Photographic Literacy: Cameras in the Hands of Russian Authors 9781501730481

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
ILLUSTRATIONS
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION
INTRODUCTION. Chasing Pushkin’s Photograph
1. TOLSTOY IN THE AGE OF HIS TECHNOLOGICAL REPRODUCIBILITY
2. THE DIFFUSION OF DOMESTICATED PHOTOGRAPHY
3. MICROGEOGRAPHY, MACROWORLD
4. LOOK LEFT, YOUNG MAN! The International Exchange of Photo-Narratives
CONCLUSION. Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, and the Anxiety of Photographic Authorship
NOTES
INDEX

Citation preview

PHOTOGRAPHIC LITERACY

PHOTOGRAPHIC LITERACY CAMERAS IN THE HANDS OF RUSSIAN AUTHORS

Katherine M. H. Reischl

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

This publication is made possible in part from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. Copyright © 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Reischl, Katherine M. H., author. Title: Photographic literacy : cameras in the hands of Russian authors / Katherine M. H. Reischl. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2018. | “This publication is made possible in part from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.” | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018016114 (print) | LCCN 2018022874 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501730481 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501730498 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501724367 | ISBN 9781501724367 (cloth ; alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Literature and photography—Russia— History—20th century. | Literature and photography—Soviet Union—History. | Russian literature—20th century—History and criticism. | Photography in literature. Classification: LCC PG3020.5.P436 (ebook) | LCC PG3020.5.P436 R45 2018 (print) | DDC 891.709/357—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018016114 Cover illustrations: El Lissitzky, Portrait of Ehrenburg (with camera and typewriter, photomontage) for Moi Parizh, 1933. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Background underlay by Alexander Rodchenko from the journal Daesh (Let’s give), no. 14 (1929); page title, “Soviet Automobile.” © 2018 Estate of Alexander Rodchenko / RAO, Moscow / VAGA at ARS, NY.

FOR JON AT H A N A ND M A R G A R E T

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgmentsxv Note on Transliteration and Translation

Introduction: Chasing Pushkin’s Photograph

xvii

1

1. Tolstoy in the Age of His Technological Reproducibility

21

2. The Diffusion of Domesticated Photography

53

3. Microgeography, Macroworld 

101

4. Look Left, Young Man! The International Exchange of Photo-Narratives

147

Conclusion: Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, and the Anxiety of Photographic Authorship 

201

Notes231 Index291

Color plates at end of e-book.

ILLUSTRATIONS

0.1. “Pushkin, a beard fragment”

5

0.2. “Double of A. S. Pushkin,” Solntse Rossii, no. 6 (1912)

6

0.3. “Overexposed Pushkin”

8

0.4. Alexander Rodchenko, cover for Zhurnalist, no. 3 (1930)

9

1.1. Sergei Levitsky, portrait of Alexander Herzen (1861)

26

1.2. Sergei Levitsky, portrait of “Herzen versus Herzen” (1865)

27

1.3. Andrei Karelin, family in a living room, from his “Artistic Album of Photography from Nature” (ca. 1880s)

29

1.4. “Dzhigets. On the Eastern Shore of the Black Sea” from The Album of Photographic Portraits of the August Persons and Figures Known in Russia (1865)

32

1.5. Sergei Levitsky, “Lev Tolstoy” (1856)

35

1.6. Anonymous portrait of Lev Tolstoy from a daguerreotype (1854)

36

1.7. Lev Tolstoy, self-portrait at Yasnaya Polyana with autograph, “I took this myself” (1862)

39

X

ILLUSTRATIONS 1.8. Sophia Tolstoy, self-portrait with a photo-portrait of the deceased Vanechka (1895)

44

1.9. Sophia Tolstoy, “Last Wedding Anniversary, 23 September 1910”

46

2.1. William H. Rau, “Pompeian Room in the Imperial Winter Palace” (1903)

56

2.2. Postcard portrait of Leonid Andreev (ca. 1910s)

65

2.3. Leonid Andreev’s scrapbook from Vadim’s infancy (1903–4)

66

2.4. Cover and interior page from Leonid Andreev’s scrapbook (1909)

67

2.5. Title page of Leonid Andreev’s first Collected Works (1909)

69

2.6. “Andreyev with a fanciful drawing by the author, at the right,” New York Times (1909)

70

2.7. “Leonid Andreev (from the latest photographs),” Solntse Rossii, no. 51 (1911)

71

2.8. Leonid Andreev, “L. ANDREEV—AMATEURPHOTOGRAPHER; the son of Leonid Andreev—Vadim: photo taken by his father,” Solntse Rossii, no. 51 (1911)

72

2.9. Vadim Andreev, diary fragment with portraits (ca. 1920)

73

2.10. Mother from Vasily Rozanov’s Fallen Leaves (1913)

76

2.11. The author’s children from Vasily Rozanov’s Fallen Leaves (1913)

77

2.12. Maximilian Voloshin, fragments from the notebook for Story of My Soul (ca. 1904)

81

2.13. Maximilian Voloshin, untitled photograph with self-portrait and Elena Kruglikova in the artist’s studio (ca. 1905)

83

2.14. Maximilian Voloshin with Taiakh, Koktebel (1911)

85

2.15. Leonid Andreev, self-portrait in window (ca. 1910s)

89

2.16. “Last Pages of L. N. Andreev’s Diary” (1921)

97

3.1. Cover and illustrations for Mikhail Prishvin’s In the Land of Unfrightened Birds (1907)

105

3.2. “Vyg-Lake,” In the Land of Unfrightened Birds (1907)

117

XI

ILLUSTRATIONS 3.3. Mikhail Prishvin, “Nadvoitsky Waterfall. Lock Open” and “Nadvoitsky Waterfall. Lock Closed,” In the Land of Unfrightened Birds (1934)

118

3.4. Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, plate 692 (1887)

119

3.5. Mikhail Prishvin, “Povenets. The Start of the Canal” (1934)

122

3.6. Vladimir Griuntal and G. Iablonovsky, What Is This? (1932)

125

3.7. Eleazar Langman, “Youth Commune ‘Dinamo’ Factory,” Proletarskoe foto no. 1 (1930)

127

3.8. G. Sashalski, “Mountain Sheep,” USSR in Construction (1935)

130

3.9. N. Shekutyev, “Fur Processing,” USSR in Construction (1935)

131

3.10. Vladimir Favorsky, frontispiece for Mikhail Prishvin’s Ginseng (1934)

140

3.11. Mikhail Prishvin, “Spotted Deer,” Golden Horn (1933)

140

3.12. Mikhail Prishvin, photo proofs in the film script for Ginseng: The Root of Life (1934)

142

4.1. Margaret Bourke-White, Trade Winds (1929)

150

4.2. Alexander Rodchenko, “Soviet Automobile,” Daesh′, no. 14 (1929)

151

4.3. Arkady Shaikhet and Max Alpert, from “A Day in the Life of a Moscow Working-Class Family,” A-I-Z, no. 38 (1931)

155

4.4. Arkady Shaikhet and Max Alpert, from “A Day in the Life of a Moscow Working-Class Family,” Proletarskoe foto, no. 4 (1931).

156

4.5. A. Gerdt, “Prosperity,” Ogonek, no. 3 (1936)

161

4.6. El Lissitzky, “Portrait by El Lissitzky,” My Paris (1933)

165

4.7. Ilya Ehrenburg and El Lissitzky, Parisian montage, My Paris (1933)

166

4.8. Ilya Ehrenburg, “Her Last Bench,” My Paris (1933).

169

4.9. “Theirs . . . Ours”: Homeless man in New York; seventeenth anniversary of October Revolution, celebratory demonstration on Red Square, Moscow, Sovetskoe foto, no. 8–9 (1934)

170

4.10. Ilya Ilf, “Americans,” Ogonek, no. 13 (1936)

172

4.11. Ilya Ilf, “Roberts,” Ogonek, no. 13 (1936)

173

XII

ILLUSTRATIONS 4.12. Ilya Ilf, “Right here is America!” Ogonek, no. 11 (1936)

176

4.13. Ilya Ilf, “Moscow,” Ogonek, no. 12 (1936)

177

4.14. Margaret Bourke-White, “World’s Highest Standard of Living,” or “Ohio River Flood” (1937)

178

4.15. Unidentified artist, Ben Shahn photographing at the New Jersey Homesteads (ca. 1936–39)

181

4.16. Ben Shahn, “Scenes from the Living Theatre—Sidewalks of New York,” New Theatre (1934)

181

4.17. Ilya Ehrenburg, “Belville,” Prozhektor, no. 5 (1932)

182

4.18. Ilya Ehrenburg “The Eiffel Tower,” My Paris (1933)

184

4.19. Unattributed, “[Anti-fascist] Rally in the Country,” UHP: Spain (1936–37)

186

4.20. Ilya Ehrenburg, “We will defend the republic,” No Pasaran! (1936–37)

187

4.21. John Heartfield, “Freedom itself struggles in its ranks” (1936)

188

4.22. Arkady Shaikhet, “Uzbek-female worker from the Tashkent Textile Combine” (1935)

192

4.23. Walker Evans, “Roadside View, Alabama Coal Area Company Town” (1935)

192

4.24. Robert Capa, untitled, laughing woman on a collective farm, Ukraine (1947)

194

4.25. Robert Capa, untitled, rebuilding on a collective farm, Ukraine (1947)

196

4.26. Robert Capa, untitled, man with family scrapbook, Stalingrad (1947)

197

C.1. Gisèle Freund, “The editorial board of Mesures, at Henry Church’s villa in Ville d’Avray, April 1937”

205

C.2. Gisèle Freund, “Vladimir Nabokov, 1967”

206

C.3. Vladimir Nabokov family photographs

208

C.4. The Nabokovs’ house on Morskaya Street, St. Petersburg, Speak, Memory (1966)

210

C.5. “Nabokov and Dmitri in Mentone [sic],” Speak, Memory (1966)

211

XIII

ILLUSTRATIONS C.6. Vera and Dmitri Nabokov’s Nansen passport, Speak, Memory (1966)

215

C.7. Nabokov with a butterfly net, from W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (1992)

217

C.8. Photographs from “The Story of One Reforging,” The History of the Construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal (1934)

222

C.9. “Orchestra on the Canal,” The History of the Construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal (1934)

224

C.10. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Immediately upon Release, 1953” The Gulag Archipelago

226

C.11. “Camp portrait from the Kaluzhskaya outpost in Moscow, June 1946,” The Gulag Archipelago

227

Color Plates 1. Retouched photograph from the White Sea Canal photographic archive (ca. 1930s) 2. Lev Tolstoy, “First Step” (1908) 3. Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, “Lev Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana” (1908) 4. “A Day with Tolstoy,” Solntse Rossii, no. 46 (1912) 5. Leonid Andreev, Dacha in Vammelsuu (ca. 1910s) 6. Leonid Andreev, “From a color photograph, the work of L. Andreev,” Solntse Rossii, no. 1 (1912) 7. Leonid Andreev, “Portrait of Judas” (ca. 1910s) 8. Leonid Andreev, dacha interior with Judas portrait (ca. 1910s) 9. Leonid Andreev, stereographic view of the dacha grounds in Vammelsuu (ca. 1910s) 10. Leonid Andreev, self-portrait with crucifi x (ca. 1910s) 11. Leonid Andreev, “In Oilskin” (ca. 1910s) 12. Leonid Andreev, “In the Office [Vadim]” (ca. 1910s) 13. Leonid Andreev, Savva (ca. 1910s) 14. Leonid Andreev, “Winter on the Sea” (ca. 1910s)

XIV

ILLUSTRATIONS 15. Leonid Andreev, double-exposed self-portrait (ca. 1910s) 16. Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, “Side View of the Kivach Waterfall [Suna River in Karelia]” (1915) 17. Cover for USSR in Construction, no. 10 (1935) 18. Mikhail Prishvin, “A Typical Place for Woodsnipe” and “Head of a Woodsnipe,” USSR in Construction, no. 10 (1935) 19. Mikhail Prishvin, details of sables, USSR in Construction, no. 10 (1935) 20. El and Es Lissitzky, “The Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic,” USSR in Construction no. 9–12 (1937)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the ten years that this book has been in the making, I have had the great good fortune to know the support of generous scholars and institutions alike. Research for this project was funded by grants from the University of Chicago Nicholson Center for British Studies, the University of Chicago Humanities Division and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, and Princeton’s University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences Grants. I extend my deepest gratitude to the archivists and scholars who took an early and sustained interest in this project. I must thank in particular Richard Davies of the Leeds Russian Archive, whose scholarly generosity and knowledge of Leonid Andreev know no bounds; Harry Leich of the Library of Congress; Yana Grishina and Lilya Ryazanova at the Prishvin House Museum in Dunino; Boris Frezinsky; Margarita Pavlova; Roza Khruleva; and Aleksandra Ilf, who is greatly missed. And a warm thank you to every archivist and librarian who facilitated access to new materials and who offered guidance and help, including those at the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library and the New York Public Library Rare Books Collection; the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (Washington, DC); University of Chicago Special Collections; the Cotsen Library and Rare Books Collection at Princeton University; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the Hoover Institution (Stanford); the State Museum of L. N. Tolstoy (Moscow); the Russian State Library (Moscow); the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI, Moscow); Pushkinskii dom (IRLI, St. Petersburg); and the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF, Moscow). This text has also benefited from the support and feedback of many readers, workshop participants, and conference events. Yuri Tsivian, Matthew Jesse Jackson,

XVI

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Bozena Shallcross, Joel Snyder, and Anna Lisa Crone at the University of Chicago gave encouragement, wisdom, and constructive objections. My never-ending thanks to the indefatigable Katie Duda, who saw through the fi rst versions of this text, and to June Farris and Thomas Keenan for helping to solve so many reference and image conundrums along the way. I am grateful to have been the recipient of so many brilliant insights from the participants in kruzhki at the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton University, as well as numerous rounds of AATSEEL and ASEEES (formerly AAASS) presentations and roundtables. In the process of revisions and manuscript preparation, this project was advanced by the generous feedback of John Mackay, Kevin Platt, and Andres Zervigon, as well as Molly Brunson, Penelope Burt, William Nickell, Kirill Ospovat, Elizabeth Papazian, Molly Thomasy-Blasing, Mikhail Velizhev, Emma Widdis, and Erika Wolf. My thanks for the support of my Princeton Slavic Department colleagues—Ellen Chances, Olga Hasty, Serguei Oushakine, and Ilya Vinitsky. I am indebted to the sharp editorial eyes of Caryl Emerson and Michael Wachtel. Should any errors or inaccuracies remain, I take full responsibility. I must also express my deepest gratitude to my mentor at the University of Chicago, Robert Bird. It was his fi rst class on modern Russian literature that lit the spark that would become a career and launched the research questions that saw Photographic Literacy through from beginning to end. His generously enthusiastic support of not only this project but also my own scholarly development has made me the scholar that I am today. Thank you to my family—my always-understanding parents and patient in-laws and most especially my husband, Jon, and daughter, Margie—for making the room for this book to enter our lives. Portions of chapter 1 were previously printed in the following and used by permission: K. H. Reischl, “Photography and the Crisis of Authorship: Tolstoy and the Popular Photographic Press,” in Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 60, no. 4 (2012): 533–49.

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION

The terms, names, and locations in this work follow the spelling generally outlined by the Library of Congress, with exceptions for readability. For example, I have used the accepted spellings of proper names: Tolstoy, not Tolstoi; Prokudin-Gorsky, not Prokudin-Gorskii. Endnotes and bibliographic information citing Russian-language material follow the Library of Congress standard. I have sought out existing English translations wherever possible, making minor alterations for clarification as necessary. All other translations are my own.

PHOTOGRAPHIC LITERACY

INTRODUCTION Chasing Pushkin’s Photograph

Imagine—if Pushkin had lived another two or three years we would have had his photograph. Just one more step and he would have emerged from the night wherein he resides, rich in nuances and fi lled with picturesque implications, to stride fi rmly into the wan daylight that is now a whole century old. . . . Around 1840 photography—those scant square centimeters of light—marked the beginning of a visual era that has lasted to the present day, and which neither Byron, nor Pushkin, nor Goethe lived to see. Vladimir Nabokov, “Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible,” 1937

The fi rst photograph, as is well known, appeared in Russia in the 1840s. Our great scientific achievements enabled us to produce photographs of Gogol, Chaadayev, and a few other of Pushkin’s contemporaries. But Pushkin himself, to our profound regret, did not have time to be photographed. What do we know objectively about the external appearance of the great poet? The iconography is extraordinarily meager and, perhaps, tells us more about the personalities of the portraitists than of the model. . . . We must correct this error of time! Andrei Bitov, “Pushkin’s Photograph (1799–2099),” 1987

What if we had a photograph of the most celebrated of Russian authors, Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin (1799–1837)? How would he be posed? What would we learn from the photographic likeness? For Vladimir Nabokov (through whose mobile imagination Pushkin’s authorial figure rides), a photograph of Pushkin from that “era of sedentary photography” would have caught the noble poet in the “flat domestic light that guides us through the [nineteenth] century’s grayness.” Trapped in the frame of a photograph, Pushkin would have been transformed into one of those “latter-nineteenth century celebrities [who] assume the appearance of distant relatives—shabbily dressed, all in black as though they were in mourning for the iridescent life of yesteryear . . . against a background of dust-laden drapery.”1 In a fantastic reimagining of Nabokov’s ruminations, Andrei Bitov weaves his own tale, “Pushkin’s Photograph (1799–2099)” (“Fotografiia Pushkina [1799–2099]”), in the twentieth century, around Igor Odoevtsev’s quest to travel back from the future to capture a photographic representation of Pushkin, only to be foiled by the contingencies of time, space, and the distraction of knowing too much. 2 While the very structure and fabric of Bitov’s imagined future nation is founded on its power to subjugate time—a power also possessed by the photograph in its capture of the fleeting moment—the very impossibility of photographic capture is hinted at from the fi rst pages of his story.3 The narrator, looking out of his own window (much as the figure of Pushkin did, we may assume, while penning The Bronze Horseman on a famous white night in St. Petersburg), asks us to look out the window alongside him: There’s no way to describe what was framed for me by someone who built this house long before I was around and who naturally did not think about planning the view from my window, but nonetheless sentenced me to this landscape. You couldn’t photograph it to catch the frame of the window—like the frame of a painting—and the fly crawling on the picture, and a pole in the foreground with wires like a music staff lining the landscape.4 Bitov’s text breaks down into a bewildering picture of fluid intermedial relationships, framing and unframing painting, music, and photography. The latter, of course, is most significant for our story. Foreshadowing the nearing crisis that our hero Igor will encounter, the narrator describes the inability to reconcile a past moment with a present one, despite the present’s dependence on the past. The two can never exist simultaneously in the contrived frame of an idealized picture. Despite such potential obstacles, the unnamed powers of a future Soviet society decree that these boundaries will be overcome. A photograph of Pushkin brought back from the past just in time for the three hundredth anniversary of his birth will 3

4

INTRODUCTION

display the state’s scientific and cultural superiority. While the chosen time-traveling hero should be ideologically minded (that is, in line with party ideals), two other practical issues are valued still more highly. The fi rst is that whoever is sent must be able to photograph Pushkin, that is, to be photographically literate; but in the state’s most defi nitive proclamation, the person must also be able to “UNDERSTAND.”5 The hero must be a literary scholar—a PHILOLOGIST (spelled out in capital letters).6 But herein, we soon learn, also lies the problem. As a philologist, Igor is immediately caught up in the story of Pushkin’s life and its intertwining with the creation of his literary works. Thus, rather than seeing clearly enough to choose a moment to capture a legible photograph of the great author at work, he unintentionally captures with his camera lens “senseless beauty” (bessmyslennaia krasota), which is amplified (as Bitov’s narrator remarks) when seen “in relation to the notes of the insane time traveler.” At the end of the story the narrator lists the photographs that are developed in the future, evoking the fleeting details of Igor’s time-traveling encounters with Pushkin and highlighting moments from a literary life now offered in an abrupt, photographic code: The storm that preceded the cloud that had inspired the poet to write the line “The last cloud dispersed by the storm . . .”; the portrait of the cook Vasily slamming the door; the remarkable portrait of the rabbit in the snow—in a drift, ears erect, front paws folded under; the cart harnessed to the bullocks covered with the tarpaulin with Abreks prancing all around it; the hand with the candle and a piece of someone’s beard; the waves carrying coffi ns . . . and all the rest of the shots were of water and waves.7 Only once is a part of Pushkin inexpertly caught by Igor’s camera. The “piece of someone’s beard” is a fragmentary capture of Pushkin’s facial hair, which earlier in the story had startled Igor, accustomed to the iconic muttonchops from the portraits painted by Pushkin’s near contemporaries. Igor’s capture is thus doubly illegible: the photographic fragment is neither a fragment of the iconic image of Pushkin—one that might be immediately recognizable to the culturally literate viewer (e.g., see the fragmented muttonchops, fig. 0.1), nor is it the portrait of the unexpectedly fully bearded Pushkin that Igor alone has seen. Without the full proof, as it were, of this latter image, how could such an image of Pushkin be entered into the official record? In 1912, however, the art journal Solntse Rossii (The Sun of Russia) had already managed to print the photograph of Pushkin that so eluded Igor: the poet seated at his writing desk (fig. 0.2). As opposed to numerous painted and bronze monuments to the poet (by and large presenting the author in dashing aristocratic poses) or the ever-rushing figure of Pushkin in Bitov’s time-traveling text, the journal’s photograph frames Pushkin simply in the act of writing. Of course, in the case of the Solntse Rossii photograph, the Pushkin pictured is an impostor. But however anachronistic and dutiful this image might be, it is, for a brief moment, believable simply because

INTRODUCTION

5

Figure 0.1. “Pushkin, a beard fragment,” made by the author from “Double of A. S. Pushkin,” Solntse Rossii, no. 6 (1912).

it is a photograph. Our desire to see the “real” Pushkin, to partake of his aura and celebrity is—for a fleeting second—realized. We can now see a copy of his image, hold it in our hands, magnify it, get as close to it as we physically can. Such an imagined interaction recalls, even in the paradoxical use of aura, Walter Benjamin’s characterization of photography’s power to fulfill our desire to “get closer to things”—that is, the very means by which aura “decays.”8 While photographic reproducibility (for Benjamin) overcomes the work of art’s uniqueness and authenticity, in the case of the author’s image, imbued as it might be with our (the misguided philologist’s or the naive reader’s) whole “image of literature,” it allows the viewer to “get closer” to the author himself by proxy. In Roland Barthes’s terms, this image of literature is “tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions.”9 Certainly in the Russian tradition, from Pushkin to Solzhenitsyn, the author not only has served as political and social commentator but, as such, has held a more celebrated position in mass culture even than in the West. And while the formalists would reject the privileging of authorial biography in literary study (decades before Barthes), the figure of the author as celebrity would continue to have considerable hold throughout the twentieth century. Here, with the photograph of our Pushkin, centered on the page as in our cultural imagination, we can reach out and touch (literally) the material manifestation—the photograph—of his unique celebrity.

6

INTRODUCTION

Figure 0.2 . “Double of A. S. Pushkin” (“Dvoinik A. S. Pushkina”), Solntse Rossii, no. 6 (1912).

But the problem of uniqueness is immediately undermined, as the caption (“Pushkin’s Double”) of the photograph in Solntse Rossii reminds us. As it turns out, the caption and the impossible photograph present to us the very antithesis of what we desire: an image with no value except in the readerly satisfaction at the unveiling of an obvious (but impressive) impostor—or simply put, a simulacrum. Pushkin’s untimely death saved the poet from the confi nes of what Nabokov might deem the inauthenticity of the photograph and any photographically enabled virtual proximity; it also saved him from the incursion of the new realistic mode of literary representation that arose along with photography in the 1840s. The poet remains forever sheltered from the magnified mimeticism of the camera’s lens and

INTRODUCTION

7

its flattening effect on the luminary literary persona, as represented in Nabokov’s imagination. Pushkin’s figure, not to be relegated to the mere status of celebrity, offers an as yet still intact synthesis of a historical figure, authorial mythos, and the sum of his literary output. The case of Pushkin, from Nabokov to Bitov, illustrates well the compound tension of the literary sphere in the age of the photograph: the conflation of author and text, enabled by the photograph’s mechanical reproducibility, and the challenge mounted by photography against the literary notion of subjectivity. For the camera apparatus casts new doubt on the creative agency of the artist, shifting the relationship between artist and world.10 Some early texts in the West even attributed authorship in photography not to the person taking the picture but to the sun itself.11 The Russian calque for photography, svetopis′ (light writing), which coexisted for a time alongside the Greek-based fotografiia in the fi rst decades following the technology’s introduction to Russia, further obscured the role of authorship in image production. Can the photographer be an active agent in the production of an image that is actually written in light? If the camera is the active agent in image production, what role does the photographer really play? Photography was perceived as a challenge—not only to painting and literature but to the very integrity of the self. In the nineteenth century this challenge resonated across the literary landscape. Fyodor Dostoevsky treated photographic realism with distrust and anxiety. As a critical and rhetorical move, he accused Nikolai Uspensky of indiscriminately picturing everything with his “photographic machine.”12 In The Idiot (1868), a photograph of Nastasya Filippovna served as a proxy for her introduction to Prince Myshkin, providing a perfect likeness of the character, thus beginning, and perhaps even foreshadowing, a relationship that ends in destruction. A photograph also has a fleeting though important role in The Adolescent (Podrostok , 1875), in which the narrator muses, “It’s extremely rare that photographic copies bear any resemblance to the original. . . . An artist studies a face and divines its main feature . . . a photograph finds the man as he is.”13 Such a judgment on the “truth” of photographic capture relegates the medium to the status of a banal foil for a true wholeness of “seeing.” And while these ekphrastic transformations in the pages of one of the great authors of Russian prose assert the dominance of text over the objectifying potential of photography, they speak directly to photography’s challenge to notions of authorship, creativity, and truth. How do authors transform their authorial practice when they take up the camera? When and how do authors become photographically literate? How does this new mode of seeing shape the literary landscape? I pose these questions in relation to the photographic life of Russian literature in full recognition that they ultimately spring from meditating on an absent page: the impossible, and now overexposed, photograph of Alexander Pushkin (fig. 0.3).

8

INTRODUCTION

Figure 0.3. “Overexposed Pushkin,” made by the author from “Double of A.S. Pushkin,” Solntse Rossii, no.6 (1912).

Developing Photographic Literacy If the camera apparatus was greeted with skepticism by nineteenth-century writers, the twentieth century welcomed it with a warm embrace. In 1926, Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Commissar of Enlightenment during the most open period of Soviet artistic expression, linked a vision of the new nation with photographic literacy, stating, “Just as every forward-looking comrade must have a watch, so must he be able to handle a camera. This will surely happen with time. Just as the USSR achieved universal literacy in general, so too will it have photographic literacy in particular.”14 For Lunacharsky, Soviet citizens en masse would now have access to portable means of organizing both time (the watch) and space (the camera). Working in parallel with the early Soviet movement to make every reader a writer, this democratically empowering call would inspire the worker photography movement, a burgeoning number of author-photographers, and well-known avant-garde artists to employ the camera in their own framings of a volatile Soviet experience.15 Just two years later, Hungarian modernist László Moholy-Nagy published his own prophetic vision of photographic literacy: “First must come the realization that the knowledge of photography is just as important as that of the alphabet. The illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as the pen”16 (fig. 0.4). While each man’s decree addressed different spheres of readership in different national contexts (for Lunacharsky, the readers of the new photography journal Sovetskoe foto; for Moholy-Nagy, the arts journal Bauhaus 2), each imagined

Figure 0.4. Alexander Rodchenko, cover for Zhurnalist, no. 3 (1930). Image courtesy of Columbia University Library. Art © Estate of Alexander Rodchenko/RAO, Moscow/VAGA, New York.

10

INTRODUCTION

a not so distant future when photography would be as ubiquitous and necessary as the printed word. Here, photographic literacy would reach its apogee as a focal point for wider interests in visual perception and representation—for both the everyday citizen of every forward-looking country and the artist working in any medium. Such an embrace of the camera’s potentially objectifying capture might serve as one illustration of Marshall Berman’s wide-reaching defi nition of modernism “as any attempt by modern men and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves at home in it.”17 Read along Berman’s lines, the camera as an object itself of modernization, wielded by the modern subject, makes in its capture both an object and a new subject(ivity) in the frames of the photograph. This expert wielding of the apparatus might, as in the vision of Lunacharsky, form a defi ning feature of a new subjecthood in the modern world: the photographer. However, the collapse of object and subject, founded on the complete adoption of a camera mode, forms the foundation for the fi lm critic André Bazin’s claim that with the camera, “for the fi rst time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man.”18 It is precisely this kind of assumption that encouraged the embrace of the camera in the Soviet era and that so struck Walter Benjamin in Sergei Tretyakov’s images of life in the Soviet Union. Benjamin saw the unconscious component in photographic production as eliminating the “long-since-counterfeit wealth of creative personality” that he viewed as inherent to the bourgeois notion of artistic creation.19 At the height of the factographic movement in Russia in the early 1930s, the camera apparatus, understood as an “objective means of fi xing fact,” was taken up by Tretyakov and new photo-reporters such as Max Alpert and Arkady Shaikhet not only for documenting a rapidly changing Soviet reality but also for shaping that very reality by an “objective” means.20 This book will explore how that shaping of reality was framed by both image and text. As Jefferson Hunter notes, Somewhere in the vicinity of every photograph there is a hand holding a pen. . . . The hand may be at a distance, but it is there. It is closest to the image, literally, in published works combining photographs with text, in all the forms this combination may take: ordinary printed book with photographic illustrations; photographic album with explanatory, technical, or expressive captions; photo essay in [a] magazine; catalogue of an exhibition; screenplay published with stills; photojournalistic compilation; [etc.]. 21 At the heart of nearly all of these printed forms in our Russian context was the figure of the author-photographer. Not coincidentally, this hybrid category, for a producer working in hybrid modes, arose in the Soviet period largely through Sergei Tretyakov, who would state in 1934, the year that socialist realism became doctrine, “I do not know what would be more difficult for me in traveling as a writer, if I were

INTRODUCTION

11

to lose my pen and notebook or my camera.”22 And while the author-photographer movement would reach its apex in the mid-1930s, its traceable lineage begins in the prerevolutionary period, through authors as diverse as Leonid Andreev, Maximilian Voloshin, and Mikhail Prishvin, followed in the Soviet period by Ilya Ehrenburg and Ilya Ilf, all of whom will be discussed in detail in the following chapters. With the exception of the oft-mentioned Sergei Tretyakov, the author-photographer was not necessarily situated at the cutting edge of the art movements of the day, but each actively struggled with the dominant modes of representation. Consequently, “author-photographer” suggests a unique picture of the way in which subjectivity is shaped in artistic production. The framing of the authorial subject was sometimes as explicit as a self-portrait but could also take on other more mediated forms, such as the delineation of a home within the frame of the photograph (Rozanov) or a microgeographical rendering of a familiar place (Prishvin). And particularly in the Soviet period, the author-photographer’s appropriation of the dominant avant-garde mode of artistic production exposed tensions underlying the creation and self-creation of the Soviet author and subject. These authors demonstrate how an authorial subject under creative duress can reassert his own framing of an individual subjectivity through the hybrid intersections of text and image. And it is in these framings of the self within the photograph—formal, textual, contextual—that the author-photographer learns to transform the seemingly objective medium of photography into a medium of self-representation and to master photographic literacy.

The Frame This book considers the interactions between photography and literary writing over roughly seventy years, with most of the attention devoted to the case of the hybrid author-photographer, treated in greatest detail in chapters 2 through 4. The author-photographer is also uniquely situated as the subject of our study, involved as he was in the various fields of intermediality, mediation, and remediation. For artists who were and continued to be writers fi rst and foremost, photography emerged in each case as a medium to work with (i.e., text plus image) within those various fields. And as Irina O. Rajewsky notes, in the larger historical trajectories of media in their ever-evolving forms, earlier media, including painting, literature, photography, and fi lm, “have frequently remediated (and continue to remediate) both the respective newer media as well as one another.”23 The shape of this remediation will provide the space in which to explore how image might be remediated in and through text (as ekphrasis, photographic practice in parallel with literary, or illustration), as well as the ways in which text is remediated in the already established spaces of image culture. Here, too, boundaries become an essential site of investigation. Boundaries take on many forms in this study, including permeable national borders, the thin line

12

INTRODUCTION

between life and death, that between literary subject and author, and most important, the frame. If we revert to a strictly literary defi nition, Mary Caws’s seminal work on the literary frame describes the “framing look” as one that “cuts out, concentrates upon, and centers on whatever is to be emphasized, by a decoupage or circumscription—writing around and about, cutting and cropping—all of which exemplify a technique of limiting with positive aims.”24 Furthermore, the framed object—ekphrastically rendered—can serve as a “visual focal point: a portrait, a photograph, or a painting, which may itself become the developing or revealing object for the import of the entire scene narrated, as it were, by condensation.”25 Not unlike the literal, material frame marking out a canvas on the gallery wall, the framed passage marks value for those conversant in literary form. Frames, in all their forms, focus attention on the singularity of a self-contained picture; the frame serves to arrest our attention by setting its picture apart from its environment while at the same time forming a key, representative part of those very surroundings. But a photograph can be “framed” in a variety of ways. Framing a scene in the viewfi nder of a camera represents the initial selection (of what arrests our attention) in the creation of the photograph itself. The resulting photograph, should the photographer herself be as photographically literate as the writer, will capture that picture once framed in the eye or viewfi nder on the photograph’s flat plane. But should a “successful” photograph be produced (with legible subjects in focus, neither overnor underexposed), the photograph will still present an interpretative challenge to its reader/viewer, precisely because it is framed and because of the ways in which those frames might shift, materially, textually, or contextually. 26 Sergei Tretyakov formulated this problem as the inherent flaw of the photograph: “The snapshot has its own internal flaw: the uniqueness and contingency of what it depicts. . . . As a rule snapshots are contingent. In order to provide the contingent gesture, expression, and action with the weight and significance of generality, it is necessary to enhance the moment either quantitatively or qualitatively.”27 For Tretyakov, along with his fellow author-photographers, this enhancement would be provided by the frame of the authorial text. As John Tagg reminds us, Historians of images have learned well enough how the law of the frame touches them: image or context, that is the choice. . . . Viewer, image, context— held together and apart, clamped in place by an apparatus. . . . The apparatus is not entirely stable and does not always work. When it does, it falls short or goes too far. And there is always the chance it will be interrupted, unsettled, undermined, sabotaged, or even smashed. 28 Photographs, despite their surfeit of objectivity and clarity, can as easily offer too little. The viewing of pictures, and of photographs in particular, encompasses not only phenomenological perception, as Meyer writes, but also an interpretation that is “socially and culturally informed.”29 What we see within the literary sphere is

INTRODUCTION

13

photography’s adaptability, its assimilation into that sphere, while also marking at times its illegibility—the “irreducible homogeneity” as the apparatus (both image capture and structures of reading) breaks down.30 Especially in the Soviet context, the viewer must be aware (as the author-photographers themselves were) that (new) framing could as easily exclude a photographic subject or, in a more violent extension of that erasure, cut out the author himself from life. As David King has shown, this exclusion could be affected not only by the cut of scissors or the violent scratching of a pen: Soviet citizens, fearful of the consequences of being caught in possession of material considered “anti-Soviet” or “counter-revolutionary,” were forced to deface their own copies of books and photographs, often savagely attacking them with knives and scissors or disfiguring them with crayon or India ink. . . . There is hardly an archive or publication from the Stalinist period that does not bear the scars of this political vandalism.31 Moreover, an image could still be falsified, whether by retouching (retush′ ), by cutting, or by the simple act of staging a scene beforehand. In these cases, what is left out, that which escapes the frame of the photograph, becomes central to completing the picture. Misrecognition of the photographed subject, such as missing the identification of Bitov’s Pushkin beard fragment, might easily serve to erase a subject from the historical/literary narrative. Even in the case of necessary retouching to make a subject more legible for print, as is visible in plate 1, the literal highlighting the picturesque Russian landscape in gouche erases the very photographicality of the photograph, just as the waters of the White Sea Canal project will soon wash the scene away. In this book, the extensively photographed and rephotographed White Sea Canal project, from which this figure is drawn, is also excavated. The site and the life of its photographs form a base camp for both the exploration of the long-lived author-photographer Mikhail Prishvin and the unexpected photographic connections made through this canal from Prishvin to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s literary experiment, The Gulag Archipelago, in our conclusion. For both Prishvin and Solzhenitsyn, the authorial self and photographic subject were essential in the formation of their visual/literary work; essential too, however, is an understanding of the formation of the authorial persona. In chapter 1, authorial celebrity in the figure and works of Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828–1910) illustrates the recognition of copyright (avtorskoe pravo), which would not only protect the claims of photographers to their photographs but also recognize photography as an artistic medium in its own right. As an emblem of his epoch and a photographic subject, Tolstoy became a focal point for debates on the nature of artistic representation and the role of the author, catalyzed by his own “crisis of authorship.” Tolstoy, in his death, was subsumed into the uncontrollable space of public image culture, becoming one of the refracted subjects of photography’s dominance over the visual

14

INTRODUCTION

landscape of the twentieth century. Here we can see the transition toward the ascendency of photographic reproducibility on the artistic scene and the concomitant loss of the expectation of authenticity remarked upon by Walter Benjamin: “The whole social function of art is revolutionized. Instead of being founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice: politics.”32 In a continuation of the issues raised in chapter 1, the second chapter turns to the more intimate setting of the domestic sphere as we consider the politics of photography at home, still bounded in part by a dialectical relationship between the rituals of domesticity and the use of the author’s legacy in print media. In large part, the second chapter explores the image of the modernist author of horror stories, Leonid Andreev (1871–1919), and his own color photography in the decade preceding the Russian Revolution. Andreev’s color photographic archive, presented alongside photographs published in the journal Solntse Rossii, reveals a man enthused by a new technology and obsessed with questions of artistic mediation. His archive provides a detailed record of his private life, framing a picture of Andreev that is quite different from the one presented in his public life as an author: it is one that he fashioned away from the spotlight of his outsized literary celebrity and the encroaching threat of social instability. Andreev’s photographic collection—his photographic life—is transformed into a complex locus of nostalgia and photo-textual source material for his family and, more broadly, into the image of a world authored “in light” by Andreev himself at the very moment when it was being eclipsed by war and revolution. Vladimir Nabokov, the best-known Russian émigré author, also made significant use of photography in his memoir, Speak, Memory (1966). Nabokov’s autobiography included many photographs from the author’s personal archive, not just incorporated into the body of the text but also accompanied by extended captions. These windows into Nabokov’s prerevolutionary Russia, personally framed and reframed by the strong hand of the author, provide insight into the meticulous structure of Nabokov’s own writing process while also mapping out photography’s role in bridging the past and the present, the world of the real and of the imagined. In each of these cases the textual frame speaks to yet another key element of photography’s role in negotiating/shaping authorship—that is, its bridging of domestic and public space, individual subjectivity and political instability. My notion of “space” as a “practiced place” is informed by Michel de Certeau, who writes that just as the “street geometrically defi ned by urban planning is transformed into space by walkers, . . . an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e. a place constituted by a system of signs.”33 And while photography, as understood by Barthes in his earlier writings, is a system without signs, I would argue that in these meeting points between photographic image and text—that is, in this exploration of intermedial formation—we are reading just such a space. In the distinctly Soviet context, the question of authorship and reading text and image is illuminated by discourses in historical and literary scholarship on Russian and Soviet subjectivities. Jochen Hellbeck’s Revolution on My Mind: Diary

INTRODUCTION

15

Writing under Stalin is emblematic of this approach to a particular kind of Soviet subjectivity. Hellbeck traces the transformation of intimate diary writing as it takes on a public, political function. This is true both of those personal accounts that remained private, such as the diary of Mikhail Prishvin, and those that entered the public sphere, like the various projects accompanying the building of the Moscow Metro in the 1930s. 34 The Metro diary project was “a medium and tool of self-formation, defi ned in terms of the merging of the individual and collective, the subjective and the objective.”35 Because the project removed diary writing from its traditionally private space, a “private” life became part of the larger Soviet whole—the Soviet project—while at the same time, the very existence of the diaries themselves, penned by ordinary subjects, could still pose a threat to the dominant totalizing structure. Diaries established a realm of self-reflection and self-defi nition that was private and untouched by ideology. 36 In each case, as Eric Naiman has shown, the transformation of the subject, catalyzed by the traumatic break of the Russian Revolution and subsequent rapid changes in ideological structure, rendered existing framings of the self impossible and necessitated a language that allowed a subject “to make her see the world in new terms, to make her speak about herself as if speaking gave her the power to make the world anew.”37 Thus, most essentially, Soviet subjectivity is bound as a discursive study to literary studies: by reading—performing the fundamental assignment of literacy—the literary scholar completes the formation of the Soviet subject. However, in his analysis of Soviet subjectivity Naiman expresses a hesitation at wholeheartedly embracing what could become a homogenous reading of the Soviet subject within a homogenous reading of Soviet ideology. What my analysis shows are the myriad ways in which the author-photographer, through the assertion of his personal authorial perspective, transforms objective photography, reformulates his authorial subjectivity, and at times challenges dominant modes of ideological representation, while at other times, he finds himself buttressing the Soviet project with a self that has been formed of photograph and text. However, diary writing as both a private and a public project is not a strictly Soviet phenomenon. The diaries of prerevolutionary authors also imbricated public and private, at once representing a locus of authorial subjectivity and speaking as well to the author’s public persona. Photography was often a visual extension of the diary project for the author-photographer: for Leonid Andreev it substituted for a written diary; for Mikhail Prishvin it served as visual shorthand in his fieldwork. Moreover, for writers who were not themselves author-photographers—Lev Tolstoy, Vasily Rozanov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Vladimir Nabokov—photography would still play a defining role in authorial self-formation at crucial moments in their literary careers. Each seemed to confront the problem articulated by John Berger: “All photographs have been taken out of a continuity. If the event is a public event, this continuity is history; if it is personal, the continuity, which has been broken, is a life story.”38 By incorporating both the process of photographic capture and photographic material into their writing, these authors creatively fused life writing and light

16

INTRODUCTION

writing as method.39 In so doing, they laid bare the creative process of self-definition that necessarily runs counter to the stasis of the photographic print. But, as noted by Craig Campbell, the photographic print is never truly static, for “the photograph (like the archive . . . as an archive) is a future-oriented object, for it is always establishing connections and being reinterpreted in each photo-encounter.”40 For these authors, a single photograph or the photograph as illustration is never an endpoint; their authorial practices continually transform and animate the frozen moment of a photograph by means of the written word as it intersects not only with a personal life story but also as framed and reframed within the longue durée of life writing. But as vital as photography would be to authorial self-fashioning for these twentieth-century authors, so too was text critical in establishing photographic discourse. At the turn of the twentieth century, Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, the prerevolutionary pioneer of color photography in Russia, framed his own photographic enterprise and agenda in print in his journal, Fotograf-liubitel′ (Amateur Photographer), thereby assuring photography a place among the recognized “creative arts” in Russia. And in the case of perhaps the most famous representative of the Soviet photographic avantgarde in the West, Alexander Rodchenko, the artist’s fi rst forays into photographic literacy evolved alongside and within the literary sphere, including his photo-collage cover designs for the film-focused journal Kinofot and his iconic photo-collage illustrations for Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poema (narrative poem) “About That” (“Pro eto,” 1923). But Rodchenko was likewise an author in his own right. His essays on nonobjective art, artistic organizations, and photography are canonical sources for the history of the dynamic modernist experiments of the 1920s, and in 1996, these writings, buttressed by his diary, were published by his heirs. With this retrospective gaze, taking account of a whole body of work and a whole life story, the reader/viewer can now contextualize not only the artist’s work but also, in the broadest sense, “trace the arc of life that was intimately touched by historical events of great scale and gravity.”41 Chapters 3 and 4 shed further light on such a relationship between a life story and great historical events. The lenses of Mikhail Prishvin at home in the Soviet Union, and Ilya Ehrenburg and Ilya Ilf abroad, survey this dialectically charged, wide range of the Soviet author-photographer. For Mikhail Prishvin (1873–1954), an author-photographer as well as a meticulous diarist, his writings provided a way to weave documentary material together with a lyrical voice, achieving what has been described as a “microgeography” (mikrogeografiia) of localized Russian and Soviet space. In the construction of the photo-illustrated ocherk (a short documentary sketch), Prishvin’s writings and rewritings from 1905 to 1954 offer a distinct perspective on a changing landscape, pricking the totalizing map of the Soviet Union with the densely layered pinpoints of his microgeographies. These microcosms grew out of his distinctive authorial relationship—his rodstvennoe vnimanie (kindred attention), that is, the author’s focused lens on his new Soviet subjects. Here we see how the artist-geographer, a unique intermediary, maneuvered between his prerevolutionary authorial identity as a Symbolist and his role as a pedagogue in the Stalinist era.

INTRODUCTION

17

But, looking both at home and abroad, the fourth chapter takes on a comparative focus in its exploration of socialist realism in Russia as well as the influences and confluences of documentary photography in the West. I show how the genre of the photo-series can be formulated as a model response to the literary trends informing the rise of socialist realism at home in the Soviet Union as well as a model for agitational propaganda abroad.42 Ehrenburg’s album My Paris (Moi Parizh, 1933) and Ilf’s “American Photographs” (“Amerikanskie fotografi i,” 1936) show each author grappling with the confl ict between the optimism mandated by socialist realism and the modernist legacy of ironic humor. While these works do not, on the whole, provide a palpable socialist realist enthusiasm, their critical gazes found resonance in American social documentary photography—a common visual language that is legible in the work of socially engaged photographers, including Margaret Bourke-White and Ben Shahn. This chapter shows how Ehrenburg’s and Ilf’s photo-narratives would leave a lasting imprint on social documentary photography in America while providing a last modernist look at life in the West for a Russian readership. As this long look at writing and photography crosses the boundaries between the intimate and the public, it also necessitates an approach to the works of hybrid author-photographers that is decidedly material, engaging them from the standpoint of media technologies and cultural practices. Undeniably, changes in camera technology had a direct impact on both image production and consumption: the increasing portability of the camera apparatus, the advent of fi lm negatives, and color processes, as well as print technologies and projection equipment all had their effect. As media theorists such as W. J. T. Mitchell, Jonathan Crary, and Friedrich Kittler have shown, the expanding impact of image technologies extended to the very structure of viewer perception in everyday experience, from the advent of the daguerreotype to color photo technologies, from stereoscopic cameras to the microcamera.43 This book relies not only on the published works and diaries of the authors and artists in question here but also on material from their personal archives, as well as the history of book and periodical publishing. It asks how images were captured and printed, how the images and text would be viewed upon their publication or in the author’s own archivization—from photographic album to boxes of glass prints—thereby addressing how the materiality of the various media determines their limitations or expressive possibilities. Finally, it asks how these material considerations might resonate within the sphere of literary authorship. A project of this sort is therefore bound to recognize the importance of works that are in many cases incomplete, revised one or more times by the author, or grouped in different ways over time, not to mention all that is lost in editing the staid, canonical complete works of any author, where the very material textures of the original magazine publication or book or manuscript are erased. This problem is addressed in every chapter, enabling us to capture the writer, the photographer, and his works in a new light; that is, we will explore the very formation of literary imagination, from image to text and back again.

18

INTRODUCTION

Just as we have begun with a failed photograph—the impossible snapshot of Pushkin—our story will end with a different kind of failed encounter: the failed meeting between Solzhenitsyn and Nabokov. And while these two émigré luminaries never met in person, their literary experiments will meet at the site where photography and text might serve to “unwrite” official photographic histories. But their works also reveal how their visual consciousness has been formed by the models of photographic authorship laid out by their literary predecessor: the author-photographer. And while this overview of the book’s trajectory suggests a story of diachronic development, it is here, in the conclusion, that the synchronic threads binding each preceding chapter return to the fore. With those themes and locales that have been essential in writing this story of photographic literacy, we see in the works and figures of Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn the same self-conscious self-fashioning of authorial identity: celebrity and image, formation of the domestic sphere, the microgeographical shape of the photo-textual close-up, and the requisite international stage upon which to complete their own distinctive image of authorship. Moreover, the use of photographs by both Solzhenitsyn and Nabokov in their literary experiments reveals how the authorial subject is threatened by the camera and the record it creates. Taking a photograph produces an objective but limited snapshot that then requires inscription. Text and context—that mastery of photographic literacy—are essential in the reclamation of subjectivity and the twentieth-century authorial self.

1 TOLSTOY IN THE AGE OF HIS TECHNOLOGICAL REPRODUCIBILITY

She got up, and, taking off her hat, took up from a little table an album in which there were photographs of her son at different ages. . . . Pulling out the photograph that was next to her son’s (it was a photograph of Vronsky taken at Rome in a round hat and with long hair), she used it to push out her son’s photograph. “Oh, here he is!” she said, glancing at the portrait of Vronsky, and she suddenly recalled that he was the cause of her present misery. She had not once thought of him all the morning. But now, coming all at once upon that manly, noble face, so familiar and so dear to her, she felt a sudden rush of love for him. Lev Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, part 5, chapter 31

But musn’t the photographer who is unable to read his own pictures be no less deemed an illiterate? Isn’t inscription bound to become the most essential component of the photograph? These are the questions in which the span of ninety years that separates contemporary photography from the daguerreotype discharges its historical tension. It is in the illumination of these sparks that the fi rst photographs emerge, beautiful and unapproachable, from the darkness of our grandfathers’ day. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography”

Photography’s debut in Russia in 1839 was nothing short of a sensation. The daguerreotype was called a “painting of a new type,” and one press account judged it to be so superior to painting in its mimetic capabilities that it surpassed art as the “most delicate, the most accurate, the most perfect representation that God’s creations and the works of human hands could desire.”1 With the proliferation of camera technologies and illustrated journals toward the end of the nineteenth century, a new class of image makers came to dominate the visible landscape. Photography and its easily reproducible images empowered not only amateur-turned-professional photographers like Mikhail Prokudin-Gorsky but also an army of middle-class Russians who took up the camera. Photography’s rapidly expanding influence also made the new medium a tendentious subject, challenging not only the place of painting as the dominant mode of visual representation but also notions of authorship across the various media. This chapter tells the story of photography as technology as viewed through and by leading cultural figures. As a literary celebrity in the latter part of the nineteenth century, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy became a perennial subject for the cameras of both professionals and amateurs, whose images were reproduced in the popular photographic press in its many forms: cartes de visite, postcards, and journal illustrations. Tolstoy was not the only nineteenth-century Russian author to shape and be shaped by photography, but his own spiritual crisis as an author in the 1870s coincided with the dispute about photography’s place in the schema of artistic representation, arising from doubts over whether its ability to mechanically copy nature allowed for artistry. Tolstoy’s literary work and his image as a cultural celebrity in turn-of-thecentury Russia encapsulate the central issues in this modern “crisis of authorship” within a market system. At almost the same time as Tolstoy’s death, photography received its own legal resolution to its crisis of authorship in the form of modern copyright protection, crystallizing a new configuration of popular, accessible art within modern image culture. Indeed, for many people Tolstoy’s death marks the pivotal moment of the true fi n de siècle: “[The figure of Lev Tolstoy] symbolized the change in epochs. . . . The old age ended, and a new one began, not in 1900—but in 1910, after the death of Tolstoy” and with it, a new photographic age. 2 In this chapter, we will follow the trajectory of this fi rst age of photography into its twentieth-century instantiations.

A Little History of Photography in Russia Walter Benjamin opens his “Little History of Photography” (1931) by describing the “fog” that surrounded the earliest days of photography, which flowered before its industrialization, before the advent of mass-produced cameras and film. For Benjamin, the fog 23

24

CHAPTER 1

was created by a “ludicrous” stereotype—the “fetishistic and fundamentally antitechnological concept of art”—which dominated the history of photography for “almost a hundred years.” But most essentially for Benjamin, these theoreticians “undertook nothing less than to legitimize the photographer before the very tribunal he was in the process of overturning,” quite opposed to the import of photography’s technological and mechanical history.3 Here Benjamin turns our attention back to a key early text on the introduction of photography, Dominique Arago’s report to the French Chamber of Deputies in 1839. In the physicist-politician’s address, he enthuses over the many possible applications of photography, from astronomical surveys to the philological study of Egyptian hieroglyphs.4 One report from the French press, likely inspired by Arago and other proponents of the technology, was quoted in the Russian press in 1839, mimicking the fanatical excitement aroused by the advent of the daguerreotype: The daguerreotype will disseminate the beautiful views of nature and works of art, as book printing disseminates the works of the mind of man. It is engraving, handy to each and all; a pencil, quick and obedient as thought; a mirror, which retains all impressions; a faithful memory of all monuments . . . ; continuous, instantaneous, tireless reproduction of all the hundreds of thousands of excellent works that time creates and destroys on this earth. 5 Although exaggerated, this effusion captures the great hope that photography, as Arago proposes, would become ubiquitous and the medium of an accessible mass-produced art. It would provide a helpmate for the study of human creations and the natural world, from the documentation of the cultural monuments of human civilization to the tiniest microbes beneath a microscope.6 However, the introduction of photography, as a revolutionary technology capable of entering into almost all spheres of visible creation, was also in various degrees caught up in proprietary battles. The purpose of Arago’s address was to ensure a fair and equitable recompense for Louis Daguerre and Isidore Niecpe,7 who could not secure patents for their process in the French courts.8 And, as in the West, the Russian papers featured polemics comparing Henry Fox Talbot’s calotypes9 with the daguerreotype, since Talbot was promoting the claims of his own process over that of Daguerre and Niecpe. Such claims for the superiority of proprietary technology, as well as authorial claims to the resulting prints themselves, would be a strong thematic current running through the early history of photography—and might certainly be extended to debates about patents and trademarks up to the present day. But as we will see, these proprietary questions were part and parcel of Benjamin’s much denigrated “traditional” artistry—specifically the cult value of painting—haunting and in large part dominating the fi rst several decades of photography in Russia.10 It is not surprising that photography would try to defi ne itself within the already existing discourse on visual production, and particularly painting, since the new technology found itself framed to a great extent by the already existing languages

TOLSTOY IN THE AGE OF HIS TECHNOLOGICAL REPRODUCIBILITY

25

of the “mechanical” or “copying” arts.11 Many photographers in Russia had come to photography through painting, including William Carrick and Andrei Karelin.12 Embracing the vogue for the “psychological portrait,” early photographic innovators— opening studios from Paris to St. Petersburg—sought to capture not only the indexical likeness of the sitter but also the inner character of their subjects.13 With this aim in mind, they hoped to overcome the severe limitations of early photographic technologies—the need for controlled settings and long exposure times under difficult lighting constraints. Sergei Levitsky was one such notable pioneer of the photographic arts in Russia.14 Levitsky studied under Daguerre for a time and, like a great number of other early photographers, trained as a chemist; he ran studios in both St. Petersburg and Paris.15 Levitsky is perhaps most well known for his studio photographs, taken in Russia and Paris, of famous subjects, including Tsar Nicholas II, as well as authors such as Ivan Turgenev and Ivan Goncharov. Many of his earliest portraits display the deadening formality and stiffness that necessarily characterized early photographic portraiture. But some photographs proved to be exceptions—most notably his intriguing and oft-reproduced portraits of Alexander Herzen.16 In one 1861 portrait, Herzen reclines with head on hand, seemingly peering beyond the photographer, out above the level of the camera, visually signaling to a “reality” behind the curtain (fig. 1.1). Two remarkable stories attest to the enduring impact of this photograph. The fi rst is the fact that the image is widely regarded as the inspiration for Nikolai Ge’s painting The Last Supper (Tainaia vecheria, 1863). Ge was deeply interested in Herzen, and it was reading Herzen’s memoirs in 1861 that led him to write to the author to request a copy of the Levitsky photograph, then in circulation as a lithograph.17 Such a desire was due not only to the reputation of the radical Herzen himself but also to the striking aesthetic success of the portrait. The figure of Christ in Ge’s painting ruminates in an adaptation of Herzen’s pose. While seeming to fulfill a vision of photography in the age of painterly realism as the “handmaiden of art” (as it was designated—and degraded as “manual slavery”—by the likes of Lady Eastlake and Charles Baudelaire), in Ge’s case a photograph served as something more, as a “higher” inspiration.18 Herzen would himself remember one of Levitsky’s photographs (probably the famous reclining photograph) at the end of a dinner party during his exile in London in 1862. In his memoirs, he recalls, The guests began to leave about twelve o’clock. . . . By way of thanking those who had taken part in the dinner, I asked them to choose any one of our publications [from The Bell ] or a big photograph of me by Levitsky as a souvenir. [Pavel] Vetoshnikov took the photograph; I advised him to cut off the margin and roll it up into a tube; he would not, and said he should put it at the bottom of his trunk, and so wrapped it in a sheet of The Times and went off. That could not escape notice.19

Figure 1.1. Sergei Levitsky, portrait of Alexander Herzen (1861); The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Yuri Molodkovets.

TOLSTOY IN THE AGE OF HIS TECHNOLOGICAL REPRODUCIBILITY

27

Figure 1.2 . Sergei Levitsky, portrait of “Herzen versus Herzen” (1865). Image courtesy of the Russian National Library, St. Petersburg.

And this photograph—wrapped in the (London) Times —did not escape notice. Not only were its size and its very material as a photograph hard to miss, as Herzen suggested, but it was also an image of a notorious radical figure. It was seized along with Vetoshnikov’s other documents—letters to the radical author Nikolai Chernyshevsky among them—on his way back to Russia on the following day. Vetoshnikov and his compatriots were accused of subversive (socialist) activities and exiled to Siberia. 20 Also of special note is Levitsky’s sutured photograph of Herzen (fig. 1.2). In this early photo collage, a seated Herzen gazes back at a standing Herzen, a composition that played on the photographer’s (perhaps heavy-handed) attempt to suggest the inner life of his subject. This photo, and others like it, naturally made an impression on early critics: “S. Levitsky . . . thought to depict a personage [osoba] on one and the same card in two poses and often in two different suits. These strange drawings [risunki],

28

CHAPTER 1

in which the photographed are speaking as though with one another . . . , are pleasing, and I would not be surprised if they become the fashion.”21 This kind of photograph, however, did not become Levitsky’s fashion. When he returned from Paris to St. Petersburg, Levitsky took what Sergei Morozov describes as a turn toward “the path of realistic art photography” (put′ realisticheskoi khudozhestvennoi fotografii), that is, away from his “infatuation with surface effects” (uvlechenie vneshnimi effektami).22 Following the work of Levitsky, the Nizhny-Novgorod photographer Andrei Karelin was one of the most influential figures in portraiture and pictorial photography in the late nineteenth century. Karelin tried to achieve the most dynamic images possible within the limits of instantaneous photography through the use of intricate settings and theatrical poses and costumes, described as reminiscent of seventeenth-century Dutch painting. 23 When the photographs were successful (aided by new lenses capable of adding a greater depth of field), the suggestive gestures and gazes of his photographic subjects were capable of conveying new meanings, as the “action in these photographic short stories unfolds before the eyes of the spectator.”24 Karelin’s portraits, often reflecting the visual language of academic painting in their domestic scenes, became posed events transcending the confines of the instantaneous static image. 25 Objects and people in a carefully arranged tumult populate his scenes, with windows or mirror often operating as points of meeting between players or suggesting a depth of psychological reflection, situated as microscenes within the scene. 26 And as is the case in figure 1.3, Karelin, the bearded figure before the mirror, might make himself part of the expanding cast in any scene. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his own relationship to the creation of theatrical scenes, the theater director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko would write on just this subject in his own praise of Karelin, whom he met during an excursion on the Volga River. Nemirovich-Danchenko chronicled his impressions in his travelogue Along the Volga: Sketches and Impressions of a Summer Excursion (1877). Here, in a section titled “Photography Promising to Kill Painting,” he describes Karelin’s particular talents: “Karelin has invented an apparatus which conveys [his subjects] receding into the depths of the scene . . . just as they do in reality. His device is subject to only one law—perspective. . . . In his works there are no imperfections, in short, it is a picture [kartina], it is entirely a work of art!”27 What struck NemirovichDanchenko was Karelin’s unique use of additional photographic lenses (convex and concave) that did not distort the image’s perspective or proportions.28 With a mimetically correct depth and artistic construction enabled by mastery of his mechanical means, Karelin’s portrayal of a scene might capture the most prescient moment of a “story,” suggesting a denouement that could take place within, and even beyond, the still frame of the photograph. In theatrical terms that would appeal to NemirovichDanchenko, it suggested a life that might extend offstage. As Catherine Evtuhov has noted of Karelin’s portraits, the participants are clearly active in their own representation, “playing themselves,” wherein they both form the documentary subject of bourgeois existence and make the act of posing in a domestic setting a part of that

TOLSTOY IN THE AGE OF HIS TECHNOLOGICAL REPRODUCIBILITY

29

Figure 1.3. Andrei Karelin, family in a living room, from his “Artistic Album of Photography from Nature” (ca. 1870s–1880s), Slavic and East European Collections, The New York Public Library, Image ID 51872.

existence. 29 Thus, even aside from photography’s mimetic capabilities, early photographers, subjects, and viewers became enthusiastic about the possibility of reading a whole narrative from a single well-framed photograph, even as it was still confi ned to the language and artistry of painting. And, rather than arresting a moment from a life story (as per Berger), these photographs fi nd readers ready to offer a new life story, theatrically framed, one that might also reenter the writing and picturing of history.

