Abstract
This article discusses illustrations in Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (PSZ) [Complete collection of the laws of the Russian Empire]. Executed in St. Petersburg 1830–1916, PSZ is a multi-volume monument of the imperial Russian legal system and contains over 2,000 lithographs of uniforms, flags, and other paraphernalia. Inherently technical, the images and particularly those of uniforms convey the normative regulations issued by the Russian administrative apparatus. They touch upon the education and social status of artists, disclose the regimental and utilitarian attitude toward government-sponsored art, and convey a false sense of security and stability in a nation heading for revolution.
“Notoriously, laws depict the so-called inner life of a nation.”
—Mikhail Mikhailovich Speranskii,
Foreword to PSZ Footnote 1
Countless official descriptions of imperial coronations and military objects were published in Russia and enhanced by black and white and color illustrations. Of these, the multi-volume, profusely illustrated publication Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (PSZ) [Complete collection of the laws of the Russian Empire] was produced from 1830 to 1916. A chronological compilation of laws organized in three series, it includes sumptuary laws prescribing uniforms, insignia, and other everyday items for the Russian populace (see ). Most of the images in PSZ, particularly those depicting uniforms, illustrate the official attributes of the nation, and thus give an account from the point of view of the administration and present the empire as its rulers wished it to be perceived both by contemporaries and for posterity (see ).
FIGURE 1 Collage of illustrations from the deluxe PSZ. Top left: medal, §5,716, Jan. 16, 1889 (PSZ Folder 1889 I, 1). Bottom left: blueprint, §7,142, Oct. 22, 1890 (PSZ Folder 1890 I, 14). Center: lettering, §3,655a, Apr. 25, 1886 (PSZ Folder 1886 II, 3). Top right: badge, §50,518, 7 Feb 1872 (PSZ Folder 1872 I, 10). Bottom right: coat of arms §33,359, Apr. 14, 1910 (Folder 1910 II, n/a). Chromolithographs, Courtesy of Historical & Special Collections, Harvard Law School Library. Rpt. in PSZ.
FIGURE 2 Uniforms for Students, Institute of Civil Engineering, Ministry of Interior, §1,348, 28 Jan 1883 (PSZ Folder 1883 I, 3). Chromolithograph, Courtesy of Historical & Special Collections, Harvard Law School Library. Rpt. in PSZ.
Over the course of the twentieth century the text of PSZ was a popular primary source for scholars of Russian history. Prominent historians such as Peter A. Zaionchkovsky, William E. Butler and Mark Raeff used PSZ to validate their hypotheses about imperial Russia.Footnote 2 For example, Butler wrote that PSZ was “without doubt the richest single source of materials for the legal, political, economic, administrative, and cultural development of Russia from 1649 to 1913.”Footnote 3 Others have called the central codification project that dealt with the laws of the Russian Empire a monument.Footnote 4 However, most historians overlooked more than two thousand assorted illustrations, particularly images depicting omnipresent uniforms, reproduced in PSZ.Footnote 5
Still widely accepted as the most comprehensive effort to organize by reign and make publicly available the majority of Russian laws, PSZ had among the many tasks involved in its creation a revision of the normative illustrations, those depicting ideal standards and models, from the end of the eighteenth century until the early twentieth century. In order to clarify the legal requirements, many regulations related to civil and military uniforms as well as flags, coats of arms, and other images reproduced in PSZ were described both verbally and visually (see ).
FIGURE 3 Top: Uniforms for Female Prison Guards, § 3210, Oct. 5, 1885 (PSZ Folder 1885 I, 19). Bottom: Travel Uniforms for Postmen, §3,122 plate 7, July 11, 1885 (PSZ Folder 1885 I, 13). Chromolithographs, Courtesy of Historical & Special Collections, Harvard Law School Library. Rpt. in PSZ.
The illustrations in PSZ also contain unexpected and precious clues about graphic art making and consumption in Russian society from 1830 to 1916. The content, execution, and intended purpose of the illustrations, especially the uniforms, complement our understanding of Russian lithography in the second half of the nineteenth century. While the iconography of these images is formulaic and academic, the composition, shading, and penmanship are rooted in the training offered by the Imperial Academy of Arts.
A limited number of PSZ volumes intended for the imperial libraries, bound in green, tooled morocco, are accompanied by deluxe illustration sets printed in color on high-quality woven paper stock. The upheaval triggered by the 1917 revolution caused a countrywide displacement and destruction of PSZ sets. Nevertheless, a handful of known deluxe versions survived in national and international repositories, including the Law Division of the Library of Congress and the Harvard Law School Library.
SURVEY OF RUSSIAN LAWS AND BIBLIOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION OF PSZ
The first printed compilation of Russian laws came off the printing presses in Moscow in 1649 during the reign of Aleksei Mikhailovich. Entitled Sobornoe ulozhenie po kotoromu sud i rosprava vo vsiakikh dielakh v Rossiiskom gosudarstvei proizvoditsia [Complete code according to which judgment and punishment in all matters in the Russian nation are carried out] (Sobornoe ulozhenie), this codex was a noteworthy, if not entirely successful, effort to organize the countless laws passed in Russia prior to the 1640s.
After the creation of the Sobornoe ulozhenie each Russian ruler tried to follow suit by reigning in the legislative articles and enactments produced by royal decree or initiated by the tsar's cabinet and his various ministries. For example, in 1714 Peter the Great pronounced that all general regulations had to be republished, and all new regulations regularly published henceforth for easy access. Despite his and other rulers' efforts, between 1649 and 1826 no more than twenty-seven years worth of laws were actually recorded and organized together.Footnote 6
Until the mid-nineteenth century, finding legal documents was nearly impossible: the originals were scattered and depositories all seemed to be missing some portion of legislation.Footnote 7 At the same time, the need for a unified body of laws was widely recognized, and any books published on the topic were quickly bought up.Footnote 8 The distinguished legal historian Aleksander Shebanov notes that laws were unknown to the greater part of the Russian courts and other executive institutes as well as the general public, particularly people residing outside of St. Petersburg and Moscow.Footnote 9 The disorder in the legal system bred lawlessness and resulted in a general dissatisfaction of the Russian populace with the extant legal system. Aware of the inadequacies in the state of the laws, the tsarist regime was nevertheless hesitant to initiate cardinal reforms, fearful of an uprising or revolution like that in France. The 1804 codification commission appointed by the liberal-minded Alexander I was doomed to failure because it relied on the Civil Code of Napoleon as a model for Russian law—a model categorically rejected in the aftermath of the Franco-Russian War eight years later.
