leaning satirical magazines during and after the Revolution of 1905. They reversed the traditional association of the occult with rebellion and pictured tsarist officials as monsters, vampires, and demons. They stigmatized the old order and portrayed death as its murderous ally. They also evoked death as an instrument of revolution. This essay explores the imagery they used and the context in which they worked.
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Alexander Pope, “One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight, Dialogue II [The Defense of Satire]” in The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 254.
See John E. Bowlt, Moscow and St. Petersburg 1900-1920: Art, Life and Culture of the Silver Age (New York: The Vendome Press, 2008), pp. 191-193. In Images of Revolution: Graphic Art from 1905 Russia (New York: Pantheon, 1983), pp. 36-45, David King and Cathy Porter also discuss the participation of the World of Art group and some Symbolists in the journals and provide short notes on the artists.
Minin, “Art and Politics in the Russian Satirical Press,” pp. 10-12. Minin cites Maliazh, “Nedavnee i nastoiashchee. Kharakteristika satiricheskikh zhurnalov,” Otkliki khudozhestvennoi zhizni, No. 1 (1910), pp. 70-75 who notes, “There were cases when the vendors would refuse to distribute certain issues that did not have the color red in them.”
V. Botsianovskii and E. Gollerbakh, Russkaia satira pervoi revoliutsii 1905-1906 (Leningrad: Gos. izdatel’stvo, 1925), p. 38.
Arkadii A[verchenko], “Momento mori. (ocherk),” Shtyk, No. 9 (Kharkov, 1907), pp. 6-7. Averchenko (1881-1925) was also the editor-in-chief of Shtyk. In 1908, the satirist who would later be praised as “the king of laughter” became the editor of the legendary Satirikon (St. Petersburg, 1908-1913). See, Viktoriia D. Milenko, Arkadii Averchenko (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2010), pp. 42-46.
See B. F. Egorov, Rossiiskie utopii. Istoricheskii putevoditel’ (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 2007), pp. 281-285.
Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, New Myth, New World: from Nietzsche to Stalinism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), p. 34. See also Rosenthal’s remarks on this entire phenomenon, pp. 27-112.
Minin, “Art and Politics in the Russian Satirical Press,” pp. 250-254, 260-265, 291-298.
See Leonid Batkin, “Smekh Panurga i filosofiia kul’tury” in M. M. Bakhtin: pro et contra, Vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: Izd-vo Russkogo khristianskogo gumanitarnogo in-ta, 2001-2002), pp. 398-415 and A. Ia. Gurevich, Srednevekovyi mir: Kul’tura bezmolvstvuiushchego bol’shinstva (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1990).
Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Muzei, Torgovaia reklama i upakovka v Rossii XIX-XX vv.: Iz fondov Gosudarstvennogo Istoricheskogo Muzeia (Moscow: GIM, 1993), p. 54.
John Marshall, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 7.
Peter Gay, Pleasure Wars. The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 25; Gay attributes the phrase to Gustav Flaubert in a letter to Louis Bouilhet of December 26, 1852 that he gleefully signed “GUSTAVUS FLAUBERTUS, Bourgeoisophobus.” There is a large body of literature on meshchanstvo. Timo Vihavainen in The Inner Adversary: the Struggle against Philistinism as the Moral Mission of the Russian Intelligentsia (Washington, D.C., 2006), pp. 45-51 notes a range of views and provides some bibliography.
Cited in N. Lapshina, Mir iskusstva. Ocherki istorii i tvorcheskoi praktiki (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1971), p. 321. Benois may have been influenced by P. B. Struve and Simon Frank who voiced similar ideas and condemned “the socialist ideal of democratic despotism” in their “Ocherki filosofii kul’tury,” in Poliarnaia zvezda, No. 3 (Dec., 30, 1905), p. 177.
Dina Khapaeva, Goticheskoe obshchestvo: Morfologiia koshmara (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007), pp. 5-15; see also her observations on the “Gothic aesthetic” in Russia, pp. 264-279. See also Dina Khapaeva, Portrait critique de la Russie—Essai sur la société gothique, trans. Nina Kéhayan (Paris: Eds. de l’Aube, 2012).
According to Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, pp. 118-119, death was “a symbol of blind fate” even in the case of war.
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Russian artists and publicists created a symbolic language of revolution in left-leaning satirical magazines during and after the Revolution of 1905. They reversed the traditional association of the occult with rebellion and pictured tsarist officials as monsters, vampires, and demons. They stigmatized the old order and portrayed death as its murderous ally. They also evoked death as an instrument of revolution. This essay explores the imagery they used and the context in which they worked.
All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 346 | 108 | 8 |
Full Text Views | 202 | 11 | 1 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 70 | 27 | 2 |