30

CHAPTER 1

But even as photographers such as Levitsky and Karelin honed their distinct artistic perspectives within the photographic medium, the camera as a solely mechanical device complicated photography’s claim to creative authorship. Early texts on photography in the West attributed authorship in the camera to the sun, taking svetopis′ at its most literal.30 Citing advertisements in the Western press in the 1870s, Joel Snyder shows that, perhaps more metaphorically than literally, the photographer’s role was simply to prepare the photographic material (camera, glass, paper)—“but it was the sunlight that drew the picture.”31 Such formulations distanced authorship from the photographer and placed it squarely upon the chemical reaction, and by extension, the mechanism of the camera. Unsurprisingly, given these assumptions of mechanistic capture, the Russian critic Vladimir Stasov claimed that photography comprised nothing but a “cold . . . summary of facts.”32 However, in his short autobiography Levitsky lays claim to the term, taking ownership not only of the word svetopis′ but also of the process of photographic reproduction: “At that time the word or the name ‘photography’ [ fotografiia] was not yet in use; snapshots on paper were called daguerreotypes on paper, although there was nothing in common between the daguerreotype process and prints on paper. I tried to synthesize the name and suggested a Russian word ‘svetopis′,’ which perfectly conveys the meaning of this invention.”33 Levitsky demystifies the term svetopis′ by relating it to the object of production— the photographic print. This suggests a correlation between rukopis′ (manuscript) and Levitsky’s “photoscript,” the original draft for the final printed photographic product. Like other early professional photographers, Levitsky made his claim of authorship based on his discoveries and improvements in photographic technology (interchangeable lenses, photographic paper, emulsions). He even used his new term to herald his studio, Svetopis′ Levitskogo (Levitsky’s Light-Writing).34 However, the objectivity of the photographic image continued to present a challenge to creative authorship. One of the central goals of the photographic press in the early years of photography in Russia, just as in the West, was to establish photography as a medium equal in its artistry to engraving or painting. However, likely because of cost and technological constraints, early photographic journals printed few actual photographic reproductions, focusing instead on acquainting their readership with often complex photographic techniques, including the chemical composition of the emulsions, charts for exposure times in different settings, and reviews of new advances in fi lm stock, lenses, and cameras. Journals such as Svetopis′ (1858–59), Fotograf (Photographer, 1864–66), and the later Fotograf-liubitel′ (Amateur Photographer, 1890–1909) attempted to promote an image of photography as a synthesis of art and science—the editor of Svetopis′ claiming, for example, that “photography combines in its techniques and the objectives it seeks the qualities of science, handicraft, and art.”35 Thus the journal campaigned for photography to be incorporated into the fi ne arts while at the same time promoting it as an agent for the advancement of science and craft. All these journals become sites where the scientific processes of chemical

TOLSTOY IN THE AGE OF HIS TECHNOLOGICAL REPRODUCIBILITY

31

reactions—those that occur when light produces an image—and the mechanism of the camera are deemed capable of becoming a transformative art.36 And by 1858 the once-reticent Stasov admitted that photography had seen only its prologue; great things were still to come.37

Tolstoy and Photography Before 1840, the circulation of the author’s image as a popular commodity took the form of engraved illustrations, particularly as cartes de visite. As François Brunet has noted, the emergence of photography in 1840 was “largely concurrent with the emergence of literature as a commodity and a cultural language of modernity, reflected by the fashioning of the writer figure as cultural value.”38 As a result of the rapid technological progress made in photography in the subsequent fi fty years, the medium took on a prominent role in augmenting a writer’s cultural and commercial cachet by way of a visually centered commodity—the mass-produced portrait. 39 It is no surprise then that photography becomes a palpable presence in literary culture in the mid-nineteenth century and, in particular, in the works of one of the most famous authors of the age: Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy. The photographic influences visible in Tolstoy’s literary works and in his private life become a prism through which to view the central problems of realism in artistic representation—the tension between creating and mechanical copying—which defi ne the dialectic of photography. Tolstoy was a photographic subject long before the time of his celebrity, sitting for his fi rst formal portrait at age twenty-one (ten years after the introduction of photography to Russia) in the studio of Wilhelm Senfeldt in 1849.40 However, it was the Crimean War that marked a seminal moment of convergence between Tolstoy’s artistic career and the history of photography in Russia. The young Tolstoy was a junior officer at Sebastopol, the pivotal events of which would figure in his Sebastopol Sketches (Sevastopolskie rasskazy, 1855) and The Cossacks (Kazaki, 1863).41 By the 1860s, images of “Tatars” in ethnic dress—and now in all their photographic clarity—circulated in albums and illustrated periodicals, facilitating the (stereo)typing of non-Russianness for the Russian reader. And in 1867, within a few years after the publication of Tolstoy’s earliest works, a large-scale exhibition of the peoples of the Russian empire was on view in Moscow. The exhibition created a kind of “virtual reality” with full-size reproductions of local architecture and mannequin figures in ethnic and regional costumes, from which a luxurious album of photographs was produced.42 In this album, and others of its kind, Russian imperial power claimed these ethnic minorities as a part of its vast empire. It could symbolically gather them together in lavishly produced photographic albums that served as metonyms of the empire’s power over its peoples, their marginalization, and their inclusion as a typed other (fig. 1.4).43 In this way, the individual portrait—so valued as individual (particularly for those of the dominant Russian class)—could just as easily be appropriated

32

CHAPTER 1

Figure 1.4 “Dzhigets. On the Eastern Shore of the Black Sea,” from The Album of Photographic Portraits of the August Persons and Figures Known in Russia (binder’s title) (1865). Slavic and East European Collections, The New York Public Library, Image ID 1234456.

for the presentation of a “representative type,” thereby giving up any claim to an individual referent. In fact, the Russian Geographical Society issued instructions for its members (photographers and ethnographers) who “were attempting to create a scientific study of difference.” These instructions codified the approach to photographic capture of ethnic peoples (“full-face, profi le, and full-length views”) in order that difference could be better revealed through formal and compositional sameness.44 It is certainly within this milieu, and in the midst of the horror of war, that Tolstoy sets up the structural backdrop for Sebastapol Sketches and The Cossacks. Stephen Hutchings accuses Tolstoy of “indiscriminate use” of the terms “Tatar” and “Abrek” in these early works, noting it to be “typical of the Russification era when writers and photographers were contributing to the colonizing campaign, subjecting indigenous populations to their own generic labels and guaranteeing epistemological control.”45 While such is not the case for Sebastopol Sketches, it is at least partly the case in his Cossacks, but to particular Tolstoyan effect.46 As the hero Olenin sets out on his journey to Stavropol, his imagination turns toward the Caucasus. Literary characters, photographic types, and landscapes fl ash in rapid succession like the pages of an album “with pictures [obrazy] of Amalat-Beks, Circassian women, mountains, precipices, terrible torrents, and perils.” And framed

TOLSTOY IN THE AGE OF HIS TECHNOLOGICAL REPRODUCIBILITY

33

picturesquely, as though on a contrived studio backdrop, is the vision of a woman set among the mountains who “appeared to his imagination as a Circassian slave, a fi ne figure with a long plait of hair and deep submissive eyes.”47 But rather than fi nd this Cossack type, Olenin meets Maryanka—the living, breathing Cossack woman who defies this submissive typecasting. Herself a revelation, she sparks Olenin’s awakening and helps him to see the Cossack village as “nothing at all like his dreams, nor like the descriptions . . . he had heard and read.”48 But even while Olenin might come to see “the other” as a representation mediated through image (be it photographic or literary), Tolstoy maintains Olenin’s outsider status throughout the course of the narrative—a fact revealed through the dialectics of seeing and reversals of imperial typecasting. In an emblematic moment in the story, dressed in the garb of the dzhigit (Tatar warrior), Olenin is frozen by Tolstoy’s “camera eye,” as I am calling it here: “Instead of a freshly starched collar, his neck was tightly clasped by the red band of his silk beshmet. He wore Circassian dress but did not wear it well, and anyone would have known him for a Russian and not a Tartar brave [dzhigit]. It was the thing—but not the real thing.”49 By the close of the tale, despite his perceived proximity—even in this external appropriation of the type—Olenin is still “not the real thing.” He is alienated from his now beloved Maryanka and Uncle Eroshka, who immediately return to their own affairs after an unceremonious farewell. Unacknowledged and unseen as the self he wishes to be, Olenin is reminded of his being apart, (re)framed by his own otherness. In the eyes of others, he is the Russian outsider he has always been.50 Framed in terms of the ethnographic study of “other peoples [inorodtsy],” we see confi rmation that Olenin, remaining an outsider to the culture of the other, is still an insider to, and of, imperial power; while he might perform in the dress of the ethnographic subject (an also not uncommon photographic practice of the age), Tolstoy’s study of the ethnographic gaze unmasks, and turns to the unphotographic. 51 A closer look at The Sebastopol Sketches further reveals the structural import of typecasting in the figure of the Russian soldier amid the narrative representation of the chaos, horror, and heroism of war. As Stephen Hutchings has noted, The Sebastopol Sketches utilized the “frame-breaking” technique of the Russian literary ocherk, or short documentary sketch, in order to “reveal the morally detached attitude of the voyeur who experiences war as a visual feast.”52 Zooming in and out of the mundane side of camp life and the horrors of battle and the aftermath of the camp hospital, the “armchair tourist,” or voyeur, seems to experience the gruesome realities of war.53 Here at work is again Tolstoy’s camera eye. However, as quickly as the eye might settle on any one view, Tolstoy shifts his lens to another vista— always moving, always providing another and often less superficially photographic view than is immediately apparent. This zooming effect is key in the transitions in “Sebastopol in August.” Standing with two naval officers on a high hill, we observe a losing battle from above through a pair of field glasses. While the scene begins with a picturesque description, we quickly focus on the masses of soldiers below,

34

CHAPTER 1

described as “dark stains spreading.” The meaning of these defamiliarized military movements is decoded by the officers’ interjection: “It’s an assault! [Shturm!]”54 The next section of the sketch turns, and we zoom into the individualized account of the action following the alarm on the ground. The confusion of battle ensues, and the individuated hero, the elder Kozeltsov, is mortally wounded. In the field hospital, a priest is sent to him. In a moment of sympathy for the dying man, the priest conceals the outcome of the battle: “Victory is ours at all points.” In the face of this lie Kozeltsov’s affective reaction follows: “a sense of ecstasy” falls over him as “he realized he had performed a heroic deed.”55 The key to understanding this interplay between the narrative structure, focused by Tolstoy’s camera eye, and this affective moment is found in the most often quoted line from the Sketches. In “Sebastopol in May,” Tolstoy concludes, “The hero of my story, whom I love with all my heart and soul, whom I have attempted to portray in all his beauty and who has always been, is now and will always be supremely magnificent, is truth.”56 Clearly, in Kozeltsov’s moment of ecstatic suffering, truth can never be construed as the documentary, or perhaps journalistic, account of a battle. Nor could it be found in the still frames of the photograph, capturing the evidence of the battle’s gruesome aftermath. And while the British Crimean War photographs tended to focus on just these bloody remains of battles (images circulated in newspapers to arouse patriotic anger in the mass reader), by contrast, Russian Crimean War photographs tended to depict “parade” images and heroic portraits of Russian officers, providing only a partial, sanitized image of the war. 57 Officers do provide the medium for the perspective on war in Sebastopol Sketches, but they are never static, never strictly heroic as they are in the official photographic typecasting. Rather, the heroic type is unmasked by the more important narrative truths constantly in development in Tolstoy’s works: the brutality of battle, the sympathy and mercy of others, the evil and good equally present within the chaos of war. A photograph is capable of telling only part of the story of the horrors of war; Tolstoy’s narratives, still grounded in the fi rsthand dispatches of his experience, depict the fuller picture of his realist (but not strictly mimetic) truth.58 But while Tolstoy makes his claim to a “real” that could also be made by a photograph, it is clear that Tolstoy’s heroic truth will never be the bounded, or at this historical moment sanitized, truth of photographic frames. The hero can no more remain sitting before Tolstoy’s camera eye in an ill-fitting Circassian cloak than he could in the midst of a harrowing battle. For Tolstoy, just as his camera eye is constantly moving, so too is the hero forever in motion. Upon returning to St. Petersburg in 1856 after his time as a soldier, Tolstoy again sat for a portrait, taken by Sergei Levitsky (fig. 1.5). He is formally posed, hands folded and almost smiling, captured in the traditional three-quarter cropping. In this uniform and stiff pose we might view Tolstoy too as a type: the young Russian soldier just back from the front. However, this photograph is unlike earlier photographs of Tolstoy in uniform in which his large epaulettes and dashing cape enhance

TOLSTOY IN THE AGE OF HIS TECHNOLOGICAL REPRODUCIBILITY

35

Figure 1.5. Sergei Levitsky, “Lev Tolstoy” (1856). Permissions and image courtesy of the State Museum of L. N. Tolstoy, Moscow.

the image of the Russian officer (fig. 1.6). By contrast, in Levitsky’s photograph, his garb has been stripped down to bare essentials while still being recognizable as an officer’s uniform. Looking at these two portraits, we might hear an echo of the words of the Symbolist poet Viacheslav Ivanov, for whom Tolstoy’s primary aim was to “expose the futility, falsehood, and sad illusoriness of phenomena.”59 Here we might witness the heroic “uncloaking” of Tolstoy himself. Set before the lens of the photographer of authors (Levitsky), he sheds a wartime typecasting to move beyond the field of war and into the next phase of his career—as Tolstoy the author.60 While examples of photographic seeing that I have discussed thus far in Tolstoy’s early works do not explicitly reference photography, the medium is a palpable presence in his mature fiction. Family portraiture figures so centrally in Anna Karenina (1877) that the novel has been described as “soaked in the burgeoning camera culture,” with photographs playing a visible role both in the characterization and at pivotal moments to reveal the inner thoughts and struggles of the central figures.61 Take, for example, the epigraph to this chapter.62 Here Anna, holding two photographs, almost misses seeing the depicted Vronsky on one of them as she uses this once-beloved photographic object as a tool—beloved we know since it held a place

36

CHAPTER 1

Figure 1.6. Anonymous portrait of Lev Tolstoy from a daguerreotype (1854). Permissions and image courtesy of the State Museum of L. N. Tolstoy, Moscow.

next to the photographs of her son. This detail not only gives us insight into the ubiquity of the photographic medium and its automatization of perception (the immediate recognition of likenesses) but also serves as a key to Anna’s psychological state. The photograph allows for proximity by proxy (perhaps not unlike Ge’s impulse to request a copy of an admired celebrity’s portrait): while the subject (Vronsky) is distant (and out of mind), the photograph recalls his features and her love for him, while at the very same time overshadowing the original photographic subject of her thoughts, her son.63 As her son is eclipsed—that is, no longer seen in photographs or mind—Vronsky surges back, seeming to jump from the frames of the photograph. Incursions of photographic culture also figure prominently in criticism of Tolstoy’s work. Julia Wedgwood’s “Count Leo Tolstoi” (1887), a title that conflates the author’s self with his works, reflects some of the contemporary skepticism about this infusion of “photographic realism” in prose:

TOLSTOY IN THE AGE OF HIS TECHNOLOGICAL REPRODUCIBILITY

37

He gives us the most trivial and the most momentous circumstances of life with scientific impartiality; no other novelist describes such great things and such small things, as it would seem, with equal interest. He shows us the destiny of nations, the crash of armies . . . and then he takes us to the dressing-room where a young lady is hurrying off to a ball, and tells us, although the fact has no influence whatever on the story, that a tuck had to be run in her dress at the last moment!64 Wedgwood notes that there is a kind of democratic equivalence in the way that photography is capable of capturing both the tiny details of the everyday and the events of war. While expansive in its ability to copy nature and experience, this mode of seeing photographically is both inherently limiting in its emotional range and overwhelming in its seemingly unlimited variety of images. She states, “Tolstoi gives a slice of experience. He selects nothing but a certain area of vision. . . . There is no concentration, no rapid sweep of the brush, no broad shadow, everywhere only a transcript of the bewildering variety of actual light and shade.”65 Such a description, lamenting the absence of the kinds of creative authorship that characterize the other arts, is also like that of early descriptions of svetopis′, which is more akin to a transcript of the world than to a literary narrative.66 Not only that, but every view is restricted to a certain field of vision as captured in Tolstoy’s metaphorical lens. Literature, by contrast, should be transformative; it should “give the soul some shadow of satisfaction in the things wherein it is more novel than the world.”67 For Wedgwood, photography’s influence in other spheres of artistic representation as well as in everyday life is symptomatic of the ethos of the current epoch. Photography can only turn the “desultoriness of life” into the even greater fragmentation of modernity.68 More recent critics have shown more appreciation for the photographic in Tolstoy’s narrative optics. Through an analysis of “perspectival vision” in Tolstoy’s fiction, Thomas Seifrid demonstrates how ocular-centric metaphors and photographic technologies infuse Tolstoy’s work. Both Seifrid and Donna Orwin discuss Tolstoy’s metaphor of the magic lantern, which he utilizes in War and Peace to describe the psychology of Prince Andrei and Princess Mary.69 On the eve of battle, Andrei’s restless thoughts torment him: The whole of life presented itself to him as a magic lantern, into which he had long been looking through a glass and in artificial light. Now he suddenly saw these badly daubed pictures without a glass, in broad daylight. “Yes, yes, there they are, those false images that excited and delighted and tormented me,” he said to himself, turning over in his imagination the main pictures of his magic lantern of life, looking at them now in that cold, white daylight—the clear notion of death.70 For the character Andrei, the magic lantern metaphor provides the condensation of a life into discrete moments that make that life story legible, however artificially or

38

CHAPTER 1

“falsely” at fi rst. The magic lantern, originally developed in the seventeenth century, enjoyed a new popularity in the nineteenth century as a way to present photographic material on glass plates. Like a slide show, the projected glass-plate photograph is briefly illuminated as a focused image before being supplanted by the following one.71 Schopenhauer, writing in 1844, more clearly likens the underlying problem of the limited field of attention and the “disintegration of perception” to the “magic lantern” in which “only one picture can appear at a time; and every picture, even when it depicts the most noble thing, must nevertheless soon vanish to make way for the most different and even most vulgar thing.”72 As Seifrid notes, a similar metaphor shapes the very fabric of the later Hadji Murad.73 In his diary Tolstoy remarks that the whole life of his title character is mediated through a “peepshow” (in English in the original), likely referring to a pre-stereoscopic device that focuses the vision of the viewer on a single image in a dark box. Here, through a glass lens, with the changing of either photographic or painted slides, “fi rst one thing appears, and then another.”74 Tolstoy lays bare the inherent limitations of the photographic medium and the central problem of perception it presents, but this structure is far less limiting than Schopenhauer’s critique and one that, as we have seen, precedes his articulation of perception in photographic terms. Tolstoy’s use of the photographic metaphor reveals the limits imposed by the instantaneous photograph and its confi ning frames but also presents each of these sharp flashes as an image of real clarity (and perhaps a development in his own way of photographic thinking)—a momentary expansion of perception that might, however briefly, reveal a truth in everyday experience. Through the rise of Tolstoy’s literary celebrity, photography would also come to occupy an increasingly central space in his life. As we will see, his own experience with photography reflected both his embrace of modern technology and a conservative diffidence about its applications in popular culture. While it has been observed that Tolstoy “dabbled in photography,” only one surviving self-portrait is Tolstoy’s own (fig. 1.7).75 The photograph was taken in 1862, the same year that Tolstoy married young Sophia Andreevna Behrs. In this amateur photograph, the subject is off-kilter and his clothing is crumpled. His gaze at the camera is somewhat less sure than in his other photographic portraits; as both subject and author, he looks as though he is anxious to check whether the camera has successfully captured the shot. While this photographic portrait often appears in book albums of Tolstoy’s images, it is always righted, cropped, and retouched to correct its formal deficiencies and the less than self-assured authorial persona. Herein, the material fragmentation of the print functions to make whole the “right(ed)” image of the author. But a more telling moment of Tolstoy’s authorship is also lost in this cropping—his handwritten note proclaiming, “I took this of myself” (sam sebia snial). In addition to labeling the image with name and date, this simple statement does more than lay claim to the photographic object (as his signature does); it also lays claim to the photographic process. The snapshot coupled with the authorial note” though not aesthetically successful as judged

TOLSTOY IN THE AGE OF HIS TECHNOLOGICAL REPRODUCIBILITY

39

Figure 1.7. Lev Tolstoy, self-portrait at Yasnaya Polyana with autograph, “I took this myself” (1862). Permissions and image courtesy of the State Museum of L. N. Tolstoy, Moscow.

by the conventions of a formal portrait, suggests more about the inner workings of this moment and Tolstoy’s authorship—capturing both his artistic self-consciousness and his right over the photographic medium. Despite this active foray into photographic technology, later in life Tolstoy displayed a reticence about having his image reproduced. In 1892 Sophia began preparing a multivolume collection of her husband’s works, which would include a

40

CHAPTER 1

portrait of Tolstoy in each volume. Tolstoy stated, “It is unseemly to print several different portraits of me in the new collected works. Isn’t it immodest and awkward to do this in my lifetime?”76 And a few years later, Tolstoy noted to his confidant Vladimir Chertkov that he felt “unnatural significance” was being placed on his portraits.77 These anxieties about the mass exposure and reverence of his image can also be attributed to Tolstoy’s engagement with the problems of mechanical reproduction and his own crisis of authorship following the publication and success of Anna Karenina. In the late 1870s, Tolstoy experienced a spiritual conversion affecting his selfunderstanding as an author and moral guide—his crisis of authorship. In this period Tolstoy rejected his most famous novels, Anna Karenina and War and Peace, turning the focus of his writing away from realist fiction toward pedagogical and spiritual works that would be accessible to the broadest possible audience and, in particular, to the neglected lower classes. For this turn, Tolstoy would be remembered in Soviet consciousness as “the great Russian author Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi,” who “raised his voice against the social order of petty-bourgeois Russia, against social inequality, against the aristocratic government, . . . against official religion, against the literature and art of the ruling classes.”78 Tolstoy was now spending most of his time at his estate, Yasnaya Polyana, in a self-imposed semi-exile, having thrown off the trappings of a privileged Russian nobleman (as only a nobleman could do) and the false allures of modern society in favor of a simple pastoral existence—one that removed him from the “artificial nature in cities with smokestacks, palaces, [and] locomobiles.”79 And in 1891, in a move that most clearly demonstrated his rejection of privileged celebrity and the market order, Tolstoy also renounced his authorial rights and royalties to his works published after 1881, intending that they should be freely accessed and reproduced for the people at the lowest cost rather than for the profit of either him or his publishers. This is not to say that Tolstoy favored abandoning all modern technological means for the circulation of art. Along with Vladimir Chertkov and Ivan Sytin, Tolstoy founded the alternative press Posrednik (Intermediary) in order to take control of the means of production, with great success. Indeed, one estimate holds that up to 3,500,000 copies of various works were distributed by Posrednik each year in the 1890s.80 His publications had the look of popular lubochnaia literatura (chapbooks) in format, which included a cover illustration with a short tale, but were distinctly Tolstoyan in both their visual and their literary content. Posrednik was intended to make art accessible to the lowest classes while combining a moral message and the “cultural enlightenment” integral to Tolstoy’s authorial and spiritual self. As Jeffrey Brooks has shown, “The mission of Posrednik . . . was to produce ‘the best content at the cheapest price,’ and the best content was as near as possible to the teaching of Christ. . . . Each literary work is a moral or immoral act of its author, and therefore the question of what to write is identical with the question of how to live.”81 To this end, the mainstay of Posrednik’s publishing ventures in the early years was Tolstoy’s

TOLSTOY IN THE AGE OF HIS TECHNOLOGICAL REPRODUCIBILITY

41

popular stories and his pedagogical writings, which synthesized the clarity of moral instruction and the integrity of the traditional fi ne arts. For his cover illustrations, Tolstoy employed the sophisticated realist paintings and drawings of Ilya Repin and Nikolai Ge rather than the simple, cartoonish, and often satirical images characteristic of the popular lubki (mass-produced printed image) of the age. In so doing, Tolstoy transformed the art of the “high” gallery space into a broadly available and accessible object of consumption for his mass audience. Accessible art for the masses was key to Tolstoy’s polemical tract What Is Art? (1897). Simply put, art for Tolstoy was “that human activity which consists in one man’s consciously conveying to others . . . the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them.”82 But this infection, a “communion” that would further a common human good, was qualified. In his list of those devices of “counterfeit art,” Tolstoy included “imitativeness” (podrazhatel′nost′ ).83 Speaking in almost the same critical terms as Julia Wedgwood once did of his own works, Tolstoy characterizes this method as “describing in minute detail the external appearance, faces, clothing, gestures, sounds and positions of characters with all the accidents that occur in life.”84 Painting becomes counterfeit when it renders itself like photography, thereby “abolishing the difference between photography and painting.”85 But it is essential to note that photography itself is not brought to bear as an art—good or bad.86 It seems that for Tolstoy it is rather of a lower order, implying that photography could not even be art. However, that does not mean that photography might not have a use value in Tolstoy’s system of aesthetics. Many of the Posrednik publications also made Tolstoy’s photographic imprint centrally visible (plate 2). The chapbook covers of his “Slaughter-Free Diet or Vegetarianism” (“Bezuboinoe pitanie ili vegetarianstvo”) and “First Step” (“Pervaia stupen′”) both featured reproductions of photographic portraits of Tolstoy. While he may have professed to Chertkov a few years before that “undue significance” was being placed on his portraits, in these instantiations his image is clearly anchored to his words and his moral messages as both a signature and a savvy advertisement. Perhaps not coincidentally, Tolstoy’s image became broadly emblematic for the vegetarian movement in both Russia and the West.87 Here, in a shift that seems to realign Tolstoy’s authorial assertion of control over the camera (“I took this of myself”), the public bears witness to the next phase of his evolution in media culture. Tolstoy “lowers” the notion of literary art by publishing popular stories and tracts but feels obliged to ennoble or elevate this humble content with images by elite artists (Repin, Ge) or of the writer as creator. Structurally, photography is placed on a par with painting as possessing an “aura”— the aura of the author. While his earlier works utilize photographic objects and ocular metaphors to reveal the complexities of the human condition in the modern age, these later works and actions take issue with media and technology. Thus, what we witness within Tolstoy’s writing during this period of his greatest fame and his crisis of authorship is both a rejection of the modern cultural condition

42

CHAPTER 1

of Russia—a clear anxiety about the means of mechanical reproduction—and his active reformulation of these means toward the creation and mass dissemination of an accessible, Tolstoyan art.

Celebrity by Proxy, Authorship in Color By the end of the nineteenth century, Tolstoy’s home at Yasnaya Polyana had become a site of cultural pilgrimage; it was inundated with visiting authors, journalists, family, and Tolstoyans, all of whom left Yasnaya Polyana with their own narrative about the great author and his intimate life to add to his increasingly public image.88 Photographs of the author were in high demand in the popular marketplace. And although he often grew impatient with all the attention that disrupted his work, Tolstoy sat for numerous visiting photographers, including the famous color photographer Mikhail Prokudin-Gorsky. But in addition to professional photographers, two amateur photographers became equally, if not more, instrumental in shaping the iconography of Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana between the mid-1880s and his death in 1910: his wife, Sophia Andreevna, and his friend and publisher Vladimir Chertkov. As we will see, their proximity and relationship to Tolstoy shaped the character of the intimacy they each tried to show in their photographs while also enabling them to utilize photography as a proxy to expand the cult of Tolstoy and their own control over his person and the dissemination of his works. Sophia Andreevna, like many other amateur photographers, used photography to create an intimate event with her subjects. These events, and the subsequent photographs, would become as central to her inner life as her diary but with a much more public face. Sophia Andreevna was an amateur painter who fi rst learned the photographic arts at the age of sixteen while still living at home under the tutelage of a close family friend. Later describing the experience in her autobiography, she stated, “Photography was quite complicated back then. One fi rst had to wash the photographic plate with collodion, then place it in a bath of silver, strengthen it with sublimate, dry it and then repeat the process with albumenised paper. . . . I spent the whole summer doing photography.”89 Sophia Andreevna, now wife to the famous Lev Tolstoy, again took up this difficult art in the 1880s. It was at Yasnaya Polyana that she developed her prints in a small nook under the stairs. As evidence of her dedication to photography, she consciously chose to continue using glass plates in order to maintain a higher image quality, even when user-friendly fi lm cameras became available at the end of the nineteenth century.90 Her photographic project, which reflects a remarkably accomplished artistry, was a documentary extension of her diary and her role as archivist for her husband, primarily centered on life at Yasnaya Polyana.91 Her subjects included many introspective and theatrical self-portraits, her family, and—more than any other—her husband.92

TOLSTOY IN THE AGE OF HIS TECHNOLOGICAL REPRODUCIBILITY

43

This kind of photographic collection demonstrates Sophia Andreevna’s desire not only to record a close and happy family life but also to re-create a domestic intimacy within the frame of the photographs. She captured Tolstoy engaged in everyday activities that would be impossible to achieve in the formal space of the studio: horseback riding, writing, playing with his grandchildren. Her photographs clearly reflect her cherished relationship to her subjects and to the photographic act itself. From the moment of taking the snapshot to preparing the print, photography offered a coping mechanism for Sophia Andreevna, allowing her to treasure the moments captured in the photograph while distancing herself from their more traumatic associations. Photography provided a particularly effective way for her to cope with the loss of her children and her increasingly difficult family life with her husband. Vanechka, the Tolstoys’ youngest son, was a subject of photographic grieving throughout his illness and in death. One of her photographs captures the acute pathos as she leans into a photographic portrait of Vanechka, placed as though on an altar of the boy’s possessions, on the porch of Yasnaya Polyana (fig. 1.8). In this way Sophia Andreevna’s photographic practice reflects Susan Sontag’s observation on the link between family and photography, in Sophia Andreevna’s construction of a “portrait chronicle” that “bears witness to [her family’s] connectedness.”93 While these photographs were intended primarily for Sophia Andreevna and her family—to reinforce that connectedness of the nuclear family unit—she as often gave them away: “I mounted photographs all evening, and tomorrow I will give them all away and I will not work on photography anymore. Today I mounted 80 [photographs].”94 This impulse, at once to control the personal domain within the frames of the photograph and to detach herself from these fragments of her family life, is another instantiation of the traumatic pull between the public and the private in the Tolstoy family.95 Even though Yasnaya Polyana was removed from the life of the capital and Moscow, visitors (Tolstoy’s disciples, editors, literary pilgrims, and reporters) still intruded into the domestic sphere, taking away with them their snapshots (literal and figurative) as mementos of Tolstoy’s and his family’s life. Caught in this photographic dialectic, Sophia Andreevna’s diary also reveals a marked concern for the public portrayal of Tolstoy in photographs. At the end of December 1904, Tolstoy’s close friend and editor in his later years, Vladimir Chertkov, arranged to have the photographer Albert Mey take a picture of Tolstoy together with Chertkov himself, Pavel Biriukov, Ivan Gorbunov-Posadov, Ivan Tregubov, and Sergei Popov. Sophia Andreevna was fundamentally opposed to having the photograph taken and circulated in the press, writing in her diary, The episode with the photograph still hasn’t died down. . . . They had persuaded Lev Nikolaevich on the sly, without telling us, to have his photograph taken with a group of “dark ones.” . . . Group photographs are taken of schools, picnics, institutions, etc., so I suppose that means that the Tolstoyans are an “institution”! The public would seize on it, and all want to buy pictures of

Figure 1.8. Sophia Andreevna Tolstoy, self-portrait with a photo-portrait of the deceased Vanechka (1895). Permissions and image courtesy of the State Museum of L. N. Tolstoy, Moscow.

TOLSTOY IN THE AGE OF HIS TECHNOLOGICAL REPRODUCIBILITY

45

“Tolstoy with his pupils”—that would make them laugh! But I wasn’t going to let them drag Lev Nikolaevich from his pedestal into the mud.96 Although by 1904 Tolstoy had certainly been photographed in group portraits, including with fellow authors (taken by Levitsky and others), Sophia Andreevna sees that this set of “dark ones” (Tolstoyans) would obscure the image of Tolstoy that she sought to protect—that of the literary genius, secular artist, and husband. Moreover, Chertkov’s proposed image of Tolstoy would give validation to a group, that blessing of the authorial aura that Sophia Andreevna felt was beneath him. Sophia Andreevna goes on to relate that she sought out Mey to claim the negatives of the photograph before they were printed. And in a fi nal act of violence against its possible dissemination, she went so far as to try to scratch out Tolstoy’s image with her earring, and she smashed the glass negatives so that they could never be reproduced.97 By positive contrast, Sophia Andreevna intended that many of her own intimate photographs with Tolstoy should be published. Not long before Tolstoy’s death she noted, “Today I saw in the newspaper [Iskry] the photograph taken of Lev N. and me on our last wedding anniversary. Let thousands of people see us there together, hand in hand, as we have lived all our lives.”98 Even as her marriage to Tolstoy came under increasing strain in disagreements over family obligations and Tolstoy’s royalties, Sophia Andreevna insisted on frequently taking their portraits together. These images, influenced as they were by trends in the pictorial photography of the day, transformed everyday experience into artistic objects. Her images were also the basis for renderings of the Tolstoys by artists such as Ilya Repin and Leonid Pasternak. And while such photographically based transformations underlie the image of the lauded author that Sophia Andreevna hoped to shape, her photographs do capture, almost against her will, the whole drama and inner life of her relationship with Tolstoy. The photograph of Sophia Andreevna and Tolstoy taken on their wedding anniversary is perhaps most telling in this regard (fig. 1.9). Sophia Andreevna looks touchingly at her husband as though trying to connect to him, holding him up like a prop, while Tolstoy looks out at the camera. His gaze rests not on his doting and devoted wife but on the dissembling camera. On the back of her own copy of the photograph, Sophia wrote, “There is no holding [him]!” (Ne uderzhat′ !).99 Further, we might hear the author’s voice from his diary: “Another request for photographs in the pose of loving spouses. I agreed, but was ashamed the entire time.”100 Or, moving further back in time, we might also see reverberations from Tolstoy’s infamous letter to his wife in December of 1885 (after the author’s spiritual crisis). He wrote, “You have evolved for yourself a means of forgetting, of not seeing, of not understanding, of not recognizing. . . . It so happened that when a spiritual revolution was taking place inside me and my inner life had changed, you ascribed no significance . . . to it.”101 In light of such an accusation, Sophia Andreevna’s gaze in the photograph becomes evidence of her photographic

Figure 1.9. “Last Wedding Anniversary, 23 September 1910,” photograph taken by Sergei Bulgakov at the request of and staged by Sophia Andreevna (1910); autograph by Sophia Andreevna. Permissions and image courtesy of the State Museum of L. N. Tolstoy, Moscow.

TOLSTOY IN THE AGE OF HIS TECHNOLOGICAL REPRODUCIBILITY

47

blindness—however hard she might be looking at her husband, she remains unable to see into Tolstoy. Her photographic framing traps him into an image that runs counter to his own inner quest for authorial selfhood. Vladimir Chertkov’s photographs, like those of Sophia Andreevna, exemplify the visual evidence of Chertkov’s intimacy with Tolstoy in his fi nal years—an intimacy that coincides with the increasing distance between Tolstoy and Sophia Andreevna. From this intimate vantage point, his photographic enterprise, begun in 1905, sought to document the life of Tolstoy on an even larger scale than Sophia Andreevna’s (a complete visual transcript of Tolstoy’s daily life), and always with the aim of public distribution.102 To this end, Chertkov employed the latest equipment, the assistance of the professional photographer Tomas Tapsell, as well as a large photo lab on the fi rst floor of his nearby house. His portable camera, capable of taking snapshots in rapid succession, allowed him to produce almost simultaneous photographs, akin to cinema stills, compiling photo stories about Tolstoy’s life as seen in walks on his estate and meetings with visitors.103 While Sophia Andreevna’s photographs tended toward the more formal and posed, Chertkov documented Tolstoy largely in action and in moments of absorption. Tolstoy was so used to his constant presence and the presence of his camera that he remarked in his diary in 1909, “Chertkov was making my portraits. Did not interfere with my writing.”104 These photographs reflect a shift away from staid authors’ portraits, which placed Tolstoy on an authorial pedestal, to ones that captured the author living his simple, peasant way of life. To this end, Chertkov printed a series of photographic postcards accompanied by Tolstoyan proverbs. In an even more succinct format than Posrednik’s chapbooks, the postcard’s single plane united Tolstoy’s image with his teachings, channeling the author’s intentions for his Posrednik publications into a photographic lubok. Consequently, these postcards—entering into a market already saturated with collectible images of theatrical actors and even Tsar Nicholas II’s family (what Louise McReynolds calls “secular icons”)—seamlessly disrupted a market system based on consumption value.105 While satisfying a demand for the author’s image, they are still inscribed with the infecting power of the Tolstoyan message. Beneath a photograph of the solitary Tolstoy walking through the snow, one such postcard reads, “When you feel dissatisfaction with your surroundings and your situation, go away, like a snail into its shell, conscious of your submission to the will of God, and wait for that time when He will call you to do His work in life.”106 Significantly, these postcards also contain the imprint of Chertkov’s authorship, each being labeled “fot. V. Chertkova” (“photo by V. Chertkov”). Chertkov’s attribution of authorship to himself is yet another way for him not only to be in the proximity of Tolstoy but also to lay claim to his image and message. In so doing, Chertkov, perhaps even more than Sophia Andreevna pictured hand in hand with Tolstoy on their anniversary day, enters into, and claims, Tolstoy’s picture.107

48

CHAPTER 1

Photography and the Fragmentation of Authorship After Tolstoy’s decision in 1891 to give up the copyright to his works written after 1881, Sophia Andreevna and Chertkov were constantly at odds over the author’s manuscripts and legacy.108 While copyright in literature had long been established and was a well-documented point of contention between the two spouses and their allies in Tolstoy’s fi nal years, the two photographic collections represent another front in the continuing battle to claim rights over Tolstoy.109 Sophia Andreevna’s and Chertkov’s photographs were entangled in their claims to a particular picture of Tolstoy—claims made stronger by both the author’s proximity and the artistry in composition and presentation. But with the death of Tolstoy, these photographers’ claims over the great author ceased to have anything to do with the process of photographic production and centered on the already realized, and infi nitely reproducible, material product: the photographs themselves. This focus on the photograph shines additional light on the crisis of authorial representation in Tolstoy’s fi nal years, since the recognition of avtorskoe pravo (copyright) for photography would also indirectly issue from the figure of Tolstoy, partly because of the intensive campaigns of one of his most famous portraitists, Mikhail Prokudin-Gorsky. By 1908, Prokudin-Gorsky, the Russian pioneer of the three-color plate photographic process, was rising in prominence as the editor of the leading amateur photographic journal, Fotograf-liubitel′.110 In this year he wrote to Tolstoy, Not long ago I had the occasion to develop a color photographic plate which someone had taken of you. . . . The result was extremely bad, since, apparently, the photographer was not well acquainted with his task. . . . Photography in natural colors is my specialty, and it is possible that you might by chance have come across my name in print. . . . It seems to me that, by reproducing your image in true color and its surroundings, I will perform a service to the whole world. These images are everlasting—they do not change. No painted reproduction can achieve such results.111 Tolstoy agreed, and in his later account of the meeting with Tolstoy in the Zapiski Russkogo tekhnicheskogo obshchestva (Records of the Russian Technical Society), Prokudin-Gorsky noted that Tolstoy took a lively interest in the newest inventions and particularly in the problem of reproducing photographs in color.112 Prokudin-Gorsky’s color portrait captures the iconic figure of Tolstoy—sitting in a chair in the woods at his estate—for the first and only time in “natural” colors from life (plate 3). While the majority of Prokudin-Gorsky’s images on glass plates were displayed as projections, the photographer also featured a select print reproduction each month in Fotograf-liubitel′. This image of Tolstoy appeared in the September 1908 issue of the journal, utilizing a lithographic transfer process, and the journal’s readers were invited to hang the picture “on the wall.”113 A demand for the image

TOLSTOY IN THE AGE OF HIS TECHNOLOGICAL REPRODUCIBILITY

49

in other forms quickly arose, and the image was also reproduced (by the publishers Sun [Solntse] and Light [Svet]) as a postcard. Not only did this iconic photograph of Tolstoy fi nd its way into the homes of many Russians of the age, but it would also open important doors for Prokudin-Gorsky. His fame following the publication of the Tolstoy image helped him to gain an audience with the tsar (who was an avid amateur photographer himself), during which Prokudin-Gorsky was able to present, and receive approval for, his plan to photograph the distant reaches of the Russian empire.114 At the same time Prokudin-Gorsky was also campaigning for the legal recognition of photography as a peer of the other arts (literature, painting, music). To this end, he was invited to testify before the State Duma during its deliberations on the passage of a new copyright law. Drafted and passed by the Duma in 1909 and ratified by the tsar in 1911, the new law grew to include photographic authorship in its list of protections, now akin to protections afforded to the other arts.115 Most important, however, this new legal status fulfilled photography’s longed-for dream (as Prokudin-Gorsky saw it) of formal recognition as an art form. But, as we will see, this recognition came just as the vision of photography as one of the arts was giving way to the widespread dominance of photography as a journalistic practice. Tolstoy’s departure from Yasnaya Polyana in 1910, followed soon after by his death at Astapovo Station, brought the issues of access to his manuscripts and his person to the foreground of public consciousness. Tolstoy’s death would be a media sensation, covered by an army of journalists, photographers, and cinematographers and watched by the entire world. In the years that followed the death of the author, Tolstoy’s life and legacy continued to play out dramatically in photographs.116 In the 1911 “Tolstoy number” of the journal Solntse Rossii, the tension between Chertkov and Sophia Andreevna, as well as the newest advances in copyright protection, are readily apparent.117 Solntse Rossii, published from 1908 to 1917 and headed by the editor Alexander Kogan (1878–1949), featured short stories, poetry, and literary and artistic reviews alongside the newest fashions in art: painting, sculpture, dance, theater, and photography. Photography was featured not only as an evolving artistic medium—including full-page reproductions of photo studies (études) by Miron Sherling, Moisei Nappelbaum, and Karl and Viktor Bulla—but also documentary photographs of public events (air shows, visits from foreign dignitaries) and literary celebrities at their summer dachas.118 In this Tolstoy number, in addition to a short piece on the problems existing between Sophia Andreevna and Chertkov in their dispute over manuscript rights, the journal printed a selection of photographs taken by each amateur photographer. The images are reproduced with signatures, as well as the all-important notice stating that the photographs included in the issue “may not be reproduced without the permission of the photographers.”119 While the images can be read as underscoring the legitimacy of each of their claims, they also serve as a proxy claim to ownership of Tolstoy’s legacy (if they can’t have his manuscripts, they can have his image). In a parallel to these visual claims of ownership,

50

CHAPTER 1

and hoping to raise its own cachet in the marketplace, the journal notes that those photographs credited to Sophia Andreevna will appear exclusively in Solntse Rossii. Here the issue of photographic authorship as defi ned by its artistic status is eclipsed by the problems of claiming rights over the author, his figure, and his legacy; in these pages, the media marketplace fractures the image of Tolstoy.120 Although this moment of overt attention to the problem of reproduction and authorial rights was fleeting, it augured the rapid changes for the photographic press. In the years following Tolstoy’s death the popular illustrated press continued to capitalize on the author’s image. For several years in a row on the anniversary of Tolstoy’s death, Solntse Rossii published issues dedicated to various aspects of his visible private life, including “Tolstoy’s peasant friends” and “Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana.” While the photographs presented in the 1911 issue remained intact (in a rectangular framing, distinctly and explicitly captioned), the later Tolstoy issues continued to fragment further the authorial legacy of Tolstoy and the image shaped by his photographers. In a “Tolstoy issue” from 1912 the great author’s tiny image (in black and white), surrounded by color images of his estate, adorns the pages in various poses. The miniature Tolstoys repeat various iconic (Chertkovian) motifs: Tolstoy and his walking stick, Tolstoy on horseback (plate 4).121 Here the figure of Tolstoy has been reduced to a small cutout and further miniaturized through the mechanism of reproduction, becoming the visible extractions of the Tolstoyan aura.122 Seeming to attempt a capture of this fragmented aura, at least in its presentation on the glossy color insert at the center of the issue, there appears an excerpt of Sophia Andreevna’s autobiographical work in progress, My Life. The excerpt runs under the heading “The First Performance of Count Tolstoy’s Comedy, Fruits of Enlightenment, from the notes of Countess Sophia Andreevna Tolstoy,” with a small portrait of the countess taking the place of the initial or drop cap of an ornamental text. The same Chertkovian Tolstoy miniatures are peppered throughout the insert, which describes the domestic production of Tolstoy’s play with Tolstoy as director and his children and household staff in the starring roles. What is remarkable about Sophia’s text—and characteristic of the whole of her memoir—are her assertions about and corrections to the public perception of Tolstoy, that is, her active role in shaping the reception of his image and his words.123 She quotes Tolstoy’s diaries (which she lays claim to in her very citation of the text) on the occasion of the production, which Tolstoy characterizes as “difficult” and “tiresome” for the actors. Sophia’s voice replies, “But it was not difficult or tiresome for the young people at all. Everyone was having fun, and all of them even treated their roles with a certain reverence.”124 And again highlighting the contradiction between her account and Tolstoy’s, she remembers Tolstoy’s laughter and joviality at the performance—while he remembers only his shame (“no vse taki stydno”).125 The text ends without any larger rumination on the nature of this contradiction; rather, it leaves this piecemeal presentation of Tolstoy, Sophia Andreevna, and Chertkov’s photographs to continue to play out the drama of Tolstoy’s memory—and the seeming impossibility of

TOLSTOY IN THE AGE OF HIS TECHNOLOGICAL REPRODUCIBILITY

51

making him whole again. Though Tolstoy was able in life to utilize photography to both extend and preserve his authorial aura in an age of mechanical reproduction, the cult of his celebrity—promulgated by professional photographers as well as by Sophia Andreevna and Chertkov—fragmented and mobilized his authorial persona, now endlessly cropped, miniaturized, and collaged into new commodities. Tolstoy, in his death, is incorporated into the now uncontrollable space of public image culture, becoming one of the refracted objects of photography’s dominance over the visual landscape of the twentieth century. In the late nineteenth century, professional and amateur photographers actively struggled to define and defend the role of authorship in photography, attempting to reconcile its objective images of reality with creative artistry. At the heart of this struggle, particularly for the professional photographer Mikhail Prokudin-Gorsky, was the recognition of copyright, which would not only protect the rights of photographers and their photographs but also recognize photography as an artistic medium in its own right. Gary Saul Morson has remarked that for Tolstoy “the self is not a system, but an aggregate. It is a cluster of habits and memories, which incorporate and ‘excorporate’ elements of the random in an endless succession describable by no overarching design.”126 If he is right, then Tolstoy’s self presents for us the perfect modern photographic subject. As this subject (and as an emblem of his age), amid the increasing incursion of mechanical reproduction into the literary sphere, Tolstoy became a focal point for debates on the nature of artistic representation and the role of the author, catalyzed by his own crisis of authorship in the 1870s. And in giving up his authorial rights and allowing his literary works to enter the public domain, he anticipated the fate of his own image, as well as that of photography in the popular press. Tolstoy’s photographic aura, at once potentially abstracted from his whole authorial persona and finally free from static iconizing frames, became the property of the public sphere, to be freely reauthored by new generations of viewers and readers.

2 THE DIFFUSION OF DOMESTICATED PHOTOGRAPHY

Oh, infi nite volumes of poems that I treasure in this small library of glass and pasteboard! . . . We are looking into stereoscopes as pretty toys, and wondering over the photograph as a charming novelty; but before another generation has passed away, it will be recognized that a new epoch in the history of human progress dates from the time when He who — never but in uncreated light Dwelt from eternity Took a pencil of fi re from the hand of the “angel standing in the sun,” and placed it in the hands of a mortal. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” 1859

Photography captures a world spectral and fantastic. The spectral—colorless, monochromatic, and flat-toned. The fantastic—because it speaks great words in a banal sputter: “Stop, instant!”—and time obeys. . . . Old photographs reveal a world, only superficially similar to the human, but at the same time one that is deeply hostile to its living essence. In it are the most horrible things for a person—his doubles and at the same time his corpses, because that which has been pictured has already died. But if three-dimensionality is given to the fl at photograph by the stereoscope, then the nightmare is still greater, as it seems to become palpable. Maximilian Voloshin, from a review of Alexander Ivanov’s “The Stereoscope,” 1909

In 1909 Maximilian Voloshin prepared a glowing review of a new story for the fi rst issue of the journal Apollon. “Stereoscope: A Twilight Story” (“Stereoskop: Sumerechnyi rasskaz,” 1909), the fi rst literary effort of Alexander Ivanov, follows its protagonist into his fantastic imprisonment within a found stereoscopic photograph of the Hermitage.1 In a world of unsettling sepia-colored twilight, the protagonist wanders from the Egyptian wing of the Hermitage to the site of his own childhood home and back to the photographer himself—as the sole living being among a tribe of photographic doubles, neither living nor dead. For Voloshin, who was left with a “strong impression of horror,” the story’s power lay in the “complete” reality of the photographic world created by Ivanov’s pen—a dead virtual reality that is terrifyingly recognizable in its uncanny character. 2 We, like the protagonist, are left in a state of perceptual uncertainty: is this photographic world animate or inanimate? Dead or alive? Palpable or illusory?3 While this story’s generic history goes back to the ekphrasis-to-phantasmagoria short story, à la Edgar Allan Poe’s “Oval Portrait” (1850) and Nikolai Gogol’s “Portrait” (1835), Ivanov’s “Stereoscope” enacts a play with a no longer new photographic technology that had become increasingly ubiquitous in Russian homes in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. As photographs became fi xtures in everyday life—from the pages of the popular press (journals, newspapers) to treasured photo albums—and as the animation of photography by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Alexander Ivanov demonstrates, the once-revolutionary medium could be relegated to the backdrop of the prose of the age. In the pages of Ivanov’s story, photography is no longer challenging the literary sphere: rather, it infuses the literary text with a certain color (in this case, the literal color of the faded sepia of an old photograph).4 Stereoscopic photography, which figures so centrally in Ivanov’s story, was introduced by the 1850s, very early in the history of photography in Russia. 5 While stereoscopic views could be created by amateur photographers at home, they were most often souvenir or collectible scenes of famous world sites—a way to travel without ever leaving the comfort of one’s armchair. Through the stereoscopic viewer, a traveler or friend could visit a three-dimensional distant land. Certainly Ivanov’s story assumes a familiarity with the technology and the medium, not pausing long to describe either viewer or stereograph (a double photograph slightly offset that when seen through a stereoscopic viewer creates the illusion of a three-dimensional image—see fig. 2.1). But what makes this story an exception in its genre is its reversal of the usual directionality. Whereas Poe or Gogol, or even Turgenev’s photographically infused “Klara Milich” (1883), bring the uncanny threat into the real world through the window of the portrait, here the stereoscope facilitates the viewer’s literal falling into the photographic image and back into his past.6 The power of the image is to break its frame—to bring the dead back into the world of the living and the living into the 55

56

CHAPTER 2

Figure 2.1. William H. Rau, “Pompeian Room in the Imperial Winter Palace,” stereograph distributed by Berry, Kelley & Chadwick Publishers (1903).

world of the dead. In the stereographic view, the viewer could lose his own world by entering into that of the photograph through the annihilation of artistic mediation. While one might fairly harbor some doubts about whether photography could bring back the dead or transport the living into the past, photography, by way of mobile metaphor, certainly enabled such connections. In Andrei Bely’s literary portrait of the recently deceased Leonid Andreev in 1922, a portrait seeking to reach out to the “real” Andreev, Bely remembers a short encounter at a literary soirée as through “a sudden sharp glance, a flash of magnesium that bridges spaces,” one “that abolishes the representation of ‘Leonid Andreev.’”7 While this moment describes seeing a theatrical Andreev across a room, it more essentially captures the distance of time and death, that obscuring shell that the flash of a camera might break through in order to capture the real Andreev, not just a representation of him. But Bely is reaching not only across the salon room to the enigmatic figure of Leonid Andreev but across time—to snap a clear (and near) photographic image in his imagination. Photography’s metaphorical ability to traverse time, space, and the very fabric of lived reality reflects both modernist aesthetics and the central anxieties that plagued the artistic world of Andreev and his contemporaries. As Vladimir Kupchenko reminds us in his writings about Voloshin, every poet and writer in this period had his or her own carefully crafted image, a mask that was constructed from the “alloy of creative work and the external manifestations of each individual,” however far that might be from a real or true human nature.8 These masks, symptomatic of the ubiquitous “life creation” (zhiznetvorchesto) that overflowed from the pages of the Symbolists in the decade preceding the publication of Bely’s reminiscences, served to further blur the lines between life and art, self and celebrity.9 But Bely’s framing of Andreev also reflects an age in which photographic technologies and the use of

THE DIFFUSION OF DOMESTICATED PHOTOGRAPHY

57

the photographic medium were saturating the image-making market. Moreover, his portrait further reveals how the larger-than-life Leonid Andreev offered an elusive figure onto which critics, contemporaries, his literary heirs, and even the author himself could project a particular, but often shifting, modernist worldview. Andreev’s own self became an emblem of the modernist world, shaped by photography.10 At this tumultuous beginning of the twentieth century, only a few decades after the invention of photography, not only were photographs fixtures in every household, but wealthy and intrepid amateurs, like Sophia Andreevna Tolstoy, took to their darkrooms to develop and print their own photographs at home. In this chapter, we ask how this diffusion of photography and its extension into the domestic sphere and projection out again affected the modes of literary production for three Silver Age authors: Andreev, Voloshin, and Vasily Rozanov.11 There are many parallels to be drawn between Voloshin and Andreev to greater and lesser degrees: Voloshin was a painter, Andreev an amateur artist; Voloshin’s dacha would be a site of refuge not only for the internal émigré author but also for fellow members of the intelligentsia, while Andreev’s was his retreat from the world.12 Most significant, both were prolific amateur photographers. While this chapter will be principally devoted to Andreev’s color photography—his consuming passion in the years leading up to the First World War—Voloshin and Rozanov offer key points of contrast in the growing diffusion of domestic photography in these same years. Taking inspiration from the “autobiographical collage” of Andreev’s Autochrome collection—which was for a time scattered among private collections and state archives in Russia, France, and England—this chapter resists a strict chronological retelling of any single life story.13 Here we will see the ways in which Andreev actively worked to shape his literary reputation in text and image, subsumed in the diffusion of image culture and his own celebrity, in dalliance with the frame-breaking power of the uncanny (unheimlich). Playing out our scenes in Andreev’s dacha—his grand home in Karelia—allows us to explore the imbrication of the uncanny with the safety of home. For as Anthony Vidler reminds us, “Unheimlich is rooted by etymology and usage in the environment of the domestic, or the heimlich, thereby opening up problems of identity around the self, the other, the body and its absence: thence its force in interpreting the relations between the psyche and the dwelling, the body and the house.”14 Andreev’s photographic legacy (literarily) domesticated and its projected life beyond the frame reveal the complex negotiations across all manner of boundaries: public and private, light and dark, photography and cinema.

Capturing Andreev in Life and Works To his contemporaries Leonid Andreev presented a larger-than-life figure, the many descriptions of whom blurred the lines between fact and fiction. He was well known as the author of horror stories, prompting the oft-cited rejoinder from Lev Tolstoy, “He tries to frighten me, but I am not afraid [On pugaet, a mne

58

CHAPTER 2

ne strashno].” However, this is most likely a misquotation from Tolstoy’s actual response to Andreev’s works. In his correspondence with Andreev in 1901, Maxim Gorky relays what Tolstoy said as follows: “There is an anecdote about a boy who told his comrade a story: ‘There was a dark night—are you afraid? In the woods a wolf howled—are you afraid? Suddenly it is under the window—are you afraid?’ Andreev is the same: he writes and always seems to be asking me: ‘Are you afraid? Are you afraid?’ Me—I am not afraid!”15 The link between the man and this legend—the man who would dare to frighten the great Tolstoy—emerged from the worlds of Andreev’s stories and spilled out onto the pages of literary and popular press alike. The slippery connection between man and art was exacerbated by the self-conscious branding facilitated in the popular press and vividly apparent in all the Symbolist critical discourse about the very assumption that the human being, literature, and brand image could or should be interfused. Stories such as “Abyss” (“Bezdna,” 1902), “Lazarus” (“Eleazar,” 1906), and “Darkness” (“T′ma,” 1907) with their treatments of violence, darkness, and the eerie manifestations of the otherworldly, earned Andreev his renown in Russia as a “defiant and decadent author” and in English translation as the “Edgar Allan Poe of Russia.”16 Andreev was in fact an avid reader of Poe, and when asked by his friend and fellow author Boris Zaitsev about the significance of Poe’s poetry, he responded, “Edgar Poe says that there is Night in the world. And this is true.”17 This figurative night entangled with Andreev’s real night: as friend and fellow writer Kornei Chukovsky recalled, “He almost always wrote late at night. I do not remember a single thing of his that would have been written by daylight.”18 This darkness—real and imaginary—colored nearly every account of Andreev throughout his writing career, clouding over his literary world and his public image. Frederick White has argued for the consideration of Andreev’s depression and fight with mental illness in reading his works as well as the reminiscences of his contemporaries. “Each of [his manic depressive episodes] influenced the way that Andreev interacted with the world around him. . . . It was just such personal experiences that [his contemporaries] had to describe, to put into the larger context of Andreev’s life and literary works.”19 This diagnosis, while clearly visible to us today, was more often rendered into the language of the modernist universe of his day: darkness, spots, masks— imagery that was significantly animated and made manifest not only by Andreev but by these contemporaries and in the life of Andreev in images and texts in the years that followed. Such was the case as Andreev’s friends and fellow authors attempted to re-create their own image of Andreev in a small compilation of reminiscences simply titled A Book about Leonid Andreev (Kniga o Leonide Andreeve, 1922). Here his contemporaries—including Maxim Gorky, Kornei Chukovsky, Alexander Blok, Boris Zaitsev, and Andrei Bely—leave the reader with perhaps more puzzles than answers as each of them searches for the real Andreev. In his reminiscence, the Symbolist Alexander Blok remembers being “struck” by Andreev’s biblical story “Judas

THE DIFFUSION OF DOMESTICATED PHOTOGRAPHY

59

Iscariot and the Others” (“Iuda Iskariot i drugie,” 1907) which painted Judas in startlingly vivid colors as the protagonist of the biblical story: “After that, nothing amazed me anymore, but I fi rmly knew what Leonid Andreev was all ‘about.’ . . . ‘About ’: I say that phrase, but what does it mean? I do not know and he did not know.”20 This ineffable clarity—melding his prose and his life into one imposing figure—would form the author’s reputation. 21 Bely, in his account of Andreev, also mixes these worlds, fi nding “spots” of darkness and masks everywhere: This is precisely the impression he made on me in life. He dwelt on the problem of the self, and all the best work he gave us was his “self”; Andreev’s reason tears itself apart in the self-criticism of our daily consciousness, which was transferred into spheres of cosmic darkness. The day is covered over with spots of masks; and night enters day; a daylight masquerade unfolds, and he hides his head like an ostrich, in association with a circle of people who seem to him like mere masks. 22 The mask was extraordinarily prevalent in Symbolist language and imagery of the period and was likely taken from Andreev’s own works. Arkady Alekseevsky identified Andreev with Lorenzo, the hero of his Symbolist play The Black Maskers, noting that Andreev spoke about “black spots,” which would appear and grow larger, taking over his entire field of vision—particularly in times of distress in his personal life. He concluded, “Undoubtedly, the author was aware of the organic link between his ‘black companions’ and the ‘black masks’ of Duke Lorenzo. It may be that The Black Maskers was made under the impression of just these black spots.”23 And here Bely found in Andreev a man who reflected an entire modernist universe as well as a pivotal moment in Russian history: “He was Don Quixote in the most wonderful sense: the greatness of his creation in the vivid aspiration toward the great; the life of his books is an epic. In his guise lived the ‘Self’ of the entire world, which he was never able to grasp.”24 However, as Bely states, this aspiration toward the “great,” colored with the imagery of modernist darkness, was not the conscious aim of Andreev’s artistic project; rather, Bely concluded, it was Andreev’s authorial subjectivity that unconsciously cast a shadow coloring the whole of this literary and historical moment. Andreev’s literary career had begun in 1898 with the publication of “Bargamot and Garaska,” an Easter story, in the newspaper Courier (Kur′er). The story caught the eye of Maxim Gorky, who introduced Andreev to the neorealist Sreda (Wednesday) salon, ushering him onto the contemporary literary scene. 25 In 1902 Andreev married Alexandra Mikhailovna Veligorskaya, who brought a measure of stability to his life and who, shortly thereafter, gave birth to their fi rst son, Vadim. However, in 1905 Andreev’s revolutionary themes (e.g., in “Marseillaise,” 1903) aroused the undesired attention of the conservative extremist group the Black Hundreds, and he was forced to go abroad. It was there in Berlin that Andreev wrote

60

CHAPTER 2

some of his masterpieces, such as the story “Lazarus” and his play The Life of Man (Zhizn′ cheloveka), the latter of which would be a great success in both Moscow and St. Petersburg through stagings by two of the greatest directors of the period, Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold. While still abroad in 1906, Andreev was dealt a great blow when his wife Alexandra died shortly after the birth of their second child, Daniil. At this time he took up Gorky’s invitation to join him on the island of Capri. In A Book about Leonid Andreev, Gorky relates a short but moving anecdote about Andreev and his fi rst son when Andreev was consumed with depression after Alexandra’s death. Gorky fi nds Andreev terrifying Vadim with stories of death and swiftly rebukes him for telling such tales to a child. Andreev replies, “And if I cannot speak of anything else? . . . I’ve finally grasped how indifferent ‘beautiful Nature’ is, and I only want one thing— to tear my portrait out of this tritely pretty little frame.”26 In a short explication of his literary process, Andreev describes his experience with the constructed and natural world in similar terms, stating his need to contain the world within his own framing: “Nature itself, all of these seas, clouds, and smells I must adapt for internal intake, since in their raw form there is too much physics and chemistry about them.”27 Andreev’s letters and contemporaries’ accounts constantly underscore the tension between his personal life and his literary world as he searched for a way to frame experience through his individual vision. It was also during this time—when Andreev felt that he would like to tear his life out of its tritely pretty frame—that he worked on his story about Judas Iscariot, transforming him into a representative of his own dark universe. Stories such as “Judas Iscariot and the Others” particularly struck Andreev’s critics in their ability to render the horror of human life as a material thing. Long before he became an author, Andreev wrote in an early diary that he wanted to write a book that would “give shape to vague strivings, the semi-conscious thoughts and feelings, which are the lot of the present generation. . . . I should like my book to make people turn pale with horror as they read it . . . like a terrifying dream, to drive them mad.”28 While this is an early, and distinctly exaggerated, remark, Andreev admitted in 1918 that this had clearly been his literary path. 29 For many of his critics Andreev’s “vague ideas” did reflect an inner horror—one that Andreev was able to make leap out not only from himself but also from his literary framing and into the imaginations of his readers. In the words of Zinaida Gippius, Andreev’s texts contained “dreadful delights, which formerly [had] been suppressed and concealed, but now . . . [were made] legitimate.”30 Countess Sophia Tolstoy reacted even more strongly to the concentrated horror that permeated Andreev’s stories, saying that he invited his readers to look at “the decomposed corpse of human degradation.”31 As he had hoped, in his mature works Andreev could strike his readers viscerally by transforming the abstract evils of the world (an idea, a myth) and making them materially manifest with a startling realism “bordering on naturalism.”32 A manifestation of the mythical is at the heart of the story “Lazarus”—the walking “decomposed

THE DIFFUSION OF DOMESTICATED PHOTOGRAPHY

61

corpse of human degradation”—in which Lazarus is followed out of death by death itself, which is seemingly imprinted on his features and infects his being: What death had succeeded in doing with Lazarus’s face and body, was like an artist’s unfi nished sketch seen under glass. On Lazarus’s temples, under his eyes, and in the hollows of his cheeks, lay a deep and cadaverous blueness; cadaverously blue also were his long fi ngers, and around his fi ngernails, grown long in the grave, the blue had become purple and dark. . . . His body, puffed up in the grave, retained its monstrous size and showed those frightful swellings, in which one sensed the presence of the rank liquid of decomposition. 33 Here Andreev brings death into his literary frame and animates it in the character of Lazarus, forcing his reader to look death in the face. Andreev is able to effect a defamiliarization so extreme that it seems capable of escaping its literary frame and slipping into material reality.34 As Dmitri Merezhkovsky stated in a 1908 review, what is most unsettling about Andreev’s work is that, by making manifest these horrors, he sides with “ugliness, horror, and chaos,” and thus he himself becomes chaos, the psychological chaos envisioned in “The Red Laugh” as well as the chaotic horror of death in the here and now in “Lazarus.”35 For Zinaida Gippius, these literary images become an all-too-real manifestation of his thoughts, grounded in a world that could be neither good nor moral. The image of Lazarus, as the material manifestation of a present death—“like an artist’s unfinished sketch seen under glass”—recalls the association between death and photography. As Martin Jay notes, the camera’s ability to capture the evanescence of life (experienced in a temporal flow) introduced “a kind of visual rigor mortis, which forged a link between the camera and death.”36 In the early days of photographic portraiture a subject would have to sit deathly still for minutes in order to capture a faithful image, drawing to the forefront the arresting qualities of the camera. As camera technology evolved, the subject no longer had to remain still for such a long period, but the click of the camera still wrests its subject out of history in order to produce an image. The camera enacts violence on its subject, freezing and arresting it in time—as death arrests the life of a human being—while the photograph remains as material evidence of that death in the constant state of the present. Thus photography at one and the same time shows us what is “utterly past” along with, as Siegfried Kracauer terms it, a “detritus” that was once present. As Kracauer continues, “Now the image wanders ghost-like through the present, like the lady of the haunted castle.”37 Andreev’s Lazarus also exists in this liminal space—trapped as it were like the image in a photograph—between the static realm of death and the world of the living, unable to wholly occupy either. Following this period of great artistic productivity, Andreev moved to the Karelian Isthmus in 1908, at this time part of the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland. There he bought land and commissioned a young architect from Eliel Saarinen’s Helsinki studio,

62

CHAPTER 2

Andrei Ol, to build a dacha for him in the village of Vammelsuu.38 He also remarried; his new wife was Anna Ilinichna Denisevich, his typist at the time. The household also included her daughter, his son Vadim, and Andreev’s mother, while his son Daniil was left to live with his maternal aunt in Moscow.39 While Andreev did travel to Europe for brief periods with his family and spent some time in St. Petersburg, most of the rest of his life would revolve around the great dacha in Finland. In keeping with the now established Andreev mythos, he retreated here to write through the night, completing his masterpiece “The Seven Who Were Hanged” (“Rasskaz o semi poveshennykh,” 1908) and plays such as The Black Maskers (Chernye maski, 1908), Anathema (Anatema, 1909), and He Who Gets Slapped (Tot kto poluchaet poshchechiny, 1915). From 1908 onward, Andreev primarily wrote plays while living in a place that looked distinctly like an enormous, highly stylized stage set (plate 5). As Boris Zaitsev recalled, This dacha amply expressed his new course; it suited him and did not suit him at the same time. When I fi rst approached it in the summer, in the evening, it reminded me of a factory: chimneys, an enormous roof, an absurd unwieldy mass. The same black-haired Leonid Andreev, with sparkling eyes and dressed in a velvet jacket, lived there, but he had already begun a new life. He got married, he was building a new nest, he was full of new plans more grandiose than before and his soul was more buffeted by fame, wealth, by a burning desire to drain the cup of life dry—a cup that seemed bottomless at the time. . . . The dacha was built and decorated in the northern modern style. . . . Admirers of the hall and foyer of the Moscow Art Theater would like this place.40 This dacha, as Zaitsev observes, had a theatrical grandeur that many of his contemporaries equated with this period of Andreev’s life—a vision that was constructed in the many images of the house in popular architecture magazines, illustrated journals, and textual accounts.41 Chukovsky also notes that everything that surrounded Andreev seemed “decorative, theatrical. The whole décor of his house sometimes seemed to have come from the stage property department; and the house itself . . . with its tower, seemed to be the invention of a talented director.”42 Not only was his furniture highly stylized—amalgamations of traditional Russian woodworking and enormous modernist pieces, also the subject of many photographs—but his largerthan-life paintings hung in prominent places throughout his home. His multipanel pastel of “Someone in Gray,” the central figure of his successful play The Life of Man, hung in his stairwell, while his enormous reproductions of Goya’s demons hung in his office, seeming to provide the backdrop for the world of his writing. Though Andreev was physically isolated from the hustle and bustle of Petersburg life, he was still constantly concerned with his public image as an author. He was deeply affected by the criticisms that he received in the newspapers, a fact that was well known in his lifetime.43 Boris Zaitsev remarked,

THE DIFFUSION OF DOMESTICATED PHOTOGRAPHY

63

It must be said that the critics, chroniclers, and reporters who were so perfect at describing his life, played for him a large and burdensome role. . . . The capital trailed after him in the most vain and pitiful form—it agitated him, pushed him to chase success, fame, and applause, and then cheated him. . . . I do not even know if he would have been able to write for himself, out of the public eye. He hated the crowd and worshipped it. He despised the newspapermen and could not free himself from them.44 Andreev struggled not only with his image as defi ned by public criticism but also in relationship to his characters. As Alexander Kaun, an early critic of Andreev in the English-speaking world, also observed of Andreev’s writing, Andreyev projects his personality in all his writings. . . . Andreyev’s subjectivity is both his weakness and his strength. His art suffers from lack of detachment. . . . Andreyev’s subjectivity lends his works a human appeal of such profound sincerity that it atones for the artistic weakness. . . . While creating a character he became saturated with its psychology, acted and lived like this character, with the abandon and earnestness of a child playing some make-believe game.45 While possibly a symptom of his manic depression (as Frederick White has claimed), Andreev’s deeply invested playacting would fuel his furious bursts of creativity and, conversely, drive him into the depths of despair.46 In fact, at the height of Andreev’s fame around 1910, letters and salacious articles published in the press claimed that Andreev was mad and suffering from “a nervous disorder.”47 But—in the Symbolist language of zhiznetvorchestvo— Andreev was often accused of immersing himself in his characters, imparting himself to them, thereby losing himself in their creation. In 1906 in the journal Vesy (The Scales) Bely also laments Andreev’s inability to “separate himself from his characters” and suggests that by merging with them, Andreev comes to contemplate the night of his own creation, leaving his readers no exit from his darkness, where anxiety “inundates everything.”48 Chukovsky echoes these sentiments in his description of the relationship between Andreev and his characters, feeling that they become, like all his themes, “colossal, much larger than himself,” thereby obscuring Andreev’s own view of the universe.49 For his contemporaries and critics, Andreev’s prose presented not only a frighteningly real place, inhabited by the embodiment of mythical chaos, but one that had the potential to spill out of its textual framing, flowing over and into both Andreev the writer and his readers. In light of these literary portraits of the author, casting and recasting the author in his various roles and in various masks, it is worth revisiting Bely’s metaphorical photograph. Can the camera capture a real Andreev? For Bely, there is clarity in the flash of magnesium in the darkness: the flash breaks through his perceived outer shell, the theatrical and literary Andreev, to reveal what is hidden from view.50 But as the camera captures life in its frozen image, in that flash, it also arrests life and

64

CHAPTER 2

summons death into the present moment. And perhaps, in the case of the imagined Andreev, this potential is the power to call forth Andreev the author’s threatening images of death and darkness.