Just as the War of 1812 served to stop Alexander's attempts to reorganize Russian legal texts, it prompted officers and other military personnel to stage a revolt in December of 1825— one of their demands being a new constitution with clearly written laws and rights for the tsar's subjects. Shaken by the Decembrist Uprising, Nicholas I hurriedly announced his intention to codify Russian laws. In 1826, he renamed and reorganized the codification commission created in 1804 under Alexander I into what became known as the Second Division of His Imperial Highness's Chancellery.Footnote 10
The Second Division was obligated, in the shortest possible period, to systematize the current laws of the empire.Footnote 11 Its first order of business was to reexamine all previous codification attempts and outline the reasons for their failure so as to avoid repeating those mistakes. These findings were later incorporated into the foreword of PSZ. Next, the Second Division sorted out superseded and current acts, and selected those which should be included in PSZ. Most individual appointments were omitted. Ultimately, the publication never lived up to its ambitious title. In just one example, William Butler estimates that for the period 1711–1762, only 17,500 of 30,000 proclamations were included in PSZ.Footnote 12
CODIFICATION OF LAW THROUGH THE PRINTING OF PSZ
Yet the codification efforts were successful to some degree, and the logistics associated with publishing PSZ depended—as in all large ventures—on securing sufficient funding. On September 22, 1827, two important and specific enactments, 1,394 and 1,395, came into force regarding the budget and the duties of the Second Division staff. The first enactment spells out the budget for the Codification Committee and the typographic division,Footnote 13 and states that the funding for drafting and printing PSZ come from the National Treasury. “For the publication of PSZ, having deemed it necessary to create a printing [shop] at the Second Division of My Chancellery” begins this law, “there is a need to establish a committee to dispense the funds for the production of the volumes.”Footnote 14
It took eight months to set up the typographic shop, and printing began on May 21, 1828.Footnote 15 Annual salaries for the members of the committee, administrators of the printing shop, and printers and their assistants totaled almost 50,000 rubles, with more than 29,000 rubles allocated for general operations.Footnote 16 The initial allowance for paper was 50,000 rubles and an additional 55,750 rubles was allocated for the one-time acquisition of equipment for: printing type; typesetting furniture; printing presses; a bindery; and other tools. The last clause in regulation 1,394 concedes the possibility of funding not being sufficient, in which case the committee might request more money, but this sum would need to be reimbursed from the sales of publications.Footnote 17
Enactment 1,395 addresses the responsibilities of the members of the committee in charge of overseeing the printing shop and production of the PSZ volumes.Footnote 18 For example, the head of the committee is responsible for the printing aesthetics. However, nothing is mentioned regarding illustrations in the description of his duties let alone what their visual qualities should be. Even in subsection 114, dedicated to the duties of the binder, there is no mention that he is responsible for integrating text pages with illustrations, as was typical binders' work. Instead, enactment 1,395 reveals that the printing shop of the Second Division, in association with the Military Publishing Office [Voennaia tipografiia], may rent letter-punches from the Military Printing Office when needed.
According to enactment 1,395, the staff of the printing workshop included a director appointed and dismissed by order of the tsar, an accountant (who also acted as an overseer of daily operations), a factor, a corrector, a master printer, a typesetter, a printer [teredorshchik], minor assistants, and when necessary, freelance printers. Given that paper, limestone, and printing equipment were the most important and expensive materials, the accountant was personally responsible for the safekeeping of paper supplies. The factor monitored the use of letter-punches, and the director personally documented and supervised the use and amortization of presses.
In January of 1845, a new regulation concerning the Second Division's printing activities came into effect. Upon careful reading, the regulation reveals that printing was closely supervised, in part to preclude anything but censor-approved text from being published.Footnote 19 No printed sheet or volume could be removed from the premises without explicit permission from the director. The regulation further outlines the responsibilities and budgets allocated to the division, explaining the duties of all staff members and the commission of overseers, including assistants to the binder, factor, and type-founder. Of particular interest is the text that addresses the physical production of PSZ. For example, paragraph thirty-two explains that the commission must approve a mock-up of any volume in production before printing en masse begins. Paragraph thirty-three outlines the role of the director of the printing shop, who decided on the type of paper, font, and number of copies to be printed, which means that output could change annually per the director's whim or due to administrative turnover.
The size of the run of each volume is unknown. Upon completion of printing, the commission tallied the number of copies produced against the amount of paper allocated, assuming that only five percent would be wasted.Footnote 20 Extra copies were given to editors and other members of the commission for personal use; the rest were submitted to the ministries responsible for pricing and disseminating new volumes. Most but not all key government administrative and judicial institutes received free copies of PSZ at the expense of the Treasury.
EVOLUTION OF PSZ
All laws and regulations included in the forty-five volumes of the first series were prepared quickly, between 1826 and 1830, and covered the period from 1649 to December 12, 1825, the day of Nicholas I's coronation. This collection of rules, decrees, and governmental acts, including temporary acts, was necessary to understand existing law. It also included a book of tariffs, a book of ranks, a chronological and an alphabetical index, a book of coats of arms of cities of the Russian Empire, and later a volume with illustrations of city plans, uniforms, and insignia. Not surprisingly though, as it was compiled in a backbreaking four years, the first series had numerous omissions as well as spelling errors of last names and geographical locations, wrong sums, and erroneous dates of laws.
The preface accompanying the first volume of the first series of PSZ forecast that due to the great number of maps, plans, and other illustrations that had to be sorted and ultimately included, engraving and lithographing would take a long time and the illustrations would be published in a stand-alone volume separately from the text of the laws. Ultimately, the imprint with illustrations, entitled Chertezhi i risunki prinadlezhashchie k 1-mu polnomu sobraniiu zakonov: litografirovannye po Vysochaishchemu povelieniiu v litografii Departamenta voennykh poselenii [Drafts and drawings belonging to the 1st Complete collection of laws: lithographed in accordance with His Majesty's order in lithography of the Department of Military Settlements], came out in 1843.Footnote 21
Without pause, printing of the text for the second series began at nearly the same time as the first. Picking up where the first series left off and continuing through March 1, 1881, the second series consists of fifty-five volumes, published between 1830 and 1884, primarily under the supervision of the Second Division. The second series contains explanations of the existing laws and general international treatises, later often reproduced in the appropriate language for each—Russian, Polish, German, etc. Unlike the first series, which was produced so quickly, each volume in the subsequent series, typically one per calendar year, had its own alphabetical and chronological indexes as well as illustrations bound at the end of the mainstream volumes.
No one predicted that PSZ would be split into more than two series, but in 1880 the need arose for a third series and the numeration for legal entries to be reset. The number of steadily increasing regulations and statutes, as there were tens of thousands of laws, created difficulties in both printing and using the volumes. In 1881, the Senate began to discuss whether PSZ should continue to be published at all, as there was another publication, Sobranie zakonodanii i rasporaizhenii pravitel'stva [Collection of laws and decrees] (SZ), which also dealt with Russian laws and was printed more frequently.
Detractors wishing to terminate PSZ asserted that it was expensive and superfluous. For example, in 1880 the production cost of making volume number 54 (three books and forty-three lithograph images) totaled fourteen rubles.Footnote 22 Ceasing production would have saved the imperial treasury at least 10,000 rubles annually.Footnote 23 The defenders of PSZ argued that it was compiled more carefully over the course of a year, and its worth was not in the speed of publication but the accuracy of its content as an official complete copy of the laws.
The Senate decided to continue financing both publications. In 1882 the Second Division was dissolved and the production of PSZ assigned to the National Council [Gosudarstvenii sovet]. From that moment forward printing of the PSZ volumes was done by the National Printing House [Gosudarstvennia tipografiia], so it could have more time to work on the volume and carefully check the validity and timeliness of the laws. SZ, termed a juridical reporter, was kept as a semiweekly periodical that aimed to inform the public quickly of newly passed laws. PSZ was considered the more comprehensive and carefully vetted of the two, and ultimately its role changed from being an annual legal publication to a chronological judicial encyclopedia, focused on preserving the historical integrity of the information. The thirty-three volumes of the third series cover the period 1881 to 1913 and include only the most important unpublished regulations, in addition to the laws already disseminated in SZ.
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION OF PSZ: FINDING THE UNIFORMS
Structurally, PSZ contains four types of information: the text of the laws in main volumes (statutes, establishments, orders, missives, instructions, treatises), two indices (alphabetical and chronological), charts documenting staffing and tariffs, and illustrations (drawings and diagrams). Each enactment begins with its number and date of passage; the year of its implementation and the corresponding reign are listed at the top of the page. Following the chronological and substantive information, there is a note about the origins of the law and whether it comes from the tsar, the Senate, or a ministry.
There are three places where descriptions of uniforms may be found in PSZ (see ). First, the uniform regulations are included in the main section of each volume; these entries vary in length and may be as brief as ten lines of text, or as extensive and detailed as to fill pages. Toward the second half of the nineteenth century, a brief entry in the main volume would typically direct the reader to a supplementary volume or appendix called Shtaty i tabeli [Ranks and tables] for a detailed description of uniforms. The appendix contained information about the colors of individual articles of clothing, the type of textiles and buttons (metal or wood), amount and location of cording and embroidery, lengths and cuts of pants, sleeves, etc. If the publishers chose to include actual illustrations of uniforms, either the main entry or the appendix would reference the images at the end of that year's publication. Thus, the third description of the uniform, the image itself, would be found in a section entitled Chertezhi i risunki [Diagrams and drawings], together with an assortment of other technical illustrations.Footnote 24
FIGURE 4 Collage: Winter Uniforms for Court Deliverymen, §1377, Feb. 9, 1883. Top left: title page, PSZ 3.3 (1886). Bottom left: detailed description in Ranks and Tables, p. 10. Top center: main description, p. 42. Bottom center: black and white lithograph, general set. Center right: chromolithograph, deluxe set, §1377 III, Feb 9, 1883 (PSZ Folder 1883 I, 8). Courtesy of Historical & Special Collections, Harvard Law School Library. Rpt. in PSZ.
