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Museum and Society in Imperial Russia: An Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Katia Dianina
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Abstract

At the turn of the twentieth century, European critics who were distressed about contemporary developments in the fine arts tended to use medical, psychopathological terms to diagnose the existing state of the field. In 1892-1893, an Austrian physician and writer, Max Nordau, published Entartung (Degeneration). Drawing on positivist psychology and anthropometry, Nordau expressed his pessimistic views on the mental and physical health of the leading figures of European fin-de-siécle culture: Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Verlaine, the impressionists, the symbolists, and many others. In Russia this book went into nine editions, in three different translations. The patriarch of Russian liberal-nationalist criticism, Vladimir Stasov applied Nordau's metaphors to Russian “decadent” artists in such reviews as “Podvorl'e prokazhennykh” (Lepers’ inn, 1899) or “Dve dekadentskie vystavki” (Two decadent exhibitions, 1903). He sarcastically remarked that, when viewing canvases by some contemporary painters, he felt as though he were “walking amidst a madhouse.”

Type
Displaying the Nation and Modernity in Russia: Directions in Russian Museum Studies
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 67 , Issue 4 , Winter 2008 , pp. 907 - 911
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2008

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References

1. Rossiiskaia muzeinaia entsiklopediia, 2 vols. (Moscow, 2001). The growing bibliography of recent research devoted to Russian collections and their history includes the following titles that appeared in the past decade: Anthony Anemone, “The Monsters of Peter the Great: The Culture of the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera in the Eighteenth Century,“ Slavic and East European Journal 44, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 583-602; Joseph Bradley “Nauka v gorode: Osnovanie Moskovskogo politekhnicheskogo muzeia,” Rossiia XXI, no. 2 (2005): 96-127; Jennifer Cahn, “Nikolai Punin and Russian Avant-Garde Museology, 1917-1932“ (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1999); Ekaterina Dianina, “A Nation on Display: Russian Museums and Print Culture in the Age of the Great Reforms” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2002); Christopher David Ely, This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, 2002); David C. Fisher, “Exhibiting Russia at the World's Fairs, 1851-1900” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2003); Rosalind Polly Gray, Russian Genre Painting in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2000); Francine Hirsch, “Getting to Know ‘The Peoples of the USSR': Ethnographic Exhibits as Soviet Virtual Tourism, 1923-1934,” Slavic Review 62, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 683-709; Nait, Nataniel [Nauianiel Knight], “Imperiia napokaz: Vserossiiskaia etnograficheskaia vystavka 1867 goda,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 51 (2001): 111-31Google Scholar; Neverov, O. la., Great Private Collections of Imperial Russia (New York, 2004)Google Scholar; Nikitin, Iu. A., Promyshlennye vystavki Rossii XIX—nachala XX veka (Cherepovets, 2004)Google Scholar; Norman, Geraldine, The Hermitage: The Biography of a Great Museum (New York, 1998)Google Scholar; Salmond, Wendy R., Arts and Crafts in Late Imperial Russia: Reviving the Kustar Art Industries, 1870-1917 (New York, 1996)Google Scholar; Susan Nicole Smith, “Museum Practices and Notions of the Local in a Russian Provincial City, 1898-1935” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2005); Richard Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power (New Haven, 2005); Anthony Swift, “Russia and the Great Exhibition of 1851: Representations, Perceptions, and a Missed Opportunity,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 55, no. 2 (2007): 242-63.

2. From the 1870s to the 1890s, for instance, 80 different museums were founded, many of which were located in the provinces. The number of exhibitions organized between 1843 and 1887 is estimated at an astronomical 580. S. A. Kasparinskaia, “Muzei Rossii i vliianie gosudarstvennoi politiki na ikh razvitie (XVIII-nach. XX v.),” in Muzei i vlast': Gosudarstvennaia politika v oblasti muzeinogo dela (XWII-XX vv.) (Moscow, 1991), 53.

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10. Joseph Bradley, “Subjects into Citizens: Societies, Civil Society, and Autocracy in Tsarist Russia,” American Historical Review 107, no. 4 (October 2002): 1105.

11. George Brown Goode, “The Museums of the Future” (1889), as cited in Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, “Objects of Ethnography,” in Karp, Ivan and Lavine, Steven D., eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, D.C., 1991), 395.Google Scholar

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13. “Vazhnost’ i pol'za vystavok,” Syn otechestva, no. 158 (3 July 1862). See also, “Neskol'ko slov o vystavke 1861 goda,” Russkii invalid, no. 192 (3 September 1861).

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