Publishing a Scrapbook, or the Making of a Photographic Autobiography But Andreev was not only captured in Bely’s metaphorical photographic image and his contemporaries’ enigmatic textual portraits. He was also photographed widely in studio portraits, which were then produced as postcards and included in his publications, creating as it were the Andreev “brand.”51 And, most notably, Andreev was caught up with photographic technology himself as an amateur photographer during his years of greatest artistic productivity, from 1908 to 1914. These images of Andreev, framed in negotiation between the public and private, modeled part of a larger matrix of photographic culture of the age. The reproducibility and portability of photographs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century led to their proliferation, providing an inexpensive form of image making for cartes de visite, family portraits, and postcards. Photographs circulated between public and private spaces; they were taken in studios, published in journals and books, and enjoyed in the intimacy of the home. Both studio portraits and snapshots taken by amateur photographers were collected into family albums and intimately shared, while personal snapshots of famous figures—like Leonid Andreev and Lev Tolstoy—were made public objects for consumption in popular journals such as Solntse Rossii (see chapter 1).52 In fact, picture postcards and cartes de visite played key roles in the rise of celebrity, including authorial celebrity, in Russia. In Louise McReynolds’s terms, these postcards became “icons of the secular age.”53 Often not used as postcards were intended—a medium of epistolary communication—they were collected, admired, and shared within the pages of memorial scrapbooks.54 Here a devoted reader could chart the development of a favorite author over the years, in a parallel to the ritual photographing of growing children.55 Andreev did not paste his studio portraits into his own scrapbooks; his studio images seemed to remain public objects, passed around among strangers as postcards, sometimes signed by the author, or as the portrait frontispiece in the glossier printed editions of his work. While Andreev’s presence is almost always striking in photographs, the photographs themselves are by and large interchangeable and generic, framing his collected stories with a reminder of his imposing and authoritative figure. In one example of a mature Andreev (fig. 2.2), the author sits facing the camera placed slightly below eye level, lending his image precisely the gravitas of “the author.” Against a dark studio backdrop, there is no other marker for the time or place; little distracts from his visage apart from the inclusion of Andreev’s all-important name in the caption (here in a more rudimentary, hand-etched lettering with the publishing house V. Vodovozova, St. Petersburg).

THE DIFFUSION OF DOMESTICATED PHOTOGRAPHY

65

Figure 2.2 . Postcard portrait of Leonid Andreev, publisher V. Vodovozova, St. Petersburg, ca. 1910s. From the author’s collection.

Andreev’s two small and incomplete scrapbooks present two other facets of Andreev, situated on each side of his own photographic enterprises. The fi rst of his two scrapbook albums dates from the beginning of his first marriage to Alexandra and the birth of their son Vadim (fig. 2.3). The scrapbook commemorates the earliest years of Vadim’s life, but its faded sepia-toned photographs span only three pages: the rest are empty of images—an imageless break coinciding with the end of this fi rst period of his life with Alexandra.56 And while Andreev does not appear in the first

66

CHAPTER 2

Figure 2.3. Leonid Andreev’s scrapbook from Vadim’s infancy (1903–4). Image courtesy of the Leeds Russian Archive.

album, the second incomplete album playfully and darkly heralds the next period of his private life, coinciding more closely in time with the studio portrait taken near the height of his fame. The cover of the second, smaller album features the caricature of a demon photographer with stereographic camera in hand, drawn by the photographer himself (fig. 2.4). Pasted in the album, housed beneath this creature,

Figure 2.4. Cover and interior page from Andreev’s scrapbook (1909). Images courtesy of the Leeds Russian Archive.

68

CHAPTER 2

Andreev and his sons are posed around the dacha in Vammelsuu, at times brooding, at times almost smiling at their photographer-father. Andreev too is included, or, more likely, Andreev included himself in the photo album. His pose in an oval portrait looks out beyond the camera (set up either by Andreev himself or with his wife Anna to snap the shot). By contrast with the confrontational stance of the great majority of his studio portraits, this image of the author at home is more relaxed but certainly not less posed or less authorial. He is set off from his children both by the frames of the photograph and by the abstracted gaze that signals a feigned disengagement with his camera but also with everything else in the room. Even within the intimate setting of home and scrapbook, such a photograph cannot help but recall the author rather than the father. While these two categories of Andreev’s photographic images (his scrapbooks and his studio portraits) are largely opposed to each other in both their subject matter and their mode of viewing, it is clear that his photographic practice actively negotiated his public and private images. Andreev not only was acutely aware of his reputation but also actively participated in its promulgation, as another indulgent moment taken from his archival materials shows. Among these materials is a title page from his first collected works (1909) onto which he has pasted a favorite self-portrait. He is standing, arms folded, in front of his enlarged copy of one of Goya’s sketches of demons (fig. 2.5), which hung prominently in his house in Vammelsuu. In the corner of this page there is faintly written in Andreev’s hand: “My book” (Moia kniga). Here Andreev creates his own collaged frontispiece for his book and takes control of the very production of his own image in the photograph, choosing his own frame. Playing out what Vidler calls one of the unheimlich’s favorite motifs—“the contrast between a secure and homely interior and the fearful invasion of an alien presence,” it theatrically foregrounds Andreev as the author of horror stories, standing before monumental demons.57 His dark shadow becomes part of the demonic scene, seeming to take on a life of its own, and serving, as a “play of doubling . . . where the other is, strangely enough, experienced as a replica of the self, all the more fearsome because apparently the same.”58 This effect is also described by Herman Bernstein on the occasion of his visit to Andreev’s dacha at Vammelsuu. Reprinting this famous photograph of Andreev, Bernstein seems to confuse the Goya sketch with character sketches from Andreev’s plays (fig. 2.6): Andreyev stood in his study against the wall, on which he had drawn with charcoal figures of weird-looking men and women, such as he depicted in his dramatic “presentation” called “The Life of Man.” It was half dark in the large room, and as he spoke about the psychology of the crowd, rapidly and vigorously and with an eloquence that marks the best passages of his works, he himself looked like one of the characters that stepped out from the frame of his literary portraits. 59

Figure 2.5. Title page of Andreev’s fi rst Collected Works (Sobranie sochinenii) into which the author has pasted his photograph (1909). Image courtesy of the Leeds Russian Archive.

70

CHAPTER 2

Figure 2.6. “Andreyev with a fanciful drawing by the author, at the right,” from “A Day with Andreyev in His Russian Home,” by Herman Bernstein, New York Times, September 5, 1909.

This photograph, taken in the intimate space of his home and placed in his own copy of his literary works (his book in that dual sense), reflects Andreev’s attempt to combine his public and private personas. This is not the staid author’s portrait of the traditional frontispiece, nor is he posed with, or in proximity to, his family in a domestic setting. Rather, Andreev frames himself in a home that is inhabited by demons, promoting the image of an author who is master of the otherworldly. Or, in the very act of framing the photograph, Andreev demonstrates his very power to traverse frames—out of the world of demons (which he himself framed) into our reality. And in its most literary rendering, like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Andreev transgresses the bounds of the good or moral universe. The publication of several of Andreev’s images in the illustrated journal Solntse Rossii further reveals the dialectic between Andreev’s domestic photographic practices and his public literary and artistic persona.60 On the cover of an October issue from 1911 (only a few weeks before the “Tolstoy Number”), Andreev is pictured on the balcony of his dacha (fig. 2.7).61 Building primarily on the author’s literary celebrity, this cover image sets the stage for the viewer to be invited into Andreev’s monumentally theatrical—but also intimate—space, his home. This intimacy is captured more explicitly in a photograph included in the following pages of this issue: here his son Vadim is presented with the caption “L. ANDREEV—AMATEUR-PHOTOGRAPHER; the son of Leonid Andreev—Vadim: photo taken by his father” (fig. 2.8).62 This photograph, which might at one time have occupied its own place in a scrapbook, is transformed by the pages of the journal. No longer framed by an intimate caption (in the album the subject would have been identified more simply as Vadim or by

Figure 2.7. “Leonid Andreev (from the latest photographs),” cover of Solntse Rossii, no. 51 (1911).

Figure 2.8. Leonid Andreev, “L. ANDREEV—AMATEUR-PHOTOGRAPHER; the son of Leonid Andreev—Vadim: photo taken by his father,” Solntse Rossii, no. 51 (1911).

THE DIFFUSION OF DOMESTICATED PHOTOGRAPHY

73

date), Andreev’s private photographic life and his eldest son are made into a public offering—Vadim is caught in the role of an artistic model and an extension of his father’s literary celebrity for the public to consume. Andreev the author-father also figures in a return to his sparsely filled scrapbook album as it takes on a surprisingly “extimate” afterlife. Vadim appropriated the fi rst album, the album featuring photographs of his mother, Alexandra, as a personal diary and scrapbook after his father’s death, fi lling its remaining blank pages with handwritten reflections. Vadim’s presence is all the more important as it marks the son’s claim on Andreev—both claiming the scrapbook as his own and making claims to his own story.63 Perhaps by way of reclamation, it is not incidental that Vadim turned the once-cherished scrapbook into a diary (fig. 2.9), one that

Figure 2.9. Vadim Andreev, diary fragment with portraits from Vadim’s passports (ca. 1920). Top: “Junker Schmidt wants to shoot himself with a pistol—K. Prutkov [A. K. Tolstoy et al.].” At center, “This photograph made my whole journey with me, pasted in my passport, issued in Marseille before my departure for Batum.” At bottom, “Taken in August in Neivola [Finland] in the middle of August 1920.” Image courtesy of the Leeds Russian Archive.

74

CHAPTER 2

in remediation would become his own photo-illustrated memoir— Childhood (Detstvo, 1963)—and the later, The History of One Journey (Istoriia odnogo puteshestviia, 1974).64 Childhood in particular painted a picture of Andreev the man, shaped by the son’s struggle to make an emotional connection to his father, and in so doing it downplayed the anti-Soviet stance that defi ned the fi nal years of Leonid Andreev’s life (thus making his father more palatable to Soviet readers, authorities, and censors). But perhaps most significantly, with regard to the father’s scrapbook as the son’s inspiration, Vadim’s memoir barely mentioned Andreev’s second marriage to Anna Denisevich. Rather, Childhood seeks to reconstruct a fading image of his mother and to reestablish a connection with his distant father—that is, to form a lasting textual connection with the small family pictured in the album. Such a textual transformation springing from empty scrapbook pages recalls Barthes’s Camera Lucida and of course photography’s affective “return of the dead”; here, too, it is important to recall that Leonid Andreev himself is not pictured in the scrapbook.65 In Vadim’s memoir, growing from the autobiographical collage of the album into a textual springboard of memory of his mother “as though on accidentally doubleexposed photographic fi lm,” the son crafts his own picture of his childhood, grappling with the fact that his little self had been overshadowed by his father’s personality and his father’s stature as literary figure.66 From his own doubly pictured self, Vadim reverses the gaze of his father’s camera with his pen in order to defi ne his father in his own literary terms. Returning to Solntse Rossii, we see in the January 1912 issue another example of the public face of Andreev’s visual artistry, which colors the dialectic of Andreev as father-photographer-author: one of Andreev’s color self-portraits and a pastel drawing (plate 6).67 In the fi rst self-portrait, placed in the middle of the page, Andreev is dressed in a deep red beret—undeniably the costume of the artist.68 The caption reads, “Leonid Andreev (from a color photograph, the work of L. Andreev).”69 Just a few pages later, this same issue features a full-page color reproduction of Andreev’s pastel portrait of Judas, along with a short excerpt from the author’s then-famous story “Judas Iscariot and the Others” (plate 7).70 The text reads, “The short red hair did not hide the strange and unusual form of his skull, exactly split at the nape of his neck by a double blow of a sword and then put together again. It was clearly divided into four parts and it inspired distrust, even alarm: for behind such a skull there could be no quiet or harmony; behind such a skull there always sounds the noise of bloody and merciless battles.”71 The editors of the journal point out that Andreev’s readers may not have known that “the famous author imprints his creations not only with a pen, but sometimes also with a brush” and that his paintings and drawings had attracted the attention of art connoisseurs, who “had the opportunity to get acquainted with the paintings of L[eonid] N[ikolaevich] in the home of the author.”72 We, as readers of the journal, are once again invited into the author’s home, here to admire his hand as a visual artist. Andreev’s particular authorial “stamp” is also revealed: his ability to “imprint” in various media. Andreev is presented as master in the self-fashioned

THE DIFFUSION OF DOMESTICATED PHOTOGRAPHY

75

self-portrait, where the red beret hints at the Andreev of “The Red Laugh” and those red locks of Judas—the characters of chaos who originate in Andreev’s imagination. The notion of imprinting recalls the characterizations of media, and specifically photography, made by the art critic Rudolph Arnheim in the early twentieth century. Media, he writes, guarantee “resemblance by being . . . a product of the object in question . . . by being mechanically produced by it—just as the illuminated objects of reality imprint their image on the photographic layer.”73 As such a product, Friedrich Kittler argues, photography “refers to the bodily real, which necessarily escapes all symbolic grids.”74 But perhaps not paradoxically for the Symbolist-neorealist Andreev, whose literary output rested seemingly at the juncture between the symbolic and the naturalistic, the photograph’s indexical referent also produces the “appearances of specters”—the unreal.75 Perhaps through its mediation as photograph, Andreev’s Judas takes on a potential bodily power, a claim to the bodily real, which once held only a symbolic presence in text and a half-life in painting. It is this conflation of the self-fashioned photographic image with the image of the literary character in the pages of Solntse Rossii that is symptomatic of the fog obscuring the origins of Andreev’s realism: Leonid Andreev is the most popular and universally known literary name in our age. His portraits, news about him, and his stories are everywhere. . . . “Andreev so sharply uncovers the wounds of our society and abysses of our world-view.” . . . This is the usual, oft-repeated reasoning in literary societies, journals, and newspapers. . . . Andreev always seems to be talking about life, but not about living people. . . . A purely cerebral author, Andreev comes not from life, nor from observations about it, but from [his] ideas [about life].76 In this overview of Andreev criticism in 1915, Pavel Zhukov aims to correct other critics who declare that Andreev uncovers or lays bare the corruption of the contemporary world. Rather, it is Andreev himself—as presented in the pages of Solntse Rossii —who is the figure and origin of otherworldly chaos. Andreev’s daughter, Vera, in her memoir of the family dacha in Finland, House on the Black River (Dacha na Chernoi rechke, 1974), remembered the portrait of Judas hanging in the hall of their family home alongside Andreev’s contemplative self-portrait (plate 8 —Judas visible in the dacha). Its image haunted her dreams, leaping from its framing into her imagination: “The picture acted morbidly on my imagination and often pursued me in my dreams.”77 This portrait, not published with the story in any previous publication, comes from the private realm of Andreev’s home life. But in this issue of the journal, as well as through later descriptions like Vera Andreeva’s in her memoir, it becomes a part of popular image culture. The journal’s presentation of the text and these two images conflates the image of the otherworldly and threatening Judas with the portrait of Andreev. It places images created in and adorning his domestic

76

CHAPTER 2

Figure 2.10. Mother from Vasily Rozanov’s Fallen Leaves (1913).

sphere in a public light where those otherworldly thoughts that spring from Andreev are materially and visually imprinted on, and by, the self-fashioned cerebral author. In this way the imprinted images of his domestic space no longer remain private but reflect and shape his public persona and literary world.78 The Andreevs’ photographic-textual exchanges invite comparison with the experiments of Leonid Andreev’s conservative contemporary, Vasily Rozanov, who included both studio portraits and family snapshots in his books Fallen Leaves (two volumes, boxes 1 and 2) (Opavshie list′ia, 1913–15), and Solitaria (Uedinennoe, 1912), the latter published with the subheading “almost a manuscript” (pochti na prave rukopisi).79 Rozanov’s heterogeneous works are collections of musings, aphorisms, and maxims, arranged in such a way that there often appears to be little connection from one to the next but that as a whole come to be read as the author’s genre-bending autobiography—they even include pages that appear to be reproductions of Rozanov’s manuscript drafts.80 In the fi rst printings of Fallen Leaves Rozanov’s portrait as an author does not appear as the frontispiece, and the author’s scrapbook photographs are interspersed seemingly at random throughout the two “boxes” of the work.81 These photographs, neither explicitly picturing the author nor taken by the author, frame scenes of Rozanov’s domestic life that are quite different from Andreev’s famous portraits and photo publications (fig. 2.10–2.11).

THE DIFFUSION OF DOMESTICATED PHOTOGRAPHY

77

Figure 2.11. The author’s children from Vasily Rozanov’s Fallen Leaves (1913).

The subject matter of Fallen Leaves and Solitaria ranges from religion and philosophy to family and domestic life, but it is the last of these that stands at the forefront of Rozanov’s work. In Solitaria he asserts the centrality of his private life: “People, would you like me to tell you a stupendous truth which not a single one of the prophets told you? . . . It is that private life is above everything. . . . This is more universal than religion. . . . All religions will pass, but this will remain: simply sitting in a chair and looking into the distance.”82 Here Rozanov proclaims from his armchair that private life holds a higher place than any other. The sense of intimacy is augmented by his captions (“in the garden,” “before morning tea”), which tie his aphorisms to real times and places in his domestic life, much like the captions to his photographs.

78

CHAPTER 2

One place frequently marked in these texts, especially in Solitaria, is “sitting at [my] coin collection” (za numizmatikoi). With just this simple caption, Rozanov’s readers can conjure up a picture of Rozanov writing away at his desk (perhaps the very words that they are now reading), the coin collection nearby—all the material circumstances of his writing life.83 And that writing creates another kind of collection: the book Fallen Leaves, a material copy of which his readers now hold in their hands. The photographs scattered throughout the book might have been part of this scene at the writer’s desk, waiting to be collected into an album, or perhaps they were taken from an album already collected. At a time when the camera, though more mobile than it had been fifty years previously, was still most often kept at home, the space of the personal album is inextricably linked to images of an intimate life and thus of the self as well. Martha Langford has located the photo album somewhere in between “the genealogy and the saga.” Both the genealogy and the saga, in the form of the family album, amount to “an expression of identity.”84 This link between album and identity, as Langford goes on to show, can serve this function only in the context of the personal memory of a pictured or related individual. The photo album, and by extension the cherished photograph, demands this context of memory and association: “[The album’s] personal nature and intended restriction to a circle of intimates, even to an audience of one, licenses singular arrangements of situational images that need explanation and are enhanced by the tale.”85 The album photograph is not only defined by its situatedness in the space of the album (its arrangement) but also marked by the intimacy of its sphere of circulation: the home. However, like his coins, Rozanov’s photographs are reproducible imprinted images. In his published “boxes” family photographs become extimate, made intimate only by their frame-breaking associations in the narrative of Rozanov’s private domestic history and space. By virtue of the fact that these photographs float (potentially) freely in Fallen Leaves, without being tied to any specific passage of the text, they do not and cannot have the same contextual meaning that they might have had for Rozanov with his intimate connection to their subjects.86 For the reader they might only quote from the category of intimate life—that is, they remain extimate. Like the textual captions that place Rozanov in his intimate spaces, the photographs in his work can be viewed as devices of “domesticity” (domashnost′ ), to use Viktor Shklovsky’s term. Shklovsky says of these photographs: These pictures produce a strange, unusual impression on the reader. . . . The photos are printed without any border, unlike the custom in book illustrations of the past. The grey background of the photos extends to the very edge of the page without any inscription above or below the picture. Taken together, all this produces the impression not so much of a book illustration as of a genuine photograph placed in a book.87 Shklovsky further articulates the contrast between this photograph and others in the book that do include captions and are framed by the page (contrast figure 2.10 with

THE DIFFUSION OF DOMESTICATED PHOTOGRAPHY

79

figure 2.11). The fact that some photographs go against convention (unframed, no caption) leads Shklovsky to the conclusion that Rozanov’s placement of a borderless photograph is conscious and deliberate; it is evidence of his use of domesticity as a device—and as another aspect of his literary work.88 While the photographs may hold meaning (as defi ned by their relationship to a familial narrative) for Rozanov alone, as a device they constitute a constructed private sphere through the very materiality of the photograph and its printed form (without a border within the page of the book). Their novel situatedness invites the reader’s imaginative vision to perform a new externalized interiority through Rozanov’s “almost” (pochti) a scrapbook. But here it is essential to distinguish between the largely metaphorical transgressions of frame performed by Andreev and the “framelessness” of Rozanov. This distinction hinges largely on the materiality of the photograph as fragment. Moreover, it is this materiality, and Rozanov’s use of it, that constitutes something more than a simple device. In his use of photographs, and particularly his photographs without a frame, Rozanov has broken with conventions—generic and material—and defamiliarized the experience of the illustrated book as well as the reading of the words on the page. He utilizes the materiality of a photograph to de-automatize reading throughout the book, while re-creating the way his readers might come across a photograph if they had stuck their own photograph into the book. In this photographically manifest defamiliarization (Shklovsky’s ostranenie), are not Rozanov’s words then also transformed into material?89 As Anna Lisa Crone points out—and as Rozanov’s own inclusion of reproduced manuscript pages in one of the 1913 publications shows—the author was concerned about the graphic representation of his words, much like the Futurists with their handmade books. Crone states, “He upheld the superiority of handwriting to print and the intimate link between calligraphy and the ‘soul’ of the author. He went so far as to claim that he did not recognize printed versions of his works as his own, but felt estranged from them.”90 Thus we can read his inclusion of handwritten inserts and unframed photographs as the author’s attempt to re-create a sense of closeness not only between himself and his reader but also between himself and his own works once they have left his writer’s desk. This might be viewed in parallel to the lessening sense of authorial aura in the proliferation of Tolstoy’s authentic image. The photographs with their brief captions, his aphorisms and musings are all collected at random. Kristina Toland draws our attention to the opening of Rozanov’s Solitaria to complete this picture: The wind blows at midnight and carries the leaves . . . So, in swiftly rushing time life tears from our soul exclamations, sighs, half-thoughts, half-feelings . . . Which, being fragments of sound, possess that significance that they have come “straight from the soul, without reworking, without a goal, without a forethought.” . . . It is simply, “the soul is alive,” that is, “has lived,” “has breathed.” . . . For a long time I have, for some reason, liked these “accidental utterances.” As a matter of fact, they flow into us uninterruptedly, but you do not have time (there is no paper at hand) to note them down, and they die.

80

CHAPTER 2 Later you cannot ever remember them. However, I managed to note some things on paper. The notes continued accumulating. And here I decided to gather these fallen leaves.91

They are themselves, as the book’s material, like the leaves of the title: they are no longer integral parts of a whole blossoming tree but material traces of a past life that now only the collector—and a reader tasked with the role of collector—can put back together into a readable and meaningful whole. The author’s imprint has been irretrievably distanced by the process of printing and reproduction, but it can still be traced back through the material leaves of the book (just as the leaves once belonged to the tree). Not only does the inclusion of photographs in the 1913 printing transform Rozanov’s volume through the materiality of the photograph, but it also re-creates the photograph’s “domestic” quality. Some of the photographs of Rozanov’s family were taken in a studio, but these photographs—even if Shklovsky identifies them as a “device of domesticity”—are still material pieces of an intimate life because they are viewed in an intimate location: the home. As Catherine Evtuhov has found in the earlier photography of Andrei Karelin, bourgeois existence is drawn into the photographs themselves; here we can see a parallel literary manifestation.92 The performance of their category of viewing—that is, domestically—becomes their defining, performative characteristic. Rozanov’s work, made of photographs and text, creates intimacy in a public form, while always returning his reader to the most important component of his philosophy: his worship of private life. And before the reader, now bound and printed, is that gospel. Rozanov’s author-shaping simulacrum of “almost a manuscript” invites comparison with an unpublished manuscript. Maximilian Voloshin (1887–1932)—poet, critic, artist, and author—was a contemporary of Rozanov and Andreev and a photographer at home.93 And while the author would become a well-known and prolific painter of Crimean landscapes, the photographs he shot after fi rst acquiring his Kodak in Paris in 1905 largely featured the city and portraits of his future wife, Margarita Sabashnikova.94 He kept beautiful albums of his small prints, as well as many photo proofs, the majority of which were taken in Paris and then at his dacha in Koktebel (in Crimea), where he moved in 1907. Although Andreev received a great number of his eminent friends at his Vammelsuu dacha, Voloshin’s dacha at Koktebel was truly a gathering site unto itself, widely known as a literary and artistic colony for the Russian intelligentsia. Many of these gatherings, especially before the revolution (including poets such as Nikolai Gumilev and Marina Tsvetaeva), are documented in Voloshin’s massive archive of photographs, often featuring the writers and artists at theatrical play.95 But the imprint of writerly domesticity is wrought most clearly in his photo-illustrated diary titled The Story of My Soul (Istoriia moei dushi, 1904–16) (fig. 2.12).96 This diary, published in part during Voloshin’s life as autobiographical fragments in journals such as Vesy, Zolotoe runo, and Apollon, is, like so many authors’ diaries of the age, an amalgam of facts, happenings, conversations, poetry, and artistic reflections, with entries organized by date.97

Figure 2.12 . Maximilian Voloshin, fragments from the notebook for Story of My Soul (begun 1904). Institute of Russian Literature, Pushkinskii dom, IRLI, f. 562, op. 1, ed. 442.

82

CHAPTER 2

The manuscript diary in question contains three self-portraits and three portraits of his wife, Margarita, all photographs taken by Voloshin himself. Most significantly, the fi rst is a reflected self-portrait featuring Voloshin with his camera (fig. 2.12). The small rectangular photograph, cut from a proof print, is pasted just below the title “Story of My Soul” (“Istoriia moei dushi”) and surrounded by various notes and scribbled lines: lists, addresses in London and Paris, a vertical signature—“Max Volochine”—in ornate Latin lettering and outlined by a doodled rectangle. In this textual/visual autobiographical collage, the reader encounters the palimpsest of the diary notebook and thereby the process of creation and recreation. The addresses and notes have been entered with various pens and inks, clearly capturing their various times of inscription. It is also clear, in this archaeological dig, that the title— penned in black ink—was likely added later than the fi rst entries across the page in thicker blue and darker black.98 The photograph’s capture of time is essential here too: whereas the fi rst page of the diary on the page opposite begins in 1904, the inscription on the photograph clearly reads Paris, 1905. Though it has its own caption, inscribed directly onto it, the photograph itself functions as the subtitle to the “title” of this autobiography: a visual rendering of the story of Max’s soul, which he has materially illustrated. Here will be reflections of Max’s own framing. While this photograph was added after the diary was begun, pasted over text that is no longer visible, later photographs structure the pages of the diary and seem to illustrate several passages in it. As Voloshin describes taking photographs of Margarita, her portraits appear on the following pages, like windows through which one can see what Voloshin had seen (both in front of the camera lens and later on, in memory). But most significant is the markedly material life that these photographs have in the space of his diary. That is, Voloshin’s photographs invoke their materiality far more than Rozanov’s simulacra do. For example, a small cutout of Margarita’s photograph is included, roughly in the shape of an octagon, the crude cuts working to remind us of his hand at work on that very photographic print (fig. 2.12). An inkblot bleeds into the base of a self-portrait, indicating that the photograph was placed there fi rst, while Voloshin’s pen rested on its corner only later. What is essential here is to note that these photographs are fi rmly fi xed onto the page. They are not stuck in as if by chance—as they appear in Rozanov’s Fallen Leaves—but are purposefully and thoughtfully placed with an eye for permanency. From this spot, affi xed, the photograph provides that fi rst framing of the self, that fi rst invitation to reflection, even before the text frames and reframes the story of the author’s soul. The reflected self-portrait is not only part of a larger series within Voloshin’s photographic practice but also tied to ekphrastic impulses in his poetic work. In the 1905 poem “Mirror” (“Zerkalo”), written in the summer that Voloshin picked up his first camera, the opening lines assert the camera-like gaze: “I am an eye . . . I am thrown to the earth / to break up and reflect this world.”99 In The Story of My Soul, this reflective link is made again, two days before he takes up his photographic hobby. He writes, “I am a mirror. I reflect in myself each who stands before me. And I reflect not only his person [litso]—but his thoughts [mysli]—I begin to consider this person and

THE DIFFUSION OF DOMESTICATED PHOTOGRAPHY

83

Figure 2.13. Maximilian Voloshin, untitled photograph with self-portrait and Elena Kruglikova in the artist’s studio, ca. 1905. Institute of Russian Literature, Pushkinskii dom (IRLI), unfi led collection of the Literaturnyi muzei. Also reproduced as illustration in Maksimilian Voloshin—khudozhnik (1976).

these thoughts as my own.”100 A self-portrait with the artist Elena Kruglikova from just this period captures almost exactly this self-creating reflection: Max the photographer visible in the mirror with both the pensive Kruglikova’s reflection and her person in the foreground (fig. 2.13). This carefully crafted scene seems to spring from Max’s “sharp eye” and “collecting lens,” as Maria Tsvetaeva once characterized the poet.101 The relationship between self, mirror, and camera is made (almost) explicit in a love letter written by Voloshin to Margarita Sabashnikova in 1905. Here he writes, What is now reflected in my clean, in my bright mirror? . . . Oh, how shameful, shameful it is to be a mirror. If I could but . . . be covered with the dark blue haze of mirrors of old, which appears on them when they are already saturated with life and ready to close their tired eye. I am so afraid of myself. So that the colorfulness of life does not wipe away the precious image, I must live in a dark room and go out only in the evenings. What a shame to be a photographic plate that cannot be developed. I look at my Kodak with envy and sympathy. When I read your letter, my first instinctive move was to go to the mirror; I did not get up, but lay face down on the floor, closed my eyes and kissed the rose which you gave me that night. . . . And now I instantly remembered how a year ago I kissed the head of the princess Taiakh.102

84

CHAPTER 2

Here Voloshin’s sharp eye and reflecting mirror become his liability. Voloshin the lover runs the risk of overexposure should he leave his isolation, thereby losing the clear image of Sabashnikova reflected onto his self (his own mind’s eye). The camera, framed here as an extension of self in emotive projection, is capable of developing that perfect picture of reflection, but without her presence, it, like Voloshin, remains impotent in seclusion. The appearance of these all-important objects demonstrates the characteristic embrace of the poet’s three-dimensional physical world. As Maria Rubins notes of Voloshin, like many of the Acmeists with whom he associated, “tangibility, concrete aspect, and clarity of meaning” were distinguishing features of the poet’s oeuvre.103 However, the mirror’s effect (as tangible object fused with the poet in metaphor) is not simply to reflect the world but to expand it. The mirror becomes a transformative creative extension of the self, creating a reflexive space and visually embodying the poetic formulation within the poem “Mirror”: “And a room is in me” (I komnata vo mne) as in his love letter. This reflexivity of photographically transformed domestic space is one that Voloshin exploits in many of his photographs, proliferating himself not only in reflected doubles but also in objects, such as his copy of the bust of his Egyptian princess (Taiakh), mentioned in his letter to Sabashnikova and figuring in numerous photographs as an essential fi xture at his dacha in Koktebel (fig. 2.14).104 These carefully staged scenes call to mind again the photographs of a professional predecessor, Karelin (see chapter 1). But while Karelin’s photographs, expertly staged for depth in their theatrical reflections and scenes—with full respect to the fourth wall of their theater, exude an almost glossy perfection of bourgeois existence in the nineteenth century, Voloshin’s photographs betray the amateur quality of the making (from off-kilter framing to over/under exposure) and are made in the fully self-conscious gaze with the camera. In the exponential doubling of the photograph with Kruglikova (two Kruglikovas visible, one Max in the mirror, and another known to be at the camera snapping the picture), we are also confronted with the collapse of space in the photograph, not unlike the verbal collapse of Voloshin in his identification with the mirror. And here, just as the mirror itself has only the illusion of depth, so too does the fl at photographic surface: in the depth of reflection we have also mimetic, material fl atness. And from the depth of this fl at image (both made of bodies and lacking body itself), captured in the act of a true self-aware life creation, emerges the foundation for the metaphorical to literal visualization of Voloshin’s role as head of the summertime gatherings of the disenfranchised Russian intellectuals at his Koktebel dacha— that postrevolutionary haven that is still being photographically developed at this prerevolutionary moment.105 But however expansive the effect of the reflexive photographic practice became at Koktebel, in the instantiation in the manuscript-diary photographs are made insignificant in their miniature presence. Likewise, such a diminution has had a lasting effect on Voloshin’s authorship of his photographs in the literary sphere. His images,

THE DIFFUSION OF DOMESTICATED PHOTOGRAPHY

85

Figure 2.14. Maximilian Voloshin, the author with Taiakh, Koktebel (1911). From an album of the author’s photographs. Institute of Russian Literature, Pushkinskii dom, IRLI, f. 562, op. 4, ed. 32, item 56.

enlarged and reproduced from their original negatives, have come to be published separately in the various “photo documents” sections of Voloshin’s publications—but most often without acknowledging Voloshin’s hand in the making and staging of the photographs (including both fig. 2.13 and fig. 2.14). They serve as a reminder that even as photography was a productive site in the domestic sphere, every photograph— each one a material object bearing the imprint of its author—is also capable of being extracted from that sphere and reappropriated, reframed. Consequently, these photographs, collected largely in the space of the scrapbook, or hybrid diary- cumscrapbook, leave us to consider what is lost when the original scrapbook is no longer at hand. What of the self is lost when its material imprint fades or is eliminated by the editor or publisher? With these questions in mind, we will turn now to one of Andreev’s photograph collections—now an archive—and treat it largely as a whole, to understand how the liminality of the writerly and photographic process comes to shape an ever-evolving moment in time.

86

CHAPTER 2

Color Photographs to Film Although photographs figure prominently in the experimental space of Rozanov’s autobiographical Fallen Leaves, his collecting practices centered primarily on his coins—historically bound objects that take on personal meaning only through the act of collecting.106 By contrast, Andreev’s collecting mania visibly manifested itself as a self-creating photographic enterprise wherein Andreev framed and reframed his self, home, and family. The archived collection of his photographs reveals his concern with self-framing and self-fashioning away from the printed page and reflects his creative processes in dialogue with his public persona. In large part, Andreev’s Autochrome photographs present a stark contrast to the gruesome world of his stories. But as an intimate portrait of his domestic life during the period of his greatest fame and artistic production (from 1908 to 1914), these images cannot be entirely divorced from his public literary life. This set of crisp color images on glass plates might also be read as Andreev’s visual diary at a time when he did not keep a written one. Andreev did keep a diary as a student, before the beginning of his writing career, but as writing became his profession, he abandoned the diary, seeming to fi nd self-reflection and self-fashioning in the form of these hundreds and hundreds of photographs, his light-writing. They reveal how Andreev orchestrated the theatrical play of light and shadow in his world and that of his children, projecting light into Finnish exile and onto a changing Russian landscape. Color photography was a source of intense fascination for Andreev. His friend Kornei Chukovsky tells us that Andreev’s infatuation with the Autochrome led him to expound on the process to anyone who would listen: “Pacing up and down his enormous study, he would deliver monologues on the great Lumière who had invented colour photography, on sulfuric acid and potash. . . . You sat and listened.”107 The chemical process that was at the heart of the Lumière brothers’ color photography and that so excited Andreev in these nocturnal monologues was a major advance in color reproduction—one that would not be bettered until the advent of color fi lm in the 1930s. The color was derived from dyed potato starch grains that were dusted onto glass plates and then covered with a chemical emulsion. An exposure would be made by the photographer on the back of the plate and then developed (again by the photographer) in a multistep process, resulting in a positive transparent image composed of tiny dots of color.108 Although the Lumière brothers’ process was complex and extremely costly, it had immediate and widespread success among both amateur and professional photographers. It yielded not only a real clarity of image on the glass plate (a clarity that cannot be achieved on paper) but also vivid, lifelike color.109 Chukovsky postulated that it was this kind of color that provided a salvational light for Andreev. He wrote, “It was precisely [his] horror that he was trying to escape when he grasped at color photography. He needed something or other to screen himself from his sickening bouts of despair.”110 The colors, in tones that ranged from subdued

THE DIFFUSION OF DOMESTICATED PHOTOGRAPHY

87

to bright, free the subjects of his photographs from the dark shadows inherent to black and white photographs. As Richard Davies notes of the photographs, “Andreev’s evocation of the countryside, which he so clearly loves, is full of serenity and charm”111 (plate 9). This colorful world also presents a contrast to that of his plays, such as The Life of Man, which both Meyerhold and Stanislavsky had brought to the stage in monochromatic productions in gray and black. And, perhaps most significant, just as light is an important component in the creation of the photograph (underscored in the word svetopis′), it is also essential to viewing the glass-plate Autochromes.112 Without a light source shining through from the opposite side of the glass plate, the image is dark and barely legible, but as it is lifted into the light, a whole sharp world is illuminated within the frame. And like all of Andreev’s manias—writing, painting, boating—photography became totally absorbing. Chukovsky recalls Andreev working like a “factory . . . ceaselessly in shifts, preparing all those masses of large and small photographs that were stacked up in his study, contained in special boxes and chests, overflowing on every table, mounted on the window panes.”113 Hung in the windows of his house, the only place where light conditions would allow for viewing, these images could provide a beautiful projection onto the world outside, an alternative world unto itself.114 Andreev’s son Vadim recalled a different side of the photographic practice, namely, the process of development, framed by the structure of Andreev’s theatrical writings. Those years from 1908–1914 were the third act of the “Life of Man.” . . . [M]y father immersed himself [ prikryvalsia] in his passions: they were harsh and almost tortuous, all of these occupations for arranging the house, the garden, color photography, painting and even the gramophone. To all these activities he surrendered himself wholly. . . . My father spent entire days in the darkroom [laboratoriia], installed under the stairs leading to the garret and which was called “Ward No. 6”; like a professional photographer he received the greatest pleasure from the process of developing. . . . Bending over the developing tray, his face seemed completely unreal in the dim ray of light—a spectral mask suspended in the air.115 The Autochromes developed in the dim light of the darkroom were largely introspective and personal, including self-portraits (alone or with his wife and children), travel snapshots, and snapshots of his dacha—there was not a single corner of his dacha that he did not photograph several times—and the surrounding countryside.116 They range from about two inches by four inches, to six inches by nine inches and may seem small in comparison with the high walls and large paintings that decorated the oversized dacha.117 However, many of the images are composed in such an unusual way as to overcome their small size. The theatrical photograph of Andreev holding a cross is

88

CHAPTER 2

particularly striking in this regard (plate 10). Here the camera is placed far below eye level, making Andreev appear monumental even within the small frame of the image. This photograph captures the Andreev of his apocryphal biblical stories in all his imposing stature, projecting the image of a larger-than-life author to the viewer. In terms much like those of Vadim remembering his father’s passions, Chukovsky notes that his “costumes suited him like those of an operatic tenor—the costumes of an artist, a sportsman, a sailor. He wore them as actors wear their costumes on stage” (plates 10–11).118 Unlike Andreev’s other passions, however, photography was capable of documenting, and thereby possibly encompassing, Andreev’s other manias. We see these costumes figuring in many of Andreev’s photographs—as an artist, as an author, as a sailor, and—as in the case of the shirtless Andreev with the crucifi x—as a character from his apocryphal biblical stories (or their master). Perhaps it is not by chance that windows figure so prominently in many of Andreev’s set directions for his plays of the period, including To the Stars, Black Maskers, and even the minimalist Life of Man. Andreev’s archive also reveals an image in which the author captures his reflection in a mirror, propped in the space of the window, creating a strange juxtaposition of the landscape outside the dacha and Andreev’s “portrait” imprinted upon it (fig. 2.15). As the mirror in Voloshin’s photographic practice would serve to expand and frame the interiority of the Koktebel stage, these photographs fill the windows with an alternative reality for the author, becoming a part of his “living theater” in everyday experience. This idea of living theater, as well as much of Andreev’s photographic and aesthetic practices, might very well be read into the arts of zhiznetvorchesto. However, the concept of life creation is an outward-facing one, based on a very conscious self-crafting of life and art in the public sphere, which would undercut the subtlety of the world that Andreev was creating at home in the space of his photographs. But in just such a suggestive juxtaposition of the self onto a world outside, that self seems always threatening to spill out of the bounded frames of domestic space. It is likely that only a small number of Andreev’s photographs would have been displayed in windows. Some of his black-and-white photographs were organized in small incomplete scrapbooks, while the remaining Autochromes were archived in the original boxes from the Lumière Company (since the images were on glass, they could not be organized in a scrapbook). An analysis of these boxes reveals that Andreev did not think of these images as a chronological documentation of his life. Grouped by subject matter and individual titles (typed or written on labels on the images), the collection in actuality resists chronological ordering. The thematic groups include subjects such as “Leonid alone,” “summer,” “winter,” “skerries,” “landscapes.” Rather than displaying the more linear chronology of a diary or photo album, the collection becomes a thematic autobiographical collage.119 For Andreev, and particularly for his family, interaction with this collage of images was an intimate performance. In her memoir his daughter Vera recalled looking at her father’s color images: “It seemed that you contemplated some kind of

THE DIFFUSION OF DOMESTICATED PHOTOGRAPHY

89

Figure 2.15. Leonid Andreev, self-portrait in window (1910s). Image courtesy of the Leeds Russian Archive.

wonderfully beautiful view through an open window,—the illusion was so great that even the light touch of breeze on your cheeks and the smell of flowers could be felt, so brightly did they blossom in the photograph.”120 Although a generation further removed, Olga Carlisle, Andreev’s granddaughter (Vadim’s daughter), recounts that she was “ready to trade [her] own childhood for [her] father’s whenever he had the inclination to open the wooden chests and the black boxes and one by one hold up the colour plates to the light.”121 The experience of this archive of images, creating in this moment of complete engagement a collaged experience, should be contrasted to the typically chronological structure of the diary or memoir that allows the writer to

90

CHAPTER 2

“track the self in time,” thereby also “mediating between the past, the present, and the future.”122 For Irina Paperno, this enables the subject to, in part, link himself or herself with historical time. The images as presented here are, however, necessarily broken from a linear experience, easily falling out of chronological organization in their thematic boxes, enabling the virtual experience of space—disconnected from a historical narrative. For Carlisle, the past abolishes the viewer’s present as well as, briefly, the viewer’s self; the photograph’s frames disappear and only the world of their father and grandfather remains. While the metaphor of the window, rather than a mirror of self-reflection, characterizes the engagement of Andreev’s granddaughter with the Autochrome collection, Andreev’s writings about fi lm, which he called a “living photography” (zhivaia fotografiia), hinge on the nature of reflection, seeing a “secondary life, reflected and enigmatic.” One sees not simply the self reflected but what one wants to see: “Do you wish to see yourself as a child? . . . Do you wish to see those who have died? They humbly appear, look, smile, and, you having passed through the same door, they now sit at the table with you.”123 This hauntingly imagined future for fi lm was contingent on developments that would be closer to his Autochrome images—a future of film in color, rather than dead black shades moving across a white screen.124 When this future came to pass, fi lm would no longer be an illusion of tekhnika (technics) but rather a true living theater, an entire world unto itself. In this ideal formulation of artistic representation, uslovnost′ (conventionality, or the bounds of artistic representation) is annihilated, removing even the viewer’s awareness of the mediation of the image.125 For Andreev, his color photographs—although they were static rather than moving images—might have seemed to be a step toward the elimination of this mediation in representation. This vision would, at least if we take Andreev’s earlier writings on cinema into account, be colored over with a modernist anxiety for the power of technological mediation and its effect on the integrity of the self. In an article published in Cinefono in 1909, at a time when Andreev had already taken up color photography, he writes, “Cinema kills the very idea of identity. Today my mental image of myself is still formed by what I am at this moment. Imagine what will happen when the cinematograph splits my self-image into what I was at eight years old, at eighteen, at twenty-five! . . . What on earth will remain of my integrity if I am given free access to what I was at different stages of my life? . . . It’s frightening!”126 And while such an encounter with the virtual self again draws parallels with Freud’s unheimlich — that unsettling space that is the encounter with the unreal-real—it is this fright that seems to compel Andreev again and again to be the subject and author of photographic images.127 It is perhaps not by chance that Andreev’s kindred spirit in horror, Edgar Allan Poe, made similar observations about the photographic technology of his age. Celebrating the introduction of the daguerreotype, Poe states, “The instrument itself must undoubtedly be regarded as the most important, and perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science. . . . All language must fall short of

THE DIFFUSION OF DOMESTICATED PHOTOGRAPHY

91

conveying any just idea of the truth. . . . Perhaps, if we imagine the distinctness with which an object is reflected in a positively perfect mirror, we come as near the reality as by any other means.”128 Clearly the science behind the advances in image making provided an intense source of fascination for each of these authors. But their infatuation with photography’s startling realism can just as easily cross over the threshold of the comforting domestic sphere into their dark, otherworldly realms. Thus, while Andreev’s description of the destruction of conventionality in fi lm allows him to foreground the light of his photographic world, one in which he, his children, and his children’s children can experience the familial image in a positive present, there is also a recurring darkness—the potential fright of a photographic encounter with the self—that creeps into many of the photographs, reminding the viewer of Andreev’s transformative authorial hand and of their historical context. As Olga Carlisle notes in her recollections of Andreev’s Autochromes, Andreev’s present was a fleeting moment that would come to be engulfed by “the passage of time, revolution, death.”129 Chukovsky also wrote of Andreev’s life at this time, in his isolation in Finland: “In general, this lavish life sometimes seemed like a stage set. It seemed that offstage lurked something else.”130 And such was the criticism offered by the philosopher Semyon Frank when writing about Andreev and the modern (literary) condition in 1910: In recent years almost all of our literature goes under the sign of “madness and horror.” From the deft hand of Leonid Andreev we get all kinds of frenzy and insanity, superhuman suffering, physical and psychological, real and mystical, satanic cruelties, which reduce even the healthiest reader almost to the point of physical convulsions and nausea; they have become a constant and commonplace literary theme. It is assumed and asserted that such literature is just a “reflection of life.” Of course no one would deny that contemporary life is full of immeasurable tragedy; nevertheless it would be a mistake to see in our belles-lettres simply a mirror or photographic “reflection” of life. As a principle art should not copy and make a stenograph of life. . . . Everyone sees the horrors of life in his own manner, responds to them in his own way: one exaggerates them, another minimizes them; one assimilates them and portrays them externally, another—internally; and all of them rework and imbue them with their own feelings, thoughts and fantasies.131 Frank, like many of his contemporaries, sides against the naturalism of photographic capture in the literary sphere; but more important for Frank, the Andreev problem lies beyond the simply photographic. It is in the power of the subjective transformation of that reality: feeling, thought, and fantasy wrought by the author of the text. We might read this fantasy of impending darkness, which so floods Andreev’s texts and lurks offstage for Chukovsky, into the visible, looming presence in many of his images. In several photographs Andreev’s subjects, most often his children,

92

CHAPTER 2

are surprisingly hidden in darkness while the light falls on some mundane detail (plates 12–13). Here it is still possible to read, as Carlisle implies, a darker haunting presence—that transformative power of Andreev’s worldview. Read alongside his text, this chiaroscuro effect recalls the double face of Andreev’s Judas: Judas’s face was also divided in two: one side of it, with a black, sharply scrutinizing eye, was alive, mobile, readily gathering into numerous crooked little wrinkles; on the other side, there were no wrinkles, and it was deathly-smooth, flat and frozen, and although it was the same in size as the fi rst, it seemed huge because of the wide open, blind eye. Covered with a whitish fi lm, closing neither during night nor day, it met light and dark just the same.132 And while the example of Judas draws forth the sharpest dichotomies, good/evil and dark/light, this line could be more subtly drawn in other works by Andreev. His play Ekaterina Ivanovna (1912, produced at the Moscow Art Theater 1913–14) features one of the few inclusions of photography in his literary work. The fallen woman Ekaterina, whose movements are always theatrically exaggerated, plays at a more literal fall by imagining throwing herself out of a sixth-story window. Signaling her imminent psychological breakdown, she holds her pose and declares herself a “lifeless corpse.” While the worried Liza tells her sister to move out of this frightening pose, the oblivious hanger-on Mentikov declares that he must “take a photograph of you in this pose some time. . . . indeed I have become a photographer after all! A marvelous little camera, stereoscopic, and the photographs come out especially well.”133 At this the scene seems to freeze for a moment, capturing both the free fall of Ekaterina and—more hauntingly—the fact that her madness is her death.134 Here Ekaterina’s increasingly erratic behavior, reaching a climax in her playing a corpse, is frozen in the imagined click of Mentikov’s camera. Andreev’s Ekaterina, a character inspired by Hoffmann’s mechanical dancer in “The Sandman” and her rampant and unchecked movements, is the human automaton whose action takes her irrevocably over the moral boundaries of womanly conduct.135And her death, despite never being enacted in the play, is suggested at every turn in the words and actions of Ekaterina-turned-automaton and is signaled not by the appearance of a gun in the fi rst act but by an imaginary camera. Always teetering on the edge—just as in Andreev’s own photographic images of domestic peace, the darkness from Andreev’s fiction can creep into the frame. Sometimes this shadow is in fact Andreev’s own (plate 14). In these images we are reminded of his hand as author, of both the photograph and the dark world of his literature, as his shadow takes the place of the artist’s signature in the corner of the frame. Roger Caillois describes the psychological effect of darkness as part of the “magical hold [. . .] of night and obscurity, the fear of the dark,” which “probably also has its roots in the peril in which it puts the opposition between the organism and the milieu.”136 Much like the encounter with unheimlich, fear of the dark

THE DIFFUSION OF DOMESTICATED PHOTOGRAPHY

93

is rooted in a sense of loss of comfort in one’s surroundings—that is, the need to see our surroundings in order to be at home in our world. Andreev’s dark presence, sometimes as bodily authorial signature, sometimes as the framer of darkness within the photograph, disrupts the homeliness (heimlich) of the image. We must underscore that this effect is made of Andreev himself. As Callois draws further on the work of Eugène Minkowski, he notes that “darkness is not the mere absence of light; there is something positive about it. While light space is eliminated by the materiality of objects, darkness is ‘fi lled,’ it touches the individual directly, envelops him, penetrates him, and even passes through him: hence ‘the ego is permeable for darkness while it is not so for light.’”137 Even in his images of light, we are still confronted with the fullness of Andreev’s delicate dance in the play between the dark and the light, life and death. In just a few photographs it is not a stretch to see the theatrical and dark Andreev that Vadim hints at when recalling his father. Some of Andreev’s double-exposed images are reminiscent of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spirit photography, which purported to capture spirits unseen among the living (plate 15). These double-exposed photographs, images that resonate with the literary worlds of both Andreev and Poe, are not spirit photography per se (the figure in the image is in fact Andreev himself, while another in the archive pictures Andreev’s brother), but they do call forth other sinister connotations in photography that seem to be present in this spooky image: the ghosts of Andreev’s living photography. These images remind us of that early link between photography and death, the spectral life of photographic bodies, arresting a moment in time, as death arrests the life of man. Andreev could describe in prose the decomposing Lazarus, but here his bodily self was transformed in an instant into a seemingly permeable deathly specter with just a click of the camera. The intensity of these spectral presences—shadows and transparent selves—is amplified by another material component of many of Andreev’s Autochrome images: the fact that they were almost all produced as stereoscopic images (plate 9). Rosalind Krauss describes the experience of “stereographic space” as perspectival space raised to a higher power. Organized as a kind of tunnel vision, the experience of deep recession is insistent and inescapable. The experience is heightened by the fact that the viewer’s own ambient space is masked out by the optical instrument he must hold before his eyes. As he views the image in an ideal isolation, his own surrounds, with their walls and floors, are banished from sight. . . . The refocusing of attention can occur only within the spectator’s channel of vision constructed by the optical machine.138 Thus, unlike a flat photographic image, the stereoscope transforms the photographic representation into a kind of hyperreality, or possibly a primitive virtual reality. As the viewer looks into the stereoscope, there appears to be a closer experience of the world

94

CHAPTER 2

of the photograph than could be possible with the flat image—or at the very least, the illusion of such an experience. The stereoscope removes the frames of the photograph, saturating one’s whole field of vision with the stereographic image, providing just that experience that so drew Andreev to cinema: the experience is wholly illusory, yet so like the real that one loses oneself in the visual frame. Beaumont Newhall suggests that it is precisely this abolition of artistic mediation that accounts for the fact that stereoscopic photography never achieved the same level of artistic appeal as a medium like the mono-image: that is, “its very virtue . . . of creating an astonishing illusion of depth [is] felt to be too close to reality.”139 In a way that reminds us of the concept of uslovnost′—that artistic framing is necessary to mediation in art—Newhall implies that the artistic appreciation of the medium can only come with a greater distance from the image. This rejection of the hypertangibility of the stereoscopic image is reminiscent of the accusations of extreme naturalism leveled at Andreev by many of his contemporaries. Like Andreev’s darkly sketched characters who seem to spill out from their textual framing, the photograph—projected within the binoculars of the stereoscope—becomes capable of saturating the visible world with a realism that is too close to the real.140 But for Andreev such photographs contain the potential for an all-consuming engagement that far surpasses that of a simple photo album or the text of a diary. For Andreev’s children and granddaughter, encounters with the photographs produce not only nostalgia for the world of his photographs but also an opportunity for a direct engagement with his world through the power of vision. While this absorption can have a positive effect—losing oneself in the bucolic fields of summer or an Italian landscape, for instance—there are undeniably darker implications presented by these images and by the medium itself. Rather than remediation, the stereographic photograph presents hypermediation. It frames a visual space where the spectral presences of the past can cross over into a disorienting hyperreality. This world contains the whole illusion of the real, but as even Andreev states in his predictions for color film, “This will be a mirror . . . a secondary life, an enigmatic existence, like the existence of a ghost or hallucination.”141 His photography becomes the haunting illusory world that is his virtual reality. But at precisely this moment in time, at the turn of the century, this illusion was also an essential (material) transition point in the history of media, and it was mediated through the figure of Leonid Andreev.142 Andreev is often credited as an early advocate of cinema, encouraging and blessing the medium. Jay Leyda, in his seminal history of early Russian cinema, uses Andreev as a structural element and key figure in writing the very history of that early cinema tradition. For as Leyda correctly states, “It was at the height of their retreat from the real problems of contemporary society that literature and the theatre discovered a new topic for fierce discussion— the cinema. Leonid Andreyev headed the crusade.”143 And while audiences found Andreev’s “madness and horror” diverting, in many places the ghostly components of his writings drop away.144 In the pages of the media journal Cine-fono, a short text

THE DIFFUSION OF DOMESTICATED PHOTOGRAPHY

95

by Andreev is included in “Contemporaries’ Thoughts” (“Mysli sovremennikov”). Here Andreev writes, I have often thought about color photography, as an amateur myself, and about the cinematograph. . . . The cinematograph annihilates the unity of the individual [lichnost′]. Now man recognizes himself in every instant, because he exists in that instant. . . . Thanks to the cinematograph, I will have the opportunity to see myself as I was when I was eight, eighteen, twenty-five! And, after all, this is not a simple approximate photograph, which gives only a partial impression of a person, like a single page torn out from a book.145 Much like the fragment from his Letters on Theater, it is in film that Andreev sees that great continuation of his color photography project—to facilitate the encounter with the self exactly as it was at a certain moment in the past. Andreev even had a fi rsthand encounter with this new technology: one of the fathers of Russian cinema, Alexander Drankov, fi lmed Andreev at home in his dacha in 1909, transforming Andreev into one of the fi rst filmic subjects for Drankov’s kino-khronika: exactly as he was, perhaps.146 Upon his visit to Yasnaya Polyana in 1910, Andreev would happily take credit for “convincing” Tolstoy that the future of (artistic) representation was in cinema. Tolstoy would later be shown footage shot by Drankov (screened by Drankov at Yasnaya Polyana) and state, “It is necessary for the cinematograph to record Russian reality in all its many-sided development. Russian life must be shown as it is by the cinema, instead of continuing to chase after fabricated subjects”147 Unsurprisingly, Andreev’s works would also be adapted for the cinema, including Anfi sa in 1912 and in 1924 an even more successful American production, starring Lon Chaney, of He Who Gets Slapped, which Andreev would not live to see. But in this pivotal moment, at the time of Tolstoy’s death and on the cusp of a great regime change, Andreev presents the visible living link between literature, photography, and film before these media would set out on more divergent paths.