UNIFORMS AND THE SOCIAL NORM
The tradition of describing and depicting uniforms in Russia dates back at least to the coronation albums produced in the eighteenth century. The album published in 1724 for the coronation of Empress Catherine I, the wife of Peter the Great, includes detailed descriptions of the livery of the Cavalier-Guards, pages, servants, and courtiers.Footnote 25 Eventually the illustrations in these albums “replaced words in showing the resplendence of the regalia, the dress, and the scene, making the album itself a work of art.”Footnote 26
Imperial Russia was world-renowned for the staggering number of uniforms and regulations pertaining to the dress code of both military personnel and civil servants.Footnote 27 Following seventy-five years of rule by women in Russia, one historian writes, “militarization became a principle of government for Paul [I], a necessity for Alexander [I], and a principle once again for Nicholas [I].”Footnote 28 During this time, civil ministries began to operate like military ministries, and civilians donned uniforms like those of their military counterparts. The famous German publisher of travel books Karl Baedeker, who visited St. Petersburg in 1914, remembered that “nearly one-tenth of the male population [in Russia] wear some kind of uniform, including not only the numerous military officers, but civil officials, and even students, schoolboys, and others.”Footnote 29 Notably, uniforms came into widespread use in Russia decades before they were adopted in Western European countries. Starting with Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, soldiers were expected to wear similar uniforms, and under the leadership of Peter the Great the army was for the first time dressed in strictly prescribed and standardized attire.Footnote 30 The first civil uniforms worn by provincial clerks were introduced in Russia in 1781, and by 1794 pupils and instructors of the Imperial Ballet School and the Imperial Academy of Arts were wearing uniforms as well.Footnote 31
Subsequently each Russian ruler introduced innovations into the dress code either on a large or a small scale.Footnote 32 Since each emperor addressed the appearance of his subjects, the changing fashion could be clearly identified with a particular period of rule. Frequent changes in the dress code captured the fashion both in dress and hairstyles. Depending on the period, the uniforms reflected the close political ties and the affinities that rulers felt towards Russia's foreign neighbors. For example, during the reign of Paul I (1796–1801) there was a distinct similarity between Russian and German military uniforms.Footnote 33 Prior to the Franco-Russian war the Russian military was dressed similarly to the French; following the defeat of Napoleon's army in 1812, the rise of patriotism and nationalism caused distancing from French fashions in all spheres including uniform designs. From the reign of Nicholas I (1825–1855) to Alexander III (1881–1894), Russia entered a period of isolationism and its uniforms were modeled on traditional domestic hunting dress and peasant outfits.
Nicholas I was particularly interested in regulating national attire both in the military and civil realms. Fearful of foreign liberal ideas that had inspired the Decembrist Uprising in 1825, and hopeful of instilling obedience and order upon his subjects, he issued numerous decrees regarding standardized dress not only for the military and the civil sector, but also for the ladies at court. The sweeping dress code reform introduced by Nicholas I in 1834 triggered the production of many drawings depicting all types of uniforms from full-dress uniforms to daily service coats.Footnote 34
His reforms were such that members of the same 10th class, from professions as varied as assistants to head solicitors, head accountants, factory treasurers, art instructors, librarians, and teachers at the Imperial Academy of Arts, were all expected to wear similar uniforms distinguished only by the piping on their collar. Higher ranking officials in the Imperial Academy of Arts, just as in the directorate of the Imperial Botanical Garden and the secretaries and accountants of the court administration, were differentiated by an additional piping on their sleeve cuffs, pocket covers, and coat tails. This information was carefully recorded in PSZ regulation 4,414 of March 11, 1832, known as an order regarding uniforms for civil ranked officials of the Department of Appanage in the Ministry of Court.Footnote 35
In the eyes of both the elites and the masses, visual attributes of Russian culture were very important for maintaining imperial identity. Given this emphasis placed on appearances, sumptuary laws concerning uniforms were submitted for the tsar's approval together with watercolor drawings. The names of the artists working on designing and documenting the uniforms are for the most part unknown, but some sketches were actually executed or corrected by the tsar himself.Footnote 36 At times, the tsar would mark changes on the drawings, adding details or leaving comments. In accordance with existing regulations, all such notes and sketches made by His Imperial Highness were varnished to avoid further changes and to be preserved for posterity. The precious watercolor drawings related to dress code regulations, submitted together with cloth samples and buttons for the proscribed uniforms, were archived. Yet the need for printed images remained, as unique watercolor images could not be widely disseminated.
The solution came with the development of the early-nineteenth-century invention of lithography. The fastest and cheapest way to document and reproduce official images in bulk at the time, it was a more efficient vehicle for disseminating art to the public than watercolors, sketches, or engravings.Footnote 37 The lithography printing process reproduces images and script from a perfectly flat, specially prepared piece of limestone. The image to be printed is drawn directly on the stone with a grease-based crayon, in reverse as a mirror-reflection, then the limestone is submerged in a water and gum arabic bath. When printing ink is applied to the stone, which is gently wetted in preparation, it adheres only to the greasy lines meant for printing and the image transfers with virtually no loss of detail. For each additional print the stone only needs to be rewetted and re-inked and the process of recreating the image on the stone can go on for hundreds of prints.
The printers could add complexity to the lithographic images by tinting or hand painting them. Tinting an image involves inking a second stone in sepia or another transparent hue, and printing it first so that the image blends with the color. Alternatively, images are printed in colors from a series of stones in a process called chromolithography or color lithography, where nearly every color in the print corresponds to a different stone used to print that color. Black ink is applied only to the keystone that when printed last “locks” all the colors and conceals irregularities.
LITHOGRAPHY IN IMPERIAL RUSSIA
Historically Russia was an importer of printing practices invented or perfected in Europe and therefore most Russian publication genres could be traced to a European prototype. As a model for its coronation albums, Russia took the lavishly illustrated French accounts for the coronation of Louis XV, particularly Le sacre de Louis XV, roi de France et de Navarre dans l'Église de Reimes [The coronation of Louis XV, King of France and Navarre, in the church of Rheims], a 1723 publication that contained multiple engravings of the procession and the ceremony.Footnote 38 Nineteenth-century Russian monarchs perceived such lavishly illustrated publications as monuments to their reign, which required careful planning and production. Naturally, the preparation of engravings and later lithographs was assigned to accomplished artists, for example academics teaching at the Saint Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts.
