A critical assessment of the Russian-language literature in the field of visual culture

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DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Archives in the USSR were initially used only for political purposes. For example, during Stalin’s rule, in the context of the mass purges in the state and public organisations, archives received direct instructions from the Party and government bodies to identify incriminating materials to discover ‘enemies of the people’. In the 1930s, every effort was made to ‘militarize’ the whole archives management system. Education in the field of archival studies, and archiving generally, was viewed very narrowly and did not imply any historical research.

2 People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (‘NKVD’) of the USSR was established in 1934 as the central body of the Soviet state administration for combating crime and maintaining public order; in 1934–1943, it also served as a secret police.

3 Ministry of the Imperial Court and Principalities of the Russian Empery was established in 1826 and united all parts of the court administration outside the control of any other institution. It was headed by the minister of the court, who was under the direct supervision of the sovereign. In 1858, a branch for ceremonial affairs was joined to the Ministry of the Imperial Court.

4 Criminal cases about insult to Majesty.

5 Methodology of ‘égo-histoire’ is based on supposition that personal history is not separate from political or intellectual history. The term was used first by Pierre Nora to refer to the collection of essays by historians writing the history of their own lives: in 1987 Nora invited several famous French historians to write neither autobiographies nor psychological portraits, but rather histories of their own academic lives, using professional epistemological instrumentation and methods (Nora 1987; Aurell 2017).

6 The term ‘bottom-up’ [memory] was introduced by scholars of the Popular Memory Group at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies while developing the concept of ‘popular memory’, that they believed should expand what scholars included in writing history (Johnson et al. 1982).

7 Popular cheap woodprints, called ‘lubok’ or ‘lubochnye kartinkee’, are the specific type of graphic art widespread in Russia in the middle of 17th century until the end of 19th century. They reproduced, with the help of primitive graphics, narratives and stories taken mainly from popular literature, folklore, religious texts.

8 The Khrushchev ‘Thaw’ is the term introduced by Russian/Soviet writer Illya Ehrenburg (1891–1967), who published in 1954 (after the death of Stalin) the short novel Ottepel (The Thaw). Subsequently, the term became an unofficial name for the period in the history of the USSR from 1953 to 1964, and related to Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971), who held the post of First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1953–1964). During this time a partial liberalisation of political and public life and a slight weakening of the totalitarian regime occurred.

9 Interview with Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov, dated on 16 July 2015 (Peredelkino). Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov (1929–2017), Soviet/Russian philologist and anthropologist, specialist in Slavic, Baltic, and Indo-European linguistics, mythology and folklore. Participant of the Folklore Commission meetings.

10 Elena Novik (1941–2014), Soviet/Russian philologist and folklorist. She belonged to the Moscow-Leningrad (since 1991 Saint-Petersburg) circle of structuralist-folklorists. Specialist in archaic traditions of the people of Siberia, author of the concept of shamanic ceremony as folkloric fact. Follower of Eleazar Meletinsky (1918–2005), one of the major figures of Soviet/Russian academia in the field of folklore, literature, philology and the history and theory of narrative. Elena Novik was a key personality in the research group ‘Folklore on the Screen’ organised within the Folklore Commission, and one of those scholars who in the 1970s–the 1980s developed theoretical approaches to shamanism free of ideological clichés.

11 Lennart-Georg Meri (1929–2006), Estonian public official (from 1992 to 2001 President of Estonia), filmmaker, ethnographer and writer. He published several books based on expeditions to Siberia, the Soviet Far East and the Arctic. Meri’s books have been translated into a dozen languages. His ethnographic films in the 1970s and 1980s won international renown. He was not permitted to travel out of the USSR until the late 1970s. When the Soviet authorities finally gave him permission to go abroad, Meri began to establish cultural and academic links with western countries (first, with Finland) and to do all he could to remind the free world of the existence of Estonia. In particular, he founded the non-governmental Estonian Institute (Eesti Instituut) in 1988 to promote cultural contacts with the West. Meri was a leader of the movement to restore Estonian independence from the Soviet Union. A member of the Folklore Commission Bureau and active participant in the Folklore Commission’s meetings in Moscow and other places.

12 During the Soviet period and in the 1990s the term ‘ethnography’ was used in the same sense as ‘ethnology’ within Western academia. So, ‘ethnography’ in fact did not mean purely descriptive practice, and included theories and theoretical work as well, but the name itself was supposed to protect the discipline from political pressure, especially in Stalin’s time. The tradition of using the term ‘ethnography’ continued in the 1990s and disappeared only in the 2000s.

13 Mikhail Maizuls identifies such a technique of maleficence as envoutêment, which was much older than all medieval practices and was repeatedly mentioned in the witchcraft cases in the medieval West (Maizuls 2019).

14 The book series entitled Visual Anthropology, published in 2007–2009 under the guidance of the Centre for Social Policy and Gender Studies (Saratov), included collective monographs with the following subtitles: New Social Reality Outlooks (Iarskaia-Smirnova, Romanov and Krutkin 2007), Regimes of Visibility Under Socialism (Iarskaya-Smirnova and Romanov 2009), Tuning the Lens (Iarskaya-Smirnova and Romanov 2009), and Urban Memory Cards/Mental Maps (Iarskaya-Smirnova and Romanov 2009).

15 By the term hypersemiotisation the Arkhipova and Kirzyuk (2020) identify the practice of attributing a sign to a semantic field that has no real place for that sign. The authors suggest that the term was first used with this meaning by the culture semiotician Vladimir Toporov (1928–2005).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Humanitarian Research Foundation of the Faculty of Humanities, HSE University in 2020, Project ‘Material, Body, Image: Visual Environments of Contemporary Culture’.

Notes on contributors

Victoria Vasileva

Victoria Vasileva, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the School of Philosophy and Cultural Studies of the Faculty of Humanities of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow. [email protected], [email protected].