The Specter In the fi nal years of his life Andreev’s world changed drastically. With World War I spreading across Europe, Andreev was not only cut off from importing the Lumière plates but also cut off from Russia when its border with Finland was redrawn in 1917 following the Bolshevik Revolution. Seeing the Bolsheviks as a threat to the future of Russia, the inadvertent émigré feverishly worked on anti-Bolshevik articles; his last work, S.O.S. (1919), was his cry for help to the Western world: “Like a telegraph operator on a sinking ship sends his last message through night and darkness: Help, come quickly! We are sinking. . . . Could you but know how dark is the night over us, there are no words to describe this darkness!”148 The spots of night and darkness

96

CHAPTER 2

that had been figurative elements of his modernist universe crossed over into his life as a real threat; the sky over his home was dotted with airplanes, and smoke was visible in the air from raids over southern Finland and Petrograd.149 Andreev, in despair, notes in his diary in 1918 that he cannot even look at his photographs: “Should I look at my photographs? Rome? Venice? Skerries? No.”150 Rather than viewing his world through the mediation of his stereoscope, Andreev picked up his binoculars. As his son Vadim remembered him in his memoir, “Black silhouettes of planes, passing above our very heads, began to move away, fading in the grey morning fog. On the balcony . . . I saw my father. . . . My father, having put his eyes to the long black binoculars, watched the planes as they moved away.”151 Andreev was viewed at this time as both the harbinger of this dark new world and as such a possible source of salvation from it. In 1918, a year before he died, Vasily Rozanov drafted a letter to Andreev asking him to write and help turn the tide of the revolution. In this letter Rozanov also hints that this new reality is one born from Andreev’s shadows: “The slope of history, along the edges of which I have been crawling this whole time, turned out not to be what I had thought it would be, but rather completely different, something like yours.”152 But Andreev, isolated in Finland, could only watch events unfold. For Alexander Blok the “real” Andreev was “the one who lived in the writer Leonid Nikolaevich, . . . forever gazing into the abyss of a black window that looked out in the direction of the islands and Finland, into a damp night and the autumn rain. . . . It was through such a window that his last guest came to him in a black mask—death.”153 In 1919 Andreev died suddenly of heart failure at the age of only forty-eight. While Maximilian Voloshin’s dacha would continue to stand in Koktebel— providing a real respite for the literary elite that had been left behind by the revolution—only images of Andreev’s retreat would remain.154 And these fi nal images of Andreev in Finland continued to live on in public image and literary memory long after his death. In 1921, the Berlin émigré journal Zhar-ptitsa — headed by the former editor of Solntse Rossii, Alexander Kogan—published the fi nal pages from his diary, accompanied by a photograph of his dacha and a photographic portrait of the author (not taken by Andreev himself) (fig. 2.16). As the dacha was already abandoned and decaying after Andreev’s death and his family’s subsequent emigration to Europe, Andreev’s photographs would be scattered, too, with his children and his wife, Anna. But as we can glimpse in this photograph of Andreev’s dacha, as recovered and reframed by the émigré press, a path is clearly illuminated and seems to offer the way to a safe harbor in the night, albeit haunted by Andreev’s authorial aura. Leaping out of the pages of the journal, this image of Andreev and his home found another, textual home in Nabokov’s 1930 novel, The Defense, in the memory of Luzhin’s nameless wife. Against the backdrop of shifting and “dissolving” images of émigré life in Berlin, she remembers a part of Finland that “remained in her heart as something more Russian than Russia.” In an image seemingly fashioned by and around Andreev (although Andreev remains

THE DIFFUSION OF DOMESTICATED PHOTOGRAPHY

97

Figure 2.16. “Last Pages of L. N. Andreev’s Diary,” Zhar-ptitsa, no. 2 (1921). Image courtesy of Librarium.fr.

unnamed), she remembers the “celebrated writer . . . with a very conspicuous goatee who kept glancing up at the sky, which enemy airplanes had begun to haunt.”155 This remediated image contains both the light and the dark of Andreev’s artistic life, dematerialized by the mediation of memory and text. While his bright images of Finland are the last fl ash of light in a prerevolutionary Russia, Andreev’s image also reminds the reader of the impending darkness threatening this reality in the twilight of the Russian empire. Vasily Rozanov, Maximilian Voloshin, and Leonid Andreev, though radically different modernist authors, reveal the way in which domestic photographic practices were being fused with writing practices to create new photographically spatialized authorial subjectivities in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. Rozanov utilized his family photographs as objects of his domestic life, which retain the imprint of intimate space, transformed by visual and verbal media in his published work. For Voloshin, perhaps most like Andreev, the practice of photography provided a tool for his self-reflection, his life/light writing. Andreev’s intimate photographs exposed a private life to the public eye, transforming his domestic space into a part of his aestheticized life as an author and artist. These photographs created a stage upon which Andreev could enact the play between light and darkness, between his domestic world and the world of his writing. Displayed in windows

98

CHAPTER 2

throughout his home, Andreev’s Autochromes provided microcosmically illuminated worlds superimposed over one he inhabited, ones in which his shadows were contained and lived in a deathly present. When viewed through the stereoscope, these photographs fulfilled Andreev’s desire to annihilate artistic mediation, forming an illusory alternative reality in which his children and grandchildren could sit side by side with the shadowy world of their past. Andreev’s self-fashioned image of a literary life in “Russian” Finland, intricately woven in texts and photographs, preserves an uncanny virtual reality of a lost modernist Russia, haunted by a looming darkness just outside the frame, fl ickering through journals, across screens, in texts, and as faded photographs.

3 MICROGEOGRAPHY, MACROWORLD

The method of Mikhail Mikhailovich Prishvin seems to come closest to my own. Like myself, he feels that “it’s possible to come with pencil or brush in hand, as painters do, and also to investigate nature in your own way, obtaining not the reasons for phenomena but their images” (The Foxhunt) . . . . I come not with a brush, but with a camera, an instrument more perfect, and I want to penetrate nature for artistic purpose, to discover images, obtaining precious truths not on paper, but on fi lm—through observation and experiment. This is the union of newsreel, science, and art. Dziga Vertov, August 30, 1939

When I speak of poetry I am not thinking of it as a genre. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality. So poetry becomes a philosophy to guide a man throughout his life. . . . Think of Prishvin, whose very being emerges in the features of that Russian nature which he described so lovingly. . . . Such an artist can discern the lines of the poetic design of being. He is capable of going beyond the limitations of coherent logic, and conveying the deep complexity and truth of the impalpable connections and hidden phenomena of life. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 1986

Writing in 1930, the author-photographer Mikhail Prishvin mourned the “collapse of the most intimate values of human life” in the face of the new reality wrought in the wake of the revolution, where everything and everyone was exposed as if “under an X-ray.”1 In this photographically enhanced metaphor, Prishvin highlights and amplifies the consideration of self in an age when private life was increasingly a public concern. Although his reputation as a children’s author has long relegated Prishvin to a peripheral status in Soviet literary scholarship, he was a gifted, prolific nature writer and unconventional ethnographer. In a career stretching from 1905 to 1954, he produced literary works in the genres of the documentary sketch (ocherk; plural, ocherki), short story, and novel. He was also a meticulous diarist. Diary writing was mandated for workers in many public projects, as witnessed by books such as How We Constructed the Metro (Kak my stroili metro, 1935). Under the direction of editors turned literary foremen, not only would workers keep an account of their progress in this high-profi le Soviet construction project, but in so doing, they would also learn to better organize, systematize, and optimize productivity. 2 The diary project was “a medium and tool of self-formation, defi ned in terms of the merging of the individual and collective, the subjective and the objective.”3 The workers on the Metro construction project were given strict guidelines for writing their diary entries, but they were also told to write truthfully (objectively), not to embellish reality.4 However, this directive to mold a subjective discourse in line with external, objective aims had repercussions for the Soviet subject. As Eric Naiman succinctly remarks, such a reformulation of subjectivity—which necessarily followed the revolution—“defamiliarized many aspects of daily life . . . ; life and language—and, perhaps, the notion of the self—became increasingly unnatural.”5 This discursive shift made old framings of the self impossible, requiring the appropriation of a new language and a new subjectivity to speak about this changed world, “as if speaking gave [the subject] the power to make the world anew.”6 And as Prishvin himself would write in his diary, just months after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, There are those who live on the go,—if they stopped they’d become senseless. And there are readers, who read a ton, but after reading remember nothing. Such is the case now with all of us here in the Russian state, at the end of this New Year: having experienced such a life, no one knows what will happen next and what needs to be done. I will tell you what needs to be done: you need to learn, citizens of the Russian Republic, to learn like little children. Learn!7

103

104

CHAPTER 3

Walter Benjamin, visiting Moscow in 1926–27, made his own similar observation of the new Soviet generation: [Soviet] youth is being put through “revolutionary” education in pioneer organizations, in the Komsomol, which means that they do not come to the revolution as an experience but only as a discourse. An attempt is being made to arrest the dynamic of revolutionary progress in the life of the state—one has entered, like it or not, a period of restoration while nonetheless wanting to store up the revolutionary energy of the youth like electricity in a battery.8 But, as we will see, it was not only in texts that the Soviet subjects shaped—and were shaped by—this new world; they would also fi nd themselves the subject and object of study in the frame of a photograph. In face of the defamiliarization that accompanied the revolution and the establishment of the new Soviet regime—a defamiliarization that was defi ned for Prishvin most centrally by the rapid pace of the reconstruction of the natural world—this chapter addresses the ways in which photography was integral to his negotiation of Soviet authorial subjectivity. Prishvin’s photographic work, as an essential component of his literary education and a visual extension of his diary project, offered a new way to bridge prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary realities. And just as the constraints of the medium of photography had the potential to threaten the subjectivity of Prishvin as author, so too did the Soviet government impose structural pressures and imperatives on his writing and, by extension, his person. Prishvin responded to these pressures, mediating his role as Soviet author and naturalist by placing his own subjecthood in the foreground of his literary-photographic projects. Here the author-photographer framed nature and his own distinct image of a changing Russian and Soviet reality not just in text but also with his own camera in a series of constantly reframed projects: In the Land of Unfrightened Birds (V kraiu nepuganykh ptits, 1907, 1934), Ginseng: The Root of Life (Zhen′-Shen′: Koren′ zhizni, 1933), and his photo-documentary sketches on hunting and fur processing. These photographically illustrated works capture—from his rodstvennoe vnimanie (kindred attention), his own X-ray vision—the natural and constructed world in Russia and the Soviet Union, creating a visual flow of transformations at dynamic moments. Each new iteration of his work incorporated another facet of his view of the changing Soviet landscape, marking the totalizing map of Soviet space with the densely layered pinpoints of a microgeography, as this artistgeographer maneuvered between his prerevolutionary authorial identity as Symbolist ethnographer and his postrevolutionary role as Stalinist pedagogue.

In the Land of Unfrightened Birds Born in Orel in 1873 into a merchant family, Prishvin was educated fi rst under the tutelage of Vasily Rozanov and then abroad in Riga and Germany.9 Prishvin’s

MICROGEOGR A PH Y, M A CRO W OR L D

105

Figure 3.1. Cover and illustrations from In the Land of Unfrightened Birds (1907), edition owned by Prishvin. Permissions courtesy of L. A. Riazanova, M. M. Prishvin Estate.

writing career began with his return to Russia in 1904 and his fi rst publication, In the Land of Unfrightened Birds (1907). This ornately illustrated ethnographic work explored the rich and largely unknown landscape of Karelia in the far northwest of Russia (fig. 3.1). On his expedition there he joined forces with an experienced ethnographer and a professional photographer to document the people, customs, and natural phenomena of this isolated geographic area. In the Land of Unfrightened Birds features many of the photographs taken in Karelia, including images of water and waterways, peasants and Old Believers, accompanied by Prishvin’s ocherki of his encounters with this far-off place.10 This was the work that established his literary reputation and gained him entry into the literary world of the day, primarily the Symbolist religious-philosophical circle, whose members included Andrei Bely, Alexander Blok, and Viacheslav Ivanov. In his retrospective writings, Prishvin identifies his literary roots in this land, where his calling was fi rst revealed to him.11 It became a homeland (rodina) that would always be an important place of return in Prishvin’s literary life, an extension of his self. The ocherk would form the starting point for his artistic explorations of a subject throughout his career. The term ocherk could be used to describe various types of short writing that blended the documentary and literary modes, described by Gorky as “something intermediate between research and story.”12 Ivan Turgenev’s socially engaged portraits of country life in pre-reform Russia in his Hunter’s Sketches (Zapiski okhotnika, 1852) were highly influential in Prishvin’s own literary development. Like Turgenev’s, the author’s forays into the natural world begin with his avocation as a hunter, who then puts down his rifle in order to sketch the landscape and people he encounters while traversing the Russian countryside and beyond. Later, in his introduction to My Ocherk (Moi ocherk, 1933), Prishvin reflects on his literary beginnings and on the genre: There is something that doesn’t come from poetry in each ocherk, there’s something of the scholar, or perhaps of the seeker of truth, in the sense of the term as Turgenev used it in talking about Gleb Uspensky’s ocherki: “It is

106

CHAPTER 3 not poetry, but perhaps more than poetry.” In general this something of the ocherk is like the residue of the material, which remains artistically unprocessed due to the relationship of the author to his material that is more complicated than that of art.13

Such formulations linking poetic voice and truth telling—a reforming of the world that is more than either raw nature or the literary text—echoes the early Symbolists’ reactions to Prishvin’s work. These critics, including Ivanov-Razumnik and Zinaida Gippius, characterized Prishvin as a metaphysical “truth seeker” in the natural world.14 It is precisely Prishvin’s ability to channel both the authorial self and the forces of nature (synthetically fused rather than working in isolation) that characterizes his fi rst work and so many others throughout his career. The opening pages of In the Land of Unfrightened Birds foregrounds Prishvin’s autobiographical approach to the documentary subject with an assertion of his authorial self as the filter, or frame, through which the reader will view the land of Karelia. This autobiographical voice fi rst asserts the objectivity of ethnographer and photographer: “[I] went to collect ethnographic material. . . . I photographed everything that seemed interesting to me.”15 However, as the work progresses, Prishvin’s authorial “I” yields its place to nature, as nature herself becomes the main actor on the stage.16 In his article on Prishvin, “Great Pan” (Velikii Pan), Ivanov-Razumnik describes this effect: Everywhere one feels . . . that it is not individual people who interest the author, but rather all the elements of popular life, all elements of nature. Everywhere one feels, fi nally, that the artist does not give himself any freedom . . . and yet before us there is an artistic work. . . . If one looks deeper, then it begins to seem that even this “epic-ness” [epich-nost′] also has its compelling reasons. What interests our author everywhere and anywhere is the general rather than the specific; the forest and the water, but not this crooked tree or this babbling brook: he senses Great Pan in the mass rather than the individual [lichnost′].17 While Ivanov-Razumnik denies the specificity of space and objects in Prishvin’s writings, many critics have focused on the exactitude of his writing.18 However, it is clear in Prishvin’s writing, and in the words of several of his critics, that these two seeming opposites (the specific and the general, or in Berger’s terms, life story and history) are actually one and the same. One contemporary Soviet critic, writing shortly after Prishvin’s death, remarked that his geographical compositions were like clearings in the forest, which reveal “the connection between the striving to understand the great in the small, which is characteristic of ‘microgeography’ and the laconicism of the bare written record, which is transformed into a miniature of nature with the radiant colors of spring.”19 The ocherk thus provided a distinctly personal way for

MICROGEOGR A PH Y, M A CRO W OR L D

107

Prishvin to embed documentary material through the concentrated lens of microgeography. His compositions, although miniature in focus, are “organically” connected to the natural world through authorial subjectivity; what Ivanov-Razumnik characterizes as an individual quality that is both natural and personal. Prishvin’s authorial self dissolves into his landscapes, allowing the reader revelatory encounters with his “truth” (the organic whole) in the “clearings”: his textually and visually composed microgeographies. Essentially, this transformation of Prishvin’s authorial self into the natural landscape is analogous to the way in which his authorial subjectivity transforms his objective material (the ethnographic notes and photographs) into a text, an ocherk. 20 While underscoring his objectivity as ethnographer and photographer in his introduction to In the Land of Unfrightened Birds, Prishvin also asserts himself as the author of the images, somewhat obscuring the fact that the expedition’s professional photographer most likely took many photographs as well: “Now possessing this material [that I photographed], on my return to Petersburg I decided to try to give in a series of small ocherki if not a picture of this land, then its photographic image embellished with colors.”21 Here Prishvin notes the central role that photography played in the writing of the ocherki and the illustrative way in which he moves beyond the objective images by coloring them with text. Ivanov-Razumnik, too, is drawn to this dialectic between objective and subjective in Prishvin’s authorial framing of the work: “The author conceals himself, as if he wants to be only a photographer, only an objective researcher. He does not succeed in this: the artist breaks through everywhere, giving whole character types. . . . Everywhere one feels that there is no photographic truth here, that three or four living people whom the author came across in the distant northern forests have been combined, perhaps, into one type.”22 Here IvanovRazumnik equates objectivity with the author’s concealing himself from view. But he goes on to conclude that it is Prishvin’s narrative, as the expression of his literary subjectivity, that overcomes photographic objectivity, thereby making Prishvin “the most subjective” of Russia’s contemporary authors: How can you approach the Great Pan in any other way than with the deepest, most intimate, most subjective side of one’s individuality, one’s essence? And this seeming “epic” of M. Prishvin is in reality the most intimate “lyric,” there is only the deep subjective penetration of the artist into the world that surrounds him; again I repeat, that M. Prishvin is perhaps the most subjective of all our contemporary artists. 23 The photographs, which serve as the source of Prishvin’s inspiration in the process of writing, capture but an isolated moment, a superficial record. But, as IvanovRazumnik’s Symbolist (and synthetic) reading demonstrates, when this material is fully “developed” in the literary form of the artistic ocherk, Prishvin’s authorial self penetrates the natural world through the virtual analogue of the photograph, and

108

CHAPTER 3

transforms it into a microgeographical (both the microcosm and the macrocosm in one) rendering of space and time. The pun on “developed” is intended. There is a parallel between the process of photographic development, which for a professional photographer would be the fi nal phase before display of the image, and Prishvin’s authorial process. The fi nal step in “development” for Prishvin is the emplotment of the photograph in a text, whereby the photograph becomes but one part of the narrative landscape. In its fi nal realization, it seems that Prishvin not only inhabits the space of his creation but also becomes fused with his microgeography, as his authorial self is visible on the photographs like the embellishment of color. Rendered thus, the photographs reveal a contrast with Andreev’s quest to annihilate mediation in hyperreality. While Prishvin’s self might at times dissolve away into his subject, his microgeography, read by Ivanov-Razumnik, functions with the writing of a distinct frame of the author’s self, made alternatively visible or invisible in the progression of reading through the text image. In visual tandem with this transformation of objective material, not only are the photographs altered by the narrative unfurling of Prishvin’s texts, but they have also been embellished by the hand of the artist P. P. Polzunov. The photographs in many instances become drawings with ornate framings, some incorporating old Slavic design motifs, adding layers of artistry to the documentary space of the book and artistic embellishment to the landscape of the land of unfrightened birds (fig. 3.1). These design elements reflect the influence of the “style moderne” (art nouveau) prevalent in Symbolist literary and visual production in this period, while also harking back to the frames of ethnographic albums of the previous century (compare with fig. 1.4). 24 The fi nal product renders the distant and unfamiliar into an intimate artistic image, held in the hands of the Russian reader safe in a domestic setting. Moreover, photographic material is presented in the frame of drawing and painting, transformed from the documentary or objective into the artistic. This artistic embellishment of the photograph is emblematic of the changes photography was undergoing in the fi rst decade of the twentieth century. In particular, photographers strove to establish the new technology as an artistic medium, as evinced by the rise in the number of photographic exhibitions as well as the proliferation of popular photographic periodicals. Another leader in this sphere is the already familiar Mikhail Prokudin-Gorsky, who, in the years following Prishvin’s trip to the north of Russia, began his project to survey not only Prishvin’s corner of Karelia (Petrozavodsk in particular) but the whole of the empire in his patented color photographic process (plate 16). 25 And while Prokudin-Gorsky’s own campaign before the Duma in 1910 was targeted to gain recognition for photography as a protected art (see chapter 1), the presentation of his survey of the Russian empire between 1909 and 1914 asserted a multifaceted notion of photography’s artistic potential. In particular, Prokudin-Gorsky perceived his project as a grand “educative scheme,” the product of which would be the incorporation of his photographic plates in pedagogical instruction. 26 Projected in classrooms across Russia, such images would provide a

MICROGEOGR A PH Y, M A CRO W OR L D

109

real window—in color—to distant and isolated reaches of the Russian empire. This pedagogical instrumentation, along with Prokudin-Gorsky’s almost single-minded dedication to his patented chemical processes that could capture the world in “natural colors,” on its surface eschewed engagement with the Symbolist model of painterly embellishment. 27 However, Prokudin-Gorsky’s framing of his photographic enterprise in print might be viewed as an assertion of a modernism of a different stamp: its instrumentality does not preclude it from being contemplated as an artistic image.28 Be it a picturesque landscape printed as a lithograph in his journal, Fotograf liubitel′, or an embellished black-and-white photograph announcing the opening of a new photographic society, the medium must be considered an art in its own right. In a parallel but distinctly more authorial manifestation, Prishvin’s own photographic projects, beginning with his In the Land of Unfrightenend Birds, would aim to synthesize seemingly competing impulses. He would at once embrace the pedagogical and scientific function of photography and artistically enhance it with his authorial subjectivity; in such a space, going beyond its simple illustrative function, photography becomes simultaneously an artistic, pedagogical, and scientific medium.

The Author-Photographer in a World Transformed With the outbreak of World War I in Russia, many of the sites that Prokudin-Gorsky had photographed were quickly designated as areas of strategic importance to the tsarist government, leading to the confiscations of a large portion of his plates and photo proofs.29 In 1918 Prokudin-Gorsky emigrated with his remaining photographic prints. Prishvin, who served briefly in the war, continued to write but would not hold a camera in his hands for another twenty years. In these distant regions, the face of the landscape would be transformed by war, as well as by the extensive processes of industrial and political reconfiguration brought on by the Soviet regime. Prishvin and a large-scale artistic movement returned to photography in the fi rst decades of Soviet rule to reassemble a comprehensive picture of these landscapes after the revolution, and to teach a new generation how to read its world. While photography played a central role in the documentary visualization of World War I and the events of the Russian Revolution in reportage, the comparative calm of the mid-1920s provided artists and writers with the freedom to develop new models for visual and textual production focused on a present still under construction. Consequently, photography and writing became essential tools in the Soviet regime’s reordering and reassembling of a new world. Soviet authorities understood the particular importance of photography in providing a means of documenting this new reality. We might think again of Anatoly Lunacharsky’s clear linking of textual literacy and photographic literacy in 1926: “Just as the USSR achieved universal literacy in general, so too will it have photographic literacy in particular.”30 Mikhail Prishvin played an essential, but not well recognized, role within the emerging dialogues on

110

CHAPTER 3

textual and photographic representation in the 1920s and 1930s. His photographs and texts reflect a model of authorial perspective and writing different from that of the avant-garde author-photographer Sergei Tretyakov—one that has not been represented in subsequent criticism but that was no less influential for Soviet readers. By the late 1920s, during the drive toward industrialization of the fi rst Five-Year Plan, the ocherk had become the dominant mode of representation for the “literature of fact [literatura fakta]” movement.31 This “factographic” movement drew directly from Soviet reality, inscribing reportage, documents, scientific data, as well as photographs and fi lm into brief accounts of contemporary life. 32 The ocherk, as a short genre, was also favored because of the rapid pace at which it could be produced, and it was lauded from a pedagogical standpoint for its clear narrative structure, which might “teach new writers to write and new readers to read.”33 For both Prishvin and Sergei Tretyakov, the vanguard advocate of the “literature of fact” movement, the ocherk answered literature’s call not only to keep pace with the changing landscape of the Soviet Union but also to become part of the productive drive. In his introduction to My Ocherk, Prishvin states that literature—facing an “unprecedented pace of construction”—is called upon to become a full participant in the new reality. He identifies the ocherk as the best way to capture and make legible the representative moments of this changing landscape: “Considering it impossible for me to write production novels in these conditions, I answered the call of the times by applying my mastery of the ocherk to this present moment [tekushchii moment].”34 Prishvin’s choice of the ocherk over the novel form echoes in part Tretyakov’s earlier proclamations in his 1927 essay “The New Leo Tolstoy,” in which Tretyakov rejects the need for a “new Tolstoy,” the author of long, slow, contemplative novels. What is needed instead is a generation of authors from the ranks of the proletariat, whose subjects will be the material conditions of life, captured in short genres: the novella, the newspaper article, the ocherk. These genres—and particularly the ocherk, which was tied to scientific and journalistic modes of writing—would provide a more direct documentary relationship to the subject matter.35 Prishvin would echo these sentiments in his diary in 1930, stating that the contrived novels of today (unlike those of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Goncharov) are evidence of the fact that the “era of the novel has passed.”36 And while Prishvin and Tretyakov would fi nd common ground in their views on the genre’s contemporary limitations, there is one essential difference at the heart of Prishvin’s and Tretyakov’s views on literature and photography: the nature of authorship. As Tretyakov writes: Time marches on, the relations of production themselves change, science matures. . . . The party, tirelessly in contact with the current day’s fact, is constantly formulating the next slogans and directives. . . . Next to this collective brain of revolution, for the individual writer to imagine his personal philosophical hegemony is laughable. The space of the writer’s problematic only keeps getting narrower—just a bit more and there will be nothing left for the

MICROGEOGR A PH Y, M A CRO W OR L D

111

writer as teacher to do. The person of science, the person of technology, the engineer, the organizer of matter and of society are coming to occupy the place where not long ago one could still catch a glimpse of the last teacher of life.37 In Tretyakov’s formulation, the teacher of life, as represented by Tolstoy among the great writers of the past, works at too slow a pace and reflects the world only from his own particular authorial perspective. This perspective, for Tretyakov, must be replaced by that of an engaged worker, the proletarian writer. Thus Tretyakov argues that proletarian society can abolish the “illusion of authorship,” as well as literature (belles lettres) as such. The most important thing for the ocherkist is his or her “observation post” (nabliudatl′nyi post) (or vantage point)—and “the worst [one of these] is to observe in the capacity of a tourist or guest of honor.”38 Rather than viewing the author as a disinterested observer, or judge, Tretyakov envisioned and lived the role of the engaged “operative” writer. Walter Benjamin’s writings made Tretyakov’s model of the operative writer famous in the West. Tretyakov’s photographic illustrations caught the German theorist’s particular notice when the Soviet author was lecturing in Germany on the collective farms in the USSR, with accompanying slides and photographs. 39 In his essay “The Author as Producer,” Benjamin lauds Tretyakov as the model of an operative writer, who has made the choice to become ideologically engaged, struggling and laboring alongside the proletariat, rather than indulging in the selfish autonomy of the bourgeois writer.40 While at the Communist Lighthouse (Kommunisticheskii maiak) kolkhoz, Tretyakov was “calling mass meetings; collecting funds to pay for tractors; persuading independent peasants to enter the kolkhoz . . . reporting for Moscow newspapers . . . , etc.”41 As an operative writer, Tretyakov did not simply inform the public but also engaged in the very production he depicted in his literary work. This model representation of the operative author-photographer was enabled by the camera apparatus. Both Benjamin and Tretyakov understood the transformative power of the camera: a tool to be placed in the hands of every worker in order to make him a powerful producer. Viewed as a mechanically determined, and therefore largely unconscious, mode of representation, photography becomes a medium that wrests creative control out of the hands of the individual. The camera—depersonalized in its democratic and mechanical appeal, modeled in the hands of the author-photographer— stands ready to finally remove “the long-since-counterfeit wealth of creative personality” that both Benjamin and Tretyakov viewed as inherently bourgeois.42 While Benjamin and Tretyakov would mediate this image of the operative author-photographer abroad, Anatoly Lunacharsky deserves credit for his contribution to the practical development, encouragement, and training of author-photographers in Russia. It was Lunacharsky who sent Prishvin his first Leica cameras in 1929 from Germany. The Leica is emblematic of the portable high-quality camera of this period, allowing for rapid and easy image capture, and was used by author-photographers including Tretyakov, Ilya Ilf, and Ilya Ehrenburg.43 The camera, for Prishvin and, of

112

CHAPTER 3

course, Tretyakov, became an essential part of his writer’s kit. A statement by Ivan Romanov, the subject of one of Prishvin’s ocherki, also echoes Tretyakov’s famous statement in Sovetskoe foto in 1934: “I do not know what would be more difficult when traveling as a writer: if I were to lose my pen and writing pad or my camera.”44 Romanov writes, “He [Prishvin] usually went with his ‘Leica’ camera, taking snapshots. . . . In his pocket he always had his notebook.”45 Lunacharsky, as the Soviet Union’s Commissar of Enlightenment, was concerned not only with photographic literacy in the growing movement of author-photographers but also with the role of photography in education—indeed, with education in photography. Quoted on the subject long after serving as Commissar of Enlightenment, he remarked that photography provides an easier and shorter path to artistic appreciation: One should also not forget the artistic side of photography—its creative significance. The skill, ability, attentiveness, and accuracy that it demands are of huge pedagogical and educative significance. Photography makes the child consciously choose a point of view for his photograph and, moreover, develops his taste for landscape, attitude, and works of art. It develops the aesthetic side of his soul.46 Lunacharsky not only imagined a Soviet Union in which all citizens might be photographers; he actively promoted the spread of photographic technology by providing cameras to authors. In so doing he made these authors into the vanguard of the new literacy movement while also further solidifying a link between documentary photography and text. Like Prishvin’s own reflections on photography, Lunacharsky’s endorsement envisions photography as an exceptional medium that is both a pedagogical tool and a gateway to artistic representation.47 Tretyakov himself acknowledged the importance of Prishvin in his essay on the evolution of the ocherk genre in 1934, part of a series of articles in Nashi Dostizheniia published after the All Union Conference of Ocherkists in the same year: On one pole is Prishvin, the ocherkist, working on the concrete [konkretnost′], but is, perhaps, less operative, because for him his subjective laws . . . are dearer than any other laws. It is true that what he writes has the extraordinary ability to be remembered. But the subject of his descriptions is always shrouded in some kind of damp mist [tumannost′ )]. . . . The other pole is pure documentalism [dokumentalizm], which is characterized by the pursuit of the absolute exactitude of fact, transforming itself into a dry and bare cipher, becomes superfluous in the ocherk. The documentalist [dokumentalist] fears his own breathing in the ocherk, he is afraid of something somehow . . . to bring in certain changes, some embellishment [vydumka] to the fact that he communicates. The documentalist is not an ocherkist. He comes to the object of his

MICROGEOGR A PH Y, M A CRO W OR L D

113

work together with the stenographer and limits himself only to the role of a man who asks a few questions and corrects the transcript.48 Certainly such a characterization moves far from a simple literature of fact. Prishvin’s response to Tretyakov immediately follows in the subsequent pages. After something like a humility topos in which Prishvin finds himself “in the center of literature” among the likes of Boris Agapov, Viktor Shklovsky, and Tretyakov, he engages directly with Tretyakov’s “two poles.”49 He agrees that he has been identified and placed on the “correct pole,” but he argues over the question of operativity (operativnost′) in his writing. By way of illustration, Prishvin zooms in on a section from his Cranes’ Homeland (Zhuravlinnaia rodina, 1929), published in Izvestiia, that focuses on the lake plant cladophera sauteri (in Prishvin’s description, “an emerald water plant of extraordinary beauty”). A lake in the cranes’ land was to be drained for development, leaving the rare cladophera to perish. He goes on to describe the larger impact of his writing, noting that his “little article [about the cladophera] caused a stir in the scholarly world.”50 An emergency commission was set up to move the threatened water plants to another lake, thereby saving them. His work was even read by a high government functionary (unnamed) who decided to reverse the draining of the lake and swamp in question, and now the plant may be found in “innumerable numbers.” In his book-length Cranes’ Homeland, Prishvin further describes the effect of his literature and his own penetrating vision at the site itself—with cladophera in hand. “Everyone [at Zabolotskoe Lake] had read my [novel] Kashchei’s Chain, . . . and their sympathetic attention for me grew greatly with my different examples of descriptions of the cladophera, like the heart of the Earth.”51 While no mass meetings are being called here, Prishvin does call a collective consciousness to order through his own literary chains. Thus Prishvin concludes, “This is the very kind of operativity that Cranes’ Homeland has. . . . I think that the better you write a thing, the more operative it will be.”52 Clearly, Prishvin’s operativity has a different focus than that of Tretyakov (even at this later date); instead of forwarding socialist progress, it intervenes on behalf of that which is overlooked. For Prishvin the environmentalist, the more personal the touch, and the more the author can step back to facilitate a connection to the natural phenomenon before him, the more convincingly does the subject come into focus, and the more (organically) operative the perspective of the author and text. And so too, according to Tretyakov, does the camera become the model tool in the operative artist’s approach: “An author who teaches writers nothing, teaches no one. What matters, therefore, is the exemplary character of production, which is able fi rst to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers—that is, readers or spectators into collaborators.”53 By contrast, Prishvin’s model of authorship in the ocherk and photography is deeply rooted in a personal authorial perspective and retains continuity with his prerevolutionary

114

CHAPTER 3

identity. In My Ocherk he states, “I am certain that any newspaper article, review, or even purely technical book can be written like a novel if the poet tries in his creative personality to seek out an exact correspondence to fact and to align himself with it.”54 Prishvin also has a very different, personal relationship to the space and the people he studies. Unlike the operative writer model, Prishvin demonstrates that his connection to his subject comes from a metaphysical connection to the natural world, a fact that he weaves into a personal creation myth: I consider it most dangerous for an author when he encroaches on the material of life only in order to write about it, and when he approaches the life of another without an internal kinship to it. This is an empty exercise! I was born under a blue sky, and grew up amidst green trees, on soft grass; I understand the music of the wind to the point that I have almost no need of concerts; and I also understand the naively beautiful soul of uncorrupted man. 55 This concept is also evident in the draft of a letter in Prishvin’s diaries. The head of a kolkhoz had written to Prishvin, as a naturalist and pedagogue, asking for his advice on what approach to use in teaching local geographical studies (kraevedenie). In his answer Prishvin identifies once again his kindred, personal attachment to writing and studying his natural subjects—what he calls his rodstvennoe vnimanie. While he asserts that the kolkhoznik must fi rst approach his teaching as a party organizer, it is most important that the kolkhoznik, like Prishvin, be a pedagogue and local geographer who approaches his subject “lovingly.” His instruction must reflect a personal unity with place and history, channeling a unique, organic unity with the natural world—not a mechanical recitation of the laws of man. If approached in this way, the student naturalist develops her rodstvennoe vnimanie through any singular detail in the world around her. Rather than a fragment, we have the microcosm in the whole. 56 Prishvin’s vision of realism is in fact also tied intimately to the camera. In his diary he proclaims that “with photography [svetopis′]” he, quite actively, “wants to prove [his] views of the real world.”57 The author’s choice of the Russian word svetopis′ rather than the Greek-based fotografiia foregrounds the role that nature, and specifically light (svet), might have in shaping his photographs; in such a statement, Prishvin once again becomes the transformative channel for the natural world. Contrasting his own work as an author-photographer to that of the general run of photographers, he states, Experiments with photography have convinced me of the possibility of continuing literary-artistic realism, illustrating my artistic discoveries with photographic snapshots. But I have also become convinced that ordinary photographic work has “photographicality” but not artistic realism only because photographers have made themselves subservient to the will of the

MICROGEOGR A PH Y, M A CRO W OR L D

115

camera-machine, and do not use it as an author uses his pen or a painter his brush. If one understands photography as a technical means for realizing artistic perception, then one can achieve extraordinary expressiveness in photographs. At the same time, “illustrations” for literary-artistic works, having the same origin as the text, should give the composition a greater simplicity and expressiveness.58 While acknowledging photography’s mimetic realism as a fact, Prishvin insists that his role as photographer does not end with the development of the photograph. Essentially, he also connects his view of the objective material of photography with a distinctly nineteenth-century (Tolstoyan) view of realism and authorial subjectivity. In contrast to Tretyakov’s rejection of the old Tolstoyan model of the teacher of life, Prishvin sees the space of the ocherk, formed in both text and image, as continuing an artistically engaged realist tradition. While photographs and notebooks collect pictures from the life around him, his artfully shaped narrative transforms this objective material through a distinct authorial perspective, uniting it with a personal expressiveness that transcends everyday reality and experience. 59

Revisiting In the Land of Unfrightened Birds While many of Prishvin’s photo-ocherki demonstrate the close link between a new brand of Soviet literacy, photography, and text, it is his new edition of In the Land of Unfrightened Birds that is the focal point of his writing in this dynamic age. In 1933, Prishvin revisited and reworked his 1907 In the Land of Unfrightened Birds for a new illustrated edition, published in 1934. Karelia, which he fi rst explored in 1906, had been transformed from an outlying and distant land, shrouded in the folkloric myth of Prishvin’s work, to the forefront of Soviet production. The high-profi le White Sea Canal construction project—built on the backs of the forced labor of Gulag prisoners—was documented and shaped for domestic and foreign audiences in various media, including fi lm, Rodchenko’s photomontages in the pages of USSR in Construction, and the hybrid photo-illustrated The History of the Construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, published in various luxury editions in 1934. This latter volume, commemorating the canal, was written by a large selection of writers including Maxim Gorky, Viktor Shklovsky, and Mikhail Zoshchenko. It also included many voices of the camp itself, from prisoners to members of the Cheka. To ensure its objective and documentary nature and to enhance the truth quality of the work, photography also accompanied the text, contributed by a brigade of photographers including Rodchenko. Under the watchful eye of Stalin (made manifest in the frontispiece), the collectively authored volume made “reforging” ( perekovka) its primary focus, documenting the Gulag prisoner’s rehabilitation as he was remade into a productive Soviet subject. The book became the public stage for new

116

CHAPTER 3

experiments in literary montage, thereby also transforming the writers and editors of the project into “artist-engineers,” a transformation that cannot help but recall Stalin’s infamous adage: “Writers are the engineers of human souls.” Drawing a parallel between themselves and those engineers overseeing the construction of the canal, the authors likened themselves to shock workers, “fi nishing the job [of book construction and printing] in thirty-eight days.”60 Prishvin had hoped to be a part of the writers’ brigade sent to document the canal, and his unexplained exclusion was a source of great insecurity for him throughout this period. And while he was excluded from the collective, his work is included in a brief but telling moment in The History of the Construction by way of visualizing the “old.” In contrast to the progress of the canal’s construction and the visible intervention of man at this site, a peaceful landscape illustration of water and trees taken from Prishvin’s 1907 work is included with the caption “Lake Vyg twenty-eight years ago” (fig. 3.2).61 And while his authorial signature is in no way marked on this image, such a use of his work suggests that Prishvin, like this image of the land, is an archaic vestige.62 This connection is made more explicit when Prishvin’s 1907 work makes an appearance in the hands of the head Chekist, Alexander Uspensky. The official is described as arriving at the White Sea Canal site “reading a book by Prishvin very attentively.” The passage reads: “You look at the columns of foam. They fall eternally into a quiet pool under the shade of a black rock. . . . Evidently, some forces act on the fall of the water; and at every moment each part is different. The waterfall seems to live some complex unceasing life of its own. . . .” This is a description of the Nadvoits waterfall. In the Land of Unfrightened Birds is a book on these localities. Uspensky read it attentively. . . . The Nadvoits waterfall is destined to disappear; above it there is to be the fourth level [of the canal lock].63 While Prishvin is made present for this brief (intertextual) moment, lyrically describing the wild flows of nature at the very center of the White Sea Canal construction project, this inclusion serves only to mark the sharp break with that past (Prishvin’s authorial past) and the marginalization of the author: Prishvin, like his image of the waterfall, will be swept away in the process of reforging. Even while threatened by these rising waters and excluded from the writers’ brigade, Prishvin was granted permission to visit the canal site in order to gather material for his own White Sea Canal book. This second edition of In the Land of Unfrightened Birds revisits the past and rewrites it in a new photographic and illustrated present.64 The small book (especially in comparison with the large format of the History of the Construction) is arranged in two halves: the fi rst simply presents framed contemporary photographs, taken by Prishvin at the canal, along with a new ocherk titled “Fathers and Sons” (“Ottsy i deti”—a nod of course to Turgenev, his literary forefather).65 The second half of the work reprints Prishvin’s original text of

MICROGEOGR A PH Y, M A CRO W OR L D

117

Figure 3.2 . “Vyg-Lake,” included in Mikhail Prishvin’s In the Land of Unfrightened Birds (1907) and reproduced in The History of the Construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal (1934). Permissions courtesy of L. A. Riazanova, M. M. Prishvin Estate.

In the Land of Unfrightened Birds while transforming the earlier publication’s photographic illustrations into small woodcuts along the headings of the pages. These woodcuts seem to work as another nod to Prishvin’s “long past” rather than a marker of the “new.” And while the past is inscribed visually by these woodcuts imprinted in bold fi ll that obscures their details, the present will be manifested in the sharp detail of the photograph. Prishvin’s “Fathers and Sons” foregrounds his personal authorial biography, intermixed with his contemporary subject: the reforging at the canal. The fi rst half of the work provides the marginal woodcuts that replace the 1907 photographs, while the new photographs are taken from nearly the same point of view as those of his fi rst trip: most prominently those of the water and waterfalls at the locks, making water, rather than the people, the protagonist of the canal’s reforging project (fig. 3.3). In fact, this focal point has visual affi nity with Dziga Vertov’s opening for his Eleventh Year (1928) as the flowing water of the Dnieper River, soon to be dammed by the enormous Dnieprstroi construction project, rushes over rocks in an extended montage sequence. At fi rst glance, each of these hydro-image projects presents large-scale ruminations on exactly these untamed wilds as Vertov’s Dnieper fi lls the screen and Prishvin’s locks run nearly to the edge of their small pages. But just as Vertov’s montage would be checked in its flow by the organized dynamism of the populated construction project, Prishvin’s text—his captions—draw our attention to the fact that these flows are now checked by the locks of the canal. In the text the reader comes to understand that a natural waterway is now directed by the hand of the new

118

CHAPTER 3

Figure 3.3. Mikhail Prishvin, “Nadvoitsky Waterfall. Lock Open” and “Nadvoitsky Waterfall. Lock Closed,” In the Land of Unfrightened Birds, 1934. Permissions courtesy of L. A. Riazanova, M. M. Prishvin Estate.

Soviet man (lock open, lock closed). Further, Prishvin’s narrative also adds a more essential framing for these photographs. Calling this site his homeland (rodina), Prishvin links this landscape with his literary birth by utilizing the language of the reforging of the waterway: “It was as if in [this] land I met with this unknown force of homeland, and my fi rst book was the fi rst lock [shliuz] of my literary canal, leading to a new homeland; and to me it is now completely clear, why and how I came to the second . . . lock of my canal: from the land of unfrightened birds. . . . Thus within myself I unexpectedly found a sort of connection of time, and there appeared

MICROGEOGR A PH Y, M A CRO W OR L D

119

to me a special joy of life conducive to a kindred attention.”66 Even as the waters are checked by the locks, Prishvin, through the lens of his rodstvennoe vnimanie, can still pinpoint his authorial past in the seamless flow between a past and present, from the wilds of nature toward the ordered construction of the present-day. The connection of time noted in this passage also speaks to Sergei Tretyakov’s model of the “extended photo-observation [dlitel′noe foto-nabliudenie]”—which would ideally make the subject visible “not as an individual, not in isolation, but as a particle in our active social tissue, connected by little roots along the most diverse lines,” capable of noting every measure of progress in order to “represent . . . construction as a single, integral process of development.”67 But this model also speaks to a more generalized notion of visual montage that provides an apt parallel to Prishvin’s writerly project, that is, “time-lapse photography,” most familiar from the pioneering work of Eadweard Muybridge (fig. 3.4).68 Time-lapse photography might be defi ned most simply as the capture of “change or motion over time,” making visible change happen too slowly or motion too rapidly to observe with the naked eye.69 In Muybridge’s famous studies, the camera traps the rapidly moving subject (the elk, in this case) into discrete, frozen moments. Tom Gunning describes Muybridge as having “conquered time, rather than spanning or penetrating space, as he exposed

Figure 3.4. Eadweard Muybridge, from Animal Locomotion, plate 692, collotype (1887). Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

120

CHAPTER 3

the tiniest intervals of motion.”70 In the resulting photo-series, artfully arranged by Muybridge, filmic motion is suggested by the juxtaposition of the photo stills.71 Sam Rohdie, describing Muybridge’s arrangement of photographs as montage writes, Movement was not seen, but imagined in the gaps between instances of stillness. . . . In the pages of Muybridge’s publications, the gap between one image and the next is perceptible, but in staging them into sequences, effectively editing the images, the gap is bridged by the reader (spectator), making a leap in time and space lured on by an apparent continuity and the wish or assumption of it without attending to its construction.72 The analogy with time-lapse photography provides an even deeper insight into Prishvin’s photo-literary process. Those instantaneous, isolated photo stills embedded into the time-lapse photo-series reveal certain elusive truths about the photographed subject. It is in its immobility that motion (invisible to the eye) is revealed—as in the locomotion of the elk, a fact that also gives Muybridge the distinction of being called the harbinger of the optical unconscious. As Tom Gunning notes, Muybridge’s series (as well as the enigmatic figure of Muybridge himself) invites the viewer into the “space between things, the interstices and gaps . . . within and between instants.”73 In the space of the optical unconscious, we montage the motion between images in order to reintegrate and make sense of the series of images that has been rendered strange and isolated by the camera rather than by our natural binocular vision.74 Gunning claims that Muybridge’s study of locomotion, particularly useful for artists, allowed them to study and master “whole movement” and thereby select for representation one phase that could stand in for that movement as a whole.75 Analogously, in his two-step preparation of this ocherk, Prishvin would fi rst record his subject on film and then craft a textual representation of the moment, “using his photographs as shorthand,” thereby also selecting the most representative moments to capture an overall effect, change, or emotion.76 Valeria Prishvina, Prishvin’s widow, echoes such a reading of Prishvin’s work, stating that “significance or quality lies not in the large or small part, but only in the coordination of this or that part with the whole. Thus the small part must recognize itself in the whole and then it will disappear as a small part and enter into an equal relation with all the parts.”77 In this way, the text would animate the still images captured by the camera, creating Privshin’s organic narrative link—his photo-textual montage: a vision that is both scientifically objective and artistically framed. The kino-eye (kinoglaz) writings of the avant-garde fi lmmaker Dziga Vertov also seem to hint at a synchronicity with the perceptual effects of time-lapse montage: “Kino-eye means the conquest of time (the visual linkage of phenomena separated in time). Kino-eye is the possibility of seeing life processes in any temporal order or at any speed inaccessible to the human eye.”78 And while Vertov’s admittedly avantgarde view is forward-looking, it is actually Prishvin’s long look back—to his earliest

MICROGEOGR A PH Y, M A CRO W OR L D

121

connections to Karelia—that seems to make the speed of work and the transformation at the White Sea Canal incomprehensible to him, requiring the intervention of his time-lapse photographic process. Confessing that he cannot keep pace as an active member of the present generation, Prishvin states, Of course, owing to my long past, it is harder for me to cast a welcoming smile at Soviet achievements than it is for a young person simply to trumpet and shout about them. But in any case, [I] am so very, and sincerely, glad for the White Sea Canal route and I am proud of my choice to write about this particular region in my fi rst ethnographic work, and would even very much like to eliminate the element of chance [sluchainost′] in my choice of theme and so become part of this project if only in the most remote way.79 Unlike Prishvin’s fi rst foray into the land of unfrightened birds, the choice of subject is now not in the least accidental (or romantically fated), and neither is his methodical approach; like Muybridge’s time-lapse series, this is not simply reportage but an almost scientific penetration of an isolated phenomenon, of reality. This methodical attention to both space and time is captured most clearly in another photograph and description of the completed canal.80 As Prishvin recounts his arrival on the recently completed Murmansk railroad, reading his own fi rst book in light of the activity at the canal site, he exclaims “what a change!”81 Recalling his arrival twenty-eight years earlier on horseback and lamenting the absence of the storyteller (his native informant) from his first expedition, Prishvin turns to that affi rmation of rodina and joyous kindred attention that form the new locks of his literary canal. Here we can see that by linking past and present vision in a photograph of a small boy fishing on the canal, rodstvennoe vnimanie provides an alternative to Vertov’s kino-eye (fig. 3.5). In this almost bucolic scene, Soviet iconography—the image of Stalin—is relegated to the background. As Prishvin tells us in his narrative unfurling of this isolated moment, his worker guides were mystified by his choice of subject—why take a photograph of that boy? But Prishvin’s frame is deliberate: his penetrating vision precedes the camera’s ability to isolate a moment of action and raise it to a subject worthy of study and metonymic contemplation. It is this boy’s stillness—his seemingly leisurely inactivity—that renders him insignificant and therefore invisible to the White Sea Canal laborers. However, as the focal point for Prishvin’s time-lapse narrative of the canal, Prishvin’s montage fuses his life story and literary birth with the construction of this new waterway. This lens makes visible both those changes occurring through time that have been imperceptible to others (the time elapsed from 1907 to 1933) and those moving too quickly for Prishvin himself to have grasped otherwise than through this fusion of camera and writing. Vertov, that auteur of montage, provides his summation in 1939, “[Prishvin] penetrates life for artistic purposes. He synthesizes his observations into original works of art. He makes artistic discoveries. Pours precious grains of genuine truth into songs of

122

CHAPTER 3

Figure 3.5. Mikhail Prishvin, “Povenets. The Start of the Canal,” In the Land of Unfrightened Birds (1934). Permissions courtesy of L. A. Riazanova, M. M. Prishvin Estate.

truth, epics of truth, into a symphony of objective reality.”82 Here is the triumphant realization of the artistic-scientific vision, capable not simply of gathering an archive of facts (and thus reducing personhood to facts as well) but of focusing, penetrating with the camera in order to create an organic synthesis of objective and artistically transformed reality: the past, present, and future of the White Sea Canal. Instead of requiring the viewer to make the imaginative leap between the photo fragment and the continuity of historical time, Privshin himself does so by transforming a time lapse into chronophotographie, or a photographic “writing of time” into a single space (if not a single plane)—the photo-ocherk or the illustrated book.83 While Prishvin the writer found himself alienated—by age and perspective— from the White Sea Canal laborers and the authors’ brigade, Prishvin the authorphotographer in fact created what Tretyakov called an “extended photo-observation”: his rewriting and rephotographing of his land of unfrightened birds transforms the canal project into an embodied experience. As the laborers on the canal would each “fi nd his own homeland on this site,” so too could Prishvin and his readers make sense of an already transformed present through Prishvin’s text—chronophotographic bridging of old and new.84 Springing from the pages of the author’s “diary” (notes and photographs), “what is now ‘the past’ comes alive once more, and exists once more in ‘the present,’” as Prishvin’s personally framed time-lapse construction: Prishvin’s own “extended photo-observation.”85 Although the brigade of authors would

MICROGEOGR A PH Y, M A CRO W OR L D

123

seem to erase Prishvin’s authorial claims within a Soviet collective, the lone authorphotographer succeeds in creating a forward-looking present that, although slowed by Prishvin’s camera and pen, never breaks its onward flow.

Photographic Literacy for a New Generation By way of placing Prishvin on the main stage of Soviet visual production, we will consider the style of Soviet avant-garde photography from the standpoint of visual literacy as well as photographic pedagogy. In so doing, we must read photographic literacy as one essential aim of a new Soviet avant-garde, as artists shifted to both represent a new generation and teach its members how to become photographers themselves. Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, avant-garde artists experimented with what the medium of photography could offer, defamiliarizing everyday objects with extreme close-ups and cutting and reassembling photographs into new collaged and montaged worlds, requiring the viewing public to learn their photographic language. As attitudes toward photographic and textual representation changed throughout the rapidly shifting ideological milieu of the 1930s, the strategies employed in creating and reading these new worlds were necessarily rewritten and reimagined, reflecting the central tensions surrounding the visualization of everyday objects, people, and production within the Soviet Union. The late 1920s and early 1930s were characterized by a polyphony of voices vying for dominance in the sphere of Soviet photographic style, primary among which were the journalistically oriented ROPF (Russian Association of Proletarian Photographers), the aesthetically conservative AKhR (Association of Artists of the Revolution), and the Constructivist group October (Oktiabr′).86 The October group stressed a formal approach to the subject of the photo still: the striking close-up, the diagonal composition, and shooting sharply from above or below the subject. Seeing itself as pioneering on a new frontier, this modernist avant-garde group was opposed to what it viewed as the retrograde art of embellishment, represented by traditional Western painting in particular.87 Photography was central to this model of artistic production, which not only captured an industrial and modernist world but was also capable of organizing life itself.88 Aleksandr Rodchenko, a professor at VKhUTEMAS (Higher Art and Technical Studios) in the 1920s and later the leading voice in the October group, was an advocate of this new photographic technique in the tendentious spaces of the art and journalistic press.89 Photographs, Rodchenko argued, should not resemble painterly landscapes with horizons painted at “navel level”—a point of view typical of traditional painting and characteristic of prerevolutionary photography, like those adorning Prishvin’s fi rst edition of In the Land of Unfrightened Birds.90 Echoing the earlier words of Anatoly Lunacharsky in Sovetskoe foto, Rodchenko utilized metaphors of photographic literacy in his pedagogical campaign. In an article entitled “Large-Scale

1 24

CHAPTER 3

Illiteracy or Dirty Little Tricks,” he lashed out at critics who accused him of plagiarizing the work of Western photographers such as László Moholy-Nagy. Rodchenko claimed that these critics were photographically “illiterate,” and in the course of several short articles he proceeded to show them how to see and “read” photographic space.91 The work of contemporary photography—as the artistic medium of the proletariat as well as a popular form in print—was not, as Rodchenko argued, to privilege his originality as auteur but rather to free photography from its subservience to painting. Photographs taken from every point of view (except from the navel) would be capable of “showing the world from all points [s vsekh tochek]” and “educating the ability to see from all sides [vospitivat′ umenie videt′ so vsekh storon]”92 In order to achieve this goal, editors of photographic journals should encourage the repetition of subjects and perspectives (what his critics decried as plagiarism in Rodchenko’s work) and print numerous examples of such photographs in their journals. Only then could photography overcome centuries of viewing the world from a painterly perspective and reflect a contemporary lived (Soviet) reality. In this formulation, photographic literacy becomes a kind of refamiliarizing project—by learning not only to read photographs but also to take them, the student can also take control of this capability and use it to gain mastery of her world, or even to map it.93 But it was not only visual echoes that Moholy-Nagy and Rodchenko shared in 1928. In the very same year, Moholy-Nagy published his own prophetic vision on photographic literacy: “First must come the realization that the knowledge of photography is just as important as that of the alphabet. The illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as the pen.”94 Moholy-Nagy’s comments, reprinted in 1946, form a coda for a small manifesto on “image sequences; series,” which lauded not the single photograph (as in the gallery), but rather the “photographic series—photographic comics, pamphlets, books.” Organized in a series, photographs acquire a different power—as “a potent weapon or tender poetry.”95 One example of the photo-series, quite similar to those published in the earlier years of Novyi LEF, is Vladimir Griuntal′ and Grigory Iablonovksy’s children’s book What Is This? (Chto eto takoe? 1932).96 Structured like a photographic series, this book (by two lesser-known members of the October group) transforms the defamiliarization of space and object into a game for the child reader. In the fi rst half of the work, Griuntal′’s “snapshot-puzzles” (snimki-zagadki) ask the reader to guess at what is being pictured in the black-and-white photographs and, at the same time, to solve an arithmetic problem (fig. 3.6). The answers to both the visual and the arithmetic puzzles are revealed in the second half of the book, where objects that were initially shot from unexpected angles or shown in unrecognizable close-ups—such as a grouping of eggs shot from above or a close-up of a household grater—are revealed from a more familiar angle. The photographed objects (alongside the solution to the mathematical problem) are refamiliarized straight on, as pictures of recognizable objects from everyday life.97

MICROGEOGR A PH Y, M A CRO W OR L D

125

Figure 3.6. Vladimir Griuntal and G. Iablonovsky, Kettle problem and solution, from What Is This? (1932); Cotsen Children’s Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

While the mathematical problem has no direct relation to the object with which it is paired, it accompanies the problem of the defamiliarized object as a parallel procedure, serving as a helpmate for solving the latter. If the child reader cannot guess the picture puzzle, she is told that she can use the arithmetic solution to locate the answer. Turning to the back of the book, the first solution (2 x 2=4) is accompanied by the proclamation “Arithmetic is a good thing!”98 When the puzzle is solved (either by completing the arithmetic problem or by guessing what is pictured in the photograph—by far the more difficult task!), the child might return to the first image (the kettle from above), creating a dynamic reading experience that resists a left-to-right, front-to-back relationship with the book. And at first look, these riddles, coupled with the nontraditional ordering of the book, appear to embody a visual ostranenie —the technique of breaking our perceptual habits in order to make objects unfamiliar and thereby increase the difficulty and length of the perceptual process. One review of the book, by Sergei Morozov in Proletarskoe foto, does hint at this reading while describing the

126

CHAPTER 3

work of the camera lens in capturing “some detail of an object familiar to a child” that “can make new the sensation [oshchushchenie] of that thing.”99 As Viktor Shklovsky states in his seminal “Art as Device,” “The purpose of the image is not to draw our understanding closer to what the image stands for, but rather to allow us to perceive it in a special way, in short, to lead us to a ‘vision’ of this object rather than mere ‘recognition.’”100 Sara Pankenier Weld has also demonstrated that this distinction between seeing and recognition has a basis in Shklovsky’s privileging of the child’s “innocent” or “untrained eye.”101 However, for the child working through these problem sets of images and arithmetic of What Is This?, the game of defamiliarization can serve to play against the slowing of perception (Shklovsky’s ostranenie) by training the mind to speed up the process of recognition. In fact, Shklovsky states that the “algebraic method of thinking”—as opposed to the workings of ostranenie—leads to spatial recognition and back to automatization “in the blink of an eye.” Further we note that “in the process of algebrizing, of automatizing the object, the greatest economy of perceptual effort takes place. Objects are represented either by one single characteristic (for example, by number) or else by a formula that never even rises to the level of consciousness.”102 In What Is This? arithmetic’s organizing structure, rather than serving the photographs, makes the defamiliarized photographs into algebraic unknowns to be solved, turning the puzzle game into a play at speeding up the practice of recognition. As a paradoxical game of photographic pedagogy, the artists’ book was, in part, favorably reviewed in Proletarskoe foto by Sergei Morozov.103 Morozov opens his review by reaffi rming that photography (like fi lm), “as the most documentary of the arts,” should occupy a conspicuous place in children’s textbooks. In such cases, the “photograph or a series of photographs can be used as the most convincing illustrations in a teacher’s program.”104 Further, the camera’s lens and the photograph, even in extreme close-ups and from oblique angles, can serve to sharpen a child’s ability to discern quickly what is before her (smekalka), to reveal new scale relationships among objects, to arouse her curiosity, and to expand the boundaries of her impressions and ideas.105 And it is precisely this kind of photographically based pedagogy that was proposed by Lunacharsky. Like Rodchenko and Morozov in his review of What Is This?, Lunacharsky saw the possibilities for photography to “illustrate all sides of life, all knowledge that the child receives.”106 To reformulate this revolution in visual thinking, the Commissar of Enlightenment reminds us that the camera can see beyond the visible realm as it captures detailed images of distant stars or microscopic worlds. In the hands of the child, a camera can “little by little” (malo-pomalu), like the ever-growing building blocks of language, become a tool for producing images of scientific and pedagogical value.107 Thus, even as photography moved beyond a means of restructuring vision—in order to “revolutionize visual thinking”—it also formed the basis by which one gains new mastery over space.108 However, in just this period, warring artistic factions, including ROPF, challenged the approach of the October group precisely because of this focus on the object alone. In 1932 they attacked Elizar Langman for a photograph taken at the Dinamo Youth Commune in 1930 (fig. 3.7), part of a photo-series displayed in the Publishing House

MICROGEOGR A PH Y, M A CRO W OR L D

127

Figure 3.7. Eleazar Langman, “Youth Commune ‘Dinamo’ Factory,” Proletarskoe foto, no. 1 (1930). Image courtesy of the Internet Archive.

(Dom Pechati) documenting the contribution of young people to the construction of the Dinamo plant: A new youth is being forged under new conditions. It is necessary to show [this youth] in such a way that the base, the essence of the alteration [ peredelka] of human material is clear and convincing. You will not grasp this theme all at once. You must go to the commune not just once or twice to talk with the young people. But Langman’s eye and shutter act quickly. And the result is that one of the thrilling topics is an obstructing teapot—“The Youth Commune.” The text cannot save it; you cannot hide behind [the caption].109 While the photograph’s composition is the focus of criticism here, the problem of time and duration—the all-important representation of the “whole” of this moment in historical progress—is of equal import. In order to provide a complete picture of this new area of Soviet life, Langman, as a potentially operative photographer, would need to return to the commune multiple times to amass a longer narrative in image and text. The viewer would need to be acquainted with all the facets of this new space—and not only at teatime. This image, as one point in the life of the Dinamo commune, cannot be expanded into a correct map of Soviet life (individual or otherwise) as a whole. However, as we note above, the spatial configuration of this photograph— perspective and scale—present the primary issues with it as a representative of life at the Dinamo dormitory. Just as a map must be scaled according to the size and relation of objects in space, so too must the photograph. Langman’s photograph frames the teapot as the most prominent representative of the Dinamo Youth Commune, upsetting the scale of the relationship between the objects of everyday life (byt) and active youth. Even though the caption places the photo at the Dinamo Commune, this is not enough when the scale of that space is askew. The teapot performs its disorienting function, so that we cannot see, or read, what should be most legible in

128

CHAPTER 3

the photograph: Soviet youth. Though it might be possible, as the critique implies, that the caption could recover the way that we read the scale of this image, it is still unclear what is distinctly Soviet about this space. This complaint is also reminiscent of the many criticisms leveled at Prishvin in this period. Most notably, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh pisatelei, RAPP) critics attacked his work for relegating to the background what was distinctly Soviet. One critic stated, “You know nature very well and you write about it superbly. But, you know, we don’t need it. We need something else. . . . Well, for example, you write about a crow. This is all right, we have no objections. But try to depict this crow in a way that readers could understand that this crow is not just any crow but it is our, Soviet crow.”110 This gibe could easily be leveled at his photograph of the boy fishing on the White Sea Canal. The placard of Stalin is clearly relegated to the background; the most prominent features are the lock and the water; and the boy fishing in the foreground on the right is not a prime model of industrious Soviet youth but a picturesque figure from landscapes of the past. This trend toward capturing a total picture of the construction of socialism in photographic and narrative production became most pronounced with the dissolution of competing artistic groups and the growing dominance of socialist realism. First coined as a term in 1932, socialist realism was implemented by decree at the fi rst meeting of the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. It marked a return in literature to a straightforward narrative structure and to figurative representation in art. In its ideal form, socialist realist art would reflect a total and unifying vision of life in its revolutionary development. But as Erika Wolf and Margarita Tupitsyn have shown, in the realm of photography there was not so complete or immediate a transformation. Even after the establishment of socialist realism as official doctrine, avant-garde trends and artists were still distinctly visible in Soviet photography. In the remainder of this chapter, as well as the following, we will explore how socialist realist photography was itself constituted, at home and abroad, by and through the author-photographer.