Lithography was introduced in Russia soon after the defeat of Napoleon. Russian military personnel and the accompanying civilians witnessed the use of lithography during the military campaigns of 1813 and 1814. They observed the ease with which allies reproduced orders, maps, and circulars by writing on a stone and printing multiple identical imprints from it.Footnote 39 Thus, it was the Russian military—not the Imperial Academy of Arts—that first sought to integrate lithography into their operations. In fact, the academy never offered courses or practicums in this field, despite the fact that many of the academy-trained and -employed artists petitioned for its inclusion and independently worked with this medium.Footnote 40
Despite a lack of official training and academic support, the popularity and quantity of lithographs grew quickly upon arrival in Russia. The first lithographic shops in St. Petersburg opened in 1816. They were affiliated with or managed by various governmental administrative institutions burdened with excessive amounts of transcribing, including the Voenno-topograficheskoe depo Glavnogo Shtaba (Voenno-topograficheskoe depo) [Topographical Corps of the Central Headquarters] and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The first dated Russian lithograph was executed in lithographic (grease) pencil and printed in the Voenno-topograficheskoe depo in 1816.Footnote 41 It depicted a junker and leib-guard of the Caucasus squadron and was created by Aleksandr Orlovskii (1777–1832). The first use of lithography in book illustration dates to 1817 and is an image lithographed by the famous painter A. G. Venetsianov (1780–1847) appearing in A. Stog's treatise Ob obshchestvennom prizrienii v Rossii [On public scorn in Russia].Footnote 42 One of the first periodicals to begin using the new printing technique also depicted uniforms: Sobranie mundirov Rossiiskoi armii [Collection of uniforms of the Russian army].Footnote 43
By the early 1820s, there were more than ten lithographic shops in the empire, and Russian artists who worked in traditional mediums such as oil and watercolor began experimenting with lithographs between the 1820s and 1830s. At that time, almost all the leading Russian artists were interested in learning the method of drawing on stone. The most popular artistic subjects for lithography included architectural ensembles, cityscapes, portraits,Footnote 44 and genre paintings such as street scenes and fashion drawings.Footnote 45 While choosing their subject matter, artists had to work within the rigid censorship boundaries and were ever mindful that light satire was permitted as long as it did not poke fun at the tsar and his entourage.Footnote 46
The information about staffing and salaries of government lithographic ateliers was proclaimed in specific PSZ regulations.Footnote 47 Regulation 648 of November 4, 1826 actually illustrates a staffing scheme of a drafting unit of the Artillery Department, a typical government-sponsored drafting workshop equipped with three printing presses, two for printing text and one for printing illustrations.Footnote 48 According to this regulation, such a shop could employ about fifty-five people, among them seventeen printing and seven working in the bindery (see ).
TABLE 1 This table reproduces regulation 648 regarding staff and annual salaries of a drafting division in the Artillery Department. PSZ 1.2 (1830): 1167–68
According to this same regulation 648, it was the tsar himself who appointed the senior management of the workshop. The General-Field Marshal approved all other appointments. Usually lower-ranking individuals staffing the printing division were assigned based on their talent and not their rank. In addition, given that all of the individuals working in these printing shops were military personnel, they had to continue wearing military-cut uniforms appropriate to their rank. The uniforms worn by the staffers of lithographic, engraving, and typographical shops were green with black velour collars and cuffs.Footnote 49
Passed almost fifty years later on November 23, 1861, regulation 37,658 documents how lithographic shops had grown, listing the staff and salaries of the artistic department of the Ministerial Administration of Railways and Public Buildings [Glavoe upravlenie putei soobzheniia i publichnykh zdanii] (see ).Footnote 50 It also lists the type of works the artistic department was expected to undertake, including printing orders, business forms, tickets, and receipts for the Nikolaevskaia railroad, as well as other drawings, plans, maps, etc. The artistic department could employ about eighty people, its annual budget for salaries averaging 14,868 rubles. These regulations shed some light about how images similar to those in the PSZ were produced in a government-run printing facility.
TABLE 2 This table reproduces information regarding staff and salaries for the Art Department, Ministerial Administration of Railways. PSZ 36.2 (1861): 312
IMAGES IN PSZ
Unlike coronation albums created exclusively for the rich and the diplomatic elite, PSZ was created for domestic audiences and used as an instrument of mass education and publicity. PSZ illustrations demonstrate technological advancements in the Russian graphic arts and the graphic arts in general, progressing from hand coloring of drawings and etchings to the new nineteenth-century techniques of lithography, chromolithography, blind printing, and photolithography. Yet the iconography of the illustrations was unaffected over time, as evidenced by the drawings accompanying regulation 55,456 in the second series and regulation 461 of the third series (see ). The artists continued to reuse the same lithographic images and compositions regardless of the structural changes in the composition and administration of the editorial staff.
FIGURE 5 Left: Uniforms for Engineers, Ministry of Transportation, §55,456 plate 2, Jan. 7, 1876 (PSZ Folder 1876 I, 2). Right: Uniforms for Civil Engineers, Ministry of Interior, §461 plate 2, Oct. 19, 1881 (PSZ Folder 1881 I, 5). Center: Uniforms for Servicemen, Telegraph Division, §55,813 plate 2, Apr. 23, 1876 (PSZ Folder 1876 I, 10). Chromolithographs, deluxe set. Courtesy of Historical & Special Collections, Harvard Law School Library. Rpt. in PSZ.
The deluxe imperial and mainstream sets of PSZ contain the same number of illustrations. The primary difference between the images in the deluxe and mainstream versions is that the deluxe have chromolithographs printed on fine heavy paper, as do coronation albums, while the mainstream images are all black and white lithographs reproduced on thin wood-pulp paper, folded and bound in the back of the last volume for a particular year.Footnote 51 Instead of being included in the back of the main text volumes, in the deluxe imperial presentation copies, illustrations were housed in individual leather bound portfolios, with 15 to 140 lithographs in each.Footnote 52
Both sets demonstrate a similar level of detail, and on average have the same outlines of images: epaulets, grass, and tree leaves. Still, for the chromolithographs in the deluxe plates, multiple stones had to be inked and printed, significantly increasing production time and costs. As seen in , the spaces in the deluxe set that are printed in green and blue and the outlines of pale clouds and the forest in the background are all missing from the black and white version. These minor differences also reinforce the idea that the mainstream plates were produced in one printing using only the keystone to avoid excessive printing costs.
FIGURE 6 Uniforms for Students, Land Academy, §837, May 3, 1882. Left: lithograph, general set. Right: chromolithograph, deluxe set (PSZ Folder 1882, I, 5). Courtesy of Historical & Special Collections, Harvard Law School Library. Rpt. in PSZ.
The high production costs of images, even when using the faster and cheaper technology of lithography also begins to explain why not all laws have pictorial counterparts in PSZ, and why the majority of other official law publications did not contain images; instead they referenced “upcoming” PSZ publications for illustrations of particular regulations.Footnote 53 Limestone was the most expensive component in lithographic printing, and even if the printer wanted to save money and time by keeping each artist's drawing and design for subsequent reprinting, it was prohibitively expensive to store a large arsenal of ready-to-print stones.Footnote 54 Thus, the regulations related to military, naval, and court uniforms and corresponding illustrations were mostly omitted from PSZ. A fair number of the laws pertaining to civil uniforms do not have illustrations in PSZ either.
The content of the PSZ illustrations includes prescriptive images (medals, coins, gun powder bags, axe handles, etc.) that are uncommon in a legal publication and perhaps unique to Russia with no Western equivalent.Footnote 55 Here the images perform ideological work by portraying the tsar's vision of Russian reality in such a way that the regimented bureaucracy and all of Russian officialdom are transformed, appearing at once aesthetic and moralistic.Footnote 56 They portray figures with blank and serene faces modeling ready-made uniforms. The images demonstrate the anonymous and generic mold of proper dress that was supposed to be transferable to individual civil servants throughout the empire.
Yet the sheer quantity of images and their seeming variety belie the fact that some of the designs were derivative from or identical to others. As seen in , illustrations corresponding to legislation passed in 1876 and 1881, such as those regarding the uniforms for high-ranking engineers of the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Transportation, it becomes apparent that at times the illustrators used stock figures differentiated from each other only by the color of lapels, collars, cuffs, and backdrops. Given that these images were not expected to be seen side-by-side, it may have appeared to the viewer that there were more compositions in PSZ than it in fact contained.Footnote 57
The use of landscape was also a powerful tool in creating diversity with similar stock images. It was already typically used by artists, including the first masters of Russian lithography—Karl Petrovich Beggrov (1799–1875),Footnote 58 Aleksandr Orlovskii, and S. F. Galaktionov (1779–1854)—who produced numerous graphic images of street scenes, working people, soldiers in full uniforms, and personages wearing traditional costumes. They incorporated landscapes as backdrops, prototypes for later official government publications with similar staffazh (from the German staffieren [decorate, furnish with ornamental details]) or griffonazh of human and animal figures appearing in landscape and genre images.Footnote 59 Indeed, in addition to being a stand-alone genre, landscapes were widely used as a background for situating figures on a page when using lithography.