Mikhail Prishvin, USSR in Construction, and the Illustrated Screenplay The large-format journal USSR in Construction provides a rich source for studying the development of the photo-narrative.111 The journal was published between 1930 and 1941 for both Soviet and Western audiences in Russian, German, French, and English editions. It featured photographs and articles documenting industrial achievements and progress across the Soviet Union.112 Unlike the photo-ocherki of Tretyakov and Prishvin, USSR in Construction by and large made images its focus, relegating text to a secondary function. Following models introduced by photographers like Max Alpert and Arkady Shaikhet in the smaller pages of A-I-Z and Proletarskoe foto, USSR in Construction featured photo-narrative documentation that moved from the single snapshot with caption to adaptations of the “extended

MICROGEOGR A PH Y, M A CRO W OR L D

129

photo-observation” on the largest scale: highlighting the new wonders of Soviet industry and production.113 Artists and writers from different backgrounds and genres contributed, including modernist circles and the more traditional Mikhail Prishvin. As an author whose ethnographic writings and children’s books made the strange and distant familiar, Prishvin may seem an unlikely subject for study in the context of a discussion of avant-garde visual production. However, his contribution to a 1935 issue of the journal provides a distinctive (authorial) space to test how images were being presented to an increasingly photographically literate readership.114 True to his reputation as a nature writer initially drawn to wild spaces by his avidity for hunting, Prishvin states that he was not attracted to massive sites of construction, but rather, as he notes in the introduction to his extended photo-ocherk Golden Horn (Zolotoi rog, 1933), to sites of animal husbandry: “My trip to the Far East was undertaken with the goal of acquainting myself with fur-farming and antler farming, as this material is closer to the author than industrial construction, in order to show the new achievements that all Soviet writers have a duty to represent.”115 Writing about these kinds of places was a natural progression from his prerevolutionary hunting ocherki; the rifle is replaced by his camera as Prishvin fulfi lls his duty as a Soviet writer.116 And in Prishvin’s issue of USSR in Construction in 1935, dedicated to the history and development of the Soviet fur industry, Prishvin is introduced in just this language. An editorial note welcomes him to the scene, quoting the author and contextualizing his presence in this issue: Vast and rich is the world of fur-bearing animals that inhabit . . . the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. . . . Tsarist Russia exterminated the furbearing animals in a barbarous and wasteful manner. The tsarist colonisers who engaged in the fur trade enriched themselves by cheating and mistreating the peoples in the outlying sections of the country. “How many efforts, how many lives, how many legends!” writes the well-known author Prishvin. “One’s hair stands on end at the tales of the hunt as practiced in tsarist Russia. . . .” M. Prishvin’s wonderful stories revive this past of barbarity, plunder, violence, deceit, and virtual destruction of the country’s wealth. M. Prishvin’s wellknown stories published below tell of this past.117 Prishvin serves as an emblem of the past facing the onrush of new Soviet industry. In the pages that follow, excerpts from his texts narrate the author’s adventures (largely prerevolutionary) in hunting sable, squirrels, arctic foxes, honey martens, hares, and mountain sheep. Photographs, spanning two or sometimes three foldout pages, feature the peoples of various geographical regions from the Far North to the Far East, framed by these textual histories of Prishvin’s hunting and contemporary accounts of Soviet fur farms and processing penned by the editors of USSR in Construction. Before we turn to these compositions in more detail, the striking covers (both front and back) of the issue bear closer examination (plate 17). At fi rst glance we are

130

CHAPTER 3

presented with a puzzle direct from the pages of What Is This?, the only linguistic marker being the journal’s heading—USSR in Construction. Here the undulating topography of a fur pelt has been transformed into what looks like a map of the Soviet Union itself. As we turn the pages, we see that each page of the issue presents a distinct pinpoint on this “fur/map” of the USSR, from the animals native to the taiga to the large-scale fur-processing industry humming away in the center of Russia. Reading the opening lines of his ocherk chronicling a past trip hunting mountain sheep in Kyrgyzstan, we might imagine an animated Prishvin moving through the topographical map of the cover: “The blue hills resembled the tents of giants roaming in these steppes, called Kyzyltau, which means red hills. From afar they also appeared blue, but as we drew nearer they became black, fringed with yellowish bushes.”118 Turning the page, we see the solution to our puzzle refamiliarized in three images: the fur pelt from the cover is now rendered in traditionally framed (rectangular and square) photographs, this time from several different angles and perspectives. It is accompanied by images depicting the new role of the Soviet state in the fur harvest in Uzbekistan, including (as the captions tell us) “the preliminary treatment of Caracul skins in the state farms” and “teaching Uzbek shepherds to sort Caracul skins” (fig. 3.8).119

Figure 3.8. G. Sashalski, “Mountain Sheep,” USSR in Construction, no. 10 (1935). Image courtesy of Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

MICROGEOGR A PH Y, M A CRO W OR L D

131

The following page further expands the scope of the fur industry map to the whole of the USSR: “The Soviet Union has moved swiftly ahead in the sphere of the treatment of fur skins. During the fi rst Five-Year Plan a well-equipped fur treating industry, the biggest in the world, grew up in the country. At the present time it has 15 factories in Moscow, Leningrad, Kazan, . . . and other towns.”120 This flow of multiple images and text makes clear the role and scale of human intervention and ingenuity in establishing a sustainable fur industry in the Soviet Union (fig. 3.9). While this issue of the journal utilizes some of the techniques of the avant-garde in individual shots—including Rodchenko’s repetition of a subject from many different angles—the subjects are not isolated in time and space. And unlike the single image of Soviet youth at the Dinamo Commune foregrounded by the teapot, the series of images with accompanying text presents the passage of time and human intervention in the correct scale relationships: it is clear that people are the driving force behind change. The almost seamless incorporation of Prishvin’s texts, along with the photographic series, builds up a complete map in text and image to form a composite whole of Soviet production on the landscape of the fur itself.

Figure 3.9. N. Shekutyev, “Fur Processing,” USSR in Construction, no. 10 (1935). Image courtesy of Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

132

CHAPTER 3

As Emma Widdis has shown, mapping played a key and empowering role in Soviet visual production, from Vertov’s nonnarrative cinema to children’s literature. The skills deployed in reading a map (reading a new geographical landscape) led to better “knowledge of one’s environment.” Such knowledge, particularly on a local level, might be seen as “prerequisite for exemplary citizenship.”121 Even in mastering one’s own, highly localized space, like the close-up image of the fur pelt on the cover of USSR in Construction, one can enter “into a closer physical and mental relationship with the material world,” one that is predicated on the assumption that in such a relationship “the local was [almost always] metonymically symbolic of the national.”122 Here the transformative narrative, emplotted and localized onto the map of the USSR, not only is thematically resonant with ideological implications for reading the creative mapping of the five-year plans but also recalls the montages of Dziga Vertov’s earlier fi lm A Sixth Part of the World (1926).123 This narrative depth is remarkable in a number of respects. In moving between the contemporary images and Prishvin’s older texts, the reader is left to infer, or montage, for herself how the smiling native hunters (evoking many visual echoes of the native peoples featured in Vertov’s fi lm) undergo their rapid transition into members of the working class through the series of photographs framing the texts.124 Cueing this time-lapse reading of the photographic subjects, several photographs—those taken by Prishvin himself— are positioned like fi lmstrips across the bottom of several pages (plates 18–19 —see his sables and wood grouse).125 This suggests that the reader should imaginatively montage the movement between the static individual shots.126 Analogously, the textual information forms a secondary layer of time-lapse motion by embedding the static images within the flow of the natural progression of history. Anchoring their subject in space while creating the effect of duration, these sequences transform the violence of prerevolutionary hunting, a focal point of Prishvin’s texts, into the sanitized industry of the Soviet fur farms in the span of just three pages. And it is for this reason that Sovetskoe foto lauded the Prishvin issue of USSR in Construction as providing a new formal model of photo-textual production, one that was likened to a clear, documentary cinematic picture, as opposed to those issues of the journal that lapse into something more like a photo album.127 In fact, the critic Vladimir Shmerling lauded precisely this issue of USSR in Constuction for its distinct point of view (est′ svoia tochka zrenia, svoi podkhod).128 The exemplary factor here is the formation of a new genre, “in which the work of the author-ocherkist is successfully matched with that of the photo-master.”129 In the case of the fur number, one of the photo-masters (while not named by Shmerling) is Prishvin himself. In the pages of the journal, the incorporation of Prishvin’s texts, along with the photographic series, builds up a complete map in text and image to form a composite whole of Soviet production embedded on the landscape of the fur itself, each microgeography containing a depth of field composed of time (narrative) and space (the photograph)—what might be called Prishvin’s distinctive chronotopography, or chronophotographie, even if not every photograph was taken by the author himself.130

MICROGEOGR A PH Y, M A CRO W OR L D

133

However, an important disruption to the narrative montage appears in the last story of the issue. Prishvin’s spider web—a favorite subject for his photographic and diarist etudes—makes its appearance, nested into a collage with two other photos: a wooded area (“A typical place for woodsnipe”) and a close-up of the head of a woodsnipe (plate 18).131 The photographs illustrate an excerpt from a Prishvin ocherk entitled “The First Wood Grouse.” In a fi rst-person narrative, Prishvin and his guide (Antipych) await their quarry in the moments before dawn. But Prishvin cannot hold himself back as he sits listening for the wood grouse: he fi res into the darkness, seemingly against his will—“My fi nger pulled the trigger of its own accord.” And so the story ends. Along the bottom of the page, however, the wood grouse’s short life seems to play out a microfilmic entirety: from the creature’s preening to its death among the leaves, punctuated by the shot of the caption, “wood grouse.” Rather than the final darkness of the text, the photograph illuminates the bird’s fate. But in the framing of the ocherk excerpt, the spider web serves no narrative purpose. Rather, it appears out of scale for the story while also paradoxically dominating in its microgeographical declaration of an alternative and nonnarrative space. Rather, the inclusion of the spider web might serve as a strong reminder of Prishvin’s authorial eye/I, drawing our attention to the complex relationship between authorship, text, and image created by the journal’s montage. Not coincidentally, Shmerling addresses this problem as a potential drawback in his generally laudatory assessment of the Prishvin issue of USSR in Construction. The editorial information presented in the back page of the journal often did not specify the authorship for every image and text but simply listed the “contributors,” leaving only those fully in the know to identify and pair up the author with each image and textual excerpt. Thus, deducing authorship in this case is a small mathematical riddle: some images are attributed to lesser-known photographers in Leningrad, Moscow, and the Far East, and “the rest are by M. M. Prishvin.”132 Prishvin’s archive, in fact, reveals the way in which the author tried to assert his authorship in this issue of USSR in Construction. In Prishvin’s own copy of the fur issue, he has marked each of the photographs he took with his penciled signature (wood grouses and sables included), which we can read as another example of his insistence on authorship, an imprint of “self,” even as he is losing control over both the material of his literary works and the photographs he has developed at home in the process of publication (plate 19). In his diary from this period Prishvin further lamented his exclusion from official circles, such as the ethnographic (kraevedenie) societies, as well as from the White Sea Canal writers’ brigade. In her introduction to the writer’s diary from 1932 to 1935, Iana Grishina states that Prishvin “strives to understand the meaning of the new life, he tries to appreciate the achievements, to grasp the degree of the cynicism of the government, to find some way to live, or rather, to save his individuality [lichnost′].”133 Hence, even as his diary was expanding in length, his fiction writing was coming under direct ideological pressure. The small but significant act of adding his signature slows the rapid transformation taking place in the pages of the journal. Perhaps much like Rozanov’s own signatures

134

CHAPTER 3

of domesticity in his “almost a manuscript,” the authorial signatures here turn our attention to Prishvin himself as he slowly moves through the issue, signing each of his images in his careful hand. If these autographs had been included in the fi nal edition, they too might have slowed the reader’s movement through the spaces of image and text so as to contemplate the nature of the authorship of the image—adding as it were the authorially framed ostranenie.134 Prishvin’s special fur issue and his status as author-photographer bear comparison with the jubilee Stalin Constitution issue from 1937. Over its publication history, the journal frequently featured guest art editors, which included the likes of Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, El and Es Lissitzky, Nikolai Troshin, and the conservative VKhUTEMAS professor Vladimir Favorsky. The jubilee issue, in contrast to Prishvin’s, is among the journal’s showpieces. Its totalizing vision eschewed authorial perspective and traditionally framed photographs in favor of celebrating the unity of Soviet space and production in photomontage.135 In the jubilee issue, examples of these totalized photomontages are prominently displayed in short photo-essays featuring the republics of the Soviet Union.136 The final product is an almost atlas-like rendering of mappable Soviet space in photographic form. As a testament not only to the size of the Soviet Union but to the magnitude of the celebration of the Stalin Constitution, this issue was so large it was counted as four months’ worth of content, from September to December. In each featurette, the fi rst page includes a simple drawn outline map of the republic (Ukraine, Belorussia, Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic, etc.) with photographs of representatives of the ethnic peoples living there and their newly constructed apartment buildings. The next two pages make up a single photographic montage including depictions of the natural resources of the various republics, images of factories or production sites, and members of the proletariat at work. For example, in a montage presenting Belorussian timber and paper production, women working in the various stages of wood processing are superimposed onto a cross-section view of a paper factory, framed by trees (plate 20). The trees mimic the straight lines of the factory construction, creating the illusion of a seamless transition between outside and inside. This photographic image—which in Prishvin’s issue would have been made up of several individual photographs framed by extensive text—is less dependent on literary material, foregrounding the move away from authorial perspective and toward one dominated by the monolithic vision of the editor. The much more limited textual accompaniment—almost like an extended caption—provides a succinct and dry summary of the formation and transformation of the Belorussian Republic through its incorporation into the USSR, as well as its vital role in timber processing. Here the caption reads, “The Byelorussian Republic occupies the fourth place among the union republics in the manufacture of paper. . . . Greatest of all, however, is her timber industry, her saw mills, which supply timber to places beyond her own borders.”137 The reader is thus reminded that the timber, though harvested and processed at this specific pinpoint, is transported to, and serves, a larger Soviet space. The text adds the (minimal) necessary context for this point in the ideological and historical narrative: the

MICROGEOGR A PH Y, M A CRO W OR L D

135

place of the Belorussian people is defi ned by their role as providers of the means of production to the Soviet Union as a whole. While the text properly fi xes the role of the people and the Soviet state in shaping the Belorussian landscape, this photomontage still requires that we ask yet again, “What is this?” The angles of the photographic fragments as well as the disproportional relationships between objects recall the techniques of avant-garde photographs. It is undeniable, however, that this is a radically different kind of image. Without calling attention to its formal composition, this landscape encapsulates the duration of production, depicting in a single plane the role of the Soviet citizen in gathering and producing essential products for the USSR at large. The images return to a painterly perspective shot from the navel, with an embellished frame. Each Soviet republic featured in the issue is presented in this same visual code: worker, resources, and production as landscape. This is a code that runs against Rodchenko’s avantgarde goal of abolishing the traditional horizon line and the easy-to-read painterly landscape but that seems to embody in toto Lissitzky’s (much earlier) proclamation that constructivist art aims to organize life. László Moholy-Nagy addresses the problems of cognition in encountering such an image: “Photomontage . . . attempts to develop a technique for the recordings of events occurring on the threshold between dream and consciousness. . . . Most photomontages demand a concentrated gymnastic of the eye and brain to speed up the visual digestion and increase the range of associative relationships.”138 In the reception of the photomontage the speed of perception is forcibly, but perhaps imperceptibly, increased. The repetition of this code throughout the issue, rather than providing different views of a single object, as in Prishvin’s photo-essays, puts the republics on a map of the USSR in a way that does not aesthetically reflect their distinctive local variations but rather constructs and conveys a vision of unified sameness. In these pages of USSR in Construction, the avant-garde artists El and Es Lissitzky, utilizing the photographs of an army of photographers and everyday citizens, present a seamless conflation of people, material, and industry in a unified and ideologically sealed space. Their photomontages end up as exemplars of the totalizing vision of socialist realist unity and industrial production—a posterization of the journal page that anyone could clearly read and that only an editor could produce.139 Here, individual subjects, metonymically standing in for a whole productive population, become the models of the transformation of a life story into a picture of history. An enigmatic moment in Prishvin’s diary sheds some light on the role of montage in his worldview, as well as the acute anxiety that such an image of photomontage might provoke. Prishvin recounts a conversation he had with close friend and illustrator Favorsky—the artistic editor for Prishvin’s issue.140 He states, There are people who have not life, but montage, but consciousness still resides in them. . . . There are people for whom life is not experienced, but is assembled [montiruetsia], and all that remains before people is a mysterious man who has expended all his natural talents on montage. . . . To struggle to get

136

CHAPTER 3 close to a fact, in order to feel it—that is what it means to become a modern person. The more complex a person, the harder it is for him to struggle through to the fact. Sometimes it seems that for this to happen, one would need to simplify one’s life, but even that won’t do it (Leo Tolstoy went so far as to take up the plough himself, but even so, he did not get closer, but moved further from the fact).141

Montage, as we have seen, was under active discussion in many spheres of artistic and nonartistic production (construction on the canal, building a metro tunnel). To this point in the chapter, I have utilized ideas of visual montage as metaphor describing the imaginative function necessary to enact the motion of time-lapse photography, to refer, most basically, to the assembly or arrangement of mental images, which creates an organic unity between the past and present. While it is unclear what kind of montage Prishvin had in mind in his diary—be it filmic, photographic, or literary— or whether he was simply referring to the assembly of industrial construction (threatening a collapse of the meaning of montage altogether), this remark should be read as a critique of the forcible juxtaposition of images that are the result of a rapid externalized transformation. In this sense, we might hear echoes of Dziga Vertov’s description of montage as an instrument that could “alter the world itself.” In 1924 Vertov would state, “To follow the growth of the young Soviet organism, to record and organize the individual characteristics of life’s phenomenon into a whole, an essence, a conclusion—this is our immediate objective.”142 Though this was an early statement on the aims of Soviet documentary, Vertov’s immediate objective would still lay the foundation for his lasting notions on montage: the capture of Soviet life into a whole would lead to a defi nite and concrete conclusion, which would also demonstrate the power of the camera and montage to “actively take part in organizing the present reality toward the necessary conclusion: the bright future.”143 And certainly, as Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers notes, her husband’s own understanding of the artistic/editorial process of photomontage and journal and book design was developed under the influence of Vertov’s documentary newsreels.144 Lissitzky, along with the collective brigade conceiving each issue of USSR in Construction, organized the visual and textual material much like a fi lmic scenario.145 Not bound to any single medium, this broad notion of externalized transformation in image and life would reach its apogee in the White Sea Canal project, assembling the many voices of the prisoners at the canal into a single literary volume, just as their lives were “montaged” in the process of their reforging.146 Photomontage in particular was under wide discussion and reassessment by the mid-1930s. Varvara Stepanova, considering the formal qualities of photomontage in its revolutionary development, writes, Its fi rst stage was characterized by the integration of large numbers of photographs into a single composition, which helped bring into relief individual

MICROGEOGR A PH Y, M A CRO W OR L D

137

photo-images…One might say that this kind of montage possessed the character of a planar composition superimposed on a white paper ground. The subsequent development of photomontage has made clear the possibilities of using photography itself, as such. The photographic snapshot is becoming increasingly self-sufficient. [In these examples] individual snapshots are not fragmented and have all the characteristics of a real document. The artist himself must take up photography. He searches for the particular shot that will satisfy his objective—but montaging someone else’s photographs will not fulfi ll his needs. Hence, the artist moves from an artistic montage of photographic fragments to his own distinctive shooting of reality.147 In his own formulation in Sovetskoe foto in 1935, Viktor Afanasiev makes a similar key distinction between the “artist-photographer” and the “montage-artist.” Here he notes that the latter’s task is “to strengthen [usilit′] the effectiveness of the photo as a means of agitation and propaganda, to add [dopolnit′] with his work that which was unattainable for the artist-photographer due to technical reasons.”148 That is, montage’s expansive and embellished presence is necessary where the photograph fails to convey meaning. Gustav Klutsis, the master photo-monteur, understands this fact clearly, writing that the “photo fi xes a frozen static MOMENT. Photomontage shows the dynamism of life, developing the themes of a given plot [siuzhet]. Photomontage, organizing simultaneously a set of formal elements —photograph, color, slogan, line, plane—has one purpose: to achieve maximum force of expression.”149 Thus, for Klutsis, for whom photomontage is the tool for propaganda and agitation, the photograph is but one of the essential technical means for the realization of the photomontage, but is not an end in itself. This accounting might fi nd a parallel in Prishvin’s own earlier-cited rumination on his relationship to the camera apparatus that he called simply the “technical means” for realizing an artistic vision. The photograph—an essential base to his (Tolstoyan) “realism”—is not a fi nalized product. Rather, it is authorial transformation, not unlike the technical process of montage (be it fi lmic or photographic), that completes the picture—his “expressiveness.”150 If Prishvin’s chronophotographie offers a bridge in that distinctive montage between a past and rapidly changing present, so does Vertov’s and Klutsis’s ideological montage. Where they differ, signifi cantly, is in the externalized visual transformation they also aim to affect: the monteurs would re-form both human beings (their life stories) and the look of the world around them (Soviet history); Prishvin’s visual-textual works claim only representation in his organic realist composite, never solely through visual means, but as an extension of his writerly project. The scale of Prishvin’s distaste for the whole culture of posterized montage and its extension into a life story is reflected in marginal notes in his diary, as he recalls photographic posters of Marx, Lenin and Stalin (which have become family photographs), alongside an icon and devotional candles, assembled in the home of an ordinary Russian

138

CHAPTER 3

man. He makes note of an image of Stalin occupying a central place opposite diagrams of the achievements of Soviet industry before he concludes: “So how did all this come together in the little house of one and the same man—what is this? Hidden indifference, a disregard for history, or wisdom? Or is it that we, of course, live well or badly, and know nothing, and here is what they do without us. Family life under the leaders [ pod vozhdiami ]—this is the very swamp where raspberry cakes and devotional candles are welded together with tractors and combines.”151 This is not to say that all notions of montage in this period were tied to the needs of transformative ideological messaging. In his teaching at VKhUTEMAS in the early 1920s, Favorsky developed a theory of image and illustration that might best be described as integral and synthetic, a doctrine that put him at odds with his more radical colleagues (like Rodchenko).152 However, he did juxtapose notions of montage with his theories on drawing as well as on the synthetic wholeness of image space and the illustrated book: The motion form of wholeness can be called “constructive” [konstruktsiia]; the visual-wholeness form can be called strictly “compositional” [kompositsiia]. The graphic material being forced to move integrally in the work of art is a construction. The visual image brought to integrity is a composition. The extreme form of a constructive image is the movie or a photographic montage, where the camera’s rhythmical movement can model a figure, can draw space. Here we have several independent instants integrated in movement and perceived in time. The time-movement rhythmics are basic in this type of image.153 This formulation of wholeness in synthetic vision might also recall the distinctly prerevolutionary Symbolist consciousness as articulated by Vladimir Soloviev. Summed up by Sergei Bulgakov in 1903, creatively formed wholeness was contrasted to the distortions of modern life: “Soloviev’s ideal—wholeness in knowledge, wholeness in life, wholeness in creativity [ideal tsel′nogo znaniia, tsel′noi zhizni, tsel′nogo tvorchestva]— is inherent in every cultivated mind. Nevertheless, despite a great wealth of information and the progress of science, modern thought presents a picture of inner disintegration and weakness.”154 The camera, the instrumentality of photomontage, would certainly present itself as a disintegrative force when taken as a fi nal product (in Favorsky’s terms, the construction only, not the composition). As Favorsky states, “A snapshot [momental′naia fotografiia] of a running horse or a walking man . . . is almost always ridiculous and never really expresses movement. The artist is well aware of the fact that only by uniting several instances into a single image can he really express movement.”155 Prishvin’s photo-textual narratives, as designed by Favorsky in the Prishvin issue, come nearer to Favorsky’s whole composition (his totalizing montage), punctuated as they are with movement and

MICROGEOGR A PH Y, M A CRO W OR L D

139

rhythm, artistically rendered, which might give an image of reality (as located in time and space, and of that time and space) as a visual “wholeness” (tsel′nost′ ), and a “wholeness of visual form.”156 Prefiguring Moholy-Nagy’s comments on photographic montage, Favorsky identifies the experience of such compositions as those “built on the basis of our binocular ability, that which gives us an exclusive, movementsaturated, point-of-view experience,” upsetting the static quality of the objects pictured, but which retain an organic unity.157 While not all totalized photomontages from the Stalin Constitution issue might qualify as just such a composition, neither, it seems, might Prishvin’s. Rather, the totalized montage—what in Favorsky’s view might stand alone as an organic whole—is a self-contained image; it is free from narrative constraints, capturing as it does both time and space in a single composition. And, paradoxically, from the hand of his own illustrator/collaborator, it is precisely this co-option of vision that seems to threaten the figure of the author Prishvin in the pages of the collectively designed journal. Drawing from his enigmatic reflections, we might conclude that for Prishvin the most problematic conception of montage is the one in which ideology prefigures material and fact, artificially shaping the fi nal presentation of the chosen subject. Most simply, montage moves away from the fact of his photographs—the basis of the ocherk. At the same time the increasing incursion of technology and ideology—the state apparatus—into his subjectivity threatens Prishvin’s own organic unity of self as author. While the full implications of montage for Prishvin begin to unfold with his issue of USSR in Construction, the Stalin Constitution issue is the pinnacle of such montage, in which the realization of the totalizing montage for ideology’s sake is rendered complete. Here, the montage-artist assembles the illusion of a natural relationship between man, nature, and production; the author’s narrative bridging can play only a minor, supporting role in subjugation to such a vision. For Prishvin, an image constructed for the sole sake of a dogmatic message—like the montaged man of his diary entry—cannot fully reflect the natural progress of a lived life (on the micro- and macroscales) but rather becomes increasingly distant from it.158 Prishvin’s authorial chronophotographie (as process and material product) is also apparent in another of his rewriting projects from this period: Ginseng: The Root of Life (Zhen′-Shen′: Koren′ zhizni, 1933) (fig. 3.10). Based on his trips to the Far East and his own photographs, the novella is the story of a displaced Russian soldier at the end of the Russo-Japanese War as he searches for the literal, and symbolic, root of life on the Manchurian steppe. As he settles in this distant land, the soldier becomes consumed by a plan to domesticate the wild spotted deer of the region in order to cultivate their valuable horns.159 Prishvin rewrote and reincorporated the material for this work in several forms, including the illustrated photo-ocherk Golden Horn (Zolotoi rog, 1933) and several versions of a screenplay (fig. 3.11). One adaptation, directed by Alexander Litvinov and titled Old Luven’s Hut (Khizhina starogo Luvena), was released in 1935. Set in 1920–22, the film shifts focus from

Figure 3.10. Vladimir Favorsky, frontispiece for Mikhail Prishvin’s Ginseng (1934). © Estate of Vladimir Favorsky/RAO, Moscow/VAGA, New York.

Figure 3.11. Mikhail Prishvin, “Spotted Deer,” from the Golden Horn (1933). Many of the photographs from the Golden Horn appear in Prishvin’s illustrated screenplay, The Root of Life. Permissions courtesy of L. A. Riazanova, M. M. Prishvin Estate.

MICROGEOGR A PH Y, M A CRO W OR L D

141

the nameless fi rst-person narrator of the novella to the young student Alekseev and his coming to consciousness as a Bolshevik (rejecting the Whites, those holdouts of the old regime) through his scientific work in domesticating the wild spotted deer of Manchuria. References to Soviet life pepper the fi lm far more overtly than in Prishvin’s original work, and it includes a heavy-handed ending in which Alekseev sees a steamship approaching the coast with the all-important inscription “Lenin.” One critic describes Alekseev’s reaction in Litvinov’s fi lm: Alekseev celebrates: this word signifies that the Bolsheviks have swept the Whites and the interventionists from the Far East. The region is governed by Soviet power. —Here it is, my root of life, here it is, my “ginseng”!—Alekseev yells ecstatically to old Luven.160 Significantly, this ending is absent from Prishvin’s own adaptations of his work. And while the film has been lost, another photo-illustrated screenplay of Ginseng, preserved in Prishvin’s archive, provides an intimate insight into this side of his writing and photographic practices as they were subjected to external pressures in other realms of visualization. The fi rst page of the typed fi lm script is heralded by a small photographic image of a spotted deer, along with a brief, but characteristic, introduction to the project (fig. 3.12). The introduction reads: The novella Ginseng/The Root of Life/, remade by the author into this screenplay, was originally written from material obtained in the Far East in large part through photography. Work on this screenplay returned the author to prototypes that arose in the photographic process. If cinematography, in the pursuit of verisimilitude, more than all the other arts, has to do with the documents of life, then the author finds it necessary to bring to the text of the screenplay a small part of his photographs, perhaps technically imperfect, but hinting at the possibility of a happy bridge between the writer and the director. In the severe and, most importantly, the unaccustomed conditions of the screenplay, the author nevertheless seeks to remain a writer, confident that a well-written and imagined scene should also be perfectly actable.161 While the inclusion of the photograph of the spotted deer and its placement on the page seem influenced by Favorsky’s composition for his engraving of the deer in the novel (fig. 3.10), this document in fact exemplifies Prishvin’s own individual writing and photographic processes. The script is peppered with Prishvin’s small photo proofs, at times capturing exactly the time-lapse photographic effect of his repeated capture of a subject—seeming to suggest that there was not a single image that could form the representative and singular vision of his subject. In the creation of this

142

CHAPTER 3

Figure 3.12 . Mikhail Prishvin, original photo proofs pasted into Prishvin’s fi lm script for Ginseng: The Root of Life (“A story for the screen”) (1934). Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), f. 1125, op. 2, d. 284. Permissions courtesy of L. A. Riazanova, M. M. Prishvin Estate.

hybrid object, Prishvin, ever seeking to forge connections between past and present, photography and text, diary and photography, frames the illustrated fi lm script as that bridge between himself and the director for the visualization of the film. For an author for whom such bridges were key to his writerly development, this script is the most complete realization (paradoxically) of his liminal forms, and perhaps a unique epitome of his embrace of the interval between time and space that characterized his chronophotographie. In this regard, we might say that his introduction actually sells him quite short. The illustrated screenplay—the bridge between the literary-photographic work of Prishvin and fi lm—provides the narrative and visual unfolding in space (the page) that comes closest to an embodiment of Prishvin’s sole authorial-photographic compositions in the 1930s. But even as we embrace such a reading, Prishvin, like Andreev, remains forever on a threshold, looking beyond photography’s frames to new realms of mediation to capture the totality of both history and a life story.

MICROGEOGR A PH Y, M A CRO W OR L D

143

The Final Road Prishvin’s last novel, Tsar’s Road (Osudareva doroga) marks a turn away from the material incorporation of photography and the fi nal stage of his time-lapse imaging of the White Sea Canal site. This unfi nished novel is also a fi nal return to Prishvin’s authorial rodina: Karelia. The novel’s title is drawn from a chapter subheading from In the Land of Unfrightened Birds, referring to the path fi rst struck by Peter the Great to transport ships from the Baltic to the White Sea. This work, perhaps more than previous iterations, focuses on the cost of the war between man and nature. The construction of the canal upsets the old way of life that Prishvin had glorified in his previous editions of In the Land of Unfrightened Birds—a way of life destroyed by the planned flooding at the construction site.162 The plot centers on the boy Zuek, a character whose origins can be traced back to the photograph taken by Prishvin during his second trip to the White Sea Canal site in 1933 (see fig. 3.5). As Valeria Prishvina notes, But the most precious discovery for the author—which had been only noticed in passing, and not yet appreciated by the author for its significance for his future novel—is the photograph of a boy, who is comfortably perched with his fishing rod on the wall of an enormous lock. This was the image of the future in the fi rmly established present, the child as an image of movement and freedom, as the ideal resolution of the many years’ struggle in the consciousness of the author between duty and desire on the great path of “the whole person.” This discovery was important for the development of the plot of the novel; yet the inner image of Zuek had long been close to the author and did not require any search.163 Once again Prishvin’s rodstvennoe vnimanie is focused on this boy fishing on the lock of the great White Sea Canal. It is not the reforged convict or the shock worker who is the emblem of the new order or the new Soviet man; rather, it is this reclining figure of a boy fishing at his ease who can embody the return of the natural order—the wholeness of past, present, and now future—of life at this canal. But significantly, Prishvin states that this central image sprang not from the photograph but rather from the author himself—in this textual transformation in the novel at hand—through his “homegrown theory of creation” (domashniaia teoriia tvorchestva). In his introduction, written shortly before he died in 1954, Prishvin declares, And my protagonist in this tale, the boy Zuek, should come from that same thing which is greater than me, and at that same time partake of my sense of life as possibility. So too, the dormant bud of a plant slumbers for many years and remains a bud. But under good conditions the bud “comes out of itself” and becomes a green sprout. This is my homegrown theory of creation, and I

144

CHAPTER 3 do not know why I should hide it from my reader, why not invite him to take part in the creation of my tales [skazki-byli], or let’s call it, a historical tale? I will draw out Zuek from myself and at the same time I will look at the shore which is well-known to me. . . . The Zuek-gulls fly there, like snow on the wind, and the Zuek-boys are scurrying everywhere, and among them is my Zuek. I think about myself, I look at him. I think about him—and I reveal myself.164

This intimate description defi nes Prishvin’s authorship. He is fused with his subject and thereby reveals his own subjectivity. Here, at the site of the White Sea Canal, the author becomes one with the changes being wrought in nature in order to channel those he is undergoing himself. He states that each man should forge for himself his own canal. “We are all building some kind of canal. . . . My tale should be historical, not in the usual sense of ‘history’ as the past, but [in the sense of] history as it really occurs in the present: the transit of the life of the past into the future, just as the water of the lake passes through the Padun [Prishvin’s waterfall] into the sea.”165 In Prishvin’s fi nal work, this canal springs from his photography and from his self through a textual transformation; it is a new path to Communism that is not dogmatically Marxist (or socialist realist), but rather “communist in form and [his own] in composition.”166 And herein lies Prishvin’s ideology. His authorial subjectivity remains steadfast. In a model of intervention into socialist production that runs counter to that of Tretyakov’s operative author, Prishvin is capable of harnessing the apparatus of camera and ideology to capture—and thereby slow—the rapid pace of change occurring around him. Only then can objectifying change become recognizable as an organic flow. Even in the face of a natural world shackled by the work of human hands, Prishvin maintains an ever-flowing continuity with his past self, even against the threat of the rising floodwaters. For Prishvin, from his fi rst literary excursion to the land of unfrightened birds to his fi nal novel, the personal diary was a constant companion, as he recorded in a tiny hand facts, hopes, and dangerous criticisms. His camera became an extension of this diary project, capturing material impressions at sensitive places and crucial moments. These photographs, artfully layered into his texts once housed in part in his diary, built complex microgeographies with a depth of field in both image and text onto a map of the USSR. Thus, while Prishvin was labeled primarily a children’s author, his diary, photographs, and writings comprised a matrix of artistic production that at times both reflected and deviated from the mainstream of Soviet artistic production. In his works, through techniques with an affi nity to time-lapse photography and the techniques of the photo avant-garde, the traces of the past and of the timeless flows of nature coexist with the larger patterns of Soviet construction. It was in the unlikely space of this dialectic—between the defamiliarization of avantgarde technique and the refamiliarization of pedagogy—that the not so avant-garde author-photographer Mikhail Prishvin both actively adapted and was co-opted by the tools of photographic literacy to slow down an all too rapidly changing 1930s

MICROGEOGR A PH Y, M A CRO W OR L D

145

Soviet landscape. An analysis of Prishvin’s works, alongside his diaries, reveals a synthetic approach to the representation of the world (natural and constructed) focused by his subjectivity, his rodstvennoe vnimanie, to create a rodina for himself and his readers. We should not forget, however, that although Prishvin is at times a detached observer of a changing landscape, he is also a solitary hunter with his rifle, capable, with the pull of the trigger, of disrupting the natural flow of life. But, when armed with a camera, he leaves the field with captured material, still alive, out of which he can build a new microgeographical image that contains the whole of an ever-flowing natural world.

4 LOOK LEFT, YOUNG MAN! The International Exchange of Photo-Narratives

There is no more surprising, yet . . . no simpler form than the photographic series. This is the logical culmination of photography—vision in motion. . . . Here the single picture loses its separate identity and becomes part of the assembly; it becomes a structural element of the related whole which is the thing itself. In this sequence of separate but inseparable parts, a photographic series— photographic comics, pamphlets, books—can be either a potent weapon or tender poetry. László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion

The hundred and ninety million Russians are against me. They are not holding wild meetings on street corners, do not practice spectacular free love, do not have any kind of new look, they are very righteous, moral, hard-working people, for a photographer as dull as apple pie. Robert Capa, “A Legitimate Complaint,” A Russian Journal, 1948

Upon her return from the Soviet Union in 1930, the American photographer Margaret Bourke-White summarized her impressions of conditions there in a free verse poem of ten words: “Little food, / No shoes, / Terrible inefficiency, / Steady progress, / Great hope.”1 At a time when Soviets were worshipping at the altar of the “beauty of the machine,” Bourke-White’s distinctive capture of industrial sites at home made her a natural fit for Fortune magazine’s assignment abroad (compare figs. 4.1 and 4.2).2 While her Russian photographs, published in American magazines and newspapers, clearly captured the excitement of industrial progress, the narrative of her book-length project Eyes on Russia! recounted again and again the difficulty of obtaining food, the food lines, and the crippling bureaucracy.3 In the throes of the First Five-Year Plan, the country was undergoing both a cultural revolution and the duress of forced collectivization and industrialization, famine, and shortages. Hope sprang largely not from real material output but from the artistic front. James Abbe, another American photographer in Russia in 1932, ironically captured this taste for optimism in his characterization of the Soiuzfoto agency:4 The Photo Trust offices are at Nikolskaya 4, Moscow, an old pre-revolutionary business block on a street connecting to Red Square. . . . These simple quarters house an organization which, through agencies in the principal capitals of the world, markets photographs of the sunny side of “building Socialism.” If, for instance, some capitalistic publication would like a photo showing starving peasants in Ukraine, it has only to communicate with the nearest Soyuzphoto agency and without delay they will be supplied with a beautiful shot of a happy workman holding a hammer in mid-air. 5 In this interwar period roughly one hundred thousand foreigners (including writers, artists, scientists, and intellectuals) looked to the left to document the Soviet experiment.6 Bourke-White and Abbe, however, also recount the relative difficulty of obtaining visa sponsorship, traveling within the country (e.g., visiting sensitive construction sites), the fact that certain subjects (bread lines, militia, mass parades, and masses of displaced peasants at train stations) could not be photographed, and that leaving the country with their negatives intact was nearly impossible without clandestine maneuvers. Still, photographs by Soviet photographers were in no short supply as demand was ever increasing—circulating with relative ease within the USSR and beyond her borders. In 1932, the year of Abbe’s Russian sojourn, the Central Committee issued its writ “On the Restructuring of Literary-Artistic Organizations,” which eliminated competition among opposing artistic factions, including photographic organizations, and aimed to “unite all writers who support the platform of Soviet power 149

Figure 4.1. Figures 4.1 and 4.2 offer a “smychka,” uniting Bourke-White and Rodchenko through their “machine worship.” Margaret Bourke-White, cover for Trade Winds (1929); image courtesy of Yale University Library. © Estate of Margaret Bourke-White/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Figure 4.2 . Alexander Rodchenko, “Soviet Automobile” in Daesh′, no. 14 (1929); image courtesy of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University. © Estate of Alexander Rodchenko/RAO, Moscow/VAGA, New York.

152

CHAPTER 4

[vlast′] and who strive to participate in socialist construction into a single Union of Soviet Writers.”7 The decree paved the way for the creation of something like a unified aesthetic under a doctrine of socialist realism: a turn away from the formal experiments of the avant-garde toward a literature with cohesive, outcome-driven narrative structures and a visual culture that was representational—all in the service of ideology. In a time of shortages, hope could be gleaned from the aesthetic wealth of goods, construction, and a smiling proletariat—“the production of virtual abundance.”8 As would be clear in the pages of USSR in Construction by the mid-1930s, socialist realist images were the primary vehicle by which visions of the productive power of socialist labor were easily, and deceptively, supplied. A newly formed army of artists would be encouraged to produce art at a rapid rate, creating both this virtual plenty and a profusion of artistic material. Thus, in the language of the “Restructuring of Literary-Artistic Organizations,” instead of the art marked by the “insularity of small circles” and “isolation from political tasks” that was seen to be fostered by the opposing literary groups of the 1920s, socialist realist art would mobilize Soviet writers and artists around the united tasks of socialist construction.9 This new imperative complicated the relationship with the internationalism of the avant-garde. The later 1934 Writers’ Conference found itself grappling with just this question as formulations and discussions took place on the role of national literature, the individual author and creativity, and, of course, world literature. Foreign elements, be they artists, literature, or American tractors, would be a site of contentious state cultural formation. Thus, artists’ pens, brushes, and lenses would engender the institutionalization of a closed system that could admit the “other” only on its own terms.10 Just as the Soviet Union hoped to stimulate the self-sufficient production of industrial goods (which would be the embodied link between industry and agriculture central to the union [smychka] under way in the 1930s), so too would the all-important output of proletarian literature and art be distinctively Soviet. Moscow—not Paris or Berlin—would become the new cultural capital of the world.11 And just as many Western intellectuals were looking left, the problem of authorial perspective was coming to shape artistic dialogues more generally in the Soviet photography of the 1930s.12 It is in the context of a very public shaping of model authorship that Ilya Ehrenburg and Ilya Ilf traveled abroad, both armed with portable Leica cameras. Ehrenburg’s book My Paris (Moi Parizh, 1933) and Ilf’s contributions to the serialized “American Photographs” (“Amerikanskie fotografii,” 1936) dramatize the struggle to reconcile a subjective literary perspective with documentary photography under the emerging aesthetic regime of socialist realism. Both Ehrenburg and Ilf were perhaps best known for their work in the picaresque genre, in which travel serves as a metonymical displacement of the social mobilization made possible by modernity. Ehrenburg’s and Ilf’s foreign travel, by contrast, problematized the conspicuous absence of proletarian mobilization in the foreign lands they visited. Their photographic works foreground the question of how to capture the human subject in

LOOK LEFT, YOUNG MAN!

153

the space of the other—that is, how documentary capture creates and shapes ideological and literary space. Through a continued close analysis of the genre of the photo-series, begun in the previous chapter through the lens of Prishvin’s ocherki, this chapter will show how Ehrenburg’s and Ilf’s photographic encounters with the human other capture their marginalized human subjects.

At Home, Abroad In June 1932, the editors of Proletarskoe foto published their effusive acceptance of the “Restructuring of Artistic-Literary Organizations.” They underscored the main points of the literary decree, including the unification of photographic circles—ROPF (Russian Association of Photo-Reporters) and the October group in particular— along with an assertion of Soviet self-reliance on the production of photographic goods and a defi nitively Soviet art. The article also stated that “the resolution of the Central Committee from April 23 fully applies to the art of photography. . . . This restructuring should be embraced by photo-reporters, photo-artists . . . , whose creative work is inextricably linked to the agitational-propagandistic, society-wide use of photography.”13 Prominently mentioned in a list of model photographic works in recent years is Max Alpert and Arkady Shaikhet’s photo-series “A Day in the Life of a Moscow Working Class Family” (“Den′ iz zhizni moskovskoi rabochei sem′i”), which followed the model Filippov family through an ordinary day. The series, fi rst published in the leftist German illustrated journal A-I-Z (ArbeiterIllustrierte-Zeitung) and reprinted in Proletarskoe foto in 1931, served as a model of photographic-textual representation not only at home but also abroad.14 The Filippov photo-series marks the embedding of the formalist experimentation of the preceding decade within a narrative framing, wherein the new Soviet family is the photographic, ideological center of agitation and mobilization and a virtual site of exchange. The photo-series was already a popular genre in both Russian and Weimar German periodicals.15 But with the publication of the Filippov photo-series, Alpert and Shaikhet, then leaders of ROPF, positioned their work not as “a ‘simple’ display of a succession of workbenches or detached [otdel′nye] people at workbenches,”—a clear jab at the fragmented bodies in photo-series by Rodchenko and Boris Ignatovich (fig. 4.2) but rather, through the narrative inscription of the photograph, as a way to “reveal the social essence of objects and events as a whole, in their complete dialectical diversity.”16 For its audience at home, reading about the Filippov family in Proletarskoe foto, the text and images (not only photographs but also reproductions of documents) were presented in such a way as to make them maximally concrete, and thus believable, as a typical Soviet family while also imposing a rigid format on the essay: each numbered caption is succinct and exact, rhythmically moving through the Filippov day with the fully embodied (not cropped) worker family.17

154

CHAPTER 4

However, the reality or even typical quality of the family is as fraught as the construction of Muybridge’s time-lapse series. The composite image is one of absolute progress in all areas of life: living conditions, labor, and education. One German visitor to the Soviet Union characterized the series as a whole as a “Potemkin Village,” obscuring the hardships of forced collectivization and industrialization, the deprivations of everyday life.18 Moreover, taken alone, the image of the family gathered at the breakfast table, with its gleaming samovar, white tablecloth, and breakfast aplenty could hardly be distinguished from any bourgeois dining room in any locale (fig. 4.3). Svetlana Boym has written in particular on the coded order of the inclusion of the rubber-tree plant, itself another member of the dining room’s ensemble in the portrait of the family at the table, noting it as “the last sickly survivor of the imagined bourgeois greenhouses.”19 But it is the particular fictionality of this scene at home that is key to the very structure of the photo-series, and for some critics, its success as a readerly model. In one response to the series, Boris Zherebtsov identifies the distinguishing feature of the Filippov series as that it transcends an ordinary sequence of photographs through its organic correspondence with the aid of a plot (siuzhet), where “something should happen.”20 Hence, the series has more affi nity with fi lm than with the novella or the short story, as each photograph must also contain an internal dynamism that connects it to the others in the montage as a whole. To illustrate these contrasts, Zherbtsov begins his own analysis of the montage of the Filippov series not with the image of the family (pictured in fig. 4.3) but with three photographs representing the Filippovs’ home, past and present. In the fi rst, which captures the Filippovs’ Moscow street seen from an apartment window high above, the viewer’s eye travels down the street along modern buildings toward a remnant of old Moscow: an Orthodox Church. The caption draws the reader’s attention to the Filippovs’ home, pictured in the second image on the page (fig. 4.4): “Khavsko-Shabolovskii lane 11—such is the address of the ‘house’ where the family of Filippov, an old Muscovite metalworker, lives. It is an entire small town made up of 18 five-story buildings. There is a club, kindergarten, nursery, store, and wide green courtyards. At entrance 69, under No. 638, is the Filippov apartment. Two rooms, a gas kitchen, and bathroom.”21 To accentuate the contrast, the small single-storied wooden house in which, the viewer reads, the Filippovs had lived just two years earlier is included at the bottom of the page. In these juxtapositions the Filippov essay “gives us the sensation [oshchushchenie] of dramatic progress.”22 Thus, on the fi rst page of the photo-series, the view shifts between the past (the old Moscow, with the church looking small in the distance, and the wooden house in the smallest photograph at the bottom of the page) and the hopeful present (the large, newly modeled, and well-accommodated apartment building where the Filippovs now live). As the pages unfold, in a progression that reproduces the effect of looking in through the windows of the Filippovs’ building (and by extension, into their collective life), the images frame views of the optimistic and productive look of the present.

LOOK LEFT, YOUNG MAN!

155

Figure 4.3. Arkady Shaikhet and Max Alpert, from “A Day in the Life of a Moscow Working-Class Family,” A-I-Z , no. 38 (1931). Image courtesy of the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago. Permissions courtesy of the Estate of Arkady Shaikhet.

These photographs include close-up portraits of the family at the breakfast table or individual family members at work, thereby clearly embedding the most important subject—the family—in this specifically Muscovite Soviet space, in some ways much like an urban Prishvinesque microgeography. This building, named by the largest caption on the page as the “‘house’ made of sixteen houses” (‘dom’ iz shestnadtsati domov), houses its own microcosm of the Soviet city within its walls (the workers’ club, the kindergarten, etc.) and encapsulates the totality of byt (everyday life) in socialist life. 23 But most important, as Zherebtsov points out for the reader, there is still the specificity of the individual at its center: the members of the Filippov family. Montage confers dynamism not on things (veshchi) but on people. Each photo-document functions in creating the dynamic and infectious montage of the whole, just as the Filippovs play their individual roles in the building of socialist society. 24 Just as it was for Tretyakov, Alpert, and Shaikhet, the photo-series not only was the documentary capture of this slice of typical Soviet life, it was also a way to actively engage the viewer and reader in the process of dynamic reading of the photo-series itself. In their article accompanying the photo-series in Proletarskoe

Figure 4.4. Arkady Shaikhet and Max Alpert, from “A Day in the Life of a Moscow Working-Class Family,” Proletarskoe foto, no. 4 (1931). Image courtesy of the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago. Permissions courtesy of the Estate of Arkady Shaikhet.

LOOK LEFT, YOUNG MAN!

157

foto Shaikhet and Alpert write, “We have the right to affi rm that serial photography should achieve a wide circulation as a constant method of agitation and propaganda.”25 Thus the photo-series would stand alongside, or even above, other modes of artistic production—in particular, painting—as a way to build socialism actively and speedily through agitation, both within the Soviet Union and abroad. The newspaper Pravda announced, “The clarity and persuasive concreteness of the photograph in unity with the ‘accompanying caption’ puts in the hands of the press an additional weapon for the mobilization and organization of the masses.”26 Through concretizing combinations of image and text, the photo-series was poised to become a prominent means not only of documenting life as it was but also of actively shaping a new socialist generation. As Sergei Tretyakov noted in his response to the series, The serial picture of the Filippov family produced by Soiuzfoto is valuable precisely because it gives the subject of its depiction enormous substance, for we see the person not as an individual, not in isolation, but as a particle in our active social tissue, connected by little roots along the most diverse lines: the line of production, that of the sociopolitical, the familial lines of everyday existence. The value of this photo-biographical excerpt lies in its cross section of the flux [ potok] that we call the life of the Filippov family, a family like many others among us. 27 Family ties are repeated thematically, not only in the family presented but also in the “family” of photographs in the serial presentation of images in the journal. We also recognize (as Soviet viewers) that we might forge lines of connection to this family— along Tretyakov’s “familial lines of everyday existence”—through other substitutes for equally strong familial ties: the work and production that shape everyday life. This theme of the “great family” is present in much of the ideological rhetoric of the 1930s, particularly in opposition to the incursion of foreign otherness.28 This link was made a few years later by Maxim Gorky in his speech at the 1934 Writers’ Congress, in which he describes the individual as integral part of a universal family, united under the auspices of socialist realism: Life, as asserted by socialist realism, is deeds, creativeness, the aim of which is the uninterrupted development of the priceless individual faculties of man, with a view to his victory over the forces of nature, for the sake of his health and longevity, for the supreme joy of living on an earth which, in conformity with the steady growth of his requirements, he wishes to mold into a beautiful dwelling place for mankind, united into a single family.29 In these ties that bind, the photo-series captures and unifies material production and the experience of the everyday, thereby encapsulating the totality of life in the

158

CHAPTER 4

Soviet Union—a totality that could never be captured by the singular or individual photograph. The affective power of the photo-series lies in a dialectical-materialist identification with the photographic subjects: understanding the “significance” of the subject “for each of us” and “the commonalities that unite [shock workers] as foremost in the ranks of the builders of socialism.”30 Thus, in moving through the pages of Proletarskoe foto, the Soviet reader recognizes herself, in reality or in potentiality, in the average Soviet family member, moving through a typical day in this optimistically forward-looking country. Using Eisenstein’s famous formulation, Zherebtsov describes this effect as the “montage of attractions” in the photo-series, applying pressure to the viewer’s emotions (‘nazhimom’ na emotsiiu zritelia).31 In Tretyakov’s conception, the reader thereby binds himself or herself along family lines. But even in these singular moments of identification, as László Moholy-Nagy would state about the photo-series genre as though it were cinema, “the single picture loses its separate identity and becomes part of the assembly; it becomes a structural element of the related whole which is the thing itself.”32 If the individual photo (and the photo of the individual) is a building block of the whole—and quite unlike the frames of a fi lm that cannot be pondered and examined individually except in the editing room—it also loses its singular importance in the movement of the photo-series, just as the singularity of the individual is lost in a totalizing fantasy of an idealized Soviet life. Just as Tretyakov himself was an intermediary between the German left front and Soviet artistic production—including his collaborations with the master of photomontage John Heartfield and his many publications for German readership—so too did the Filippov family serve as a proxy (virtual) intermediary in the pages of A-IZ.33 Tretyakov was sent by VOKS (All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries) in 1930 and again in 1931 to Berlin, where he gave the speeches, including “The Socialist Village and the Writer,” that so influenced Walter Benjamin.34 But just as the text of Tretyakov’s own writings had to be translated for a German audience, the texts and image layouts in the pages of Proletarskoe foto and A-I-Z are not identical. In contrast to the Soviet publication, the text in A-I-Z had a broader pedagogical function and, as the authors hoped, also an agitational one.35 The captions in the A-I-Z photo-series had longer textual descriptions of the various details of the family’s life in order to complete the picture of life in the Soviet Union for their foreign audience. Leonid Mezhericher, the editor of the project, asserted that the strong response to the series depended on a psychological identification, stating, “‘The Filippov Family,’ printed in A-I-Z , made an enormous impression on the readers of this journal, and almost exclusively workers read it. The psychological reason of this impression is completely clear: the workers of Germany and Austria correctly understood that in the figure of Filippov A-I-Z shows a typical Soviet worker, his living standard and conditions of everyday life.”36 And while the cover of the issue is a far cry from one of the typical Soviet worker, featuring instead

LOOK LEFT, YOUNG MAN!

159

the Filippov sisters with tennis rackets (potential icons of bourgeois leisure again, rather than of labor), the propagandistic affi rmation of the success of the series was proclaimed to show a widening gap between the Soviet way of life and the deepening fi nancial crisis in Germany. As Pravda’s summation read, “The deeper and more excruciating the crisis that is enveloping the countries of capitalism becomes . . . the more intensely riveted is the attention of the broadest proletarian and semi-proletarian masses of the entire world on the USSR and the grand creative work being accomplished within it.”37 And it is perhaps for this reason, to widen that gap, that even the seemingly incongruous, but highly legible, bourgeois imagery became a visual piece of building socialism in the Filippov family series.38 In this formulation the photo-series was capable through its verbal-visual depiction of a totality of prosperity and productivity—however fictional that prosperity might be—of agitating the oppressed and turning them toward socialism, in effect, closing the gap between the deficient capitalist present and a possible radiant future already unfolding. Not only does this kind of international agitation smack of the rhetoric of the operative author Tretyakov (and as he was later framed by Benjamin), but it came to be articulated by Karl Radek in his speech at the later 1934 Writers’ Congress: “Socialist realism means not only knowing reality as it is, but knowing whither it is moving. It is moving towards socialism, it is moving towards the victory of the international proletariat. And a work of art created by a socialist realist is one which shows whither that confl ict of contradictions is leading which the artist has seen in life and reflected in his work.”39 But this notion of forward movement, of the mobilization that is emblematic of this period, is particularly challenging for photography and most certainly for the photographic still.40 Radek mentions photography only rhetorically—to contrast it unfavorably with socialist realism. In his response to the discussion, we see the compounded import of photography (with echoes of Julia Wedgwood’s Tolstoy critique): We do not photograph life. In the totality of phenomena we seek out the main phenomenon. Giving everything without discrimination is not realism. That would be the most vulgar kind of naturalism. We should select phenomena. Realism means that we make a selection from the point of view of that which is essential, from the point of view of guiding principles. . . . Show the typical in the individual. . . . Do this, basing yourself on the criteria of the laws of historical development. That is what socialist realism means.41 Here authors and photographers—and most pressingly the author-photographer—are faced with a dual pressure: to eschew the personality that was a detriment in early Soviet and prerevolutionary literature while embracing the creative perspective that transforms naturalism into socialist realism.42 But Soviet photographic practice already had the photo-series. And in light of the 1934 Writers’ Congress, Mezhericher—then editor of Sovetskoe foto and head

160

CHAPTER 4

of Soiuzfoto—highlighted the one clear path for the future of photography: to consciously become part of the universal proletarian cause.43 Photographers, as they touched on the “fact of our everyday life” (fakt nashei povsednevnosti), fell into three groups: formalists (such as Rodchenko, who were indifferent to content); small groups of photo-journalists who focused solely on the sharpness of the image (a secondary category of formalists); and the largest group, those who were indifferent to both form and content, making images simply as a livelihood. Mezhericher goes on to quote Radek from another of his speeches at the Congress: “We call this realism socialist, because it is not simply a photograph of life. It is founded on an understanding of where the world is headed . . . to the triumph of socialism.”44 Taking seriously such threats to exclude photography entirely from socialist realist production, Mezhericher’s article returns to a frequently mentioned favorite model: Alpert and Shaikhet’s photo-series. To illustrate the effect, the editor includes a photograph from another of Shaikhet’s photo-series: a female Uzbek worker from the Tashkent Textile Combine, smiling with an overflowing set of textile rolls in her hands (fig. 4.22). Through Mezhericher’s editorial gaze, she becomes the poster child of Soviet ethnic diversity and abundant production.45 He also transforms the photographer into an iconic pillar of ideological correctness, stressing that the “fundamental, definitive quality of artistic work . . . depends not on the camera, but on the man who holds it in his hands.”46 The work of the photographer, then, fi rst begins with his orientation, this process of self-transformation: only then might he gain the correct mastery over his technical apparatus and go on to produce works that might play a concrete part in the “great work of Socialist Construction.”47 And the Alpert and Shaikhet photo-series was a success abroad, albeit largely as a media blitz at home, entering into a periodical market that was already manifestly photographically literate. The photo-series, exported to buttress the left front and printed at home, served to concretize this optimistic moment of the First Five-Year Plan and exemplified the new programmatic model for photographic production in the Soviet Union. A 1936 issue of Ogonek, another publication for an exclusively Soviet audience, clearly shows the codification of the socialist realist photo-series. As David Shneer describes the break between the prerevolutionary version of the journal and its postrevolutionary reality, the Soviet readers of Ogonek “would aspire to participate in the budding of a new socialist society, one that seemed to lack . . . class limitations. . . . Ogonek would be photography for the Soviet masses.”48 As such, it might, not surprisingly, reflect those masses in a socialist realist mirror, where the ordinary Soviet citizen is turned into a heroic subject.49 The short photoseries “Prosperity” (Zazhitochnost′ ) illustrates everyday—heroic—life on the collective farm Red October (fig. 4.5).50 Organized along the format of roughly a day, without explicitly saying so, the series captures the grain harvest and shows houses under construction (and textually communicates that new and better ones are soon to arrive), communal dining, and children’s education. The photographs zoom out to capture the general picture—photographs of the busy collective—and zoom into

Figure 4.5. A. Gerdt, “Prosperity,” Ogonek, no. 3 (1936).

162

CHAPTER 4

individual portraits, optimistic and heroic portraits with shining smiles. In one photograph, the foregrounded figure is rendered as just a silhouette, seeming to invite the reader to enter into his labor and, having once done so (as is described in the caption), to claim his right to leisure (pravo na otdykh). The composite image, including the imaginatively mobilized viewer/reader, is clearly captured by that optimistic title: “Prosperity.” With “Prosperity” serving as a model for the genre’s entering into an almost ritualized form, we will turn our attention now to the ways in which the look of prosperity of home was shaped by lenses abroad. Here Ilya Ehrenburg and Ilya Ilf, much like Mikhail Prishvin, provide a counterpoint to the development of photographic literacy as a facet of literary production itself. Forming for us a parallel to Prishvin’s bridging of disparate times and genres in concentrated construction of microgeographic space, the photo-textual work of Ehrenburg and Ilf frames the foreign human subject in dynamic exchange across international boundaries. These subjects, potentially left outside the frames of developing socialist realism, cannot help but enter into the picture, thereby complicating the shape of prosperity at home.

Approaching Ilya Ehrenburg’s Paris Ilya Ehrenburg, writer, journalist, and representative of the Soviet cultural elite in the 1930s, served as intermediary for Soviet writers and readers in their travels abroad, both real and imagined.51 In fact, Ehrenburg’s Paris home would become a meeting point for many Soviet citizens traveling through Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, including Ilf and Petrov as the duo made their way to America. Ehrenburg’s fi rst literary success, which would come to defi ne his early career and secure his reputation as a representative of international modernism, was the picaresque Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples (Neobychainye pokhozhdeniia Khulio Khurenito i ego uchenikov, 1922). The novel was well received both abroad and by the Soviet reading public, though somewhat uneasily by the Soviet authorities— particularly because of Ehrenburg’s vacillating allegiances to the Bolshevik Party in this period.52 Nikolai Bukharin’s introduction both framed and mitigated Ehrenburg’s ideological position: It easy to say that the author is not a communist, that he does not believe very much in the future order of things and that he does not particularly desire it passionately. All this would be very true and respectable. . . . [But] the author, a former Bolshevik, is familiar with what goes on behind the stage of the socialist parties; he’s a man with a broad horizon, an excellent understanding of the Western European way of life, a quick eye and a sharp tongue. 53

LOOK LEFT, YOUNG MAN!

163

Here Bukharin calls attention to Ehrenburg’s distinctive literary perspective— one that has been shaped by his position as both a socialist insider and an intimate observer of the capitalist world. This perspective would allow the author throughout his career to turn his quick eye (ostryi glaz) and his sharp tongue (metkii iazyk) to crafting images of everyday life (byt) outside the Soviet Union. Bukharin characterizes Ehrenburg as an author on the margins but as such, capable of revealing his own broad and expansive insights into the problems of the capitalist, Western other. In this period, Ehrenburg’s “broad horizon” also included the short-lived journal Veshch′/Objet/Gegenstand (1922), produced with El Lissitzky. 54 This multilingual (Russian, French, German) journal featured art, poetry, and news about technological advances, as well as a few striking examples of object-centered photography: the rear of a steamship at dry dock, shown at the level of the propellers, and a train engine outfitted with a stylized snow removal tool—a shape that, in the context of the art journal, mimics the geometric compositions of Malevich and Lissitzky. These photographs, included alongside photographs of a constructivist art exhibition and Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, transform practical, industrial objects into aesthetic objects. Veshch′ was emblematic of Ehrenburg’s commitment to the cutting edge of avant-garde art in the 1920s—as well as of his commitment to internationalism. As the introductory editorial announced, “The appearance of Veshch′ is another sign that the exchange of experiments, achievements, and objects between young Russian and West European artists has begun. . . . Art today is INTERNATIONAL.”55 Ehrenburg and Lissitzky go on to proclaim their goal of promoting Constructivism, “whose task is not to adorn life, but to organize it.”56 Not only would the journal open more lines of artistic exchange between the new Soviet Union and the West, but its allegiance to Constructivism could also help to redesign everyday life through the visual and textual languages of objectcentric art. As the Soviet state’s view of art shifted in the fi rst half of the 1930s, Ehrenburg also reoriented to become a strong supporter of, and participant in, the development of socialist realism—a fact that is reflected in his production novels The Second Day (Den′ vtoroi, 1933) and Without Stopping to Take a Breath (Ne perevodia dykhaniia, 1935). And while the latter of these novels was penned in Paris, its action takes place in Russia at the construction site of the Kuznetsk blast furnace. Sketched and photographed between these two construction novels, however, My Paris (Moi Parizh, 1933) exemplifies Ehrenburg’s position in the early 1930s on the cusp of the great change in the sanctioned artistic movements of the Soviet Union, amid a high-stakes ideological argument concerning the role of individual engagement in the collectively constructed artistic and literary spaces of this period. It was through this work that Ehrenburg played an active role in defining the look and shape of socialist realism by placing the author at the center of his photo-textual project from abroad. In fact, it was photography that defi ned Ehrenburg’s retrospectively framed

164

CHAPTER 4

authorial persona. In his memoirs he writes, “I have been writing for half a century and still keep hearing: ‘You’re not photographing the proper thing, comrade. Turn to the left, there’s a worthy model for you with a high-quality, well-studied smile.’”57 While Veshch′ placed the object at the center of artistic representation, Ehrenburg, upon taking up photography around 1923, would rarely return to everyday objects as his subjects.58 If Prishvin’s photographic gaze was one founded in an ethnographic approach, focused by rodstvennoe vnimanie, Ehrenburg’s was humanistic. In fact, his passion for photography was closely linked to his own kindred attention, formed in his second home and the center of his international life: Paris. His fi rst trip to the French capital was in 1908 at the age of eighteen, following a short imprisonment by the tsarist police for his revolutionary activities. It was at this time that he formed a strong attachment to the city. Having lived abroad for most of the teens and twenties in Paris, Berlin, and Brussels, Ehrenburg returned to Paris in 1931 as a correspondent for Izvestiia. However, he did not encounter the city he had known in his youth. As he notes in his memoirs, “The year 1931 in Paris was not gay: the economic crisis was spreading. . . . All kinds of fascist organizations began to make their voices heard. . . . Germany continued to rearm.”59 It was in this year that Ehrenburg took to the streets of Paris, like Baudelaire’s “painter of modern life,” with a Leica and a lateral viewfi nder, to capture the city unawares. The intimately titled book My Paris is composed of these candid photographs, each with its own caption, accompanied by Ehrenburg’s personally framed narratives of the city.60 With his sharp eye, camera, and pen, he captures a distinctly humanistic approach to the documentary subject abroad. And while objects are not the focus of My Paris, vestiges of Ehrenburg’s constructivist perspective—and the technology that made the work possible—are clearly referenced in the Lissitzky-designed montages of the work’s first pages. On the title page, a montage entitled “Portrait by El Lissitzky” (“Portret raboty El′ Lisitskogo”) sutures two images of Ehrenburg: one of him looking through the lens of his side-angle viewfinder and the second with just his hand working at the typewriter (fig. 4.6). This image foregrounds not only the role of the technological object in the construction of the work, perhaps harking back to Ehrenburg’s and Lissitzky’s aspirations in Veshch′, but also the complex hybrid between text and image in Ehrenburg’s album. As Erica Wolf describes this montage, El Lissitzky’s photomontage portrait of Il′ia Erenburg for the book My Paris presents a vivid image of th[e] new hybrid cultural producer: resembling a two-headed jack on a playing card, the author-photographer manipulates both camera and typewriter. This portrait evokes the modernization of the writer’s profession, the implementation of modern technologies and new techniques. While the camera enhances the author’s vision, the typewriter registers an analogous transformation of written language via mechanical means.61

LOOK LEFT, YOUNG MAN!

165

Figure 4.6. El Lissitzky, “Portrait by El Lissitzky,” My Paris (1933). ©2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy of Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

Ehrenburg’s new photographic device—the lateral viewfinder—not only parallels the mechanical means of textual production as an extension of the typewriter but also determines the way in which Ehrenburg captures his subjects. In this album he aimed to capture his Paris rather than the tourist’s images of wide boulevards and bright squares—a declaration that calls to mind Tretyakov’s own operative rejection of the observation from the standpoint of the tourist.62 In another Lissitzky montage at the opening of the work, Ehrenburg’s photograph of a Parisian monument is juxtaposed with an upside-down view of a man sleeping (or crying) on a park bench, the two images connected by a bold curving arrow (fig. 4.7). This juxtaposition succinctly demonstrates that Ehrenburg’s work will transform the reader’s vision, turning his or her preconceived notions of Paris upside down, as Ehrenburg’s lateral viewfinder and typewriter transform what it is possible to see and read.

166

CHAPTER 4

Figure 4.7. Ilya Ehrenburg and El Lissitzky, Parisian montage, My Paris (1933). © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy of Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

And while the lateral viewfi nder was a source of technological interest in the work, it was also central for the particular kind of documentary intimacy that defi nes My Paris. John Boling, a critic for the American journal New Masses, states, “[The book’s] lasting fascination is undoubtedly due to the fact that Ehrenbourg [sic] has been able to catch the most intimate gestures and expressions of these people fully unaware of the camera. . . . Nothing much happens in these pictures although each one tells a complete story in itself. This and the shocking true and human insight make the perusal such an exciting experience.”63 Ehrenburg credits the capture of these intimate gestures and expressions to the lateral viewfi nder, likening the candid shot to a moment of truth, as opposed to the mask of a subject who acknowledges the camera. Ehrenburg notes in his memoirs that a “man who is being photographed is . . . unlike himself: when he notices the camera pointed

LOOK LEFT, YOUNG MAN!

167

at him, he immediately changes. . . . There is neither the permanent character of the model nor the moment of truth.”64 And while the lateral viewfi nder was a novel invention, the concept of “catching life unawares” was not. Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom, 1929) featured a hidden camera that aimed to catch “life as it is” on the streets of Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, and Leningrad.65 Like Ehrenburg’s lateral viewfi nder, Vertov’s kino-eye was not simply a formal device—that is “not ‘fi lming life unawares’ for the sake of the ‘unaware,’” but rather “to show people without masks . . . to catch them through the eye of the camera at a moment when they are not acting, to read their thoughts, laid bare by the camera.”66 Such was the language of David Zaslavsky’s review in Literaturnaia gazeta, describing Ehrenburg’s agency in “showing us the underside [iznanka] of bourgeois civilization. He ‘tears off the masks’ [sryvaet maski ]. His book is a collection of documents.”67 Ehrenburg’s art of remaining “invisible” is also part and parcel of his approach to literary creation: “A writer knows that to see people, he himself must remain unseen. An attentive stare changes the world just so.”68 Here the lateral viewfi nder not only allows the writer to remain hidden but also inhibits the writer from looking directly at his subjects, shifting his gaze so that he can look at them only askance. Somewhat paradoxically, it is the lateral viewfi nder—what might also be called his own “camera mask”—that also allows for the most direct capture of human expression, creating what Ehrenburg calls “human documents.”69 At the same time, in both Vertov’s fi lm and the fi rst pages of Ehrenburg’s My Paris (the Lissitsky montage), the hidden cameraman actually appears, becoming an omnipresent witness for the viewer and a reminder of the mediation involved in the work—even as this fi gure fades into the background as the work progresses. In his memoirs Ehrenburg explains that he took up photography precisely because contemporary society lacked “diaries and frank, informative letters,” those intimately reflective literary sources that come closest to the human document.70 And his look askance turns Ehrenburg into a kind of voyeur. He quotes Isaac Babel’s statement that the “most interesting of all that I’ve read have been other people’s letters” and goes on to equate his own voyeuristic photographic gaze with his authorial perspective, admitting that “of course, a strict moralist might judge me, but such is the craft of the writer—we do nothing but try to peep through a crack into the life of another.” 71 Through the gaze of the author-photographer, or hidden cameraman, we, the viewers and readers, also become voyeurs, peering directly into the unaware moments of the human subjects now that they have become human documents. This ethical judgment on photographic capture was also leveled at the American, Lithuanian-born, photographer Ben Shahn. As Laura Katzman writes, “Shahn’s photographs of . . . sleeping vagrants . . . involve a complicated, even disturbing relationship between the photographer and his subject, for the men’s slumber makes them doubly vulnerable: they lack both the

168

CHAPTER 4

comfort of shelter and an awareness of the camera.” 72 The camera becomes the tool for an act of violence, even as it might seek to urge us to lift up the lives of those it captures. To an extent this dual objectification and valorization of the subject includes both city and human subject, creating an almost metaphorical relationship between the two throughout Ehrenburg’s work.73 Giving the city a human face, he writes, Yes, everything in this city is made up [vydumano]: vistas, exploits, passions. . . . Everything is made up except the smile—Paris has a strange smile, a smile barely perceptible and quite unexpected. A poor man is sleeping on a bench, he wakes, picks up someone’s discarded cigarette butt and takes a drag. He has a smile on his face; it’s worth traipsing through hundreds of cities to see such a smile. Paris’s gray houses know how to smile just as unexpectedly and sublimely. This smile is why I love Paris, a city where everything is made up, except make-believe [vydumka]; here make-believe is understood and excused.74 The smile that Ehrenburg describes is rarely, if ever, captured in the photographs of My Paris. Rather, the reader is more often drawn to the divide between the description of the smile and the dismal reality of the photograph. This Parisian smile, mired in the detritus of Paris, certainly stands in contradistinction to the radiant glow of a growing body of Soviet photography that claimed optimism as its “second organic quality”—its fi rst being, of course, the human subject: the proletariat (neither disembodied machine nor abstracted object). Ehrenburg’s chapter “Benches” presciently anticipates such an established dichotomy (not only between optimism and pessimism but also between objects and people); his benches are not just benches but are populated by “human waste, uncollected by dustmen . . . : war heroes with stumps instead of legs, mad girls who’ve been tormented by their families, consumptive poets and asthmatic tramps.” 75 He muses over an old woman, the “hero”: “Perhaps she was sleeping on the bench. Perhaps it wasn’t sleep, but her fi nal agony.” 76 While the text does serve as a simple description, it also arouses and expands the reader’s/viewer’s imagination to the point of envisioning a possible narrative in the margins or beyond the image and the text. And this will inform the reaction of the reader/viewer to the photographs of elderly people on park benches that follow. In this particular photograph, entitled “Her Last Bench” (fi g. 4.8), we see the woman slumped down (dead or only sleeping)—and the joyful Soviet hero, gazing onward and upward, could not seem farther away. If the optimistic look is up, then she is down, and downtrodden.

LOOK LEFT, YOUNG MAN!

169

Figure 4.8. Ilya Ehrenburg, “Her Last Bench,” My Paris (1933). Image courtesy of Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

Theirs and Ours This divide between up and down is fundamental to the photo-series of “theirs and ours” (u nikh, u nas) featured across the Soviet press of the time. The simple composition, formed of a foreign photograph placed next to another portraying socialist byt, shows in clear contrast capitalist and socialist “realities.” The juxtaposition of two antithetical photographs might be described as a micro-photo-series that might, as Mezhericher envisions, be readily deployed as a “photopostcard” (fotootkytka). For the photo-editor, the “theirs and ours” genre, deployed in the mass-circulated object, would serve as a direct, accessible, and effective weapon of the party—no longer the neutralized object of consumption that once characterized the postcard in the bourgeois cultural sphere.77 While not a postcard itself, one example of the

170

CHAPTER 4

Figure 4.9. “Theirs . . . Ours”: Homeless, jobless man on the sidewalk in New York (photo by the American Workers Photo League); the seventeenth anniversary of the October Revolution in Moscow, celebratory columns on Red Square (photo by B. Kudoiarov), Sovetskoe foto, no. 8–9 (1934).

genre, printed in the pages of Sovetskoe foto in 1934, makes plain its image of the “mobilization . . . of the party line” (fig. 4.9).78 Here, “theirs” is clearly captured in a single subject at left: a disheveled, homeless man sleeps on a sidewalk grate.79 At right, an overflowing celebration of the seventeenth anniversary of the October Revolution marches on, resplendent with Soviet iconography rising above the crowd. Although the smiles on the faces of the joyous participants might not be visible in the dense mass of human figures, they—along with the single smile of the viewer recognizing her potential self in the scene—are readily available to the imagination. The work of Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov provides an opportunity to explore the gulf between theirs and ours and perhaps to fi nd that elusive smile abroad. Ilf’s “American Photographs” (“Amerikanskie fotografi i,” 1936), photo-illustrated feuilletons, penned with his writing partner Petrov, were published serially throughout 1936 in the pages of Ogonek—interspersed between issues including photo-series like “Prosperity.” Ilf fi rst picked up a camera in 1929, taking photographs of his home, family, and Moscow often with soft lighting and subjects in soft focus. While his

LOOK LEFT, YOUNG MAN!

171

photographic mania began as a hobby, it soon also became part of his professional identity as an Ogonek photojournalist. Ilf and Petrov’s “American Photographs” each briefly chronicled a theme (“New York,” “California,” “Advertising,” “Indians”) from the writing duo’s 1935 road trip across America. We might consider this a photo-series unified by two machines: the camera and their Ford. When this material was gathered the next year into a book— Single-Storied America (Odnoetazhnaia Amerika, 1937), this thematic grouping was replaced by a chronological account of their trip, and the photographs were omitted.80 At this fi rst stage, however, it was still a serially published photo-series unified by its title, “American Photographs.” And although the text was a collaboration, the photographs were snapped solely by Ilf. The chapter entitled “Americans” is, in the words of Ilf and Petrov, “a difficult chapter,” but it is also representative of many of the issues at play in the whole of the photo-series (fig. 4.10).81 The writers state, “What we offer for the reader’s attention is no more than photographs, just a few photographs, a few characteristics of American life.”82 This slice of American life—we might also say, of Ilf’s American types—includes photographs, with short captions, primarily of men (jobless workers, an engineer, a Mexican, young men at a football match), taken at various points in the authors’ travels (Texas, California, New Mexico). One man stands out from the rest in his frontal pose, staring straight into the camera and out at the reader. Identifying the man as one of their hitchhikers, the text gives a short history of his life and his misfortunes (fig. 4.11): One of our passengers [was] an out-of-work fellow from Texas. . . . Now he’s penniless. His wife is in the hospital. Smiling sadly, he showed us a clipping from a local paper, which had run an interview with the unhappy woman and included her picture. There was a cheerful caption underneath it: “She knows that she is paralyzed for life, but she looks to the future with a smile.”—“After all, I have my Roberts!” said the poor woman during her talk with our paper’s correspondent.83 This description, which at fi rst seems to serve only to establish a sympathetic bond between the Soviet reader and Roberts, the down-and-out worker in the picture, quickly reveals a far more complex relationship to its subject. Like Ehrenburg’s suggestive text framing the man and his cigarette butt, Ilf and Petrov’s account draws us out of the frame of the photograph. Not only is Roberts’s sad smile not pictured, but neither is the newspaper clipping about his wife. Newspapers do figure textually elsewhere in the feuilleton as the authors state that “provincial papers are as flat as a pancake,” lacking any substantial content, recounting only the stories of the dizzying ascent of some errand-boy who becomes a millionaire.84 And “that’s why American optimism is so irritating. One of America’s best people, a famous, gravely ill writer who suffers less from his illness than from the illness of the country, said about that traditional American jollity: ‘I can’t take this idiotic laughter anymore!’”85

Figure 4.10. Ilya Ilf, “Americans,” Ogonek, no. 13 (1936).

LOOK LEFT, YOUNG MAN!

173

Figure 4.11. Ilya Ilf, “Roberts,” Ogonek, no. 13 (1936).

The space between image and text in the Roberts episode recalls the broader analysis of Valery Stigneev, who argues that text reveals the “marginal quality in the image. . . . This distinctive quality exists in between what is meant and what is said, what is printed on the page and what can be read between the lines, what is formally

1 74

CHAPTER 4

pronounced and what is casually discussed. It presents the discrepancies of human existence.”86 Reading into the semantic space of the photograph, the viewer-reader might imagine the “picture within the picture”: the sad smile of the man looking at the picture of his wife with its “idiotically” positive caption. In this juxtaposition of various human documents—the photograph, the newspaper clipping, and Ilf and Petrov’s text in Ogonek—the veneer of American positivity is wiped away, widening the gulf that stretches between this man and his ill wife and any possibility of salvation within an American space. In this way, Roberts (representative of the working man and a potential subject of mobilization) is left powerless, trapped in his own senseless American smile. But as we draw nearer to this subject in our dive into the “picture within a picture,” so too do we—potentially—draw nearer to the author himself. Rodchenko, in fact, lauded Ehrenburg at the expense of Ilf for precisely this reason. Rodchenko notes, “One striking peculiarity of Ilf’s American photographs is that they lack the ironic, sharp eye that Ilf and Petrov possess in literature. There is no satire, no humor.”87 Rodchenko presumes that Ilf had not yet found his own style in his photographs, functioning rather like a “bookkeeper,” unlike Ehrenburg, who “saw Paris differently and in his own way.”88 And such must be the approach in returning to an assessment of Ilf’s “American Photographs.” What Rodchenko overlooks is the fact that the irony and satire in these photographs do in fact emerge from the juxtapositions between text and image. As Ilf’s daughter responded to his critics, “The thing is that Ilf the photographer can in no way be separated from Ilf the writer.”89 And this is the considered view of Sergei Morozov in his 1958 history of Soviet photography, where he calls the “American Photographs” “photo-stories” (fotorasskazy)— in a single word creating a clear link between the literary and photographic, neither bare bookkeeping nor the more sophisticated reportage but another photo-literary amalgamation.90 While the “left” might already be photographically legible, as suggested to Ehrenburg by the corporate critic of his memoirs, Ilf and Petrov lamented their inability to capture the American landscape in both image and text. In the description of the Grand Canyon, the duo writes in Ogonek, “A photograph, of course, can’t convey the grandeur of this sight that has no equal on Earth.”91 Hence the authors turn to text to describe the scene: The landscape overturned all our European conceptions, if we can put it that way, of the globe. This looks like the way a boy reading a fantastic novel might imagine the Moon or Mars to himself. We stood at the edge of this magnificent abyss for a long time, not saying a word. There are times when even the most incorrigible chatterboxes can keep quiet. Far below, a bird floated, slowly, like a fish. Even deeper, almost swallowed up in shadow, flowed the Colorado River.92

LOOK LEFT, YOUNG MAN!

175

The large scale of the view is impossible to capture within the small frames of the photograph and is barely contained even within the grandiose and playful description, which also renders the “chatterboxes” Ilf and Petrov mute. Anne Nesbet describes the effect as montage: Where, after all, does the difference between Ilf’s photograph of the Grand Canyon [and the text] lie, if not in the mobilization of metaphors, each instance of which again opens a kind of vision into another world while not entirely leaving a sense of the ‘whole’ behind? . . . The “montage” achieved textually does not seem to be present in Il′f’s photographs, which remain pleasant but typical views of the Grand Canyon, something (to borrow the words of the Russian formalists) to be “recognized” rather than “seen.”93 This distinction—to be recognized rather than seen—also marks a contrast between Ehrenburg’s photography and Ilf’s. Ehrenburg’s project succeeds in making the marginal visible through the lateral viewfinder (the Parisian subject and his/her elusive expressions), while Ilf captures what is directly before him, rendering it recognizable to the Soviet viewer.94 But what is neglected in Nesbet’s reading is that Ilf’s photograph of the Grand Canyon must be read as the first image in his montage sequence. The photographic document is the base from which the textually rendered montage expands—it must be considered the source, just as the Colorado River flows through and out of the much too grand Grand Canyon. In contrast to the Grand Canyon’s ineffable grandeur (photographically speaking), Ilf and Petrov state with an ironic surety in “The Road” that a deserted corner gas station is America. “We would like to use this caption for this picture: ‘This right here is America!’” (fig. 4.12).95 This disconnect between the content of the photograph (emptiness) and the proposed caption encapsulates the Ilf and Petrov-ian irony in this hybrid photo-textual space—that is, the text signifies the opposite of what is pictured in the photograph. While the verbal statement promises an archetypal view of America, the image itself is potentially lacking in any legible content as America. The passage that follows expands upon the caption by summoning up a montage of their American road trip: Truly, when you close your eyes and try to resurrect in your mind the country in which you spent four months, you imagine not Washington with its gardens, columns, and complete set of memorials; not New York with its skyscrapers, with its poverty and riches; not San Francisco with its steep streets and hanging bridges; not the mountains, the factories, or the canyons, but this intersection of two roads and a gas station against a backdrop of wires and advertising billboards.96

176

CHAPTER 4

Figure 4.12 . Ilya Ilf, “Right here is America!” Ogonek, no. 11 (1936).

As in the case of the ineffable Grand Canyon, it is imagination that completes the picture. But the America on offer in this photo-textual montage is also an unexpected one, a paradox that is both everything (big cities, monuments) and nothing (the empty gas station). This kind of composite image, which in its paradoxical juxtapositions also empties out the spaces of America, also makes it possible to inscribe Soviet/Russian locales onto the strangely indeterminate American map. In the feuilleton “The Small Town” a photograph of a sign for Moscow, Ohio, serves as the starting point for a satirical digression on naming practices that transport Russia itself into America (fig. 4.13): Americans don’t like to waste time on stupid things, for example, on the tortuous process of coming up with names for their towns. And really, why strain yourself when so many wonderful names already exist in the world? The entrance to the town of Moscow is shown in the photograph. That’s right, an absolutely authentic Moscow, just in the state of Ohio, not in the USSR in Moscow province. There’s another Moscow in some other state, and yet another Moscow in a third state. On the whole, every state has the absolute right to have its very own Moscow.97

LOOK LEFT, YOUNG MAN!

177

Figure 4.13. Ilya Ilf, “Moscow,” Ogonek, no. 12 (1936).

As Nesbet notes, this sign serves as a “pictogram” for the embedded spatial structure of a Russian presence in America: “within the idyllic leafi ness of ‘Ohio,’ the sign announcing Moscow; within the sign for Moscow, another sign marked ‘U.S.’ The larger the entity, the more deeply embedded (and thus, in appearance, ‘smaller’) in the picture.”98 And it is this effect—one in which the ridiculous humor might also put a smile on the face of the viewer/reader—that is the key to Ilf and Petrov’s photo-series. Each of Ilf’s photographs might be read as these pictures within pictures within pictures—a micro-microgeography that serves almost like the self-referential, expanding mirrors of Voloshin’s photographic studies. But as the pieces of America become increasingly smaller, America becomes increasingly insignificant. Through the montaging of the text, Moscow (presented in the negative—“not in the USSR in Moscow province”) remains a looming-large contrast to the shrinking Moscow of America, while also, inevitably by association, shrinking as well. The authors sum up: “If you look carefully at a small town, you can see it’s built just like New York. It’s a New York that has been shrunk immeasurably, a New York of just three thousand inhabitants, not seven million. Thus between the biggest town and the

178

CHAPTER 4

smallest towns in America there are more similarities than differences.”99 Ilf and Petrov’s America, into which Soviet space can be inscribed, becomes (humorously) monotonous and banal, shrunk into America’s repeating single-storied spaces—not the dynamic land of possibilities or of socialist transformation. Consequently, the sad imaginary smile of the down-and-out Roberts, embedded deep within the montages of the photo-textual space, is the most scathing critique not only of the forces behind Roberts’s situation but of America at large.100 Margaret Bourke-White’s famous photograph “World’s Highest Standard of Living,” fi rst published in 1937 in Life magazine (where she had the enviable position of staff photographer), with its striking ironic pathos, became the poster of the American Depression (fig. 4.14). Its context, however, was far more specific. It was taken at the time of the devastating Ohio River flood in the same year and was part of a series of photographs capturing both the displaced people and the damage done. As testimony to the powerful artistry of Bourke-White, the packed juxtaposition of text and image called up entire semantic fields of American advertising, sloganizing, and the clearly legible line of humanity that embodies suffering and perseverance. The image took on an extraordinary life and grew to epitomize the

Figure 4.14. Margaret Bourke-White, “World’s Highest Standard of Living,” or “Ohio River Flood” (1937). Getty Images ®.

LOOK LEFT, YOUNG MAN!

179

entire age. And while Ilf and Petrov’s writing and Ilf’s photographs came to defi ne the image of America for generations of Soviet readers, Ilf’s photographs do not and cannot claim such a life. The marginalized irony of the photos, shot for and embedded within the photo-series, is shaped by Ilf’s and Petrov’s satirical voice. And so their photo-series as a whole and any single photograph within it resist the posterization that carried photographs like “The World’s Highest Standard of Living” along with it in both the socialist realism of the Soviet Union and the social documentary movement in the United States.

Social Document or Socialist Realist Document Of course, not all social documentary photography in the West rose to the level of the posterized image, nor was the sphere of influence extending between American and Russian photography of the 1930s so apparent. However, Ehrenburg might be the figure to have left the clearest mark as a positive model for documentary photography in the American context. While largely disregarding the text (likely as a result of linguistic barriers), a positive visual reading is apparent in John Boling’s aforementioned glowing review of My Paris published in the socialist magazine New Masses in 1934. In the midst of his censure of the current uses of photography in American magazines, Boling criticizes other photographers of Paris, such as Eugène Atget and André Kertész, for producing photographs for use in “breezy newspapers” and “lengthy feature magazines.”101 His choice of words to describe Ehrenburg’s work— specifically “document photography”(by contrast with the ubiquitous contemporary term “documentary”)—captures the emerging term in American photography at just this moment, as it was not in common use until the mid-1930s.102 But on the Russian front, and the German as well, the factographic literary movements of the 1920s had introduced the documentary into far more common parlance to varied effect and employment, from the photograph as document to dokumental′nost′ (or the documentary quality of the photograph, sometimes associated with the charge of naturalism—as opposed to “socialist” realism). But for Boling, document photography is a socially engaged photography, anticipating and answering the question posed by the photographic establishment a few years later: “How should the public respond to pictures such as those of [Walker] Evans . . . and others—a new kind of contemporary picture, neither ‘art’ nor journalism, but a record of the lives of common people during the Depression? How to distinguish a ‘record’ from ‘fine art’?”103 Boling calls for a new kind of radical “document” photography, characterized by a “convincing momentum and absolute strength of the camera which can unify a group of individual shots to an extraordinary manifestation of the contemporary scene.”104 In the words of Tretyakov, Alpert, and Shaikhet, it is not the single shot but the momentum of the photographic series in its entirety that achieves success as a critical, concrete document.

180

CHAPTER 4

For Boling, Ehrenburg not only manifests the contemporary scene of Paris in 1931 but also, through his particular point of view, achieves a new sympathetic connection to the documentary subject. In Boling’s view, Ehrenburg is working against the “classic Russian technique of symbolizing events with the enlarged features of face and body shot from below,” a clear reference to the Rodchenko style.105 Instead, Ehrenburg’s photographs are taken from eye level, a method that can sometimes assume a privileged position above a fallen subject but that in general re-creates the effect of being “on the scene.” This approach does not draw attention to the position of the photographer or the formal considerations of the photograph, as symbolic photography forces one to do; rather, it allows for a straight documentary style. On this front Ehrenburg’s work is also held up as counterpoint to the leading American social documentary photographer of the day, Walker Evans. Boling laments the fact that to this point Evans seems to have been stymied by the exploitative politics of photo publication, having been recently limited in his choice of subjects for publication by his work for the Temporary Emergency Relief Organization. He was thereby “confi ned to the task of reproducing images of social workers in their various activities, of workmen engaged in obviously trumped-up jobs . . . just as a commercial photographer in an advertising agency is required to record the machinery of salesmanship.”106 Perhaps unbeknownst to Boling, Walker Evans, as well as the photographer and painter Ben Shahn, had copies of My Paris, gifted to them by Jay Leyda, who was in Moscow at the time.107 In fact, both Evans and Shahn were so struck by Ehrenburg’s photography that they took up the lateral viewfi nder themselves (fig. 4.15). In more recent criticism Laura Katzman has noted that Shahn’s work actually “shares the more radical vision of the modern city expressed by Ilya Ehrenburg.”108 The two were even published together in the pages of the journal New Theatre in 1934, where Shahn’s radical vision of the city is on full display in an uncaptioned spread of the streets of New York.109 Ehrenburg’s article “Continuous Performance”—an excerpt from his parody of the excesses and consumerism of the American fi lm industry from The Factory of Dreams (1931)—read in tandem with the work of his kindred photographic comrade, seems to unmask American consumerism in order to reveal the real America beneath the shiny veneer: the living, breathing, and suffering marginalized individual (fig. 4.16–4.17).110 In fact the text excerpted for an earlier publication predating My Paris, printed in Prozhektor under the title “Belleville” (one of the working-class neighborhoods in Paris), might read as a caption for either Shahn’s “Living Theatre” or Ehrenburg’s Paris: “A realistic drama. Tickets for 2 francs. The word ‘realistic’ has two meanings: it is romantic [romantika] and it is staged [butaforiia].”111 The photographed subjects, living life as a drama unbeknownst to them, are turned into actors by the spectating author-photographer, their scenes given life (and to an extent taken away) by the printed photograph.

Figure 4.15. Unidentified artist, Ben Shahn photographing at the New Jersey Homesteads (ca. 1936–39). Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Bernarda Bryson Shahn.

Figure 4.16. Ben Shahn, “Scenes from the Living Theatre—Sidewalks of New York,” New Theatre, November 1934. Permissions courtesy of the Harvard Fogg Museum.

Figure 4.17. Ilya Ehrenburg, prepublication excerpts from what would become My Paris, in “Belville,’” Prozhektor, no. 5 (1932). Image courtesy of the Amherst Center for Russian Culture, Amherst College, USA.

LOOK LEFT, YOUNG MAN!

183

However, Ehrenburg was criticized in the Soviet press largely from the standpoint of his marginalized subjects, that is, for overlooking the drama that must be unfolding on the streets of capitalist Paris. As Zaslavky further noted, Without a doubt, Erenburg’s book lays bare Paris, but it also lays bare Erenburg himself. His Leica shot not only at 45 degrees, but also at 180 degrees. It is the right of the artist to wander wherever he pleases for observation. The backyards attract Erenburg. But you see, situated thus in the backyards, it is possible to overlook the most interesting and significant events in history, because genuine history takes place all the same on the boulevards of Paris, in the workers’ quarters, in the collisions between the streets of the financial elite and the factory suburbs, but not on the scrap heaps of the Parisian petite bourgeoisie. These scrap heaps can only give birth to skepticism. . . . The side viewfinder rendered Erenburg a disservice. He really photographs only that which is “on the side.”112 While for Zaslavsky it is the side angle viewfinder that renders the invisible author too visible, another reviewer from Zvezda in 1933 explicitly states what is missing: “the life of the Parisian masses, the crowds, . . . the Parisian proletariat.”113 Thus, unpeopled, his photographs fail to signify politically, and Ehrenburg presents no images of people turning ideology into action. In fact, his short chapter devoted to the Eiffel Tower perfectly illustrates just such a reading. One photograph (fig. 4.18) is almost unpeopled, with the exception of a small silhouetted figure amid the pile of lumber and other trash in the foreground. In the background, the famous monument appears small, marginalized. Ehrenburg writes, “[The Eiffel Tower] emerges unexpectedly at the end of some dirty little street, above fields of soot-blackened roofs, among vacant plots in the affecting poverty of the Parisian outskirts. It was thought of like a poem, built like a curiosity at an exhibition, and met by all as an absurdity. It became life itself. Paris and [the Tower] cannot now be separated.”114 And while his photograph and text weave a picture that transforms this emblem of modernity and design, this postcard icon, into a minor monument that is overshadowed by the poverty of his unmasked Paris, so too does the composite image come to include Ehrenburg himself. He writes his own artistic history onto the tower, citing the fact that its “name was met in the Soviet journals of the 1920s, when the Russian Constructivists tried to remake not only the world, but also chairs and trousers.”115 Imparting to the tower that piece of his own history, Ehrenburg continues with his own animating personification of the monument: “Whenever I see it from a distance through the grey Paris fog, I want to greet it. . . . like a good acquantaince. I do not know whether it has the right to represent our future. It seems to me more like a memory [vospominanie]. Notre Dame is a historical memory, but the Eiffel Tower is my own personal memory, mine and my generation’s.”116 Thus while the photograph of the Eiffel Tower, obscured by debris, is seemingly devoid of the human figure, it is clearly always Ehrenburg— the artist, photographer, and writer—who populates the scene.

184

CHAPTER 4

Figure 4.18. Ilya Ehrenburg “The Eiffel Tower,” My Paris (1933). Image courtesy of Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

Writing in his own defense in Sovetskoe foto, Ehrenburg reaffi rms this particularly intimate aspect of My Paris, which on the whole is intended not as a propagandistic work but rather as a “lyrical book.”117 And in fact, its status as book or, as he more often calls it, an “album” is of some import. While the operation of reading the ocherk or photo-series, be it in a book or a journal, functions in much the same way for the reader, text and images being activated and exchanged in the same sphere of images (that is, reading is still reading), the binding of a book does materially distinguish it from other kinds of publications. Rather than a series published, for example, in the pages of Ogonek, perhaps abutting an optimistic photo-series, the photobook presents a seemingly (materially) closed system. Moreover, it is further striking in its vaunted position—that of the celebratory paradnaia kniga, running in smaller numbers than journal circulation, usually printed on high-quality paper, and bearing an equally inflated price tag.118 Ehrenburg’s response to criticism, however, focuses not on the medium but on reading images. On the subject of his less-than-mobilizing images, he states: “Supplying some photos of mass demonstrations does not yet mean that it’s testimony

LOOK LEFT, YOUNG MAN!

185

to the revolutionary struggle. They cannot communicate the revolutionary essence of the French worker. . . . I have not yet seen such photographs.”119 For Ehrenburg, viewers are not mobilized, emotionally or politically, simply because photographs of revolutionary activity are placed before them. But, as evidenced from his photographic production during the Spanish Civil War in 1936, this sentiment was shortly to change. As Karl Schlögel notes, this historical moment was charged with a highly different character than that of the five years preceding it: The external war . . . had become a backdrop for identifying and settling internal conflicts. . . . The need for an internal enemy was coordinated with the image of the external enemy. This facilitated the formulation of an optimal mobilization strategy. . . . Welding the nation into a whole is most plausible and has the greatest impact when it feels threatened and its powers of resistance are most effectively mobilized.120 The photobooks (written in Russian) on the Spanish Civil War, titled UHP (United Brothers of the Proletariat) and No Pasaran!, were collective volumes overseen by the directorial eyes of Ehrenburg and Es and El Lissitzky.121 Not unlike those in the The History of Construction, the books’ many photographic contributors, including Ehrenburg, Robert Capa, Hans Namut, Chim, George Rancer, and the brothers Mayo, are not individually credited.122 Rather, they serve as a model collective of author-producers, agitating actively for revolution on Spanish soil, subsumed as it were in the collective struggle before them. Taken at times from oblique angles or simply in a straightforward reportage style, the photographs include staged portraits and action shots, with images of the mobilizing masses at their heroic center (fig. 4.19). The aim of UHP and No Pasaran! is also undeniably agitational, asking the Soviet viewer to enter into the suffering of the other through both human and political sympathies with photographs of men, women, and children on the street, victims of and heroes in the violence of civil war. As a correspondent for Izvestiia characterized it, “These are two albums in which the photo-documents have the eloquence of an agitator, and the text forces the heart to beat faster.”123 In Sovetskoe foto in 1938, while also underscoring the embedded “operativity” (operativnost′ ) of his Spanish work, Ehrenburg tells about his experience photographing the Spanish Civil War: “I love to go about with my ‘Leica’ when I am not diverted by literary work. Then I try to photograph strictly documentary stills [dokumental′nye kadry].”124 Such an assertion remains constant for Ehrenburg: the most important characteristic of the photograph is to capture life as it is. However, these assertions also draw to the fore that ethical stance of the photographer and those central and pressing issues that plagued both American social documentary and socialist realist photography. What are we to make of retouching, staging and restaging, and even downright falsification: individuals wiped out of the historical record? Retouching was extraordinarily prevalent in the Soviet press.125 Stalin’s image was notoriously retouched to hide the pockmarks on his face, and many photographs

186

CHAPTER 4

Figure 4.19. Unattributed, “[Anti-fascist] Rally in the Country,” UHP: Spain (1936–37).

published in periodicals and as book illustration were so retouched as to no longer look like photographs at all. One assessment of Stalin’s photographic portraits describes “such excessive retouching” that “one gets the impression that the entire face is made of a single material—rubber or wax.”126 And, as a close investigation of the Ilf photographs has shown, almost every one of them was retouched, largely for legibility, before publication in Ogonek.127 But the problem of authentic documentary capture, as Ehrenburg knew well, could enter the picture even before the development and publication of the print. Staging was also a point of contention between Bourke-White and Walker Evans; he “reacted with horror to . . . Bourke-White’s stage-directing and operatic lighting.”128 Alpert and Shaikhet themselves were torn over the question of staging (intsenirovka), with Alpert arguing for the necessity of “re-creating events” for the camera, particularly in his famous series “The Giant and the Builder” (Gigant i stroitel′, 1931).129

LOOK LEFT, YOUNG MAN!

187

Thus even as Ehrenburg reasserts his documentary gaze, in the face of such a torrent of documentary direction and misdirection, in the midst of a collective, mobilizing moment, the author recedes. And it is perhaps for this reason that we can further see the symbolic mobilization of Ehrenburg’s photographic work move beyond the photobook into the space of the (non)documentary poster. In one instance, a photograph taken by Ehrenburg of the mobilized Spanish masses is adapted for use by the master of antifascist photomontage, John Heartfield (fig. 4.20–4.21). In a poster heralded by the slogan “Freedom itself struggles in its ranks” (“Die Freiheit selbst kämpft in ihren Reihen,” 1936), Ehrenburg’s photograph of republican troops provides the documentary grounding and visual rhyme for Delacroix’s painting Liberty Guiding the People.130 Together they resonate with full symbolic meaning. Thus Ehrenburg’s photography—outside the space of the photobook, altered and now (re)staged—enters into the canon of the upward or forward-looking gaze that is repeated throughout socialist realist imagery.131 That gaze looks beyond the borders of the image—to the wartime front or the front of socialist labor, mobilizing the subject into action. So too does the image mobilize the viewer beyond the photographic moment, through the documentary and into the symbolic.

Figure 4.20. Ilya Ehrenburg, “We will defend the republic,” two-page spread from No Pasaran! (1936–37).

Figure 4.21. John Heartfield, “Freedom itself struggles in its ranks,” photomontage (1936). Published in Die Volks-Illustrierte no. 1 (1936). Image courtesy of Art Resource, NY. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

LOOK LEFT, YOUNG MAN!

189

The Fall of Paris For Ehrenburg the success of My Paris is not in overt images of a mobilizing mass but in its ability to capture the marginal traces of the emerging totality, or at least the spaces which that totality will fi ll. The question then remains, what is the success that Ehrenburg predicts for the photographic album? The answer to this question may lie in the intimate space created in My Paris. Ehrenburg’s My Paris is at its core a personally engaged and humanistic work. In it he pays homage to his past participation in the avant-garde with collages designed by Lissitzky, while also creating a vivid document of Paris in 1931. As another critic would write in Sovetskoe foto in 1934, “[For Ehrenburg] Paris is people. . . . Ehrenburg’s book is fi rst of all a book about people, life, labor, cares, happinesses and sorrows, which the author knows so well and sharply shows in his photographs.”132 In these phototextual spaces, the author-photographer is capable of identifying the self with the other, thereby creating an experience that draws the reader/viewer closer to his marginal subject, the human document. However, in this moment, as he seems to realize the danger of engaging solely in his marginal spaces, Ehrenburg decides to make that fi nal turn to the left to face—head on—the smiling, forward-looking faces of the rising Stalinist totality, adapting his developing documentary humanism into the form of the novel to shape narratives of hero-centric awakenings in The Second Day, Out of Chaos, and Without Stopping to Take a Breath.133 But even amid of storms of criticism, in his speech to the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Authors in 1934 Ehrenburg would continue to insist that “the composition of artistic works is an individual matter, to state more precisely, an intimate one.”134 By the latter half of the 1930s, just as American social documentary photography had already turned its collective gaze on problems at home, Soviet photographic art consolidated its gaze on the best forms for building socialism—still based in large part on the documentary techniques fi rst presented in the Filippov series. In an article in the January 1935 issue of Sovetskoe foto, Mezhericher utilizes the photographs of Alpert and Shaikhet to illustrate the humanization of photography in the service of socialist realist artistic construction and its seemingly novelistic orientation—that is, to make the photographer look more like the author of a text. In order to overcome the naturalism of photography—what Tretyakov had also called the purely documentary character of photography—authors must assert their mastery over the camera.135 Writing from the midst of war in 1942, just before his own death in a plane crash, Evgeny Petrov framed his reading of Ehrenburg’s Stalin Prize-winning novel, The Fall of Paris (Padenie Parizha, 1942), in terms of the author-photographer’s transformative side-angle viewfi nder. Noting the author’s long connection to Paris,

190

CHAPTER 4

much like the connection between Privshin and Karelia, which he loved so “deeply and tenderly,” Petrov writes, Ehrenburg lived in Paris for nearly half of his life. And in all this time his writerly apparatus [ pistatel′skii apparat], if you can express it so, ceaselessly snatched from life and saved onto fi lm the memories of workers and ministers, poets and minor actresses, deputies and businessmen, artists and generals, bankers and journalists. All these entered into the writerly archive of Ehrenburg in order to come alive at some moment and become characters in his splendid novel. . . . With the help of his side-angle viewfi nder Ehrenburg once photographed people, and the photographs were singular and truthful. Now he has written an extraordinarily truthful book. His “side-angle viewfi nder” was his writer’s honesty [ pisatel′skaia chestnost′].136 While Petrov would see the viewfi nder of Ehrenburg’s camera as a productive and positive metaphor for artistic creation, at the end of his career, Ehrenburg himself would recognize the threat that the objectivity of photography can present to creative authorship. But in this long view, the author noted the compounded threat of an ideology that demands the capture of an impossible subject: both author and hero. In an interview with Olga Carlisle (Leonid Andreev’s granddaughter) in 1961, Ehrenburg stated, I have tried to approach my subject matter as a poet would do. In such cases, most important for me was not the fate of individual heroes, but rather a certain situation, a mood. Such are the Summer of 1925 and The Thaw. But even in those novels which are more like classical novels—like The Fall of Paris and The Tempest —my attention was not concentrated on given heroes, but rather on those central elements which are the real heroes of those novels—Paris in the case of The Fall of Paris, the war in The Tempest. I have already told you that in my opinion the most important thing for the writer was an ability to live the experiences of his heroes—to “co-experience” them. We must abandon the notion that a writer is only an observer—he is not a camera. He is expected to present that which is invisible at fi rst.137 While there were restrictions on most Soviet citizens’ movements, even within the bounds of Soviet Russia, a few authors, including Ehrenburg and Ilf, were allowed to go abroad and return to publish pictures of their travels for the Soviet audience. These works not only created a virtual space for Soviet readers to experience foreign spaces but also forged a link between the self and the other, mobilizing

LOOK LEFT, YOUNG MAN!

191

sympathy for their downtrodden brethren. The advent of socialist realism as an institution, however, left little space for these images of life abroad or for the international travelogue more generally, as the genre of the novel that now came into favor turned its sights squarely on recognizable heroes at home. And with this turn, the author-photographer movement burned out by the end of the 1930s.138 The novelization of “American Photographs” into Single-Storied America (without photographs, and in large part separately from his partner, Petrov) would be one of Ilf’s last works before he succumbed to tuberculosis; Ehrenburg would take a few pictures of the mobilizing proletariat in Spain before abandoning his camera by the end of World War II, as both he and Prishvin (though as different as two authors could be) turned to novelistic forms. However, in the span of the decade in which these author-photographers were actively publishing their photo-textual works, their hybrid mode of artistic production—visible on the pages of A-I-Z, Proletarskoe foto, Ogonek, and USSR in Construction —left an indelible mark on the consciousness of the international left. This fact demonstrates, undeniably, that the photo-series was a mobile and mobilizing genre, even when the authors and subjects were to be found primarily in and on the margins, potentially outside the frame. Tretyakov, while erased from the history of the international left and the history of photography in the Soviet Union, lived on internationally in the margins of Western scholarship.139 While Ehrenburg’s My Paris was not republished in the Soviet Union, the editors and staff writers of Sovetskoe foto continued to hold up his Parisian album as a model of an author—taking on a foreign subject—who successfully defined his authorial point of view in photography. And in light of Mezhericher’s summation of the central tenet of socialist realism, Ehrenburg’s Parisian album might be viewed as a practicum in gaining mastery of self and camera apparatus but still lacking a fully realized look to the left. Most important, these authorial experiments—a search for the real in the other—meant that photographers would have to don the camera’s mask. By placing the camera apparatus between themselves and their subjects—a mask that both screened their own otherness in foreign places and revealed it—the camera facilitated a way in . But in their textual transformations of photographic space, they once again revealed their selves behind the image. These foreign photo stories, and in the case of Ehrenburg we might say photo poetry, resisted the posterization of the subject; they comprised a last hurrah for the author-photographer as hero before he and his pen and camera were forced to recede into the background to let the socialist realist photographer of the true left capture the shining model with a high-quality, well-studied (Soviet) smile. The West would be left to confront that which could only be theirs (fig. 4.22 and fig. 4.23).

Figure 4.22 . Arkady Shaikhet, “Uzbek-female worker from the Tashkent Textile Combine,” also included in Sovetskoe foto, no. 1 (1935). Image and permissions courtesy of the Shaikhet Estate.

Figure 4.23. This figure and figure 4.22, juxtaposed by the author, offer one more look at an “Ours/Theirs” construction. Walker Evans, “Roadside View, Alabama Cola Area Company Town,” included in the photo-series American Photographs (1935). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

LOOK LEFT, YOUNG MAN!

193

Coda: A Russian Journal in “The Family of Man” Karl Schlögel notes that the ideal companion to Ilf and Petrov’s road trip is author John Steinbeck and photographer Robert Capa’s A Russian Journal (1948): “Steinbeck and Capa, Ilf and Petrov all inhabited the same world to an extent: the Great Depression, fascism, the Spanish Civil War, the New Deal and the emergent planned economy.”140 And just as Ilf and Petrov were looking for the “real America,” Capa and Steinbeck were looking for the real Russians. They were divided, however, by the gulf of the Second World War and its devastation, which informed the very structure of observation and photographic mediation in Steinbeck and Capa’s work. Describing both the bureaucratic tangles of securing approval for Capa to photograph in the Soviet Union and the impact of war on attitudes toward the camera, Steinbeck writes, The camera is one of the most frightening of modern weapons, particularly to people who have been in warfare, who have been bombed and shelled, for at the back of a bombing run is invariably a photograph. In back of ruined towns, and cities, and factories, there is aerial mapping, or spy mapping, usually with a camera. Therefore the camera is a feared instrument. . . . In the minds of most people today the camera is the forerunner of destruction, and it is suspected, and rightly so.141 But Capa is described as largely successful in breaking down this photographic wall in his Russian sojourn, allowing his (and Steinbeck’s) human focus to shine through. In fact, one such encounter with a photographic subject draws an optimistic human connection, reminiscent of Ilf and Petrov’s encounter with the American Roberts— but now with a distinctly American lens. Capa, looking for a photographic subject in a small Russian village, finds a woman with an “engaging face and a great laugh” (fig. 4.24). Joking with the foreign visitors, the “village wit” says of herself (through a translator), “‘I am a great worker, I am twice widowed, and many men are afraid of me now.’” Steinbeck continues, “And she shook a cucumber in the lens of Capa’s camera. And Capa said, ‘Perhaps you’d like to marry me now?’ She rolled back her head and howled with laughter.”142 But this laughter, unlike that described in the montage of Ilf and Petrov’s “American Photographs” is a source of mutual enjoyment. The woman is photographed from below, raised by the camera’s lens. And her image and optimism are not darkened by either the photographer’s or the author’s cynicism. Capa was no stranger to the USSR, although this was his first time on Russian soil. A passionate antifascist and talented photographer, he worked with Ehrenburg during the Spanish Civil War. His powerful photographic series were printed in magazines such as Vu, Regards, and Life, and appeared alongside the work of Soviet photojournalists in Illustrierte Zeitung (formerly A-I-Z) and, of course, in Ehrenburg’s No Pasaran!143 But even if their acquaintance had not been forged in the trenches of embedded photojournalism, the appearance of Ehrenburg—the international intermediary— is not unexpected in A Russian Journal, although the repressive Soviet policies of

Figure 4.24. Robert Capa, untitled, laughing woman on a collective farm, Ukraine (1947), included in A Russian Journal (1948). © International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos.

LOOK LEFT, YOUNG MAN!

195

anticosmopolitanism were under way. Ehrenburg is one of the authors invited to dinner with Steinbeck and Capa (and is included in a photograph by Capa) and gives an impassioned speech on truth—and the role of the author to mediate first and foremost that truth, no matter what Steinbeck and Capa may have found in their travels in the USSR.144 Having asserted that the duo hoped to “tell the objective truth” about what they had seen, Steinbeck reported that Ehrenburg continued an impassioned exchange with an unnamed author. “He said that to tell a writer what to write was an insult. . . . We had always heard that the party line was so strict among writers that no argument was permitted. The spirit at this dinner did not make this seem at all true.”145 The remarkable “objective picture” of the Soviet Union, generally full of optimism and openness, captured by Steinbeck’s prose and Capa’s camera, lived on in one of the most famous photographic exhibitions of the twentieth century—Edward Steichen’s “The Family of Man.” The exhibition was a defining moment in photographic history during the Cold War, in part (oddly enough) a retrospective of social documentary modernism up to the exhibition’s mounting in 1955. Steichen chose photographs “made in all parts of the world, of the gamut of life from birth to death with emphasis on the daily relationships of man to himself, to his family, to the community and to the world we live in.”146 It was a photo-series on the grandest scale—“a vast photo-essay”—displaying journalistic prints in a gallery to tell the whole life story of the whole human race at that time.147 While the show was fi rst mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the exhibition’s five hundred photographs traveled the world, receiving an especially enthusiastic welcome in Moscow.148 Criticisms of the show, however, focus on the curatorial choices; that is, the family of man pictured in the show is but a partial picture, conjuring up a utopian dream of world harmony that glosses over the most pressing issues of interwar photography: poverty and race.149 The photographs from the USSR (roughly fi fteen), forming a small portion of the exhibition, are by and large credited not to individual photographers but to that familiar agency—SovFoto. However, two remarkable photographs included in Steichen’s “The Family of Man” were taken by Robert Capa and were fi rst inscribed as part of A Russian Journal (see one in fig. 4.25).150 The photograph of a couple raising timbers for their roof or the now-iconic image of a woman gathering an abundance of hay on a collective farm (used in recent editions of A Russian Journal as the cover) could have as easily come from another “Prosperity” photoseries. But Steinbeck’s original text is a reminder of the otherness in front of Capa’s lens. He writes of the collective farm: We thought we were up early, but the village had been in the fields since the fi rst dawn. We went to the fields where they were reaping the rye. The men with long scythes walking in a line, cutting a great swath. Behind them came the women who bound the grain into bundles with ropes of twisted straw, and after them the children who gleaned the grain, who picked up every straw and every head, so that none was wasted. . . . The people worked this way for

196

CHAPTER 4

Figure 4.25. Robert Capa, untitled, rebuilding on a collective farm, Ukraine (1947), included in A Russian Journal (1948) and “The Family of Man” exhibition (1955). © International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos.

thousands of years, and then for a little while they were mechanized, and now they have had to go back to hand labor until they can build new machinery.151 The theme of rebuilding, replanting, and survival constantly reminds the reader of the war. The inclusion of these photographs in Steichen’s architectural vision for the “Family of Man,” however, turns them into just another part of his utopian building project—one making them part of Steichen’s own idea for the photographic narrative. Just as Capa’s photos are swept up into “The Family of Man” (only one year after his own death on assignment), so too is their home in A Russian Journal left behind.

LOOK LEFT, YOUNG MAN!

197

Figure 4.26. Robert Capa, untitled, man with family scrapbook, Stalingrad (1947), included in A Russian Journal (1948). © International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos.

But within this original architecture we must further consider Steinbeck’s and Capa’s reclamation of the camera. In the most striking chapter of A Russian Journal, they visit the ruins of Stalingrad, pictured in a haunting series of photographs. There they meet a factory bookkeeper, also in the process of rebuilding his house. As Steinbeck’s prose describes the encounter, Capa’s photograph provides the photographic springboard (fig. 4.26): And then he went and got his scrapbook to show that he had not always been ragged, that he once had an apartment in Stalingrad. And his scrapbook was

198

CHAPTER 4 like all the scrapbooks in the world. The photographs showed him as a baby, and as a young man, and there were pictures of him in his fi rst uniform when he entered the Army, and pictures of him when he came back from the Army. There were pictures of his marriage. . . . And then there were pictures of his vacations at the Black Sea, of himself and his wife swimming, and of his children as they were growing. . . . It was the whole history of his life, and all the good things that had happened to him. He had lost everything else in the war. We asked, “How does it happen that you saved your scrapbook?” He closed the cover, and his hand caressed this record of his whole life, and he said, “We took very good care of this. This is very precious.”152

Here Steinbeck and Capa, two foreigners gazing at a sometimes illegible Soviet Union, captured the liminal moment of (re)construction. The most stable object, held in the hands of the unnamed individual, is the universally recognizable, personal scrapbook. From this object—a scrapbook “like all the scrapbooks in the world”—the symbolic order of the Russian family emerges (constructed along the lines of a new Filippov family) and becomes a template for building universal family ties. Photography is emplotted into that familiar utopian vision from America to the USSR: “a camera testament, a drama of the grand canyon of humanity . . . here is the Family of Man!”153

CONCLUSION Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, and the Anxiety of Photographic Authorship

“But then perhaps,” thought Cincinnatus, “I am misinterpreting these pictures. Attributing to the epoch the characteristics of its photograph. The wealth of shadows, the torrents of light, the gloss of a tanned shoulder, the rare reflection, the fluid transitions from one element to another—perhaps all of this pertains only to the snapshot, to a particular kind of heliotypy, to special forms of that art, and the world really never was so sinuous, so humid and rapid—just as today our unsophisticated cameras record in their own way our hastily assembled and painted world.” Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, 1936

In order to know, we must imagine for ourselves. We must attempt to imagine the hell that Auschwitz was in the summer of 1944. Let us not invoke the unimaginable. Let us not shelter ourselves by saying we cannot, that we could not by any means, imagine to the very end. We are obliged to that oppressive imaginable. . . . Images in spite of all: in spite of our own inability to look at them as they deserve; in spite of our own world, full, almost choked, with imaginary commodities. Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 2001

In October 1974, Vladimir Nabokov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn planned to meet in Montreux. Solzhenitsyn had been expatriated from the USSR in February of that year and was setting out on a European tour; Nabokov had just read The Gulag Archipelago, published by the YMCA-Press in Paris—the very book for which Solzhenitsyn was exiled. The expatriated Solzhenitsyn would not enter the ranks of the Russian émigrés, who, he lamented, were known to the Soviet imagination as only “pianists in stinking little restaurants, as lackeys, laundresses, beggars, morphine and cocaine addicts.”1 Nor, since the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in Novyi mir in 1962, would he ever be counted among the unknown Russian authors abroad, like “that incredible writer Nabokov-Sirin,” whose publications were still unavailable to the Soviet reader. 2 Both men existed outside the usual frames of the émigré literary scene: Solzhenitsyn for his high-profi le exile, shaped by both the sensational publication of One Day in the USSR and The Gulag Archipelago abroad; and Nabokov for the fact that he, as a Russian author, would come to reshape American literature. 3 For, as Solzhenitsyn would later say, even though Nabokov was a genius, he betrayed his very status as a Russian author: “He wrote absolutely brilliant novels in Russian—the early émigré novels. . . . But to reach Western readers, Nabokov was obliged to use his brilliant knowledge of English. This meant breaking with the past. He was born anew, with a new soul . . . but he lost his Russian roots.”4 And when called upon to judge Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov would characterize his style as “a kind of juicy journalese, formless, wordy and repetitious, but endowed with considerable oratorical force. The lasting virtue of the work is its trenchant historical truth annihilating the smugness of old Leninists.”5 Just as the literary giants would miss each other in their grudging compliments, their real meeting in Montreux was also foiled by miscommunication. In this concluding chapter, the two will meet by proxy of photography: its material centrality in their experimental memoirs. Their use of photography bridges time—life story and history—as they bring the past to the present to memorialize and dissolve their authorial selves.