In the early nineteenth century, academy students were taught to use landscape as a decoration, a foil for a human figure. Hazy and more evocative than documentary, landscapes appeared everywhere from official portraits of the imperial family to lubki [popular prints]. In the case of battle scenes, landscapes contextualized and heightened the impression of authenticity. Artists working on the PSZ illustrations fully embraced this technique by frequently placing two figures on the same sheet with a faint image in the background, just a hint of buildings or nature symbolizing typical surroundings.
PSZ's ARTISTIC PRODUCTION: PRINTSHOPS AND ARTISTS
Almost every image in PSZ contains a written or typeset caption, a regulation number, a date, and a picture. Generating these various forms of information required different skills—typesetting, calligraphy, drawing, shading, and coloring mdash; and it is highly likely that more than one person worked on each plate in an atelier setup, where each worker who had perfected a particular skill was responsible for that component of the assignment. It is documented that artists sometimes cooperated in the production of lithographs. One would create a drawing and another would interpret pencil or ink lines from paper into a grease sketch on a stone.Footnote 60
Frequently, the quality of lettering and drawing in the PSZ illustrations differ; in some plates irregular lettering is coupled with a proportional and dynamic image, in others attractive calligraphy appears side by side with disproportionate and static figures. The greatest visual shortcoming in PSZ is the technical execution of the drawings. Some figures do not conform to standard proportions and are not anatomically correct, others cast short shadows at random angles. Many images lack perspective and objects sometimes appear suspended in the air when there is clearly a ground below them.
This varying quality is probably because unlike many other governmental institutions actively involved in publishing, the Second Division did not have its own lithographic facility and did not employ any artists.Footnote 61 Regulation 42,244, passed June 24, 1865, established the process for the production of lithographs for PSZ. Footnote 62 Treated like all other state commissions [kazennye podriady], in a manner similar to modern-day bids for government contracts, the firm that agreed to do the work for the smallest sum would secure the job.Footnote 63
Initially, illustrations found in PSZ were produced by a combination of handwork and lithography under the supervision of academician I. A. Ivanov. The overwhelming majority of the images corresponding to the second series have no attribution, making it nearly impossible to identify the individual artists and even the printing facilities where the illustrations were produced. In general, sporadic signatures found under some of the earliest imprints make it hard to reconstruct the chain of government and private lithographic facilities employed by the Second Division. For example, it is not known who printed the illustrations for the second series from 1830 to 1848. In 1848 and 1849 the Department of Military Settlements took back the commission, having previously produced the 1843 illustrations for the first PSZ series.Footnote 64 No later than 1851, the assignment passed to the lithographic shop of Nikolai Antonovich Glybov, who printed images for PSZ until 1853.Footnote 65 From 1854 to 1857, the commission passed to the shop of the brothers Brif.
The last detected signature attributes the work to the shop of Alexander Ivanovich Beggrov (1841–1914), nephew of the accomplished lithographer Karl Beggrov and son of the owner of the first private lithographic shop in Russia, Ivan Petrovich Beggrov (1793–1877).Footnote 66 Following a career as an officer, Alexander either opened his own lithographic shop or took over his father's business.Footnote 67 Judging by the quality of the images produced at his shop, he must have employed talented artists, as the images in the volumes he produced are more complex and more skillfully executed than elsewhere.Footnote 68
Most of the rare labeled prints bear the name of the lithographic shop responsible for printing, such as the Ministerial Administration of Railways or the Department of Military Settlements, rather than the names of individual artists. The few personal names that do appear underneath the prints include P.-E. Froberger, J. Haase, A. Safonov, Fr. Wodecki, and K. Hefs. Little is known about these artists, and only a few are briefly mentioned in the literature. Petr-Eduard Froberger is noted as receiving the status of non-classroom artist from the Academy of Arts in 1855.Footnote 69 The fact that he created and signed his works for PSZ a decade earlier, in 1845, means that he began his artistic career while still in military service and later pursued more formal training from the Academy.
LEGACY
Perhaps the most important artistic legacy of PSZ is that the government, recognizing the advantages offered by lithography and its potential use in a large scale publication went on to create other grand illustrated works. Publications commissioned by the state include Stoletie Voennogo Ministerstva [One hundred years of the Ministry of War], F. Solntsev's Drevnosti rossiiskogo gosudarstva [Antiquities of Russia],Footnote 70 and Istoricheskoe opisanie odezhdy i vooruzheniia Rossiiskikh voisk [Historical description of uniforms and weapons of Russian troops].Footnote 71 This last title is particularly notable and relevant to the story of PSZ.
Produced between 1841 and 1862, Istoricheskoe opisanie was edited by Alexander Vasil'evich Viskovatov (1804–1858).Footnote 72 An important description of Russian military uniforms, it includes over 4,000 lithographs printed by the Voenno-topograficheskoe depo with Karl Karlovich Piratskii (1813–1871) as its master artist.Footnote 73 Viskovatov's publication demonstrates and reiterates the complications affiliated with compiling historical documents, replicating uniforms, and hiring artists for an official, extensively illustrated production. The similarities between PSZ and Istoricheskoe opisanie are marked and they help explain and complement each other. G. E. Vvedenskii observed that the volumes edited by Viskovatov are among the first illustrated published descriptions of the evolution of Russian military uniforms.Footnote 74 PSZ appears to be the only equivalent to do the same for Russian civil uniforms.
Most, if not all, of the plates in Viskovatov's publication are signed by the artists responsible for the original design and for drawing on stone. Often there are as many as four names to a plate, each artist applying different skills in portraiture and landscape. The signatures also reveal that initially the printing was done in Russian lithographic shops including that of the Ministerial Administration of Railways. In the 1840s, the production of Istoricheskoe opisanie was outsourced to the highly regarded French workshop Lemercier, which would also provide images for the 1856 coronation album of Alexander II. Stylistically, Viskovatov's illustrations are better executed and there is a more naturalistic and integrated use of landscape. The quality and level of detail incorporated in PSZ is inferior to Istoricheskoe opisanie.
Still, there are strong similarities between the normative drawings of civil uniforms in PSZ and the historical drawings of military uniforms in Istoricheskoe opisanie. These similarities are evidenced by the fact that some of the plates for the two publications were created by the same lithographers, as shown by signatures on a handful of PSZ illustrations. One example is Froberger, who signed at least three chalk-lithographed plates in the 1845 volume of PSZ, and who according to Obolianinov's Russian Engravers and Lithographers, was best known for his Viskovatov works.Footnote 75 A thorough comparison of the early attributed illustrations in Istoricheskoe opisanie with anonymous images in PSZ might yield some attributions of unsigned lithographs in the second series.
Various critics observe that the artistic period between the 1840s and 1860s was dominated by naturalism or realism in all artistic genres, including lithography.Footnote 76 While the nineteenth century has been labeled the least interesting in terms of book production in Russia, if it were lacking in visual experimentation, it was certainly a century marked by a proliferation of genre works reflecting current social-political events.Footnote 77 The official use of lithography in the second half of the nineteenth century was conservative yet ongoing, and lithography appeared in all kinds of publications including book illustrations, invitations, menus, and currency design. The benefits of lithography were not limited to their faithful reproduction of an original drawing or the relative simplicity and rapidity of creation.Footnote 78 In addition to these functional qualities, lithographs made art more accessible to the general public.
Despite the considerable attempts by scholars to catalog and describe Russian lithography, studies largely ignore government-sponsored technical commissions such as graphs and maps put out by the Ministerial Administration of Railways, War Ministry, or Ministry of Military Settlements. As a rule, only high-end, early nineteenth-century lithographs are studied. The most examined lithographs of the second half of the nineteenth century include caricatures, such as the ones in Western periodical publications or lubki. The official publications are auspiciously overlooked despite the fact that they—coronation albums, historical surveys, and legal publications—clearly show the pragmatism and the interest toward this medium displayed by the administration.