Speak, Memory If Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is “steeped in the burgeoning camera culture,” then Nabokov’s literary world is even further saturated.6 Walker Evans, in his own writing on the immaterial qualities of photography and claiming too that photography “seems to be the most literary of the graphic arts,” draws on Nabokov as an exemplar of

203

204

CONCLUSION

the “noticeably photographic.”7 He goes on to quote from Nabokov’s fi rst story published in English, “Cloud, Castle, Lake” (1941): Vasili Ivanovich would look at configurations of some entirely insignificant objects—a smear on the platform, a cherry stone, a cigarette butt—and would say to himself that never, never would he remember these three little things here in that particular interrelation, this pattern, which he could now see with such deathless precision; or again, looking at a group of children waiting for a train, he would try with all his might to single out at least one remarkable destiny—in the form of a violin or a crown, a propeller or a lyre—and would gaze until the whole party of village schoolboys appeared as on an old photograph, now reproduced with a little white cross above the face of the last boy on the right: the hero’s childhood.8 It is unsurprising that photography played more than a peripheral role in the works of an author who stated that “literature is not a pattern of ideas but a pattern of images.”9 In a great number of instances, these images are photographic: in shape, material, or likeness. In Mary (Mashen′ka, 1926) photography appears as part of a memory world that comes to be as shadowy and faded as the photograph of Mary herself; in Pale Fire (1962), the characterization of John Shade springs from a photograph (not pictured) in the narrator’s foreword; in Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969), an album featuring incriminating photographs is the center of intrigue and blackmail; and in Lolita (1955), Annabel and Lolita are remembered as if through the very structure of photographic memory, fluttering between the authentic and inauthentic, “in the laboratory of [the] mind . . . a little ghost in natural colors.”10 And so begins Lolita’s long career in images, pictured usually in color and often in photographs on countless book covers since her original appearance in print, embodied in an endlessly repeating photographic series.11 These brief examples are but the backdrop against which one might view the assimilation of photography into the material fabric of the author’s “photobiography,” Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1966).12 Nabokov’s fi rst book-length iteration of the autobiography was Conclusive Evidence (1951), that is, “conclusive evidence of my having existed.”13 As evidence might have once been at the titular (but not literal) heart of the autobiography’s fi rst version, it is also of central interest in the author’s foreword: situating him photographically. He begins by remarking that the work “is a systematically correlated assemblage of personal recollections ranging geographically from St Petersburg to St Nazaire, covering thirty-seven years . . . with only a few sallies into later space-time.”14 But Nabokov quickly jumps to a moment of photographic misrecognition: “A photograph (published recently in Gisèle Freund’s James Joyce in Paris) commemorates [the publication of the fi rst excerpt from my autobiography], except that I am wrongly identified . . . as

CONCLUSION

205

Figure C.1. Gisèle Freund, “Sylvia Beach, Barbara Church, Vladimir Nabokov, Adrienne Monnier, Germain Paulhan, Henry Church, Henri Michaux, Michel Leiris and Jean Paulhan. The editorial board of Mesures, at Henry Church’s villa in Ville d’Avray, April 1937,” included in Freund’s The World in My Camera. Originally published in Gisèle Freund, James Joyce in Paris, His Final Years (New York : Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965). ©IMEC, Fonds MCC, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

‘Audiberti’”(fig. C.1).15 With this correction, coming just at the opening of the autobiography—without the photograph itself being pictured—we gather the import of not just seeing the author but also knowing the author, knowing that he was, just as the photograph was. Prefiguring Roland Barthes’s assertion of the photograph’s evidentiary power—“the thing has been there”—and rendering it as “I was there,” this assertion of Nabokov’s existence in his “space-time” resonates throughout the list that follows of previous iterations and publications of the impending chapters of the volume the reader holds in her hands.16 This anxiety of recognition follows on the existential hysteria of so many of Nabokov’s exiled heroes: the displaced émigré who is unseen, unrecognized, who must ask, “what if I did not exist?”17 Such might be the anxiety of photographs of the author, a fear that did not yet plague Tolstoy’s fractured photographic self but that defi nes, in part, Nabokov’s. For as we see in the short piece on Nabokov included in Freund’s own autobiography, The World in My Camera (Le Monde et ma caméra,

206

CONCLUSION

Figure C.2 . Gisèle Freund, “Vladimir Nabokov, 1967,” also included in Freund’s The World in My Camera. ©IMEC, Fonds MCC, Dist. RMNGrand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

1970), the portraitist and photo-journalist remembered the misidentification and her reconciliation with Nabokov. Calling him the “father of Lolita,” she describes her reencounter with Nabokov in 1967: He immediately began to read me the preface to latest book, Speak, Memory, in which he mentioned my mistake, showing that he must have been very struck by the fact that I had neglected to associate him with the literary movement in France during the 1930s. Nabokov told me he remembered the day perfectly and that he had taken a taxi to the Churches’ in Ville d’Avray, along with Adrienne Monnier, Sylvia Beach, and one other person he could no longer recall. “I, my dear Nabokov,” I replied, “was also in a taxi with Adrienne Monnier, Sylvia Beach, and one other person I could no longer recall.”18 Thus Freund has the last word, and the photograph, when read in light of her text, shapes the image of Nabokov as an aged man, whose memory was just as fallible as Freund’s (fig. C.2). But even here Nabokov would seem to anticipate such an accusation in repeated declarations that (his) memory is fallible and frail.19

CONCLUSION

207

Those cards that the author holds in his hands in figure C.2 are, of course, Nabokov’s famous index cards, and they are particularly apropos when considering his authorial process in general and Speak, Memory in particular. 20 Photographs were not included in the fi rst iterations of the memoir turned autobiography, but in the revisited and defi nitive versions, the photographs become inseparable from the text. They came, on the whole, from Nabokov’s own family collection of candid and posed snapshots, including those of his family, home, and self. Several photographs in the Nabokov archive, collected for scholarly use and now housed in binders with clear plastic sleeves, show some material evidence that they were once pasted in an album, glue strips visible on their reverse side (fig. C.3)21 Brought together and all encased in their archival sleeves, both old prints and new copies invite that close inspection that might differentiate one from another. As Rozanov’s Fallen Leaves invokes domesticity by photographic proxy, the archive’s presentation of equivalencies presents a micropuzzle. Which copy was the author’s? Which is an instrumental copy intended for publication? Whose hand made the notes on the back of the photographs? Should we take the difference into account?22 But it is their publication that makes for authorial intimacy. Not that in publication they look as though they emerged from an album or were stuck haphazardly into the pages of a book (à la Rozanov). They were just as crafted by Nabokov’s strong authorial hand as the universes of his fictional texts, equally structured and restructured literarily as his autobiography, developing the story of self in a now lost Russia and continental emigration. Think again of Prishvin and his revisit to his homeland—that redevelopment (literally, literarily, and photographically) of the land of unfrightened birds. As Nabokov’s foreword states, “Certain tight parentheses have been opened and allowed to spill their still active contents,” founded on what seems to be new documentary evidence: “data” about his father’s life and family, correcting where his memory “might be at fault.”23 The author’s archive shows his interventions in note cards, handwritten notes, and typed pages, largely adding and clarifying rather than subtracting. 24 For the purpose of this book, the most notable additions are the two later-added paratextual elements—the photographs and the index. The fi rst mention of this index is not at the end of the work, as one might expect, but in the foreword: “Through the window of that index / Climbs a rose / And sometimes a gentle wind ex / Ponto blows.”25 In the poetic metaphor, the index provides a structure like a home with windows, through which the rose (while seemingly hackneyed as lyrical metaphor) will provide our key to the work. Further, the “illustrations,” as he labels the photographs in the caption drafts on the index cards, are precisely what I have avoided calling photographic images in this book. While the notion of illustrations conjures up the embellishments of luxury book editions, entertainment in children’s books, or visual support for a plot, and, in the case of photographs, “conclusive evidence”—for Nabokov, as for each of the author-photographers in this book, photographic illustration is both transformed by the hand of the author and transformative for the author himself. 26 Thus, as we will see, the

Figure C.3. “V[ladimir] N[abokov]’s family photos. Album of photographs [Sergei and Vladimir Nabokov],” photograph of Sergey and Vladimir Nabokov included in Speak, Memory. The Berg Collection (NYPL). © The Estate of Vladimir Nabokov, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

CONCLUSION

209

paratext is as key to Nabokov’s works as the text itself, “part of a pattern of referential circularity in which its own elements participate,” or, to place more import on the index and photographs, their addition become the master pattern to the already patterned world of his autobiography.27 While time—chronology—is traditionally a key to the structure of an autobiography, this is not the case for Speak, Memory. It is an autobiographical collage, akin to Andreev’s familial photographic collection, but to which has been added an (almost) scientific organization by the inclusion of the index. However, there is in fact a hole, or perhaps a “window” as suggested in the foreword, in the index. Under the entry for our author, “Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich,” the pages show 9–16, 19–310, passim.”28 In the 1966 edition of Speak, Memory, the fi rst to include photographs and the index, blank pages mark the window between the foreword and the fi rst chapter: the title page has a blank reverse. 29 The second title page is in fact the second announcement of the work, perhaps an unnecessary repetition, or a Nabokovian red herring that leads to a dead end. This blank space, however, like the stage window in the theater (that is, a window either to nowhere or to the imaginary world suggested by actors on stage) becomes part of the illusory promise of self-revelation in Nabokov’s work. It functions like the disorienting map drawn by Nabokov and included in the endpapers (front and back). This map, as Brian Boyd has noted, is “thoroughly muddled,” its legibility marred not only by scale and orientation but also by the names and direction of the waterways.30 Such a map serves only to orient us to Nabokov’s memory, further reminding us that a defi nitive and objective bird’s-eye view—taking in all of a scene—will be as impossible as taking in a whole view of the author himself—unless, of course, we enter on his own terms. A close reading of the photograph of the Nabokov house in St. Petersburg continues along similar lines (fig. C.4). While as a photograph it is thoroughly legible, as a captioned image it is nearly as “muddled” as the author’s map. The extended caption gives the address: 47 Morskaya, now called Hertzen Street, and the provenance: “taken by an obliging American tourist.”31 The caption that follows is long by any measure and indicative of the relationship between text and image in Nabokov’s autobiography, recalling the adage coined by Svetlana Boym—“the literal is less truthful than the literary”:32 “My room was on the third floor, above the oriel. The lindens lining the street did not exist. Those green upstarts now hide the second-floor east-corner window of the room where I was born. After nationalization the house accommodated the Danish mission, and later, a school of architecture. The little sedan at the curb belongs presumably to the photographer.”33 Though it is invisible in the photograph itself, we “see” the author’s point of entry into the world—or we could, if we could see into the window. But the reader cannot even see the window except by transcending the black-and-white photograph into the imaginative space provided by Nabokov’s caption. Just as the handwritten index cards will disappear from our view in the transition to print, a concretization that can be likened to building the foundation of the house itself, this will not be a house built on the conclusive

210

CONCLUSION

Figure C.4. The Nabokovs’ house on Morskaya Street, St. Petersburg, from Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1966). © The Estate of Vladimir Nabokov, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

evidence of the photograph. Locating Nabokov—as we might have done with Prishvin’s self-framed microgeographies, or even Andreev in his dacha, projecting into and out of photographic windows—will not be so simple as looking into the frames of a photograph. This is a window into which only Nabokov’s eyes of memory can see. This very play on peeping through windows or looking over the author’s shoulder— akin to the sideways glance through the lateral viewfi nder that allowed Ehrenburg to document his subject unawares—was distasteful to Nabokov’s own “hypertrophied sense of privacy.”34 In his lectures on Russian literature Nabokov reverses the very formulation Ehrenburg adopted in his own memoirs. Nabokov writes, “I hate tampering with the precious lives of great writers and I hate Tom peeping over the fence of those lives—I hate the vulgarity of ‘human interest.’ I hate the rustle of skirts and giggles in the corridors of time—and no biographer will ever catch a glimpse of my private life.”35 In fact, despite the growing torrent of captions accompanying the photographs in Speak, Memory, Nabokov is more often hidden than visible. In the author’s inclusion of a photograph taken by Vera on the doorstep of their boardinghouse in Menton, the caption draws attention away from the figures pictured, as Nabokov turns midway through a description of the place with a decisive “I get no special kick out of revisiting old émigré haunts in those incidental countries” (fig. C.5).36 Rather, he spends the latter half of the caption describing the sound and anticipation of the touch

CONCLUSION

211

Figure C.5. “Nabokov and Dmitri in Mentone [sic],” from Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1966). © The Estate of Vladimir Nabokov, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

of the mosquitoes in the dark—not only not pictured in the photograph at hand but also impossible to capture photographically.37 While “photographs” do not have their own entry in the index, the “magic lantern” does. Turning to the fi rst page noted in the entry, the author announces that “we are now ready to tackle the main theme of this chapter,” which we soon fi nd

212

CONCLUSION

are the “Magic-Lantern Projections” shown by the tutor Lenski at the Nabokovs’ St. Petersburg home.38 The lantern slides provide another window through which to view the central theme of the work—peering into Nabokov’s artistry of memory. However, the memory of the slides, projected onto a sheet, tells more about the effect (or lack of effect) of the tutor’s attempt to enliven Mikhail Lermontov’s poetry with the lantern images: The lights went out. Lenski launched upon the opening lines. . . . The monastery, with its two rivers, dutifully appeared and stayed on, in a lurid trance (if only one swift could have swept over it!), for about two hundred lines, when it was replaced by a Georgian maiden of sorts carrying a pitcher. When the operator withdrew a slide, the picture was whisked off the screen with a peculiar flick, magnification affecting not only the scene displayed, but also the speed of its removal. Otherwise, there was little magic. We were shown conventional peaks instead of Lermontov’s romantic mountains. 39 And while this display—the attempt to enliven poetry with images—was unsuccessful, its only interest being found in the operation of the lantern as it inadvertently enlarged the image, Nabokov turns to his more meaningful interaction with unprojected slides: “How tawdry and tumid they looked, those jellylike pictures, projected upon the damp screen . . . but . . . what loveliness the glass slides as such revealed when simply held between finger and thumb and raised to the light—translucent miniatures, pocket wonderlands, neat little worlds of hushed luminous hues!”40 Nabokov finds in this moment, looking through the miniature windows of the colored photographs, his nascent rapture at observing butterflies under a microscope. As he moves through memory from the impersonal project of a macrovision, akin to that of Prokudin-Gorsky’s pedagogical photographs and the personally meaningful microcosm of Prishvin, he finds “in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic.”41 However, we still do not see to Nabokov himself; rather, through the lens of photographic technology, rendered literary, we see through Nabokov’s photographically literate eyes. In perhaps another sideways glance at Andreev’s universe, we encounter a memory mediated through photographic technology—this time through a stereoscope. In the chaotic winter of 1905–6, when Nabokov was still in Russia, he remembers Mademoiselle at the train station: For one moment, thanks to the sudden radiance of a lone lamp where the station square ends, a grossly exaggerated shadow, also holding a muff, races beside the sleigh, climbs a billow of snow, and is gone, leaving Mademoiselle to be swallowed up by what she will later allude to, with awe and gusto, as “le steppe.”. . .

CONCLUSION

213

Very lonely, very lonesome. But what am I doing in this stereoscopic dreamland? How did I get here? Somehow the two sleighs have slipped away, leaving behind a passportless spy standing on the blue-white road in his New England snowboots and stormcoat.42 Such passages are evocative of the notion, articulated by the author W. G. Sebald, that “we are attending the séance staged by Nabokov.”43 While I have underscored the dominance of Nabokov’s text to obscure the documentary value of the photograph, the author’s technique might also be described as akin to the layering of transparencies, sending us on a dig through the layers of meaning (textual and visual) to claim what is behind the photograph. Thus the autobiography becomes a protective barrier for the authorial self, not unlike the archival sleeves housing the photographs once cherished in a family album. Such a characterization is the substance of Robert Alter’s review of Nabokov’s late work Transparent Things (1972): “The idea of transparency announced in the title of the novella refers above all else to the pellucid vision of art, which is all we have to set against the fi nal clutter and blockage, the ultimate opaqueness of death.”44 That is, just like the opening of Speak, Memory, life, rendered into transcendent art, is the “cradle [that] rocks above an abyss.”45 Photographs are transparent in this literary universe, just as the characters are turned into shades, ghosts, and shadows.46 These ghosts are even evident in the prefiguration to the photograph of the Nabokovs’ house in St. Petersburg—a discarded “motto” to the fi rst edition of Conclusive Evidence: The house was there. Right there. I never imagined the place would have changed so completely. How dreadful—I don’t remember a thing. No use walking any farther. Sorry, Hopkinson, to have made you come such a long way. I had been looking forward to a perfect orgy of nostalgia and recognition! That man over there seems to be growing suspicious. Speak to him. Turisti. Amerikantsi. Oh, wait a minute. Tell him I am a ghost. You surely know the Russian word for “ghost”? Mechta. Prizrak. Metafi zicheskiy capitalist. Run, Hopkinson!47 Nabokov calls himself the “passportless spy” as he traverses the dangerous borders between nations—Russia to USSR, and perhaps the more threatening boundaries of time—between the living and dead, the latter transfiguring the very self from material to immaterial.48 There is another very real danger linked to photography in the penultimate chapter of the autobiography as well, emanating not from Russia but from continental Europe and the encroachment of the Nazis, whom Nabokov was to outrun and who would claim the life of his brother, Sergei. Nabokov describes one of his only non-Russian acquaintances in Berlin—a German who collected and took photographs of executions. Nabokov wryly notes, “I can well imagine the look of calm satisfaction in his

214

CONCLUSION

fish-blue eyes as he shows, nowadays . . . a never-expected profusion of treasures to his thigh-clapping, guffawing co-veterans—the absolutely wunderbar pictures he took during Hitler’s reign.”49 In the fi nal chapter of the autobiography, Hitler’s colored photograph is mentioned, but this image comes to form but a part of the intricate web of photography, family, violence, and salvation. In these last two chapters, Nabokov reflects on “those years of exile” in continental Europe before coming to America. He calls the inhabitants “aborigines” who were, in the now familiar images of transparencies, “to the mind’s eye as flat and transparent as figures cut out of cellophane,” where “no real communication, of the rich human sort so widespread in our own midst, existed between us and them.” This was a “spectral world” made physical by a documentary violence: the passport. Our utter physical dependence on this or that nation, which had coldly granted us political refuge, became painfully evident when some trashy “visa,” some diabolical “identity card” had to be obtained or prolonged, for then an avid bureaucratic hell would attempt to close upon the petitioner and he might wilt while his dossier waxed fatter and fatter in the desks of whiskered consuls and policemen. Dokumentï, it has been said, is a Russian’s placenta. The League of Nations equipped émigrés who had lost their Russian citizenship with a so-called “Nansen” passport, a very inferior document of a sickly green hue. Its holder was little better than a criminal on parole.50 Fittingly, the last photograph in the autobiography is a reproduction of Dmitri and Vera’s Nansen passport, with one of Nabokov’s shorter captions: “A Nansen passport picture taken in Paris in April 1940, of the author’s wife, Vera, and son Dmitri, aged five. A few weeks later, in May, the last chapter of our European period was to end as it ends in this book” (fig. C.6).51 Not stated in this caption is the fact that this is one month before the Nazi invasion of Paris. While the Nansen passport photograph and document represent placelessness and the ossifying control of bureaucratic structures, it would also provide the Nabokov family safe passage to the next chapter of life, which reaches beyond the confi nes of Speak, Memory: to America. In this sense, once again, the photograph “lets us look at his world twice over: once within time, once as if beyond.”52 We are bounded within the time of the photograph, the control it exerts, but the suggestion of an expansive time allows us to free ourselves from the confi nes of that given moment. As Boyd summarizes the effect, He makes his patterns converge on the last line of his life story as if to suggest that, could we only detach ourselves from the world of human time, something surprising might emerge into view: an artfulness and harmony hiding in things, even in things at their worst, watching over life with parental tenderness and leading us to the point where all the patterns meet, to the great transition of death, to the shock of the mind’s new birth, to something unrealistically real,

Figure C.6. Vera and Dmitri Nabokov’s Nansen passport, from Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1966). © the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

216

CONCLUSION larger than the toys we can play with in life, to our passage at last into “the free world of timelessness.”53

And, most important, in the long last line of Speak, Memory that Boyd evokes, this revelation is predicated on seeing “a splendid ship’s funnel.” While only visible as an abstracted part of the whole, “made out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls . . . showing from behind the clotheslines as something in a scrambled picture,” this ship is the ship waiting to take Vera, Dmitri, and Volodya to a new home. It has grown out from the harbor—a “neutrally blooming design” with a “clever thematic connection with transatlantic gardens and parks” (just like the rose from the window of the index)—to be visible through the visual cacophony of the everyday harbor scene. Here we see through to that key: the mobility of “art’s transcendence.”54 It is this mobility, patterned photographically, that Sebald picks up again in his own photo-illustrated documentary fiction, The Emigrants (Die Ausgewanderten, 1992) (fig. C.7). Much like Andreev’s remediated image, which came to stand for an émigré consciousness (founded photographically) in Nabokov’s own text, Nabokov’s photograph appears as the stand-in for Dr. Henry Selwyn, who has emigrated to England from Lithuania. Once or twice, Edwin was to be seen with his field glasses and a container for botanical specimens, or Dr Selwyn in knee-length shorts, with a shoulder bag and butterfly net. One of the shots resembled, even in detail, a photograph of Nabokov in the mountains above Gstaad that I had clipped from a Swiss magazine a few days before. Strangely enough, both Edwin and Dr Selwyn made a distinctly youthful impression on the pictures they showed us, though at the time they made the trip, exactly ten years earlier, they were already in their late sixties. I sensed that, for both of them, this return of their past selves was an occasion for some emotion. 55 While there is no chance of misidentifi cation here (the photograph in figure C.7 is of Nabokov himself, taken by his son Dmitri on a butterfly collecting trip, printed in a Swiss magazine, and cut out by Sebald himself), it is only the likeness of a likeness: Dr. Selwyn looked just like Nabokov. However, the image as perfect likeness is almost as quickly swept away in the intertextual/interphotographic exchange. The characterization of Dr. Selwyn is founded on that transcendent bridge of Nabokov’s artistic self: lost time and lost space, found for a brief moment in human connection. As Sebald says of Nabokov, he “tried . . . to cast a little light into the darkness lying on both sides of our life, and thus to illuminate our incomprehensible existence.”56 But it is only in a clear understanding of the elusive Nabokovian photograph, the one that we can no longer “unsee,” that such an illumination is possible.

CONCLUSION

217

Figure C.7. Excerpt (page 19), Nabokov with a butterfly net, from W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse, copyright ©1992 by Vito von Eichborn GmbH & Co Verlag KG, copyright ©1999 by The Harvill Press. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp and The Random House Group Ltd. ©1996.

The Gulag Archipelago In her work On Photography —published at almost the same time as the English translation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago —Susan Sontag claimed that there were no photographs of the Gulag. While she missed the hardto-uncover The History of the Construction book, her claim does suggest the

218

CONCLUSION

problem of facing the invisibility of the Soviet Gulag camps. 57 Certainly in comparison with the number of images taken inside the Nazi concentration camps and upon their liberation by the Allied Forces, there are almost no images of life in the Soviet Gulag. As Anne Applebaum states, “What is really missing . . . is the kind of photograph that British and American photographers took when their armies liberated the concentration camps run by the Nazis: photographs of atrocities, of mass executions, of punishment cells, of starving prisoners. . . . Although there are pictures of brass bands playing on construction sites, there are no pictures of the morgues that would have been located not far away.”58 Photographs of the camps during their time of operation were largely staged, as in the images and text of The History of the Construction and the coverage of the forced labor project in USSR in Construction. Otherwise, photographers can make out only the traces of the camps, their ruins—as captured by Tomas Kizny in his large-format album on the Gulag and Michael Kunichika’s more recent photographs of the site of the White Sea Canal. 59 Anne Applebaum comments on the endemic dilemma of reading Gulag photographs, noting in particular the contingency of the photograph’s relationship to truth telling. She suggests a way out of a neatly framed account of the The History of the Construction by calling on the reader of the images to leave the text behind and look at these images with a different kind of imagination, one that utilizes a “visual archaeology”: The truth is that remembering the Gulag still requires a great reliance on a form of visual archaeology. . . . You cannot merely look at the photographs . . . [and] understand automatically what it is that you are seeing. Instead, you must look at them while simultaneously intuiting, or imagining, or inventing all of the things they do not, cannot, show. You must look at the pictures of musicians in a brass band and remember that they were probably covered with lice. You must look at the children and remember that they will soon be separated from their mothers. . . . Not all of these photographs are dishonest, but they do not tell the whole story.60 The photograph is evidence—as Barthes calls it, “an emanation of a past reality” with an “evidential force.”61 But without Applebaum’s visual archaeology, that is, without providing the image with a narrative, the photograph cannot stand alone in place of history, nor can the photograph alone capture the traumas infl icted by the Gulag system. We—as readers, as historians, as humans—are tasked with becoming archaeologists in order not only to uncover what we can of this life but also to interpret these remnants, be they written documents or photographs. In the preface to the fi rst volume of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn frames his “literary experiment” with a metaphorical encounter with an unexpected slice of the Gulag experience. The author recounts coming across an article from the magazine

CONCLUSION

219

Nature in 1949 (printed in “tiny type,” as he notes) containing an account of an archaeological dig near the Kolyma River—the site of a notorious Gulag camp— where the “archaeologists” happen upon a prehistoric salamander. They fi nd the animal so perfectly preserved that they are able to eat it “with relish [OKhOTNO] on the spot.”62 Solzhenitsyn goes on to state that the magazine’s account undoubtedly astonished its readership with the novelty of a salamander’s being preserved in such a state: But few, indeed, among its readers were able to decipher the genuine and heroic meaning of this incautious report. As for us, however—we understood instantly. We could picture the entire scene right down to the smallest details: how those present broke up the ice in frenzied haste; how, flouting the higher claims of ichthyology and elbowing each other to be fi rst, they tore off the chunks of the prehistoric flesh and hauled them over to the bonfi re to thaw them out and bolt them down. We understood because we ourselves were the same kind of people as those present at that event. We, too, were from that powerful tribe of zeks, unique on the face of the earth, the only people who could devour prehistoric salamander with relish.63 Through the lens of his own Prishvin-esque rodstvennoe vnimanie, Solzhenitsyn reveals what the naive readers of Nature could not see: the microgeographical significance of the pinpoint.64 Solzhenitsyn’s rodstvennoe vnimanie is focused on the tribe of zeks (Gulag prisoners) through the place where they are bound—Kolyma— who are so driven by hunger as to eat a prehistoric salamander. The visceral impact of the metaphor brings the reader to enter, physically and intellectually, into the consciousness of Solzhenitsyn’s tribe.65 Although Solzhenitsyn was not interned at the Kolyma camp, he is linked to the camp through his shared identity as a zek with the “citizens” of the Gulag Archipelago: “And the Kolyma was the greatest and most famous island, the pole of ferocity of that amazing country of Gulag which, though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent.”66 He will go on to dig up those traces of the Gulag experience, so that we too (the non-zeks), can understand why these men might be moved to eat the prehistoric salamander with relish. This opening formulation has further resonance with the ideal narrative Tolstoy describes in What Is Art?, a model of storytelling that is capable of infecting the reader with the emotions of original, fi rsthand experience: Even if the boy had not seen a wolf, but had often been afraid of seeing one, and, wishing to call up in others the feeling he experienced, invented the encounter with the wolf, telling it in such a way that through his narrative he called up in his listeners the same feeling he experienced in imagining the wolf—this too, is art. In the same way, it is art if a man, having experienced

220

CONCLUSION in reality or in imagination the horror of suffering or the delight of pleasure, expresses these feelings on canvas or in marble in such a way that others are infected by them.67

The infection’s frozen remnant is the key to reading Solzhenitsyn’s archaeological project and his authorial subjectivity. Solzhenitsyn’s salamander resonates with echoes from Tolstoy’s realism, rather than Tretyakov’s operativity, and the author’s anxiety about narrative truth telling. It is not to be read as a curious story in the pages of Nature magazine, as one fragment of experience, but as the starting point for the whole tale of a people suffering invisibly, interred in the ice. The anxiety of nineteenth-century realism over technology’s machinery of control is realized to its most terrifying extent in the Gulag. The collectively authored The History of the Construction embodies the model by which this control of the Soviet subject could be achieved — a site where subjectivities were remade through physical internment, image, and text. Although the voices of those in the camp do make up a component of this work, the published stories of the prisoners have all been fi ltered through and rewritten by the authors’ brigade, most often obscuring the original authorial hand.68 The History of the Construction depicts the “internal other,” the Gulag prisoner, and documents his reforging ( perekovka) as he was forcibly modeled into a new Soviet subject. Perhaps the most well-known text from the book is the “Story of One Reforging” (“Istoriia odnoi perekovki”), the account of a criminal, Rottenberg, who through his labor in the construction of the canal is transformed from an inveterate thief into a model shock worker (udarnik). Mikhail Zoshchenko, the author of this short narrative, never met this prisoner, as he acknowledges in the opening of the story: rather, he was handed an account already taken down on paper—a document of sorts—which he then “cleaned up” and made more literary. The History of the Construction archive reveals the distance from its source—Rottenberg—that his tale would have to travel, literarily speaking. Hundreds of personal stories were collected from the prisoners, typed out by officials, and compiled for the authors of the White Sea Canal brigade to rework into stories like the “Story of One Reforging.”69 The prisoners’ accounts are gathered like “facts,” which are then given over to the writers who shape them into acceptably literary form. In Gorky’s words, used as the dedication to the English translation, “Our writers must tell all about this. For facts appear fi rst, and then followed by their artistic reflection.”70 A similar statement is made by Vsevolod Ivanov, a contributor to The History of the Construction, in his address to the First Congress of Soviet Writers: “Each one of us creates around himself an archive of documents of the epoch, but we still have no public archive of documents of our time. The Union of Writers must create such an archive. . . . We must collect diaries, personal correspondence, we must write the biographies of our neighbors in life, we must write the history of the Soviet family.”71 Ivanov pulls the private—life story—squarely back into the writing

CONCLUSION

221

and visualization of history; the autobiographical collage becomes the draft of the historical montage. Such a montage still lays claim to documentary—to fact—but does not capture a single narrative experience.72 Montage’s effect at the White Sea Canal is to generalize, thereby obfuscating specificity. In the case of Rottenberg, even if we are to believe that it is the single life story that Zoshchenko was handed and simply made more literary, the illustrations from this chapter speak to a more disparate source material for this single model life story. The photographs included are from a variety of sources—many life stories: Rottenberg’s dossier, Western journals, stock photos, and one taken at the canal presenting the location where Rottenberg was reforged. But Rottenberg himself is never pictured (fig. C.8). Just as the photographs included in the volume are uncredited to any individual photographer in the brigade, what we see underscored in the photographic illustrations representing the various phases of Rottenberg’s life is what Darius Tolzcyk describes as “the overall notion of the world’s transition from the stage of chaotic cacophony towards harmonious univocality.”73 This triumph of “univocal harmony,” or seamless montage, in the space of the Gulag—a unified voice arising in contrast to the chaos and cacophony of individual voice and history—necessarily silences and marginalizes the polyphony of individual experience. Just as photography is key to the montage structure of The History of the Construction, so too is it of structural import in the space of the camp. Gulag documents were created by the click of the camera at the prisoner’s very entrance into the camp system. The arrest photo, as part of the prisoner’s dossier, signifies the moment in which the prisoner’s likeness is captured and frozen (like that salamander encased in ice). As the photograph is taken, so is the freedom of the Gulag prisoners; they are not the authors of their own personal narrative—rather, their subjectivity is shaped by the frames of image and text mandated by Soviet ideology. In Solzhenitsyn’s fictional work One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Odin den′ Ivana Denisovicha, 1962), this freezing of an unalterable image is suggested by the case of a character named Tsezar: “Tsezar . . . had a heavy black walrus moustache. They’d have shaved it off, only he was wearing it when they photographed him for the record [delo].”74 More explicitly in The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn links this kind of photographic capture with the removal of individual subjectivity. At the moment the prisoner receives his number, thereby removing his “human individuality,” “his ‘I’,” he is then photographed with the identifying number hanging on a placard around his neck (for example, Shch-262, see fig. C.10).75 The record, created by the camera, is a material extension of the control that the camp exerts over the prisoner. Not only is he physically controlled in the space of the camp, but his image and very identity are also trapped within the frame of the photograph. As the prisoner’s arrest photograph demonstrates the control of the camp system over the physical subject, the expressive subjectivity of an individual is also defi ned by the camp’s totalizing boundary. Such is the main subject of Varlam Shalamov’s “Children’s Drawings” (“Detskie

222

CONCLUSION

Figure C.8. Photographic montage assembled by the author from “The Story of One Reforging,” top left to bottom right: “Work in a tsarist prison camp: one hammer for three men”; torture in Western prisons of the past; “[Rottenberg’s ] Criminal Girlfriend. Photo taken from criminal investigation documents”; “Here Rottenberg reclaimed his self from life,” in The History of the Construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal (1934).

kartinki,” 1959), in which the author vividly demonstrates this sublimation of the individual creative self through a child’s sketchbook. Not only do the drawings show a child’s imagination bounded by barbed wire, but in a fi nal act of degradation, the drawing is discarded.76 In the dossier the zek’s life is to be both read and written, beyond even the confi nes of the passport document. And, paradoxically, by being turned into photographic material, the prisoner’s identity can then be hidden from view—the prisoner’s photo is buried in his dossier, as the prisoner himself is hidden

CONCLUSION

223

from the view of outsiders by the walls of the camp. As Solzhenitsyn parenthetically muses, “All those photographs are still preserved somewhere! One of these days we shall see them!”77 And this is precisely Solzhenitsyn’s photographic project: to show what has been impossible to see. Like Prishvin’s chronophotographie, Solzhenitsyn fuses text and image to open a historical optical unconscious; and like Andreev’s photographic vision, his pictures might resurrect the dead for a next generation. But in order to fi rst uncover and then reanimate these frozen images, Solzhenitsyn’s own collective project inscribes material that “was also provided by thirty-six Soviet writers . . . authors of the disgraceful book on the White Sea Canal.”78 And for Solzhenitsyn, it is not just a visual archaeology that is necessary to recover this experience but a physical one as well. By 1937 many of the officials featured in the book were blacklisted, most prominently the former head of the secret police and Gulag camp administration, Genrikh Yagoda, prompting removal of the book from libraries and in many cases destruction of the book itself.79 Thus one of Solzhenitsyn’s fi rst tasks in incorporating The History of the Construction involved an archaeological investigation simply to obtain a copy, which was fi nally achieved through a friend and fellow zek, Volodia Gershuni. The second step necessary to incorporate the unearthed book would most likely be through photography. In volumes 3–4 of the fi rst YMCA Paris publication of The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn incorporates images from The History of the Construction in both the chapter “The Archipelago Metastasizes” and the cover image of the book.80 In History of Construction the photograph, “Orchestra on the canal” illustrated a text that described how music lifted the spirits of the prisoners and in turn increased their productivity (fig. C.9). By introducing an eyewitness, a member of the band, Solzhenitsyn challenges the “evidentiary truth” of the account: “They put [the band] on the shore and it played for several days in a row until prisoners working without relief or rest periods had unloaded timber from a barge. I.D.T was in a band at [the White Sea Canal] and he recalls: . . . They used to shout at us: ‘Parasites, drones! Come here and get to work!’ In the photograph neither this nor anything like it is shown.”81 While this reinscription of the photograph demonstrates, fi rst and foremost, the role of text in reading the image truthfully, it also draws our attention to that disconnect between the photograph and text—creating a further gulf between the reliability of the image and a textual account. Such is a reversal of the trajectory of Andreev’s domestic photographic practices. While in the creation of his personal archive Andreev leaves the trace of his authorial shadow in the material of the photograph, these images increasingly become part of the public image sphere and, as such, become further distanced from the domestic realm by taking on a new life in images of an émigré consciousness. In contrast, Solzhenitsyn imbues the public image with a singular voice. What was once a photograph standing in for the generalized and idealized experience of those imprisoned at the Belomor Canal is transformed into a conduit for an individual prisoner, whose voice can now call out with its own

2 24

CONCLUSION

Figure C.9. “Orchestra on the Canal,” from The History of the Construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal (1934); also appears in The Gulag Archipelago vol. 3–4 (1974). Permissions courtesy of the Fond Solzhenitsyna.

story from the frames of the photograph. It bears testimony to the power of Solzhenitsyn’s authorial project, as a zek and witness himself, to correct the interpretation of the evidentiary truth of the photographs. Much as was the case in Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, this reading underscores the primacy of text in Solzhenitsyn’s literary experiment. It is only in the space of text, or through the intercession of text, that we can both see and feel the suffering of the Gulag prisoner. However, camera technology also served an essential function in getting The Gulag Archipelago into print. Suffering under the confines of Soviet censorship (and knowing that the discovery of his work would certainly lead to his reincarceration or worse), Solzhenitsyn relied on photography, specifically microfi lm, for the preparation and transportation of the samizdat manuscripts of The Gulag Archipelago to his Parisian publishers at the YMCA press—including the photographic images included in the three volumes.82 Solzhenitsyn recounts his discovery, along with his friend and fellow zek Nikolai Zubov, of what his new Smena camera could do while they were both still in exile in Kazakhstan: “We went about it systematically, fi rst reading up on the theory of photography. . . . How, we wondered, could photography be harnessed [ postavit′ na sluzhbu] to serve our goals? We studied up on the technique of photoreproduction . . . and in due course I learned to make excellent photographic copies of my texts.”83 This symbolic reclamation of photography is made stronger when considered in light of a significant development

CONCLUSION

225

in camera technology in the 1930s: the FED cameras. Introduced to compete with the sleek and revolutionary German Leica, they were fi rst produced and manufactured in an OGPU camp and bear the initials of Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, notorious head of the Cheka.84 And while Solzhenitsyn’s camera model was a newer Smena, it is clear that his harnessing of the technology of the prison record is that very means through which he reclaims his self and a human record.85 Like Ehrenburg and his side-angle viewfi nder, but certainly with a stronger imperative, Solzhenitsyn wrote to mobilize Soviet consciousness while simultaneously appealing to, and fi nally reaching, the international front. Through their authorial lenses, and in their interlacing of image and text, both authors focus on the marginalized other. But Solzhenitsyn’s document, in its passage to the West in a microtext format, was also a completely marginalized material fragment until it could be made visible once enlarged, transcribed, and fi nally published. The line between reclaiming the objectivizing gaze of Soviet ideology and Solzhenitsyn’s marginalized status as zek is captured in the inclusion of photographic portraits of the author in The Gulag Archipelago.86 In figure C.10, the photograph clearly shows Solzhenitsyn in his prison garb, a documentary fact. But the scene is staged—it is not a shot taken within the Gulag, as it is often mistakenly assumed in articles and posthumously published writings that include precisely this photograph of the author.87 Almost immediately upon his release and subsequent exile to Kazakhstan, Solzhenitsyn posed in his prisoner’s uniform in front of a white background—at the very time when he and Nikolai Zubov were harnessing photography to serve their goals. In one sense, it is a document of the zek Solzhenitsyn, the visual proof of his image as a prisoner. He sits, slightly hunched over with the weight of his experience on his exhausted shoulders. Here Solzhenitsyn calls on us to confront the “double system” of photographic portraiture: “a system of representation capable of functioning both honorifically and repressively.”88 Unlike the photograph taken of Solzhenitsyn by the Soviet authorities at the time of his arrest, or any photograph taken of Solzhenitsyn within the camp (as in fig. C.11), here the author has defi ned his own subjectivity.89 He self-consciously shapes his pose and his garb and chooses the time of the photograph. He has taken complete control of his prisoner identity by posing one more time before the camera, displaying his smuggled-out prison jacket and painted identification numbers. Moreover, the placement of the images in the work—as the authorial frontispieces—concretizes the link between zek and author. Like Tolstoy’s less successful self-portrait or Andreev’s photograph standing before his demons, the photograph channels Solzhenitsyn’s assertion of authorial persona: Solzhenitsyn is fi rst and foremost a zek even when he is no longer physically confi ned within a Gulag camp. In this sense, he does not move beyond the visual frame of The History of the Construction. But within these confi nes, Solzhenitsyn’s literary experiment stands as testimony to the power that the hunched zek of the photograph can wield, as his literary I reshapes the objectivizing camera apparatus.

226

CONCLUSION

Figure C.10. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Immediately upon Release,” 1953, The Gulag Archipelago (1973–75). Frontispiece. Permissions courtesy of the Fond Solzhenitsyna.

Susan Sontag’s statement does contain a partial truth: no photographs of the Gulag can stand alone as authentic representations of life there. Sontag’s summary of Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading comes nearer to capturing Solzhenitsyn’s own deeply experienced anxiety over the contingency of the photographic image and the reason for his repeated inclusion of his own Gulag portraits: [Invitation to a Beheading’s] portrait of a model totalitarian state contains only one, omnipresent art: photography—and the friendly photographer who hovers around the hero’s death cell turns out, at the end of the novel, to be the

CONCLUSION

227

Figure C.11. “Camp portrait from the Kaluzhskaya outpost in Moscow, June 1946,” frontispiece for Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 3–4 (1974). Permissions courtesy of the Fond Solzhenitsyna.

headsman. And there seems no way . . . of limiting the proliferation of photographic images. The only question is whether the function of the image-world created by cameras could be other than it is.90 And notwithstanding his creation of a monument to his tribe and self in his vast literary experiment, Solzhenitsyn still exists within these frames.91 The photographs of the Gulag are necessarily tightly bound to text, both in official publications and in memoir and historical accounts. As the metonymic representative of the totalizing system of Soviet repression, the Gulag organism utilized the camera apparatus to remove prisoners from the narrative of a free life outside the camp, to obscure their identity from the eyes of the outsider, and to confi ne their subjectivity within

228

CONCLUSION

the most narrow confi nes of a totalizing ideology. These confi nes might be eternally remade, be it honorifically or repressively.

Last Encounters Writing on the coincidence of Nabokov’s and Solzhenitsyn’s finding a home in the seemingly “un-Russian Switzerland” at precisely the same time, Harrison Salisbury writes, “These men seem to be antipodes—Nabokov urban, civilized, master of tongues and riddles; Solzhenitsyn, son of Gulag, child of the revolution, born almost in its year, in 1918, once a believer in Lenin, hard-muscled, and intense. Still, their Russianness binds them together.”92 For Salisbury, these authors’ exile proves a boon for the world, presenting as they do a picture of the “Russian Writer as World Conscience.”93 However, with letters crossed, meetings left unconfirmed, and notes never answered, the two writers did not manage to meet in Montreux.94 Mikhail Shishkin includes the incidental anecdote in his “Nabokov’s Inkblot” (“Kliaksa Nabokova,” 2012): I remember I told him a funny story about how Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn, two giants of Russian literature, never met in the Montreux Palace Hotel. They wrote to each other and agreed to meet: Nabokov wrote in his daybook: “6 October, 11:00 Solzhenitsyn and wife.” Apparently Solzhenitsyn was waiting for a letter confi rming the date. He came to Montreux with his wife Natalia, walked up to the hotel, but decided to drive on, thinking that Nabokov was either sick or for some reason didn’t want to see them. Meanwhile, the Nabokovs waited for their guests at the restaurant for an entire hour—without ordering lunch—not understanding why they weren’t showing up.95 Shishkin’s story frames in brief an encounter with Nabokov’s photographs, still hanging in his room in the Montreux Palace Hotel. “Old photographs of Nabokov hung on the walls of the room, and Kovalev wanted to re-create each one. . . . Of course, Kovalev also wanted to have a picture of himself behind Nabokov’s desk. For the fi rst time, I was glad Nabokov was dead.”96 This act of photographic doubling brings us back to where our story began: Pushkin at his writing desk. While missed connections characterized the photographic chase after Pushkin’s image (time-traveling Bitov and a Pushkin impostor), here the fetishization of photography—what we might even call a moment of photographic poshlost′ on the part of Shishkin’s Kovalev— removes the thrill from the creation of the double and replaces it with the attempt to (re)create the hollow simulacrum of a life story. We turn now, one last time, to Nabokov’s doubling, this time in the photographic lens of Lord Snowdon in 1973—a year before the missed connection with Solzhenitsyn. But rather than looking at such photographs directly (that is as reproductions in the book), this last turn is writ ekphrastically, not unlike Barthes’s never-pictured

CONCLUSION

229

Winter Garden photograph, leaving us to ruminate over photographic connections made of and in text.97 In a January 1973 issue of the Saturday Review of the Arts Lord Snowdon’s lens “penetrates the isolation of Vladimir Nabokov.”98 The titular author is framed as if inhabiting the ethos of his works: “Glimpses of Nabokov keep recalling his art. The author of ‘The Eye’ looks out of an oeil-de-boeuf window at his hotel.” And in one canny capture image, Nabokov appears doubled in a Pninlike pose at his writing desk. The editorial caption reads, “And the man whose fiction is all mirrors and doubles appears twice as he works in his study.”99 With the journal’s seam dividing the print nearly down its center, Nabokov (one reflected and one directly captured) appears to be in conversation with himself in what we might read as either a Voloshin-esque mirrored expansion, or more likely, a near “Herzen versus Herzen” confrontation from the author’s two “selves.”100 In print the photograph appears out of focus, adding a nearly spectral effect to the surface of the reproduced photograph. For a brief moment, we must decide which angle gives the picture of the real Nabokov. Which is the reflection? Can the reflection captured be as real as the subject mediated by the camera’s lens? Ruminating himself on the many photographs included in the issue of the Saturday Review of the Arts, Nabokov writes in a letter to its editor, Edmund White, “You have never set eyes upon me, and yet, by a flash of inspiration, you chose from my portfolio my best likeness of the cover of the SR The Arts, Jan. 1973! All the other pictures are good too but I hope you realize that the one on p. 37 (Nabokov lives and works, zhivyot i rabotaet) mimics marvelously a well-known formal of the author of ‘Aug. 14,’” that is, Solzhenitsyn.101 This figure, in fact, looks out confrontationally, partially hunched in the half darkness of chiaroscuro. And although this issue predates the failed meeting of the two writers in the following year, Nabokov offers a tantalizing, if fleeting, frame through which to view a meeting of the two authors—unified by an acknowledged likeness within that single frame. Who is this Nabokov who looks like Solzhenitsyn, and who is this Solzhenitsyn who could look like Nabokov? It could only be in the treacherously indexical photographic mirror that these two authors, refracted authorial selves, could be seen as part of the same tribe: the masters of photographic literacy. For both Solzhenitsyn and Nabokov the use of photographs in their literary experiments reflects back on the foundations of their Russian author-photographer forefathers—a family tree of photographic literacy. But in each case the anxiety of their influence, and the more acute anxiety of the real threat to the authorial self, is made visible. The Russian and Soviet legacy of photography in the twentieth century is a threat to be neutralized by these two exiled authors: for Solzhenitsyn most clearly it is an extension of the state apparatus. For Nabokov, it is like any other number of tools to be reordered, reworked, rewritten, and invested with new patterns of meaning and artistry. While widely differing in scope and aim, we see united in the works of these two authors what Sontag calls “the camera’s twin capacities”—that is, “to subjectivize reality and to objectify it”—so that it might serve the needs of

230

CONCLUSION

the man who holds the camera in his hands.102 The photograph provides an objective but limited snapshot that requires inscription; text and context—that mastery of photographic literacy—are essential in the reclamation of subjectivity and the authorial self. Thus readers are left with a pressing task: an ethical imperative to discover what lies behind their images, be it to fi nd a truth behind a photograph’s banal exterior or to create a new transcendently artistic depth behind the image. Through tracing this figure of the author-photographer, the paradoxical life of the photograph and the medium’s own assumed agency are revealed in all their maddening manifestations: their claims to objectivity and falsification, to science and artistry, to original and copy, propaganda and dissidence. Photography shapes the author’s self, while he in turn exerts the power of logos over the image; it is capable of building bridges over time and space, while at one and the same time editing a moment out of the continuity of time forever. These paradoxes make the medium endlessly enchanting, while its subsequent ubiquity makes it banal—and therefore insidiously dangerous to ignore. But it is through the lens of photographic literacy that we can learn to see through those obscuring paradoxes to a clearer image of meaning, message, and the authorial self.

NOTES

Introduction 1. Vladimir Nabokov, “Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible,” trans. from the French by Dmitri Nabokov, New York Review of Books, March 31, 1988. I have modified the translation for clarity. Vladimir Nabokov, “Pouchkine ou le vrai et le vraisemblable,” La Nouvelle Revue Française (September 1999): 87. 2. In fact, one cannot help but immediately recall Nabokov in an early line in Bitov’s story, which reads, “A landscape is not a landscape but a whoosh of time: two butterflies are bumping against it, knocking on the glass against some quickly drawn sheep.” Andrei Bitov, “Pushkin’s Photograph (1799–2099),” trans. Priscilla Meyer, in The New Soviet Fiction: Sixteen Short Stories, ed. Sergei Zalygin (New York: Abbeville Press, 1989), 18; Translation has been adjusted for clarity; Andrei Bitov, Fotografiia Pushkina (1799–2099) (Moscow: Futurum, 2007), 18–19. At several other moments butterflies and moths enter to interrupt the progress of the narration. While many iterations of the work in Russian have been published since the work originally appeared in 1987, this edition is of particular note. It was published in a small run in 2007 by the Futurum publishing house in Moscow. The small book is printed on thick designer paper, giving it an aged look, and illustrated by striking photographs, largely of contemporary Petersburg, and drawings by Viacheslav Mikhailov. 3. The declaration comes from an unseen speaker and is highly reminiscent of the genre of science fiction but especially of Zamyatin’s We and Mayakovsky’s Bedbug: “The whole Universe is delighted by our achievements in the field of the subjugation of time.” Bitov, “Pushkin’s Photograph,” 22; Fotografiia Pushkina, 36. 4. Bitov, “Pushkin’s Photograph,” 17; Bitov, Fotografiia Pushkina, 15–16.

232

NOTES TO PAGES 4–8 5. In capital letters in the original. Bitov, “Pushkin’s Photograph,” 24; Bitov, Fotografiia

Pushkina, 45. 6. Meyer’s translation has rendered the Russian filolog as “humanist.” I have changed the translation here. 7. Bitov, “Pushkin’s Photograph,” 59 (ellipsis in the original); Bitov, Fotografiia Pushkina, 176–77. 8. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 23 (italics in the original). 9. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed., ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2010), 1322. The question of how the author came to be individualized and considered in light of the “man and his works” in the West is also famously treated in Michel Foucault’s “What Is an Author?,” in Leitch, Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1475–90. 10. The notion of “apparatus” is in part informed by Jean-Louis Baudry and his seminal article “Ideological Effects of the Cinematographic Apparatus,” Film Quarterly 28 (Winter 1974–75): 39–47. 11. As Joel Snyder has written regarding the reception of photography in the 1870s, the photographer’s role was to prepare the photographic material (camera, paper), “but it was the sunlight that drew the picture.” Snyder, “Res Ipsa Loquitur,” in Things That Talk, ed. Lorraine Daston (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 204. This relationship to authorship and the term svetopis′ is discussed in more detail in chapter 1. 12. Fedor Dostoevskii, “Rasskazy N. V. Uspenskogo,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 19 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1979), 180–81. 13. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Adolescent, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 2004), 460; Fedor Dostoevskii, Podrostok, vol. 8 of Sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad: Nauka, 1990), 587. And as the nineteenth century cannot be mentioned without reference to the other giant of realism, I assure my reader that Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy will be treated in detail in chapter 1. 14. Anatolii Lunacharskii, Sovetskoe foto 1 (1926): 2. 15. On the worker photography movement see Erika Wolf, “The Soviet Union: From Worker to Proletarian Photography,” in The Worker Photography Movement [1926–1939]: Essays and Documents, ed. Jorge Ribalta (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arta Reina Sofia, 2011), 32–46; Erika Wolf, “SSSR na stroike: Constructivist Visions to Construction Sites,” in USSR in Construction: An Illustrated Exhibition Magazine, ed. Petter Õsterlund et al. (Sundsvall, Swed.: Fotomuseet Sundsvall, 2006). 16. László Moholy-Nagy, “Image Sequences: Series,” in Vision in Motion, ed. Paul Theobald (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1946), 208 (italics in the original). This phrase appears originally in the essay “Photography Is Creation in Light” (“Fotografie ist Lichtgestaltung”), published in Bauhaus 2, no. 1 (1928). See the English translation in Krisztina Passuth ed., Moholy-Nagy, trans. Mátyás Esterházy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 302–5.

NOTES TO PAGES 10–15

233

17. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 13. 18. Andre Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 241. 19. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 232. 20. Sergei Tret′iakov, “We Are Searching,” in Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), 474. See also Elizabeth Papazian, Manufacturing Truth: The Documentary Moment in Early Soviet Culture (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009); Margarita Tupitsyn, The Soviet Photograph, 1924–1937 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). 21. Jefferson Hunter, Image and Word: The Interaction of Twentieth-Century Photographs and Texts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 6. 22. Sergei Tret′iakov, “Moi zritel′nyi dnevnik,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 2 (March–April, 1934): 24. 23. Irina O. Rajevsky, “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality,” Intermédialités, no. 6 (Fall 2005): 60. She cites Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 24. Mary Anne Caws, Reading Frames in Modern Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 5. 25. Ibid., 25. 26. See the discussion of legibility and illegibility by John Berger in Berger and Jean Mohr, Another Way of Telling (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 124–29. 27. Sergei Tret′iakov, “From the Photo-Series to the Extended Photo-Observation,” trans. Devin Fore, October 118 (Fall 2006): 74. 28. John Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 5. 29. Michael Meyer, “Intermedial Framing,” in Handbook of Intermediality: Literature— Image—Sound—Music, ed. Gabriele Rippl (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 365. Here Meyer is drawing particularly on the work of W. J. T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 2002), 86–101. 30. Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame, 6. 31. David King, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia (London: Tate, 2014), 10. 32. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 25 (italics in the original). 33. Michel de Certreau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 117. 34. Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). And more recently, Irina Paperno’s work explores the most direct literary reflection of the author’s self in the genre of diary and memoir writing. Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). 35. Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, 44–45.

234

NOTES TO PAGES 15–24 36. Ibid. 37. Eric Naiman, “On Soviet Subjects and the Scholars Who Make Them,” Russian Review

60, no. 3 (July 2001): 308. Lilya Kaganovsky examines the painful bodily repercussions of the transformation of the new Soviet man in both literary constructions and cinematic depictions: see Kaganovsky, How the Soviet Man Was Unmade: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity under Stalin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008). 38. John Berger in Berger and Mohr, Another Way of Telling, 91. 39. See Timothy Dow Adams, Light Writing & Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 40. Craig Campbell, Agitating Images: Photography against History in Indigenous Siberia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), xix. 41. See Glenn Lowry and Peter Galassi, foreword and acknowledgments in Experiments for the Future, by Alexander Rodchenko (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005); Aleksandr Rodchenko, Opyty dlia budushchego: Dnevniki, stat′i, pis′ma, zapiski (Moscow: Grant, 1996). 42. See Erika Wolf’s contributions in Ribalta, The Worker Photography Movement, and her article “The Author as Photographer: Tret′iakov’s, Erenburg’s, and Il′f’s Images of the West,” Configurations 18, no. 3 (2010): 383–403. Her work on the journal USSR in Construction is also indispensable to this book. See Erika Wolf, “USSR in Construction: From Avant-garde to Socialist Realist Practice,” 2 vols. (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1999); and “When Photographs Speak, to Whom Do They Talk? The Origins and Audience of SSSR na stroike (USSR in Construction),” Left History 6, no. 2 (1999): 53–82. 43. See Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

1. Tolstoy in the Age of His Technological Reproducibility 1. “Novogo roda zhivopis′,” Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, January 25, 1839, 181; also cited in Elena Barkhatova, Russkaia svetopis′: Pervyi vek fotoiskusstva, 1839–1914 (Saint Petersburg: Al′ians—Liki Rossii, 2009), 10. 2. “Ukhod L′va Tolstogo—prikhod novoi epokhi,” Nachalo vsekh nachal: Fakt na ekrane i kinomysl′ “Serebrianogo veka” (Moscow: Materik, 2002), 14. 3. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography” in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 274–75. 4. See Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” and Dominique Francois Arago, “Report” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 15–26.

NOTES TO PAGES 24–25

235

5. “Svetopis′, ili proizvodstvo zhivopisnykh izobrazhenii posredstvom svetovykh luchei,” Biblioteka dlia chteniia, May 1839, 64; also cited in Barkhatova, Russkaia svetopis′, 12. Although Barkhatova calls the tone of this formulation satirical, it appears almost entirely earnest. Moreover, the description captures the real enthusiasm and contemporary language of the press at the popular reception of the daguerreotype in France and Russia. 6. On technology, instrumentation, and mediation from the perspective of the history of science see John Tresch, “The Daguerreotype’s First Frame: Francois Arago’s Moral Economy of Instruments,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 38 (2007): 445–76. 7. Isidore was the son of Joseph Nicephore Niepce, partner to Daguerre, who made the first photographic prints in the late 1820s. 8. In fact it was filing for patent rights in England that slowed the proliferation of daguerreotypes there. For a complete account, see R. Derek Wood, “A State Pension for L. J. M. Daguerre for the Secret of His Daguerreotype Technique,” Annals of Science 54, no.5 (September 1997): 489–506. 9. This early photographic process, created by Talbot and also called a Talbotype, used paper coated with silver to make paper negatives. Though it was a true ancestor of modern photography, since the process involved both a negative and a positive, the calotype did not have any success in replacing the daguerreotype, largely because Talbot patented his process, thereby making it unavailable to a wider public. 10. See Benjamin, “The Work of Art.” 11. See Joel Snyder, “Res Ipsa Loquitur,” in Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, ed. Lorraine Daston (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 195–222. 12. This influence led new photographers to often retouch, or “paint” their images. See David Elliott, “Icon of a New Age,” in Photography in Russia: 1840–1940, ed. David Elliott (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 12. William Carrick was a Russian-Scottish photographer. 13. See the entry “Sergei Levitsky” in Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, ed. John Hannavy (London: Routledge, 2008), 853. 14. Levitsky was by no means the first portraitist in Russia. Another pioneer of note is Aleksei Fedorovich Grekov. He had his own portrait studio as early as 1840. See S. Morozov, Pervye russkie fotografy-khudozhniki (Moscow: Goskinoizdat, 1952), 5–13. 15. He was also an early master of the wet collodion process. See Tat′iana Saburova, “Early Masters of Russian Photography” in Elliott, Photography in Russia: 1840–1940, 32–35, and Morozov, Pervye russkie fotografy-khudozhniki, 17–20, 33–35. 16. Levitsky was Herzen’s cousin. See Morozov, Pervye russkie fotografy-khudozhniki, 17n. 17. Nikolai Ge, Pis′ma, stat′i, kritika, vospominaniia sovremennikov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1978), 370–71. This exchange is also treated by Inessa Medzhibovskaya in “On Moral Movement and Moral Vision: The Last Supper in Russian Debates,” Comparative Literature 56, no. 1 (2004): 23–53. As she writes regarding the polemics surrounding the painting, “Russia’s art was undergoing a revolution of its own. . . . Art had to reproduce reality and address itself directly to Russia’s social problems, especially the need for progress” (28). Herzen would also add a call for art to “immerse itself in social distress and expose injustice” (ibid., 31n6). With such a backdrop it is no great leap to read the image in a meta-artistic and allegorical fashion

236

NOTES TO PAGES 25–28

as a biblical scene with resonance for contemporary Russia. This is precisely Dostoevsky’s reductionist criticism of the painting: “There sits Christ—but is that Christ? . . . Where are the eighteen centuries of Christianity that followed, and how are they connected to the event? How is it possible that from such an ordinary quarrel of such ordinary people gathered to have supper, as Mr. Ge depicts, there could arise something so colossal? . . . Mr. Ge was trying for realism.” Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Apropos of the Exhibition,” in A Writer’s Diary, vol. 1, 1873–1876, trans. Kennenth Lantz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009) 216; “Po povodu vystavki,” in Dnevnik pisatelia, izbrannye stranitsy (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1989), 77–78). Ge would later paint Herzen’s portrait from life in 1867. 18. Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, “Photography” in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography, 39–68; Charles Baudelaire, “The Modern Public and Photography,” in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography, 83–90. 19. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 553; A. I. Gertsen, Byloe i dumy, vol. 2 (Minsk: Gosudarstvennoe uchebno-pedagogicheskoe izdatel′stvo Ministerstva prosveshcheniia, 1957), 514. 20. See Gertsen, Byloe i dumy, 514; also Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 1326n32. This incident and the Herzen photograph have come to be the defining image of Pavel Alexandrovich Vetoshnikov in popular history; the excerpt from Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts relating to the photograph and two reproductions of the Herzen photograph illustrate Vetoshnikov’s Russian Wikipedia page. Vetoshnikov himself is not pictured. 21. From Fotograf, nos. 3–4 (1865), cited in Morozov, Pervye russkie fotografy-khudozhniki, 18. 22. Morozov, Pervye russkie fotografy-khudozhniki, 20. In fact, unlike a great many photographs of this age (and particularly in the 1850s), Levitsky very rarely colored his prints. Saburova, “Early Masters of Russian Photography,” 55; see also Morozov, Pervye russkie fotografy-khudozhniki, 67–68. 23. In 1887, Julia Wedgwood briefly stated that Dutch art “anticipates the photograph.” Wedgwood, “Count Leo Tolstoi,” Contemporary Review 52 (1887): 250. 24. Saburova, “Early Masters of Russian Photography,” 37. 25. See also Piktorial′naia fotografiia v Rossii 1890–1920-e gody (Moscow: Art-Rodnik, 2002), and Loginov’s entry “Karelin” in Hannavy, Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, 787–89. 26. Also noted by Catherine Evtuhov, “Karelin and Bourgeois Photography,” in Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture, ed. Valerie Kivelson and Joan Neuberger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 117. 27. Vasilii Nemirovich-Danchenko, Po Volge: Ocherki i vpechatleniia letnei poezdki (St. Petersburg: Izd. Knigoprodavtsa I. L. Tuzova, 1877), 32–33. See also Stephen Hutchings, Russian Literary Culture in the Camera Age: The Word as Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 26: “This is not a photograph but an artistic portrait with a complete correspondence in every detail.” Nemirovich-Danchenko also met Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana in 1900 to discuss the possibility of putting on his play The Living Corpse, but Tolstoy quickly lost interest in staging it with the Moscow Art Theater. Nemirovich-Danchenko acquired the play from Chertkov after Tolstoy’s death, and it was staged in 1911. See Sergei Bertensson,

NOTES TO PAGES 28–31

237

“The History of Tolstoy’s Posthumous Play,” American Slavic and East European Review 14, no. 2 (1955): 265–68. 28. Karelin was the first in Europe to use this method. See Morozov, Pervye russkie fotografy-khudozhniki, 35. Nemirovich-Danchenko also notes that Karelin most often took photographs indoors, where the exposure needed to be longer and a successful portrait was therefore more difficult to achieve. Nemirovich-Danchenko, Po Volge, 34. Karelin was also a landscape photographer at both the start and end of his career. He created remarkable albums of Nizhny-Novgorod, including both landscapes and peoples. See “Karelin” in Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, 787–89; and Saburova, “Early Masters,” 37–39. 29. Evtuhov, “Karelin and Bourgeois Photography,” 117. 30. Moreover, in the word svetopis′ the relationship to writing (pis-) places image making into the sphere of writing: writing an image. From its inception photography was linked with writing as a subject. Written documents were also a subject of early photographic experiments, including Niepce’s lithographs and Talbot’s photogenic drawings of manuscripts. François Brunet, Photography and Literature (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 13. Fox Talbot’s work was reported to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1839, see “Report by Julius Fritzsche to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences on Ackermann’s Apparatus and the Work of Fox Talbot [document],” in Elliott, Photography in Russia, 30. 31. Snyder, “Res Ipsa Loquitur,” 204. Later, film critic André Bazin would go further in articulating this passive relationship to image production, claiming, “For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man.” Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography, 241. 32. Quoted in Morozov, Russkaia khudozhestvennaia fotografiia: Ocherki iz istoriia fotografii, 1839–1917) (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1955), 23. Also in Richard Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 376. 33. Sergei Levitskii, “Iz vremen dagerotipii,” in Fotograficheskii ezhegodnik P. M. Dement′eva (St. Petersburg, 1892), 118; reproduced as a facsimile document in Barkhatova, Russkaia svetopis′, 40. 34. Saburova, “Early Masters of Russian Photography,” 33. 35. Ibid, 41. 36. A parallel might be drawn to England, where “scientific processes of transformation, such as those caused by the chemical changes that occur when light produces an image, allow photography to be an art as well—an art with transformative powers.” Catherine M. Soussloff, The Subject in Art: Portraiture and the Birth of the Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 85–86. 37. Vladimir Stasov in Russkii vestnik (May 1858), quoted in Morozov, Pervye russkie fotografy-khudozhniki, 45. 38. Brunet, Photography and Literature, 115. 39. Ibid. 40. The neutral studio backdrop is typical in early examples of photographic portraiture. However, Tolstoy’s relaxed and confident pose is particularly striking considering that the sitter had to remain still for the long duration of the daguerreotype exposure. The photographer’s

238

NOTES TO PAGES 31–34

name in Russian is rendered as Vil′gel′m Shenfel′d. See also Kristina Anatolievna Toland, “Picturing the Self: The Changing Medium of Russian Autobiography” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2010), 91–93. 41. David McDuff notes that it is with the appearance of Tolstoy’s “full signature” (Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy rather than L. N. T.) at the close of his “Sebastopol in August” that Tolstoy emerges as a literary celebrity. McDuff, introduction to The Sebastopol Sketches, by Leo Tolstoy, trans. David McDuff (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 36. 42. For more on the relationship between the Russifying imperial attitude and photography, see Margaret Dikovitskaya, “Central Asia in Early Photographs: Russian Colonial Attitudes and Visual Culture,” in Empire, Islam, and Politics in Central Eurasia, ed. Uyama Tomohiko (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, 2007), 99–121. 43. See Barkhatova, Russkaia svetopis′, 130–31. 44. Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (London: Laurence King, 2006), 152. 45. Hutchings, Russian Literary Culture, 39. 46. This use of the terms is also part and parcel of the literary tradition into which Tolstoy is entering, specifically his “rewriting” of the “Prisoner of the Caucasus” (1872)—a story already told by Pushkin before him. 47. Leo Tolstoy, “The Cossacks,” in The Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 93–94; Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi, “Kazaki,” in Sobranie sochinenii v 22 tomakh, vol. 3 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1978–85), 159–60. 48. Tolstoy, “The Cossacks,” 190; Tolstoi, “Kazaki,” Sobranie sochinenii, 3:251–52. His awakening and reverence for the people of the village in many ways remains a Romantic infatuation with the “natural man.” See also John Hagan, “Ambivalence in Tolstoy’s ‘The Cossacks,’” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1969): 28–47. 49. Tolstoy, “The Cossacks,” 93–94; Tolstoi, “Kazaki,” Sobranie sochinenii, 3:189. 50. Tolstoy, “The Cossacks,” 243; Tolstoi, “Kazaki,” Sobranie sochinenii, 3:301. 51. On the term inorodtsy, sometimes translated as “aliens” and used to refer to nonRussian inhabitants of the Russian empire between 1822 and 1917, see John W. Slocum, “Who, and When, Were the Inorodtsy? The Evolution of the Category of ‘Aliens’ in Imperial Russia,” Russian Review 57, no. 2 (April 1998): 173–90. 52. Hutchings, Russian Literary Culture, 38. Here Hutchings also cites Gary Saul Morson on the didactic implications in Tolstoy’s appropriation of the ocherk style. The ocherk is treated in greater detail in chapter 3. See also Morson’s “Genre and Hero/Fathers and Sons: Intergeneric Dialogues, Generic Refugees and the Hidden Prosaic,” in Literature, Culture and Society in the Modern Age, Stanford Slavic Studies, ed. E. J. Brown, L. Fleishman, G. Freidin, and R. Schupbach (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991) 4: 336–81. 53. Hutchings, Russian Literary Culture, 38. 54. Tolstoy, Sebastopol Sketches, trans. David McDuff , 176–77 ; Tolstoi, “Sevastopol′ v avguste 1855 goda,” Sobranie sochinenii, 2:200–201.