CONCLUSION
Now as before, PSZ stands as a monument to the sheer bulk of Russian imperial laws. Unlike the previous legislative publications, produced in small numbers and circulated mostly in handwritten form, PSZ was intentionally produced in mass quantities and distributed free of charge to the key legal institutions.Footnote 79 PSZ epitomizes the normative world and culture of imperial Russia, where law and narrative, either verbal or visual, are inseparable. Every prescription and detail serves to construct a form of reality since “[t]he very imposition of a normative force upon a state of affairs, real or imagined, is the act of creating narrative.”Footnote 80
The two American institutions that own deluxe portfolios of PSZ illustrations are the Library of Congress and the Harvard Law School Library.Footnote 81 These extremely rare imperial association sets came onto the market in the aftermath of the 1917 Revolution, at the moment when the new Soviet government nationalized private property and decided to divest itself of seemingly useless imperial patrimony by selling art works and examples of imperial official publications.Footnote 82 Looking back, Mark Raeff wrote, “many of the books, albums, portfolios and letters formerly in imperial and private possessions had great value because of their unusual formats, rich bindings, limited print runs and historic associations and provenance.”Footnote 83 Replete with clues for understanding the inner workings of imperial Russia, these two sets of PSZ are surviving artifacts of government-sponsored art production and consumption. They demonstrate the official use of lithography, and their illustrations are evidence of the changing fashions and the expectations of the tsar toward his subjects.
According to social art historian Beth Fowkes Tobin, who studied English colonial art produced in India, art in all manifestations is actively involved in organizing and structuring political, social, and cultural environments.Footnote 84 This scholarship brings new insight to the illustrations in PSZ, traditionally undervalued as aesthetically inferior and culturally insignificant remnants of an autocratic regime. Given that images function as representations of what we perceive to be the world around us, the images appearing in PSZ provide an unusual window into the period they cover. They address a particular area of artistic production and aesthetic value, significant not simply because of who made them, but also because of their iconographic limitations and content.
Intended for a broad audience, these images served as ambassadors from the court and from St. Petersburg to all corners of the empire and beyond. As Fowkes Tobin observed, all sanctioned views of the English Empire provided a calculated imperial display, and in this same manner PSZ illustrations provide an imperial display and assert Russian imperial power and aesthetics. What might seem ridiculous today—exhaustive images of town homes, dressed mannequins with unremarkable features, and countless epaulets and cording—must have been informative, comforting symbols of the status quo to the officials far from the capital. The pictures delivered not only the letter of the law; they also conveyed, however false, a sense of security and order. Indeed, the limited visual vocabulary of the PSZ illustrations makes one forget that the Russian Empire was so large and diverse.
While ethnic and religious diversity was great in Russia, it is absent from the images in PSZ.Footnote 85 Various peoples were distinguishable by their native dress, skin color, hairstyles, or facial features, yet in PSZ there are no visual reminders of these multinational dimensions of the empire.Footnote 86 All of the mannequins are ethnically Russian, and I would argue that they demonstrate not only the prevalent fashion, but also the ideal man of the period who set the ultimate fashion standards—the tsar himself. By placing images of uniforms corresponding to a particular ruling period side by side with portraits of the then active rulers, we see that the abstract figures have facial features nearly identical to the tsars: a mustache for the period of Nicholas I, mustache and sideburns for the reign of Alexander II, and a long beard as well as mustache for Alexander III. Either consciously or inadvertently, this iconography, possibly introducing a level of comfort and homogeneity, reaffirmed Russian authority over the annexed ethnically diverse regions.
Now a historical source for the study of imperial Russian law, PSZ still maintains its value as a testament to the training and work of long-forgotten Russian graphic artists in the service of the tsar. As we look at the images in PSZ depicting the uniforms of students, postmen, engineers, ministry workers, and others who personified the state, we catch a glimpse of the tsar's subjects as he wished them to be perceived. As these are not the images from the literary descriptions of unhappy, starved, and desperate immortalized by Gogol and Dostoevsky in their novels, then there were at least two versions of reality for the civil servants in the Russian Empire: the starved and desperate of Crime and Punishment and the lean and debonair of PSZ.
Notes
1. Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii [Complete collection of the laws of the Russian Empire], series 1 (St. Petersburg: Pechatano v Tipografii II Otdieleniia Sobstvennoi Ego Imperatorskago Velichestva Kantseliarii, 1830); Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, series 2, (St. Petersburg: Pechatano v Tipografii II Otdieleniia Sobstvennoi Ego Imperatorskago Velichestva Kantseliarii, 1830–1884); Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, series 3, (St. Petersburg: V Gosudarstvennoi Tipografii, 1885–1916). PSZ 1.1 (1830): 17. Mikhail Mikhailovich Speranskii (1772–1839), the statesman most closely connected with the imperial codification effort, viewed this publication as the foundation for the history and jurisprudence of the nation, without which new codes would be unacceptable. For information about Speranskii and his efforts to reform the legal education in Russia, see William Benton Whisenhunt, In Search of Legality: Mikhail M. Speranskii and the Codification of Russian Law (Boulder: East European Monographs, 2001), and Marc Raeff, Michael Speransky: Statesman of Imperial Russia, 1772–1839 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1957). In the foreword to PSZ, Speranskii described the difficulties of accessing laws prior to the codification efforts and explained the organization of PSZ.
2. See Peter A. Zaionchkovsky, Samoderzhavie i russkaia armiia na rubezhe XIX-XX stoletii [Autocracy and the Russian army on the boundary of the 19th-20th centuries] (Moskva: Mysl', 1973); William E. Butler, Russia and Soviet Law: An Annotated Catalogue of Reference Works, Legislation, Court Reports, Serials, and Monographs on Russian and Soviet Law (Including International Law) (Zug: Inter Documentation Company, 1976); or Mark Raeff, Understanding Imperial Russia: State and Society in the Old Regime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
3. Butler, Russia and Soviet Law, xii.
4. A. E. Nolde, Ocherki po istorii kodifikatsii mestnykh grazhdanskikh zakonov pri grafe Speranskom [Notes of the history of codification of local civil laws under Count Speranskii] (St. Petersburg: Senatskaia tip., 1906-14), i-1.
5. L. E. Shepelev, “Normativnye izobrazitel'nye materialy v Polnom sobranii zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii” [Normative visual material in PSZ], in Problemy sotsial'no-ekonomicheskoi i politicheskoi istorii Rossii XIX-XX vekov, ed. V. S. Diakin and Iu. B. Solovev (St. Petersburg: izd. Aleteiia, 1999), 143-50.
6. Butler, Russia and Soviet Law, xii.
7. Alexandr F. Shebanov, “‘Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii’: iz istorii sistematizatsii zakonodatel'stva v Rossii” [PSZ: from the history of law systemization in Russia], Trudy: problemy istorii gosudarstva i prava 14 (1970): 280.
8. Shebanov, “Polnoe sobranie,” 280.
9. Shebanov, “Polnoe sobranie,” 280.
10. According to V. Butromeev, Entsiklopediia Rossiiskoi monarchii: chiny, tseremonii, gerby, dvortsy [Encyclopedia of the Russian monarchy: ranks, ceremonies, coats of arms, palaces] (Ekaterinburg: U. Faktoriia, 2002), 30, His Imperial Highness's Private Chancellery [Sobstvennaia Ego Imperatorskogo Velichestva Kantseliariia] changed with the control of each new ruler. During the reign of Nicholas I, the chancellery was separated into six divisions: the First Division was responsible for signing new laws into power; the Second Division was responsible for arranging and publishing historical laws; the Third Division performed political investigations and was equivalent to a secret service; the Fourth Division, formed in 1828, was placed under the personal care of the Empress; the Fifth Division, formed in 1836, and the Sixth Division, 1842, were temporary and in charge of managing the sociopolitical order in specific parts of the empire.
11. Butromeev, Entsiklopediia Rossiiskoi monarchii, 283.
12. Butler, Russia and Soviet Law, xii. Shebanov, “Polnoe Sobranie,” 280, notes that PSZ omits regulations signed into law by the Senate that were held in the archives of Moscow institutions and destroyed or lost during the War of 1812.
13. For more information about the Codification Committee, the Second Division, and PSZ see, Plany Polnago sobraniia Svoda zakonov [Plans of the complete collected code of laws] (St. Petersburg, 1885).
14. PSZ 2.2 (1830): 804-5.
15. See P. M. Maikov, Vtoroe otdielenie sobstvennoi Ego Imperatorskago Velichestva Kantseliarii 1826–1882: istoricheskii ocherk [The Second Division of His Imperial Highness's Chancellery, 1826–1882: historical sketch] (St. Petersburg: Skorokhodov, 1906). Volume 1 of PSZ is dated 1830, but the watermark found in the paper reads ‘1828.’
16. The exact number of employees is unknown, but according to enactment 1394 all single workmen lived in state-provided housing for the workmen's cooperative association.
17. PSZ 2.2 (1830): 805–7.
18. This law suggests that the committee was obligated to produce annual reports recording their expenses, the remainder of their supplies, and a tally of published materials used. These annual reports would probably list the lithographic shop expenses. Unfortunately, this information is not included in PSZ and the author does not have access to the archives where such materials might be kept.
19. PSZ 20.2 (1845): 65.
20. PSZ 20.2 (1845): 68 (§18,589, Jan. 4, 1845).
21. Chertezhi i risunki prinadlezhashchie k 1-mu Polnomu sobraniiu zakonov: litografirovannye po Vysochaishchemu povelieniiu v litografii departamenta voennykh poselenii [Drafts and drawings belonging to the 1st Complete collection of laws: lithographed in accordance with His Majesty's order in lithography of the Department of Military Settlements] (St. Petersburg: Tip. II otd. Sobst. E. I. V. Kantseliarii, 1843).
22. Istoricheskaia zapiska o sodieistvii Vtorago Otdieleniia Sobstvennoi Ego Imperatorskago Velichestva Kantseliarii razvitiiu iuridicheskikh nauk v Rossii [Historical memorandum on the help of Second Division of His Imperial Highness's Chancellery toward the development of legal sciences in Russia] (St. Petersburg, 1876), 32.
23. Istoricheskaia zapiska o sodieistvii, 32.
24. There are other nineteenth-century publications with titles beginning Chertezhi i risunki, suggesting that there was a fashion for reproducing designs and drawings in formal or semi-formal publications. For an example see, Chertezhi i risunki k Polozheniiu o dovolstvii komand Morskago viedomstva po chasti obmundirovaniia i ammunitsii [Diagrams and drawings for the Regulation on allowances for crews of the War Department related to uniforms and ammunition] (St. Petersburg: s.n., 1876).
25. Opisanie koronatsii E. V. Ekateriny Alekseevny [Description of the coronation of Her Highness Ekaterina Alekseevna] (St. Petersburg, 1724; Moscow, 1725) as described in Edward Kasinec and Richard Wortman, “The Mythology of Empire: Imperial Russian Coronation Albums,” Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library 1, no. 1 (1992): 77–100.
26. Kasinec and Wortman, “The Mythology of Empire,” 81. This excellent bibliographical study of the Russian coronation albums does not, however, discuss the techniques of printing or the art of making engravings or lithographs.
27. Paul Fussell, Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 16–18.
28. John P. LeDonne, The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, 1650–1831 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 215.
29. Fussell, Uniforms, 16.
30. M. M. Khrenov and P. T. Zubov, Voennaia odezhda Russkoi armii [Military clothing of the Russian army] (Moscow: Voennoe Izdatel'stvo, 1994), 3–5.
31. L. E. Shepelev, Chinovnyi mir Rossii XVIII–nachalo XX v. [World of officials in Russia, 18th to beginning of 20th centuries] (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 1999), 199, 208.
32. Fussell, Uniforms, 198.
33. Shepelev, Chinovnyi mir Rossii, 211.
34. See, generally, Shepelev, Chinovnyi mir Rossii. For more information about the Department of Appanage, see, Wayne S. Vucinich, ed., The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968), 138.
35. PSZ 6.2 (1832): 224–30.
36. Shepelev, Chinovnyi mir Rossii, 230.
37. A. F. Korostin, Russkaia litografiia XIX veka [Russian lithography of the 19th century] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1953), 50.
38. Kasinec and Wortman, “The Mythology of Empire,” 81.
39. Korostin, Russkaia litografiia, 10.
40. See Galina Miroliubova, Russkaia litografiia, 1810–1890 gg. [Russian lithography, 1810– 1890] (Moscow: Tsentropoligraf, 2006), 22–144.
41. Korostin, Russkaia litografiia, 50.
42. Korostin, Russkaia litografiia, 50.
43. Korostin, Russkaia litografiia, 50.
44. Lithographers experimented with and produced portraits, but with the advent of photography the popularity of lithographic portraiture declined. That said, while photography was cheaper and faster at capturing an image, it was slower to take hold in book production and never completely displaced lithography. Thus gravure and lithography persevered, arguably more as a trade than an art, until they were rediscovered and reinterpreted by the artistic group Mir Isskustva [World of Art].
45. Miroliubova, Russkaia litografiia: 1810–1890, 22–150.
46. The administration was mindful of the potentially dangerous power of the press, and aimed to curtail its use by imposing regulations that determined who could operate a lithographic or typographic printing press. In 1826, for example, a new law required that any and all individuals who bought or inherited printing equipment or who wanted to print privately had to seek permission, and only those deemed trustworthy would be allowed to print. Even then, everything destined for printing had to be approved by censors from the Ministry of the Interior or Education. Printing shops condemned for creating uncensored books were to be closed and the owners brought to military court. PSZ, 31.1 §24,326 (1830).
47. For example, the lithographic shop of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, established in 1817, operated on an annual budget of 13,560 rubles and employed at least four printers from the Academy of Arts, each earning 500 rubles annually. PSZ 34.1 (1830): 384. The annual budget for the drafting workshop of the Artillery Department was nearly the same as the lithographic shop of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the same year—13,583 rubles. Of the total amount, 2,080 rubles were intended to cover the maintenance of printing and binding instruments and the expenses associated with supplies, including ink and paper. This information is noteworthy because it demonstrates how expensive printing supplies were in the nineteenth century.
48. PSZ 1.2 (1830): 1167.
49. PSZ 2.2 (1830): 1–2. Unfortunately, these uniforms are not illustrated in PSZ.
50. PSZ 35.2 (1863): 489.
51. The deluxe illustrations remain crisp and bright, while the thin wood-pulp paper used for mainstream illustrations is now changing color and becoming dangerously brittle. Mainstream illustrations also contain more irregularities. In some instances too much ink was applied to a lithograph stone and details were blurred, in others there was not enough ink, or the stone was not re-inked and the imprints came out faint and dull. Sometimes there are even smudges and fingerprints where printers touched the paper with inky hands, leaving evidence of the printing process.
52. Kulturnye tsennosti-zhertvy voiny: Peterhof, 3 May 2008, http://lostart.rosculture.ru/lost/catalog/t11/k3/. According to the Federal Agency of Culture and Cinematography, the holdings of the imperial libraries were increased through the imperial family members' personal acquisitions. They were often given presentation copies by authors or were sent complimentary copies by publishers of official publications such as PSZ. In 1845 the Second Division was ordered to supply one copy each of PSZ and SZ to the Winter, Anichkov, Yelagin, Tsarskoe Selo, Peterhof, and Gatchina palaces, as in the case of any publication dealing with jurisprudence.
53. Shepelev, Chinovnyi mir Rossii, 150.
54. To avoid the need to redraw the same images over and over, and to have a large inventory of stones, commercial printers in the middle of the nineteenth century devised a way to transfer images from working stones to “mother stones” for storage. One mother stone could contain as many as twenty unrelated designs, and whenever a particular image was needed the mother stone was prepared for printing and the desired likeness was printed onto paper. This print was then used to transfer the image onto a “daughter stone” from which the image could be printed for publication. For additional information, see Galina Yankovskaya, “The Economic Dimensions of Art in the Stalinist Era: Artists' Cooperatives in the Grip of Ideology and the Plan,” Slavic Review 65, no. 4 (2006): 779.
55. There are many fashion plates and military uniform illustrations produced around the same time as the PSZ illustrations, but none appears to accompany legal publications.
56. See Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 2, for her investigation of the role of art created under another nineteenth-century imperial power—England. She too suggests that artistic productions, like any other form of cultural production, reflect larger social and economic forces while constructing meaning and a sense of national identity.
57. The device of recycling images was common in early book production; one of the best known and earliest illustrated publications, the Nuremberg Chronicle, first published in 1493, purports to provide images of more than 70 cities. However, the same woodcuts were used to depict Macedonia, Neapolis, and Serraria. See Hartmann Schedel, Das Buch der Croniken und Geschichten [Book of chronicles and histories] (Nüremberg: Anton Koberger, 1493).
58. Beggrov was one of the leading lithographers in Russia during the first half of the nineteenth century. He studied at the Academy of Arts under M. N. Vorob'ev, a well-known landscape artist, and even as a student became interested in lithography. After graduating in 1825, he worked as a lithographer at the Ministerial Administration of Railways. His older brother Ivan Petrovich Beggrov and his nephew Alexander Ivanovich Beggrov operated a successful lithographic shop, one of a few involved with printing PSZ illustrations in the 1840s.
59. Miroliubova, Russkaia litografiia, 1810–1890, 46.
60. Miroliubova, Russkaia litografiia, 1810–1890, 159.
61. PSZ 2.2 (1830): 804-5 and 34.2 (1830): 384. The National Ministry of Foreign Affairs began operating its own lithographic shop the same year the printing shop of the Second Division was founded.
62. PSZ 40.2 (1867): 683–84.
63. Approaching the commission from the Second Division, draftsmen and lithographers must have been faced with a dilemma: how to reduce production costs and at the same time create attractive, informative, and authoritative illustrations. Clearly members of the Codification Committee needed to reconcile the great number of images with the practical limitations imposed by the publication business. There is no way to determine whether the limitations displayed by PSZ illustrations were a result of temporal or financial constraints. The actual price of producing individual lithographs for PSZ is still unknown. Typically, more detailed, colored, and oversized images would be priced higher than basic line drawings; presumably for PSZ bids, different-sized plates were priced depending on size and level of detail or mastery of each artist.
64. This information is derived from the bibliographic information available about the 1843 volumes. See Sobstvennaia Ego Imperatorskago Velichestva Kantseliariia, Chertezhi i risunki prinadlezhashchie k 1-mu Polnomu sobraniiu zakonov: litografirovannye po Vysochaishchemu povelieniiu v litografii Departamenta voennykh poselenii [Drafts and drawings belonging to the 1st Complete collection of laws: lithographed in accordance with His Majesty's order in lithography of the Department of Military Settlements] (St. Petersburg: Tip. II Otd. Sobst. E. I. V. Kantseliarii, 1843).
65. Glybov was not a very well-known lithographer. There is only one identifiable reference to an N. A. Glybov, owner of a lithographic shop in St. Petersburg, House of Talia, 17, who wrote “Obshchii vzgliad na graviroval'noe i litograficheskoe iskusstvo i sovremennoe ego sostoianie v Rossii” [Survey of engraving and lithographic art and its present state in Russia] as a presentation for the Russian Technical Society meeting in January of 1869.
66. For more about Ivan Beggrov, see A. F. Korostin, Nachalo litografii v Rossii [Beginning of lithography in Russia] (Moscow: Gos. Biblioteka SSSR im. V. I. Lenina, 1943), 116–121.
67. Alexander Beggrov studied at the Engineering and Artillery Schools, and at the Imperial Academy of Arts under Mikhail Klodt. Later he served as an officer on the frigate Svetlana and became a painter for the Naval Ministry. In 1873 he received a medal for his contributions to the arts, and in 1899 he was awarded the title of Academician of Arts. Kondakov mentions that in 1912, Alexander donated almost 64,000 rubles to help poor artists, their widows and orphans. For more information see S. I. Kondakov, Spisok russkikh khudozhnikov k Iubileinomu spravochniku Imperatorskoi akademii khudozhestv [List of Russian artists for the Jubilee handbook of the Imperial Academy of Arts], reprinted, edited, and expanded ed. (Moscow: Antik Biznes-tsentr, 2002), 64.
68. Until the 1860s, the title pages for illustration sections in PSZ were lithographed. These are beautiful examples of calligraphic and decorative scripts. Considering that lithography is a printing process that permits an easy and faithful reproduction of scripts, ample examples of handsome decorations found in PSZ can be used in the study of nineteenth-century Russian calligraphy. They are certainly similar to the examples of calligraphy found in sheet music produced by the same shops, and can be used to attribute the work of individual artists.
69. Kondakov, Spisok russkikh khudozhnikov, 229.
70. For information about the career of Fedor Solntsev, see the exhibition catalog, Wendy Salmond, Russia Imagined, 1825–1925: The Art and Impact of Fedor Solntsev (New York: New York Public Library, 2007), and Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, ed., Visualizing Russia: Fedor Solntsev and Crafting a National Past, (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
71. A. V. Viskovatov, ed., Istoricheskoe opisanie odezhdy i vooruzheniia rossiiskikh voisk, sostavlennoe po Vysochaishemu povelieniiu [Historical description of uniforms and weapons of Russian troops, compiled on His Highness' orders] (St. Petersburg: V Voennoi tip., 1840–1862).
72. Viskovatov became involved with this publication following his successful Kratkaia istoriia Pervago kadetskago korpusa [Short history of the First Cadet Corpus] (St. Petersburg: Voen. tip. Glav. shtaba, 1832). This information was shared with me by Ernest Zitser of Duke University.
73. According to Vvedenskii, RGIA fond 789 contains materials about students and professors of the Imperial Academy of Arts, and unfortunately these materials are very limited and do not provide the names of the artists. Zitser suggests that there was a split in responsibility for artists, those at the Intendant Department documenting current uniforms and those at the Military Settlement drawing historical uniforms.
74. For example, G. E. Vvedenskii, Piat' vekov russkogo voennogo mundira [Five centuries of the Russian military uniform] (St. Petersburg: Atlant, 2005).
75. Nikolai Obolianinov, Russkie gravery i litografy [Russian engravers and lithographers] (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf; Vneshtorgpress, 2003), 92.
76. In addition to Miroliubova, see Paul Apostol, “The Art of the Book,” in Russian Art, ed. D. Talbot Rice (London: Gurney and Jackson, 1935), 115–126.
77. Miroliubova, Russkaia litografiia, 1810–1890, 226.
78. Miroliubova, Russkaia litografiia, 1810–1890, 7.
79. Individuals who wanted to own a personal copy needed to pay ten rubles per volume. A complete set of the first series of PSZ was priced at 500 rubles. See E. Frish, Kodifikatsionnyi otdiel' pri Gosudarstvennom Sovetie 98 (Feb. 15, 1885): 12.
80. Eva H. Hanks, Michael E. Herz, and Steven S. Nemerson, Elements of Law (Cincinnati: Anderson Publishing Co., 1994), 77.
81. Harvard Library has two volumes from the Cadet Corps and Commerce Institute in addition to the imperial composite set.
82. For more on this topic see Anne Odom and Wendy R. Salmond, eds., Treasures into Tractors: The Selling of Russia's Cultural Heritage, 1918–1938 (Washington, DC: Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens, 2009).
83. Mark Raeff, “The Romanovs and Their Books: Perspectives on Imperial Rule in Russia,” Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library 6, no. 1 (1997): 12.
84. Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power, 13.
85. For more information on this topic, see Willard Sunderland, “Shop Signs, Monuments, Souvenirs: Views of the Empire in Everyday Life,” in Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture, ed. V. A. Kivelson and Joan Neuberger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
86. Sunderland, “Shop Signs,” 105.