NOTES TO PAGES 34–37

239

55. Tolstoy, Sebastopol Sketches, trans. David McDuff , 179; Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi, “Sevastopol′ v avguste 1855 goda,” Sobranie sochinenii, 2:203. 56. Tolstoy, Sebastopol Sketches, trans. David McDuff, 109; Tolstoi, “Sevastopol′ v mae,” Sobranie sochinenii, 2:145. Moreover, photography was not yet capable of capturing the action of battle that is narrated (in, at times, seemingly photographic detail) in Sebastopol Sketches and War and Peace. 57. Barkhatova, Russkaia svetopis′, 53. 58. As Stephen Norris argues, Tolstoy takes issue in both Sebastopol Sketches and War and Peace with the visual and narrative—propagandistic and journalistic—accounts of war. “Tolstoy’s experiences prompted him to become a writer, and he intended to develop his ‘hero,’ truth.” Norris, A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812–1945 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 55. This “truth,” of a logocentric narrative variety, it could be argued, was in dialogue with the lubok, which various agents used as a means of mobilizing the Russian populace in the cause of war. Although Norris does not mention it explicitly, photography—like the wartime lubok—was a tool for circulating a particular, official narrative during the war to which Tolstoy was certainly sensitive. Norris discusses the reissue of Napoleonic lubki images as Crimean War propaganda. The lubki produced between 1853 and 1856 “articulated a specific national identity and elaborated on the myth of 1812” (57). For more on the narrative structure of Tolstoy’s works, see Gary Saul Morson, Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in ‘War and Peace’ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). 59. Viacheslav Ivanov, Selected Essays, trans. Robert Bird (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 203. 60. It should be noted that this portrait was taken at a transitional moment: Tolstoy is no longer in the army, but as per Russian cultural norms, he is still in uniform, albeit a simplified one. 61. Hutchings, Russian Literary Culture, 39. 62. Lev Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Collier and Son Company, 1917), 138; Tolstoi, Anna Karenina, vol. 9 of Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1985), 118–19. 63. This representation of mental abstraction further exemplifies Morson’s observations on the mental faculties of Tolstoy’s characters. Anna’s mind here is neither whole nor attentive as we see her in the habit of moving through the album and the unrealized immediacy of the photograph as tool. Thought and action are in disconnect, much like Morson’s example of Pierre’s and Oblonsky’s habitual smiles. Hidden in Plain View, 207. 64. Wedgwood, “Count Leo Tolstoi,” 251. I am indebted to Kathryn Duda, who first shared this wonderful article with me. Frances Julia Wedgwood (1833–1913) was a writer and journalist who also published several critical pieces on her contemporaries, including George Eliot and John Ruskin. She was the niece of Charles Darwin and the grandniece of one of the earliest pioneers of photography, Thomas Wedgwood. 65. Wedgwood, “Count Leo Tolstoi,” 252.

24 0

NOTES TO PAGES 37–40 66. Ivanov also laments Tolstoy’s lack of transfiguration in his depiction of the world.

Selected Essays, 203. 67. Wedgwood, “Count Leo Tolstoi,” 251. 68. Ibid., 255. The infinite fragmentation reminds us of Roland Barthes’s photographic “madness.” Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), 13. 69. Thomas Seifrid, “Gazing on Life’s Page: Perspectival Vision in Tolstoy,” PMLA 113, no. 3 (1988): 436–48; Donna Tussing Orwin, Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, 1847–1880 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Morson does not explicitly mention the magic lantern, but his descriptions of the minds of Tolstoy’s characters in War in Peace come close to matching its operations: “Tolstoy occasionally compares attention to a narrow beam of light that may illuminate only a small part of what is going on in the mind at any given time.” Morson, Hidden in Plain View, 200. 70. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 2008), 769; Tolstoi, Voina i mir, in Sobranie sochinenii, 6:211. 71. For more on the magic lantern as technology, see L. H. Laudy, The Magic Lantern and Its Applications (New York: E. & H. T. Anthony, 1886); Nikolai Petrovich Zhivotovskii, Volshebnyi fonar′, ego opisanie i upotreblenie (St. Petersburg, 1874). 72. For an analysis of Schopenhauer, see Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 55; Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966), 138. The problem of perception, attention, and truth is also addressed by Morson in Hidden in Plain View. 73. Seifrid, “Gazing on Life’s Page,” 443. John Bayley also takes note of Tolstoy’s so-called peepshow method on display in Hadji Murad. “This is essentially the method, on a meticulous and miniature scale, that makes War and Peace a vast scenic panorama.” Bayley, introduction to The Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy, viii. 74. Tolstoi, diary entry, March 21, 1898, in Sobranie sochinenii, 22:86. See also Seifrid, “Gazing on Life’s Page,” 443. Similar devices (called both peepshows and kinetoscopes) are widely regarded as the precursors of the cinema. At the turn of the century they were ubiquitous fixtures at sideshows and fairs. See W. K. L. Dickson and Antonia Dickson, History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope, and Kinetophonograph (1895), facsimile ed. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2000); and Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 136, 269n274. 75. Hutchings, Russian Literary Culture, 37. Also noted in Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts, 375. To take this image, Tolstoy would have most likely set up a portable camera and employed a second person to operate it. 76. Leah Bendavid-Val, Song without Words: The Photographs and Diaries of Countess Sophia Tolstoy (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2007), 30. 77. Tolstoy cited in Ol′ga Ershova, “L. N. Tolstoi v fotografiiakh V. G. Chertkova,” in Tolstoi v zhizni, ed. Tat′iana Popovkina and Ol′ga Ershova, vol. 1 (Tula: Priokskoe knizhnoe izdatel′stvo, 1988), 122. 78. A. Zotov, “Lev Tolstoi i russkie khudozhniki,” in L. N. Tolstoi v izobrazhenii russkikh khudozhnikov (Moscow: Izogiz, 1953), 3.

NOTES TO PAGES 40–42

24 1

79. Tolstoy in William Nickell. The Death of Tolstoy: Russia on the Eve, Astapovo Station, 1910 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 88. Additionally, while he was in semiexile, one of Tolstoy’s main concerns was the plight of the Dukhobors. Tolstoy’s outspoken views on the Orthodox Church and its repression of religious sectarians, such as the pacifist Dukhobors, drew increasing pressure from the central government authorities and censorship of his works. Iconic images of Tolstoy with the Dukhobors continued to proliferate after his death. A glossy two-page reproduction of the painting Tolstoi i dukhobory by K. A. Veshchilov is featured in the Tolstoy issue of Solntse Rossii from 1912 (no. 145, November 7, centerfold), with the caption “Itak, druz′ia, v dobryi put′” (And so, friends, safe passage). 80. Gary Jahn, “Tolstoy as a Writer of Popular Literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, ed. Donna Tussing Orwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 115. 81. Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861– 1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 337. 82. This view of art is presented largely in his treatise What Is Art? (Chto takoe iskusstvo?), which was heavily censored by the Russian authorities upon its completion in 1898. Here Tolstoy attempted to create a program of synthetic artistic representation, linking the expression of spiritual and emotive clarity with artistic accessibility. Tolstoy, What Is Art?, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 40; Tolstoi, Chto takoe iskusstvo?, in Sobranie sochinenii, 15:80. 83. See further discussion in Caryl Emerson, “Tolstoy’s Aesthetics,” in Orwin, The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, 240. 84. Tolstoy, What Is Art?, 86; Tolstoi, Chto takoe iskusstvo?, 15:130. 85. Ibid. 86. Caryl Emerson notes that these categories of judgment are essential for Tolstoy’s valuation of art. She writes, “True/counterfeit and good/bad: these two axes of judgment must be applied to every human product that claims to be art.” Emerson, “Tolstoy’s Aesthetics,” 243. 87. For more on Tolstoy and his vegetarianism see Peter Brang, Ein unbekanntes Russland: Kulturgeschichte vegetarischer Lebensweisen von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Cologne: Bohlau, 2002). 88. On the subject of narrative proliferation and the iconography of Tolstoy see Nickell, Death of Tolstoy, 89–113. 89. Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya, My Life, trans. John Woodsworth and Arkadi Klioutchanski (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2010), 32; Sof′ia Tolstaia, Moia zhizn′, vol. 1, ed. B. Remizov (Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2011), 41. 90. T. K. Popovkina, “Kollektsiia fotografii S. A. Tolstoi,” Tolstoi v zhizni (1988), 9. 91. Sophia Andreevna also, on occasion, included photographic images in her diary. She illustrated stories written for her children with photographs, particularly “Kukolki-skelettsy” (story published 1910, photograph from 1905). See Bendavid-Val, Song without Words, 26–27, 112–113. 92. Sophia Andreevna’s self-portraits are also telling of her level of artistry. They reflect a pictorialist aesthetic and at times a theatrical flair—a style that calls to mind Karelin’s photographic portraits. This comparison is also made in Bendavid-Val, Song without Words, 34–35.

24 2

NOTES TO PAGES 43–47 93. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 8. 94. Entry from July 16, 1897, in Sof′ia Andreevna Tolstaia, Dnevniki, vol. 1 (Moscow:

Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1978), 266. 95. A few comments by Susan Sontag might illuminate Sophia Tolstoy’s psychological state here, both her “addiction” to making photographs and her willingness to give them away (in order to make more): “As we make images and consume them, we need still more images; and still more. . . . Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and a means of making it obsolete.” Sontag, On Photography, 179. 96. Entry from January 8, 1895, Sofia Tolstoy, The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy, trans. Cathy Porter (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 144; S. A. Tolstaia, Dnevniki, 1:227. The term “dark ones” was used by Sophia and Tolstoy’s domestic staff to refer to Tolstoy’s disciples, the pilgrims, and the drifters who flocked to Yasnaya Polyana, including Vladimir Chertkov. Sophia explains that she coined the term to refer to the “mysterious people who came to see Lev Nikolaevich” and to distinguish them from those visitors from “secular society” (svetskie), but with a clear play on light versus dark. Later the term came to be used to apply to all Tolstoyans. Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya, My Life, 801 n353. 97. See S. A. Tolstaia, Dnevniki, 1:227. This incident calls to mind a more recent apocryphal story about Sophia Andreevna and her pistol shot through a portrait of Vladimir Chertkov at Yasnaya Polyana. A depiction appears in the film The Last Station (2009), as William Nickell notes on his website, “The Death of Tolstoy,” http://humweb.ucsc.edu/bnickell/tolstoy/tolstoy/ station.html. The site is a rich visual companion to his monograph The Death of Tolstoy. He notes that Sophia Andreevna did fire a gun with blanks in the summer of 1910. 98. Entry from October 21st, 1910, in Sofia Tolstoy, Diaries, 407; S. A. Tolstaia, Dnevniki, 2:222. Perhaps to this end, Sophia published her own photographs during her lifetime, including a family album. 99. See reproduction of the photograph’s reverse in Bendavid-Val, Song without Words, 219. 100. Entry from September 25, 1910, Tolstoi, “Dnevnik dlia odnogo sebia,” Sobranie sochinenii, 22:420. This photograph (taken after the anniversary photograph) is likely the last of Sophia Andreevna and Tolstoy together, taken by Valentin Bulgakov. Ibid., 22:487n24. 101. Lev Tolstoy, Tolstoy’s Letters, vol. 2, trans. R. F. Christian (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978), 396; Tolstoy, unsent letter to S. A. Tolstaia, Sobranie sochinenii, 19:86. 102. In addition to photographing Tolstoy, Chertkov also used the camera as a way to smuggle Tolstoy’s banned works between England and Russia in 1906. Ershova, “L. N. Tolstoi v fotografiiakh V. G. Chertkova,” Tolstoi v zhizni, 1:121. Chertkov’s “transcriptual” activities also included recording Tolstoy on a phonograph and transcribing Tolstoy’s words and deeds. 103. The cameras are described as momental’nye apparaty. Ershova, “L. N. Tolstoi v fotografiiakh V. G. Chertkova,” Tolstoi v zhizni, 1:122. 104. Ibid. Chertkov also utilized a smaller “hidden camera” (skrytaia kamera) to capture Tolstoy “unaware.” 105. Louise McReynolds, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 114. Here McReynolds’s discussion is focused not on Tolstoy but on the market for celebrity images (particularly actresses) in the late nineteenth century.

NOTES TO PAGES 47–49

24 3

106. Reproduced in Nickell, Death of Tolstoy, 12. 107. Nickell speaks similarly of the journalists who came to Yasnaya Polyana. One example shows Chertkov being photographed by Tapsell, who is photographed while taking Tolstoy’s portrait, thereby also becoming part of the picture. Death of Tolstoy, 92. Not surprisingly, this proprietorship extends to Tolstoy’s manuscripts and publications. The 1928 Complete Works of Tolstoy (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo]) includes Chertkov’s description of his role in mediating the manuscripts for publication and includes (photographic) reproductions of the manuscripts. In their respective writings both Sophia Andreevna and Chertkov repeatedly assert their role in editing Tolstoy’s manuscripts. 108. See Nickell, Death of Tolstoy, chapter 1, “The Family Crisis as a Public Event,” 13–54. 109. On Tolstoy, literary copyright, and authorial rights, see Ekaterina Pravilova, A Public Empire: Property and the Quest for the Common Good in Imperial Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 215–16, 226–27, 230–40. 110. The journal was a family affair. In 1905 Prokudin-Gorsky took over the editorship from his father-in-law, Aleksandr Lavrov. Before taking command of the journal, ProkudinGorsky was identified simply as a periodically contributing “amateur-photographer.” 111. Svetlana Garanina, “Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky,” The World of 1900–1917 in Color/Mir 1900–1917 v tsvete, 2003, 14, http://www.prokudin-gorsky.ru/downloads.shtml. 112. Ibid. 113. It was precisely for the ease of reproduction that Prokudin-Gorsky preferred his process of three-color plate exposures rather than the easier-to-use Autochrome process, also available at the time. Prokudin-Gorsky’s plates, unlike the positive Autochrome prints, lent themselves more easily to enlargement via a lithographic process. 114. See also Robert H. Allshouse, Photographs for the Tsar: The Pioneering Color Photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Commissioned by Tsar Nicholas II (New York: Dial Press, 1980). 115. “Zapiski ob avtorskom prave fotografa gosudarstvennoi dume, ot 11 Russkikh Fotograficheskikh Obshchestv,” Fotograf-liubitel′ 6 (1910): 188. The first copyright law in Russia, issued in 1828, was enacted to halt the unauthorized publication of literary works as part of the tsar’s censorship statute. The author or translator was given exclusive rights, to be succeeded by his or her heirs, to be protected for another twenty-five years after the author’s death. This time was extended to fifty years in 1857 in response to a request made by Pushkin’s widow. In 1845 the State Council extended copyright protection to musical works and a year later to the fine arts. By 1897, the laws were again under review. However, it was not until 1906 that a new draft of the statute, which would extend copyright to literature, music, works of fine art, and photographs, was under discussion in the State Duma. It was passed by the Duma in 1909 and ratified by the tsar in 1911. “One major departure from previous practice was the rejection of the concept of copyright as ‘property.’ The law merely asserted that copyright was sui generis and subsists in literary, musical, artistic, and photographic works.” Michael A. Newcity, Copyright Law in the Soviet Union (New York: Praeger, 1978), 6–9. In more recent scholarship, see Pravilova, Public Empire, 253–57, 218–23. 116. For an English audience, the controversy is explained in Vassili Spiridonov’s introduction to Sofia Tolstoy’s autobiographical My Life: “The whole question of the will and the

24 4

NOTES TO PAGES 49–51

going away of Tolstoy [ukhod′], of the difference with his wife, and of the subsequent dealings with his property, has given rise to an immense literature in Russia . . . [I]t is treated as a kind of cause célèbre in which the whole of humanity is to judge between Tolstoy and his wife. The importance of this book lies in the fact that in it for the first time Countess Sophie Andreevna Tolstoy herself states her own case in full.” Preface to Autobiography of Countess Tolstoy, by Sophie Andreevna Tolstoy, trans. S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1922), 8. 117. Solntse Rossii, no. 53 (November 1911). 118. See also Elena Barkhatova, Russkaia svetopis′. 119. “Ot redaktsii,” Solntse Rossii, no. 53 (November 1911): 13–14. 120. This claim to photographs and ownership parallels the fraught disputes over manuscripts as well. As Nickell notes by way of the popular press, the public “found itself arbitrating the family dispute over Tolstoy’s legacy.” Death of Tolstoy, 15. Not only did the dispute include Sophia Andreevna and Chertkov, but also Alexandra Tolstoy, who was close to Chertkov, and sided with her father and against her mother. Her publication of Posmertnye khudozhestvennye proizvedeniia L′va Nikolaevicha Tolstogo (Moscow: Tipografiia I. D. Sytina, 1912) is an emblematic example. Here her prefaces lay claim to her father’s manuscripts and his wishes; photographic reproductions of the manuscripts themselves are included, and Chertkov’s photographs of Tolstoy herald each volume as authorial frontispieces. 121. Solntse Rossii, no. 46 (November 1912). I am grateful to William Nickell for noting that these are images taken by Chertkov. The small images are not attributed in this issue. 122. These tiny Tolstoys and Sophia Andreevnas continue to appear in the history of imaging Tolstoy. The publication of Tolstoi v zhizni in a third volume (a collection of photographs of Tolstoy between 1900 and 1905 compiled by the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow) features gray-scaled negative prints of iconic Tolstoy photographs in miniature, accenting the introductory pages of text. See L. V. Gladkova, ed., Tolstoi v zhizni: L.N. Tolstoi, ego sem′ia, rodstvenniki, druz′ia i znakomye, vol. 3, 1900–1905 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi muzei L. N. Tolstogo, 2013). 123. Spiridonov offers this characterization in his preface to the memoir: “In her story about this domestic drama she has not sinned against the truth; she has gone back again into the past deeply and with sincerity—everyone who reads her work without prejudice will admit this. . . . Continual references to the difficulties of her position as a mother, insistent emphasis upon the mutual love of herself and her husband, and the allusions to “friends” who entered the house, got possession of the mind, heart, and will of Leo N. and disturbed the harmony of their married life—all this creates an impression in the reader’s mind that S. A. T., in writing her autobiography, was guided by a definite purpose, that of contradicting the unfavorable rumours about her which circulated everywhere and were getting into the newspapers and magazines” (Spiridonov, preface to Autobiography of Countess Tolstoy, 21). 124. Solntse Rossii, no. 46 (November 1912): 10. 125. Ibid. 126. Morson, Hidden in Plain View, 205.

NOTES TO PAGES 55–56

24 5

2. The Diffusion of Domesticated Photography 1. Though the review was never published, it was passed along to the author, Alexander Ivanov, who received it warmly. See “M. Voloshin: Iz neizdannogo, Stereoskop,” New Review/ Novyi zhurnal 168–69 (1987): 232–38. 2. The use of the uncanny (unheimlich) here is precisely in the sense of Freud: the feeling of unease or dread aroused by an inability to distinguish whether a representation (e.g., wax figures, lifelike dolls) is alive or inanimate. Favorite literary examples used by Freud are E. T. A. Hoffmann’s stories. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 135. 3. Voloshin views the story as the next page in the genre of the fantastic Petersburg tale. See “M. Voloshin: Iz neizdannogo,” 237. Voloshin did have a stereoscopic viewer and a collection of stereoscopic photographs. They are now kept at the author’s house museum in Koktebel. From an interview with the Voloshin scholar Roza Khruleva, June 2011. 4. While it was by no means a simple task to take photographs even by the start of the twentieth century, and photography was still a pastime only for a largely elite class outside the studio setting, photographs became fixtures in middle-class and aristocratic homes in albums and as portraits hung on walls. The ubiquity of photography among the middle class is also a basic premise of Pierre Bourdieu’s Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). 5. William Darrah, The World of Stereographs (Gettysburg: W. C. Darrah, 1977), 128–29. 6. Ivan Turgenev’s influence is palpable in “Stereoscope,” a fact not missed by Voloshin. In Turgenev’s “Klara Milich” an obsessive young man reproduces a stereographic photograph of the deceased actress Klara in a futile attempt to bring her closer, to bring her back from the dead. In the seemingly liminal space between dreaming, reality, and the illusory mimeticism of the stereoscope, she comes so close as to seem alive while always remaining elusively distant. Klara does miraculously return to life in the young man’s imagination—his lucid dreams, which seem to cross over into his reality in a material way as the young man wakes to find himself clutching a lock of Klara’s hair. 7. Andrei Belyi in “A Book about Leonid Andreev,” trans. Frederick H. White, in Frederick White, Memoirs and Madness: Leonid Andreev through the Prism of the Literary Portrait (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 131–32. White’s Memoirs and Madness is structured in two parts: part 1 is a complete translation of the multiauthored Kniga o Leonide Andreeve; part 2 is a commentary on the same book. I will cite both the English in White’s translation throughout and the original Russian edition, as follows: Andrei Belyi in Maksim Gor′kii et al., Kniga o Leonide Andreeve: Vospominaniia (Berlin: Izdatel′stvo Z. I. Grzhebina, 1922) 180–82. In Petersburg Bely makes reference to a figure that seems to call up Andreev in Petersburg: “I knew an unfortunate fellow whose black cloud was very nearly visible to the gaze: he was a literary man.” Andrei Bely, Petersburg, trans. David McDuff (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), 44; Andrei Belyi, Peterburg (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2004), 43. 8. Vladimir Kupchenko, introduction to Maksimilian Voloshin, Istoriia moei dushi (Moscow: AGRAF, 1999), 5.

24 6

NOTES TO PAGES 56–58 9. On zhiznetvorchestvo see Irina Paperno’s introduction to Creating Life: The Aesthetic

Utopia of Russian Modernism, ed. Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 1–11; Michael Wachtel, “Zhiznetvorchestvo: The Conflation of Art and Life,” in Russian Symbolism and the Literary Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 143–56. 10. The link between modernism, material culture, and celebrity has been firmly established in Western scholarship, and particularly the fetishization of the self, through the works of Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), and Aaron Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), among many others. A survey of this literature is also included in the introduction to Jonathan Goldman, Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). 11. Omry Ronen has described the “Silver Age” as a misnomer that is at the least reductive, while also implying a “debasement, imitation, weakness, pale stylization.” However, the closing lines of Ronen’s study have a metaphorical bearing on the “ghosts” of this chapter: “The pious hope of the author of the present study is that, perhaps, more awareness of the history of this misnomer might help exorcise its pallid, deceptive, and meddlesome ghost.” Ronen, The Fallacy of the Silver Age in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature (Ann Arbor: Harwood Academic, 1997), 94. 12. Voloshin’s cultivation of the kruzhok and culture of his dacha is treated in Barbara Walker, Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle: Culture and Survival in Revolutionary Times (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). And on Voloshin as painter, see R. I. Popova, ed., Maksimilian Voloshin—Khudozhnik, sbornik materialov (Moscow: Izdatel′stvo “Sovetskii khudozhnik,” 1976). 13. “Autobiographical collage” is drawn from Martha Langford as a term used to describe a photographic album. Langford, Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 41. On the Andreev archive in the West, now housed primarily at the University of Leeds Library, see Richard Davies, “Leonid Andreyev Manuscripts in the Collections of Vadim, Valentin and Savva Andreyev,” in Poetry, Prose and Public Opinion: Aspects of Russia, 1850–1970: Essays Presented in Memory of Dr. N .E. Andreyev, ed. William Harrison and Avril Pyman (Letchworth, UK: Avebury, 1984), 321–81; see the interview with Aleksandr Andreev, Leonid Andreev’s grandson, in “My vsegda zhili na chemodanakh,” Ogonek, no. 9 (1997): 5. 14. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), x. 15. Liudmila Ken and Leonid Rogov, Zhizn′ Leonida Andreeva, rasskazannaia im samim i ego sovremennikami (St. Petersburg: Kosta, 2010), 96. Andreev comments on the Tolstoy phenomenon in a conversation with his American translator: “Tolstoy once made a statement about some of my work in which he said: ‘When I read Andreyev I get the impression that he is trying to frighten me, but I am not afraid.’ Since that time every critic in Russia has used this phrase.” Herman Bernstein, “A Day with Leonid Andreyev in His Russian Home,” New York Times, September 5, 1909. Andreev further reflects on the phrase and its impact on his

NOTES TO PAGES 58–59

24 7

authorial persona in his later diary: see Leonid Andreev, S.O.S., ed. Richard Davies and Ben Hellman (Moscow: Atheneum-Feniks, 1994), 44–45, 63–64. 16. The Russian characterization of Andreev’s reputation is treated in Frederick White, “The Early Visual Marketing of Leonid Andreev,” in Marketing Literature and Posthumous Legacies: The Symbolic Capital of Leonid Andreev and Vladimir Nabokov, by Yuri Leving and Frederick H. White (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 21. The Poe moniker was given to him by his English translator and promoter, Herman Bernstein. See “A Story by the Russian Poe: ‘The Ocean’ by Leonid Andreyev,” New York Times, January 22, 1911, and “A Day with Leonid Andreyev.” Bernstein also lauded Andreev as the greatest living Russian author after Tolstoy. For more on Poe and Andreev, see Joan Delaney Grossman, Edgar Allan Poe in Russia: A Study in Legend and Literary Influence (Würzburg, Ger.: Jal-Verlag, 1973). 17. Boris Zaitsev in “A Book about Leonid Andreev,” trans. White, 97; Boris Zaitsev in Gor′kii et al., Kniga o Leonide Andreeve, 133. 18. Kornei Chukovskii in “A Book about Leonid Andreev,” trans. White, 67 (translation altered for clarity); Chukovskii in Gor′kii et al., Kniga o Leonide Andreeve, 89. 19. Fredrick H. White, “Leonid Andreev through the Prism of the Literary Portrait,” Memoirs and Madness: Leonid Andreev through the Prism of the Literary Portrait (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 8. 20. Aleksandr Blok in “A Book about Leonid Andreev,” trans. White, 74; Blok in Gor′kii et al., Kniga o Leonide Andreeve, 101. 21. This “about” also shares the language of Roland Barthes’s punctum. In Camera Lucida Barthes defines punctum as a “sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), 27. The punctum is opposed to the studium, which can also be defined as the photographer’s intent. The studium is the harmonious relationship between the viewer and the photographer; the punctum, on the other hand, is what makes a photograph truly striking for the viewer. Here the punctum might be the dissonant (dark vs. light, death vs. life) components of Andreev’s world that so shocked his modernist readers. 22. Belyi in “A Book about Leonid Andreev,” trans. White, 137 (translation altered for clarity); Belyi in Gor′kii et al., Kniga o Leonide Andreeve, 190–91. 23. Cited in Ken and Rogov, Zhizn′ Leonida Andreeva, 220–21. Bely describes an encounter with Andreev that resembles the masquerade ball in Bely’s own novel Petersburg (1905). In this scene Andreev’s face seems to be a mask, although he is one of the only guests without one. He also has the ability to see through the physical masks that others are wearing and is the only one to identify Bely at the masquerade. Belyi in Gor′kii et al., Kniga o Leonide Andreeve, 136. For more on The Black Maskers in the context of masquerade, see Colleen McQuillen, The Modernist Masquerade: Stylizing Life, Literature, and Costumes in Russia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 130–31. 24. Belyi in “A Book about Leonid Andreev,” trans. White, 138 (translation altered for clarity); Belyi in Gor′kii et al., Kniga o Leonide Andreeve, 192.

24 8

NOTES TO PAGES 59–61 25. The group included, among others, Nikolai Teleshov, Iuly Bunin, Vikenty Veresaev,

and Ivan Belousov, as well as visitors such as Maxim Gorky, Aleksandr Kuprin, Valery Briusov, and Konstantin Balmont. Gorky would continue to figure in Andreev’s life as a mentor, friend, critic, and correspondent. 26. Gorky, trans. White, Memoirs and Madness, 44; Gor′kii et al., Kniga o Leonide Andreeve, 60; Gorky in “A Book about Leonid Andreev,” trans. White, 60. This reference to the indifference of “beautiful Nature” finds its origin in Aleksandr Pushkin’s famous poem “Whether I Wander along Noisy Streets” (“Brozhu li ia vdol′ ulits shumnykh,” 1829). See White, “A Book about Leonid Andreev,” 56n76. 27. Leonid Andreev, quoted in Zaitsev in “A Book about Leonid Andreev,” trans. White, 102; Zaitsev in Gor′kii et al., Kniga o Leonide Andreeve, 140. 28. Leonid Andreev, quoted in Richard Davies, Photographs by a Russian Writer: An Undiscovered Portrait of Pre-Revolutionary Russia (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1989), 11. 29. Ibid. 30. Zinaida Gippius, quoted in Temira Pachmuss, “Leonid Andreev as Seen by Zinaida Gippius,” Slavic and East European Journal 9 (Summer 1965): 142. In Vesy she also wrote her negative review of Lazarus, among others. “Chelovek i boloto,” Vesy, no. 5 [1907]: 53–58, reprinted in her Sobranie sochinenii: My i oni (Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 2003), 154–59. 31. Herman Bernstein, “Interview with the Author of ‘Red Laughter,’” New York Times, September 8, 1908. 32. Pachmuss, “Leonid Andreev as Seen by Zinaida Gippius,” 152. 33. Leonid Andreev and Ivan Bunin, Lazarus; The Gentleman from San Francisco, trans. Abraham Yarmolinsky (Boston: Stratford, 1918), 9–10; Leonid Andreev, “Eleazar,” in Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh, vol. 2 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), 192–93. The earliest publication of “Lazarus” appeared in Zolotoe runo in 1906 (no. 11–12). Likely making a thematic link, or perhaps creating its own minipolemic, Rozanov’s analysis of A. A. Ivanov’s “Appearance of Christ to the People” and a watercolor of Ivanov’s studio also appear in this issue. 34. “The Red Laugh” (“Krasnyi smekh,” 1904–5), written about the debacle of the Russo-Japanese War, similarly enlivens the abstraction of war and madness. The once-abstract “Red Laugh” becomes tangible and real for its narrator: “‘They’ll smother us! . . . Let’s escape through the window.’ ‘Impossible,’ said my brother, ‘We can’t go there. Look what’s out there!’ Out the window, in the still, crimson light, stood the red laugh.” Leonid Andreev, “The Red Laugh,” in Visions: Stories and Photographs by Leonid Andreev, trans. Henry and Olga Carlisle (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), 142; Leonid Andreev, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), 2:73. 35. Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, “O Leonide Andreeve,” in Leonid Andreev: Bol′shoi i malen′kii, ed. Kornei Chukovskii (St. Petersburg: Izdatel′skoe biuro, 1908), 86. 36. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 134. 37. Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 56.

NOTES TO PAGES 62–64

24 9

38. Andrei Ol′ shortly thereafter married Andreev’s sister Rimma. 39. In this period Andreev’s image also came to encompass that of the paterfamilias. He had four sons: Vadim (b. 1902), Daniil (b. 1906), Savva (b. 1909), and Valentin (b. 1912), and one daughter, Vera (b. 1910). 40. Zaitsev in “A Book about Leonid Andreev,” trans. White, 100 (translation altered for clarity); Zaitsev in Gor′kii et al., Kniga o Leonide Andreeve, 138–39. 41. As Molly Blasing reminds us, the practice of domestic interior photography was well under way at the start of the twentieth century, a practice that could transform the interior of the house into not only a legible series of representations but handheld and portable ones. Blasing, “Through the Lens of Loss: Marina Tsvetaeva’s Elegiac Photo-Poetics” Slavic Review 73, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 27. 42. Chukovskii in “A Book about Leonid Andreev,” trans. White, 64; Chukovskii in Gor′kii et al., Kniga o Leonide Andreeve, 83. 43. See the caricature picturing a crying Andreev being whipped by a critic reprinted in “Leonid Andreev o ‘Literaturnom raspade,’” Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 2 (Moscow: RAPP i institut LPA Komakademii, 1932), 103. The caricature was originally printed in Shtrikhi i blestki in 1903. Judging by her trademark bun, the critic pictured is most likely Sophia Andreevna Tolstoy. For more examples of contemporary caricatures, see throughout Andreev, Sobranie sochinenii. 44. Zaitsev in “A Book about Leonid Andreev,” trans. White, 101–2 (translation altered for clarity); Zaitsev in Gor′kii et al., Kniga o Leonide Andreeve, 140. 45. Alexander Kaun, Leonid Andreyev, a Critical Study (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1924), 96–98. Merezhkovsky uses a similar metaphor. He criticizes Andreev for playing at horror like a child, for not being frightened himself, as one should be, at the manifestation of the devil: “I am not afraid of what Andreev scares me with; but I am afraid that he is himself frightened, like children, for whom sometimes, during a game with the devil, the devil appears.” Merezhkovskii, “O Leonide Andreeve,” 90–91. 46. See White, Memoirs and Madness, 211–25. 47. Ibid., 284. 48. Andrei Belyi, “Rasskazy Leonida Andreeva,” Vesy, September 1906, 65–66. 49. Chukovskii in “A Book about Leonid Andreev,” trans. White, 65; Chukovskii in Gor′kii et al., Kniga o Leonide Andreeve, 85. 50. One of the earliest and lasting functions of photography: to reveal what is invisible to the naked eye. See the discussion of Muybridge and stop-motion photographs in Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 138–48; and Tat′iana Saburova, “Early Masters of Russian Photography,” in Photography in Russia: 1840–1940, ed. David Elliott (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 31–40. 51. See Frederick White’s analysis of the early postcards of Andreev. White, “The Early Visual Marketing of Leonid Andreev,” 17–38. 52. What is meant by snapshot is an informal image taken by an amateur photographer. A snapshot (momental′nyi snimok), as opposed to the studio portrait, opens the potential for the unexpected, for interruptions in an intended shot—mistakes that might be edited out of

250

NOTES TO PAGES 64–74

a studio portrait with retouching. Snapshots became possible with advancements in camera technology, being taken as they are with a handheld camera. The first handheld camera was introduced to the Western market by George Eastman with the Kodak in 1888. See Robert Hirsch, Seizing the Light: A Social History of Photography (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2008), 139. 53. Louise McReynolds, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 114. Also taken up in Alison Rowley, Open Letters: Russian Popular Culture and the Picture Postcard, 1880–1922 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 81. We might also consider Chertkov’s photos of Tolstoy rendered as postcards in this light. They at once serve as the commodities that McReynolds describes and attempt to subvert commodification with their Tolstoyan aphorisms. See chapter 1. 54. See Alison Rowley’s Open Letters, 78–84. The theater producer and writer A. S. Voznesenky kept such an album, collecting letters, photographs, and postcards from famous authors of the day between 1890 and 1937. Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), f. 2247, op. 1, ed. 32. 55. White analyzes this development in Andreev through his clothing and attitude, from rebellious young author to assured, mature celebrity in “Early Visual Marketing,” 17–38. 56. Perhaps in testament to this intimacy, Vadim later appropriated this album as a personal diary and scrapbook after his father’s death. Vadim, as well as Andreev’s son Daniil and daughter, Vera, went on to become authors in their own right, extending the project of authorship begun by their father. Vadim in particular will be discussed later in the chapter. 57. Vidler, Architectural Uncanny, 3. 58. Ibid. 59. Bernstein, “A Day with Andreyev.” 60. For more on the journal, see chapter 1. Andreev was pictured regularly in the journal in photographic portraits taken by other photographers (including a portrait by Sherling) and in his own photographic self-portraits. These published photographs by Andreev include a winter landscape (January, no. 5, 1914, 12), self-portraits (January, no. 1, 1912, 3; November, no. 146, 1912, 1), and photographs of his family (October, no. 51, 1911, cover, 9). 61. Solntse Rossii, no. 51 (October 1911), cover. 62. Ibid. 63. For more on Vadim’s role in shaping his image of the Andreev legacy, see also White, “Creating Posthumous Legacies: The Power to Consecrate and to Blaspheme” in Leving and White, Marketing Literature, 69–82. 64. It was first published without photographs in the Parisian émigré journal Russkie Zapiski as Povest′ ob ottse in 1938. The 1963 edition was published in Russia and coincided with a renewal of Soviet interest in and scholarship on Andreev. See White, “Creating Posthumous Legacies,” 69–98. Vadim would continue the story of his life after the death of his father in Istoriia odnogo puteshestviia (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1974). The photograph in the Andreev family scrapbook (fig. 2.9) is part of this latter history, accounting for Vadim’s first emigration to France and his return to Batum during the Russian Civil War. White links Vadim’s autobiographical subjectivity in this memoir with the first, noting that “The History of One Journey reflects the trajectory and strategies of Vadim’s habitus within the field

NOTES TO PAGES 74–76

251

of cultural production––that of a poet and the son of Leonid Andreev, both of which Vadim invests with symbolic power.” White, “Market Pressures” in Leving and White, Marketing Literature, 88. The quotation at top is a well-known parodic poem (“Iunker Schmidt,” 1854) by Aleksei Tolstoy and the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers, writing under the pseudonym Koz′ma Prutkov. While the contemplation of suicide could offer a very troubling insight into Vadim’s psyche, the poem lends a distinctly ironic take to the dark theme. For more on the passport photo in general, see conclusion. 65. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 63–64. 66. Vadim Andreev, Detstvo (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1963), 5, 237–38. The work was (re)published just at a time (during the Thaw) when Andreev began to reappear in Soviet scholarship. 67. The Autochrome will be discussed in more detail in the final sections of the chapter. 68. The color might also call to mind the famous portrait of Andreev in a red shirt by Ilya Repin (1905). Repin had a friendly relationship with Andreev. He was one of Andreev’s neighbors on the Karelian Isthmus and also provided illustrations for Andreev’s famous short story “The Seven Who Were Hanged” (1908). 69. Solntse Rossii, no. 1 (January 1912): 3. 70. The image reproduction included in this chapter is from one of Andreev’s own Autochrome photographs of his drawing, held at the Leeds Russian Archive. However, this image also reveals another facet of Andreev’s photographic practices. His capture of his own paintings and drawings demonstrates the kind of fluid exchange among his various artistic practices. Here we see the various angles from which Andreev approaches his literary subject: in text, painterly image, and framed in his photograph. 71. Leonid Andreev, in “Leonid Andreev khudozhnik,” Solntse Rossii, no. 1 (January 1912): 7. 72. Ibid. 73. Rudolph Arnheim, quoted in Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 11–12. 74. Kittler, Gramophone, 12. 75. Ibid. The slippage between the Symbolist and neorealist branding of Andreev is also evident in Evgeny Zamyatin’s 1918 speech for the People’s University in Lebedyan. The essay is infused with visual metaphors in order to explicate the differences between the realists, neorealists, and Symbolists, describing Andreev largely as a Symbolist. However, many of the same descriptions of naturalism applied to the neorealists might as easily be applied to Andreev’s earlier works, as we have seen. See Evgeny Zamyatin, “Contemporary Russian Literature,” in A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Evgeny Zamyatin, trans. Mirra Ginsburg (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992), 34–50. 76. Pavel Zhukov, L. Andreev i A. Blok (Ufa, Russ.: Izdanie I. A. Kuznetsova, 1915), 9. 77. Vera Andreeva, Dacha na Chernoi rechke (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1974), 37–38. 78. Andreev made Vera into a dramatic photographic subject as often as he did Vadim. A more playful moment from Andreev’s photographic archive is captured in a photograph of Vera

252

NOTES TO PAGES 76–78

with her brother Savva in their nightshirts at Vammelsuu. On the back of the photographic portrait is a short typed vignette, identified as a cinematographic excerpt written by Andreev in 1912. Titled “Italian Beggars,” it reads in part, “These poor children, as the reader can see, need the immediate assistance of a sympathetic heart. . . . See how the older child, having so little to itself, protectively presses his innocent little sister under his wing . . . how much infinite thoughtfulness is in her deep dark eyes, encircled with blue from hunger.” “Andreevy Vera i Savva, deti pisatelia L. Andreeva. Portret vdvoem,” Literaturnyi muzei, St. Petersburg, Russia, inv. 3772. In a second image of Vera alone, apparently from the same series, Andreev calls his daughter a “battleship by the name of Vera” that is housed in “L. Andreev’s shipyard” and launched in May of 1910 (her birthdate). “Andreeva Vera v detstve, doch′ L. N. Andreeva,” Literaturnyi muzei, St. Petersburg, Russia, inv. 3773. In the space of this photographic object we encounter the confluence of two hobbies in Andreev’s textual framing: that of Andreev the sailor and Andreev the photographer. And while this is certainly a playful moment for the camera and likely before the typewriter, framed perhaps as a game with the children, it bears recalling that it is still crafted by Andreev the author. 79. There are two volumes of Fallen Leaves (2 boxes) from 1913, published by A. Suvorin’s publishing company Novoe vremia, both with photographs, the second with manuscript pages in facsimile. I will refer to the works as Fallen Leaves. 80. See Anna Lisa Crone, Rozanov and the End of Literature: Polyphony and the Dissolution of Genre in Solitaria and Fallen Leaves, Colloquium Slavicum Bd. 10 (Würzburg: Jal-Verlag, 1978); Anna Lisa Crone, “Rozanov and Autobiography: The Case of Vasilii Vasilievich,” in Autobiographical Statements in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature, ed. Jane G. Harris (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 36–51; and Kristina Anatolievna Toland, “Picturing the Self: The Changing Medium of Russian Autobiography” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2010). 81. Kristina Toland argues that they work in tandem with the text and thematic discussions of the family members pictured; however, the 1913 edition is not consistent in the placement of these images, changing the reading of these photographs considerably from one to another. Toland, “Picturing the Self.” 82. Vasilii Rozanov, Solitaria, trans. S. S. Koteliansky (London: Wishart, 1927), 96; Vasilii Rozanov, Opavshie list′ia (Moscow, 1992), 63. 83. The importance of the coin collection for Rozanov is explored in depth in Mikhail Spasovskii, V.V. Rozanov v poslednie gody svoei zhizni (New York: Vseslavianskoe izdatel′stvo, 1968), 87–123. 84. Langford, Suspended Conversations, 95. 85. Ibid., 5. 86. The fact that they are reproductions printed in a book also distances them from an authentic intimacy. 87. Viktor Shklovsky, “Literature without a Plot,” in Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991), 195; Viktor Shklovsky, “Literatura vne ‘siuzheta,’” in O teorii prozy (Moscow: Krug, 1925), 168.

NOTES TO PAGES 79–83

253

88. Shklovsky goes on to say in more extreme terms on this subject, “Under no circumstances should the reader infer from my comments on Rozanov’s domesticity that Rozanov was ‘pouring out’ his soul to the reader. No, he had assumed the ‘confessional mode’ as a device.” Shklovsky, “Literature without a Plot,” 195. 89. For more on ostranenie or defamiliarization in photography, see chapter 3. 90. Crone, Rozanov and the End of Literature, 124. We might also extend the idea of what Crone describes as “genre fragments” to the reproductions of his handwriting and the photographs. 91. Cited in part in Toland, “Picturing the Self,” 141–43n197; Vasilii Rozanov, Uedinennoe (Petrograd: Suvorin, 1913), 1–2. 92. See chapter 1. 93. Voloshin reviewed Andreev’s works, including Life of Man (for Shipovnik), as well as “Iuda Iskariot” (not favorably) in Zolotoe runo in 1907. 94. The relationship between the spouses became frayed through a too close relationship with the Ivanovs in Petersburg. See Marina Tsvetaeva, “Zhivoe o zhivom: Voloshin,” in Izbrannaia proza (New York: Russica, 1979); Vladimir Kupchenko and Zakhar Davydov, Vospominaniia o Maksimiliane Voloshine (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1990); Walker, Maximilian Voloshin, 57–70. 95. The photographs, housed at the Pushkinskii dom (IRLI) archive and the literary museum, span from 1905 to the early 1930s. 96. It was not published in its entirety until it was “framed” and resurrected by the Voloshin scholar Vladimir Kupchenko in 1991. While there are several published versions of a text titled Istoriia moei dushi, I reference the most complete one here, compiled by Kupchenko as Istoriia moei dushi, which includes all of Voloshin’s autobiographical writings (Moscow: AGRAF, 1999). I am deeply indebted to Kupchenko’s widow, Roza Khruleva, who generously aided my search for Voloshin’s writings on photography at Pushkinskii dom and provided me access to Kupchenko’s academic archive. Before his death, Kupchenko had planned to publish an article on Voloshin’s photography. 97. The regularity of the entries depended on his relationship with his wife: when relations were good, more content was added; when bad, no new entries for various periods of time. See Maksimilian Voloshin, Avtobiograficheskaia proza, dnevniki (Moscow: Kniga, 1991), 398. 98. The closest we will get to a forensic reading of the diary. 99. “Ia—glaz . . . Ia brosheno na zemliu / Chtob etot mir drobit′ i otrazhat′. . .’” Maksimilan Voloshin, Stikhotvoreniia (St. Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2009), 44. 100. Istoriia moei dushi, 114. The mirror theme is repeated in Istoriia moei dushi on several occasions. This topic is broached in conjunction with a discussion of Steiner and anthroposophy; it is introduced as Voloshin recounts a conversation with Anna Rudol′fovna Mintslova (an eccentric character and prominent theosophist) in which she describes having a one-way conversation with Voloshin’s photograph as a surrogate. This account is physically proximate to another of Voloshin’s pasted-in photographs in his notebook. Istoriia moei dushi, 132–33; IRLI, f. 562, op.1, ed. 442. On Mintslova, see Maria Carlson, No Religion Higher Than Truth:

254

NOTES TO PAGES 83–87

A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875–1922 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 89–95. 101. Marina Tsvetaeva, “Zhivoe o zhivom,” in Popova, Maksimilian Voloshin, 207. One of Voloshin’s photographic portraits of Tsvetaeva and group portraits with the Efrons at Koktebel are included with this publication. See Popova, Maksimilian Voloshin, 138, 142, 148, 162. See also Elena Kruglikova’s reminisciences in Popova, Maksimilian Voloshin, 98–103. 102. Maksimilian Voloshin, letter to Margarita Sabashnikova, in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 11 (Moscow: Ellis Lak, 2013), 188. 103. Maria Rubins, Crossroad of Arts, Crossroad of Cultures: Ecphrasis in Russian and French Poetry (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 157. 104. The Egyptian princess was called also called “Tia” or “Tiya.” Voloshin procured the copy of the partial bust in Paris. In his early writings, its image was fused with Margarita Sabashnikova. See the poem by the same name from 1905, “Taiakh.” She also figures in his famous poem “Dom poeta” (1926). She is pictured in numerous photographs included in almost every photographically illustrated book on Voloshin’s work. The sculpture figures in the protagonists’ pilgrimage to Koktebel in Liudmila Ulitskaya’s The Big Green Tent (2011). 105. As Barbara Walker argues, at Koktebel Voloshin “offered a vital emotional and intellectual haven from the prevailing avant-garde literary scene of the period.” Walker, Maximilian Voloshin, 4. 106. This reading of collecting is constructed under the influence of Walter Benjamin: “The period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership—for a true collector, the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object. In this circumscribed area, then, it may be surmised how the great physiognomists— and collectors are the physiognomists of the world of things—turn into interpreters of fate.” Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Collecting,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 60. 107. Chukovskii in “A Book about Leonid Andreev,” trans. White, 61–62; Chukovskii in Gor′kii et al., Kniga o Leonide Andreeve, 79. The Lumière brothers’ Autochrome process was not the only example of color photographic technology at this time. Prokudin-Gorsky was also promoting his own triple-negative color photographic process and photographing in color. See chapters 1 and 3. 108. See also Hirsch, Seizing the Light, 143–44. 109. See also John Wood, The Art of the Autochrome: The Birth of Color Photography (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993). 110. Chukovskii in “A Book about Leonid Andreev,” trans. White, 66–67; Chukovskii in Gor′kii et al., Kniga o Leonide Andreeve, 88. 111. Davies, Photographs by a Russian Writer, 20. 112. For more on the term svetopis′, see the introduction and chapter 1. 113. Chukovskii in “A Book about Leonid Andreev,” trans. White, 61; Chukovskii in Gor′kii et al., Kniga o Leonide Andreeve, 79. 114. Discussions in photographic journals and magazines were rife with advice on developing Autochromes for window display, as color would need to be intensified for best effect.

NOTES TO PAGES 87–90

255

Advertisements for manufactured frames and instructions for making one’s own were also included. See Bertrand Lavédrine and Jean-Paul Gandolfo, The Lumiere Autochrome: History, Technology, and Preservation, trans. John McElhone (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2013), 176; “Dew Apparatus, &c.,” British Journal of Photography, December 6, 1907, 93; “Colour in Photography,” Amateur Photographer, December 24, 1907, 617. 115. Andreev, Detstvo, 19–20. “Ward No. 6” is a reference to Anton Chekhov’s story (1892) of the same name set in a psychiatric ward. 116. Anna Ilinichna took an active part in the photographic enterprise as well, serving not only as a model but also at times as the photographer. In one letter from Italy in 1914 to his mother, Andreev describes the humorous revelation that Anna’s hat brim had ruined a whole set of exposures. See the translation of the letter by Richard Davies as “Leonid Andreyev: From Letters to His Mother from Abroad, 1910–14” in Literature & Photography: Interactions 1840–1990, ed. Jane Rabb (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 180–83. 117. To be exact: the stereo pairs are 1.7 x 4.1 inches; half stereo are 3.5 × 7 and 3.5 × 3.5 inches; the single image plates are 7 × 5 and 9.3 × 7 inches. 118. Chukovskii in “A Book about Leonid Andreev,” trans. White, 64; Chukovskii in Gor′kii et al., Kniga o Leonide Andreeve, 83. Vera Andreeva also remembers her father dressing some of his photographic subjects in various costumes: “Sometimes father was not content with the usual appearance of his models and had them put on fantastic turbans, some kind of Greek tunics, put some kind of staff in the form of a scepter in their hands and stood them in heroic poses.” Andreeva, Dacha, 35. 119. Langford, Suspended Conversations, 41. 120. Andreeva, Dacha, 34. 121. Olga Carlisle, quoted in Davies, Photographs of a Russian Writer, 8. This is certainly part of Olga Carlisle’s own branding of herself as the daughter of the Russian (literary) intelligentsia. She says something quite similar in 1987 in the New York Times in a short biography of her grandfather: “My father told me that these were the works of his father, my grandfather, which I would read when I was older. In the meantime I could look at pictures of him and of my father as a young boy. I spent hours leafing through albums and holding up glass plates to the light. They opened for me the world my father had known when he was a child. There was the house in which my grandfather lived, an enormous wooden castle with a tower. St. Bernard dogs at play. A boating party gliding down a river. The family and guests assembled at the sun-flecked tea table, presided over by my grandfather in a white linen summer suit. And again and again, my grandfather, dressed as a sea captain, as a medieval prince, an artist, a Russian peasant.” She goes on to state that her father “assumed the legacy” of her “once-celebrated” grandfather. Carlisle, “My Grandfather, Leonid Andreyev: Heard Again, Loud and Clear,” New York Times, October 4, 1987. 122. Irina Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), xiii. See also the discussion of the magic lantern in chapter 1. 123. Leonid Andreev, “Andreyev on Motion Pictures,” trans. Herman Bernstein, New York Times, October 19, 1919; Andreev, “Pis′ma o teatre,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 6:519.

256

NOTES TO PAGES 90–94 124. Andreev, “Pis′ma o teatre,” Sobranie sochinenii, 6:518. In a much earlier essay from

1896 Gorky associates his experience of cinema with the black-and-white shadowy world of symbolism: “Yesterday I was in the kingdom of the shadows. . . . This is not life but the shadow of life and this is not movement but the soundless shadow of movement. I must explain, lest I be suspected of symbolism or madness.” Maxim Gorky, “The Lumière cinematograph,” Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, vol. 3, eds. Phillip Simpson, Andrew Utterson, and K. J. Shepherdson (London: Routledge, 2004), 7. 125. For a discussion of the character of uslovnost′ see Yuri Lotman and B. A. Uspenskii, “Uslovnost′ v iskusstve,” in Ob iskusstve (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPb, 2005), 374–76. 126. Andreev quoted in Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception, trans. Alan Bodger (London: Routledge, 1994); Leonid Andreev, “O kino,” Cine-fono 1 (1909): 10. 127. This notion of a fractured self might be compared to Tolstoy’s assumption that the whole self can never be fully known. See chapter 1. 128. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Daguerreotype,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (Stony Creek, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 37–38. 129. Carlisle, quoted in Davies, Photographs of a Russian Writer, 8. 130. Chukovskii in “A Book about Leonid Andreev,” trans. White, 63; Chukovksii in Gor’′kii et al., Kniga o Leonide Andreeve, 83. 131. Semyon Frank, Filosofiia i zhizn′. Etiudy i nabroski po filosofii kul′tury (Saint Petersburg: Izdanie D. E. Zhukovskogo, 1910), 312–13. The “madness and horror” is likely a reference to “The Red Laugh.” 132. Andreev, “Iuda Iskariot,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 3:212. 133. Leonid Andreev, Ekaterina Ivanovna, in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1994), 448–49. 134. The play caused such a sensation that Ekaterina was placed on mock trial around Russia. For more on the play and the role of degeneration and madness in Andreev’s works see Frederick White’s Degeneration, Decadence and Disease in the Russian Fin de Siècle: Neurasthenia in the Life and Work of Leonid Andreev (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2014). 135. Andreev describes this inspiration in a letter to the director of the Moscow Art Theater, Nemirovich-Danchenko. See N. P. Balatova, “Pis′ma L. N. Andreeva k Vl. I. Nemirovichu–Danchenko i K. S Stanislavskomu,” in Voprosy teatra (Moscow: Vserossiiskoe teatral′noe obshchestvo, 1966), 286–89. 136. Roger Callois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” trans. John Shepley, October 31 (Winter 1984): 30. 137. Ibid., 30. 138. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 137. 139. Newhall, The History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 115. This is opposed to Barthes’s conclusion that the photograph is art precisely because the viewer can, through the experience of the punctum of the photograph, annihilate the medium of the photograph. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 39.

NOTES TO PAGES 94–96

257

140. In our contemporary milieu, this feeling is expressed by the popular theory of the “uncanny valley.” Computer-generated images (CGI), 3-D films, and video games are said to have a threshold of human-like representation in animation. Specifically, viewers are less willing to accept animated characters the more human they look. See Angela Tinwell, The Uncanny Valley in Games and Animation (New York: CRC Press, 2015). 141. Andreev, “Pis′ma o teatre,” 518. Krauss would later note the protocinematic parallels between stereographic space and that of cinema in similar terms: “In both [cinema and the stereoscope], the pleasure derives from the experience of a simulacrum: the appearance of reality from which any testing of the real-effect by actually, physically, moving through the scene is denied. And in both, the real-effect of the simulacrum is heightened by a temporal dilation. What has been called the apparatus of cinematic process had, then, a certain proto-history in the institution of stereography.” Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde, 139. 142. It bears noting that, perhaps coincidentally, the Lumière brothers created both the Autochrome photographic process and the first moving pictures. They quickly abandoned photography in favor of developing cinema technology. 143. Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 56–57. 144. Ibid. 145. Leonid Andreev, “Mysli sovremmenikov,” Cine-fono, no. 1 (October 1909): 10. 146. Reference to the film is also made in a feature on Andreev at his dacha in “Kak provodili leto pisateli, khudozhniki i artisty,” Ogonek, September 26, 1909, 8. In this short interview, Andreev also lamented the shortcomings of photography, speaking in favor of cinema. 147. Leyda, Kino, 43–44. And Drankov would only rise in prominence—as the first cinematographer in Russia—along with an ever-growing film industry in Russia. Important for our purposes here, Drankov began as a photographer for the State Duma and a photocorrespondent for the London Illustrated News before turning to cinema (see Leyda, Kino, 31). 148. Leonid Andreev, S.O.S. Spasite! (Paris: Union, 1919), 10. 149. In his final diary, Andreev also conflates the Bolsheviks with the “black maskers” from his earlier play. 150. Andreev, S.O.S., ed. Davies and Hellman, diary entry, May 5, 1918, 73. 151. Andreev, Detstvo, 247–48. By this time, Andreev and his family had to give up the villa and move to two rented dachas in short succession. 152. From an unpublished letter: RGALI, f. 11, op. 2, d. 30, 1. In the letter, Rozanov reports that he is dying and expresses the hope that Andreev might be able to turn the tide of the revolution with his popular clout—which, however, had been waning in the previous few years. 153. Blok in “A Book about Leonid Andreev,” trans. White, 78; Blok in Gor′kii et al., Kniga o Leonide Andreeve, 103. 154. In 1926, Rimma Andreeva (Andreev’s sister) would write to Voloshin to ask if she could visit the dacha. Letters collected in IRLI, f. 562, op. 3, ed. 183. Following Voloshin’s death, his widow was able to convert the dacha into an archive and house museum, which still stands today. Most of the collection consists of Voloshin’s watercolors and paintings, along with his personal library. See Walker, Maximilian Voloshin, 184–96.

258

NOTES TO PAGES 97–105 155. Vladimir Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense, trans. Michael Scammell and Vladimir

Nabokov (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 89–90.

3. Microgeography, Macroworld 1. Entries from July 11 and 18, 1930, in Mikhail Prishvin, Dnevniki: 1930–31 (St. Petersburg: Rostok, 2006), 150, 158. This text also appears in Mikhail Prishvin, “1930 god,” Oktiabr′ 7 (1989): 164. See also the explication and partial paraphrasing in Irina Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 173. 2. See Kak my stroili metro (Moscow: Izd. “Istoriia fabrik i zavodov,” 1935), and Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 43–46. 3. Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, 44–45. 4. Ibid., 45. 5. Naiman,“On Soviet Subjects and the Scholars Who Make Them,” Russian Review 60 (July 2001): 315. 6. Ibid., 308. 7. Entry from December 31, 1917, in Mikhail Prishvin, Dnevniki: 1914–1917 (St. Petersburg: Rostok, 2007), 546. 8. Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary, trans. Richard Sieburth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 53. For Benjamin this is the failure of education in the nascent Soviet state; Russia’s isolation from the West is largely to blame. 9. Prishvin maintained a close relationship with his tutor and mentor, the conservative author Vasily Rozanov, until Rozanov’s death in 1919. Alexandra Smith states, “Undoubtedly in his diaries Prishvin presents himself as a thinker and a writer whose work is a ‘free appendix’ to the collection of Russian classical literature and which carries on from where, in Prishvin’s view, Vassily Rozanov left off.” Smith, “The Enigma of Mikhail Prishvin: Prishvin’s Pre-Soviet and Soviet Diaries,” New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 2000, 80. This notion is more fully explored in V. A. Fateev’s “Novaia vstrecha s izgnannym gimnazistom Prishvinym,” in Zhizneopisanie Vasiliia Rozanova (Saint Petersburg: Pushkinskii dom, 2013). On Rozanov, see chapter 2. 10. Prishvin had his own connection to the Old Believers through his mother, who was born and raised in an Old Believer family. This bond would continue as a theme throughout many of his works and underlay his particular sympathy for the Russian peasant. 11. Prishvin was not the only artist in this age to discover his artistic beginnings in ethnographic work; the Expressionist painter Vasily Kandinsky traces the use of abstraction in his work to his studies of the Finno-Ugric peoples in Siberia in 1889. See Peg Weiss, Kandinsky and Old Russia: The Artist as Ethnographer and Shaman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 12. Cited in Evgeniia Zhurbina, Teoriia i praktika khudozhestvenno-publitsicheskikh zhanrov (Moscow: Mysl′, 1969), 56. The genre, which began with the physiological sketches of the 1840s, was later transformed by the more radical authors of the 1860s into the didactic,

NOTES TO PAGES 106–108

259

socially engaged function described by the Soviet Literary Encyclopedia. These authors’ subjects ranged from scientific articles and short travel pieces to philosophical and literary sketches. The genre’s evolution, founded primarily on a “sense of reality and observation,” was formative in shaping the very understanding of the term “realism” in the nineteenth century. Jane Costlow, “Icons, Eclipse, and Stepping off the Train: Vladimir Korolenko and the Ocherk,” in Russian Writers and the Fin de Siècle: The Twilight of Realism, ed. Katherine Bowers and Ani Kokobobo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 199. And for the influence of the ocherk on Dostoevsky’s writings, see Gary Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 14–17. 13. Mikhail Prishvin, Moi ocherk (Moscow: Moskovskoe tovarishchestvo pisatelei, 1933), 10. 14. Smith, “Enigma of Mikhail Prishvin,” 86. 15. Mikhail Prishvin, V kraiu nepugannykh ptits: Ocherki Vygovskago kraia (St. Petersburg: F. V. Devrien, 1907), 2–3. 16. There is a superficial parallel to be made with some of the contemporary criticism of Leonid Andreev here, including that of Ivanov-Razumnik. As I state in chapter 2, Andreev was often accused of losing himself in his characters, to his detriment as an author. With Prishvin, immersed as he was in the natural world, the criticism of self-abandonment or absorption takes on a very different tone. 17. Ivanov-Razumnik (Razumnik Vasil′evich Ivanov), “Velikii Pan,” in Tvorchestvo i kritika (St. Petersburg: Kolos, 1922), 29–30. Ivanov-Razumnik’s image of the “Great Pan” may refer to Pan (1894), an early novel by Knut Hamsun, who later won the Nobel Prize in Literature (1920). Prishvin’s early diary also reveals that Knut Hamsun was a subject of thought in his Symbolist religious-philosophical circle. The figure of Pan also appears in some of Prishvin’s musings on metaphysics, nature, and self. In particular, see the diary entry from March 12, 1909, in Prishvin, Rannii dnevnik: 1905–1913 (Saint Petersburg: Rostok, 2007), 211. 18. See Ray J. Parrott, “Questions of Art, Fact, and Genre in Mikhail Prishvin,” Slavic Review 36 (1977): 465–74. 19. Andrei Khailov, “Put′ k ‘drugu-chitateliu,’” Russkaia literatura 4 (1958): 165–66. Iana Grishina also employs the term “microgeography” to describe Prishvin’s writings and some of his photographic compositions. Grishina, “Stat′i o M. M. Prishvine: Ia naidu sebe svobodnuiu rodinu,” 115, http://www.prishvin.ru/books/Article.Yana.Grishina.pdf. 20. See chapter 1. 21. Prishvin, V kraiu nepugannykh ptits (1907), 3. 22. Ivanov-Razumnik, “Velikii Pan,” 29. 23. Ibid., 30–31. 24. Prishvin’s work also has a visual continuity with an earlier collaborative work between the painter Ivan Shishkin and the photographer Andrei Karelin: a colored photo album dedicated to the city of Nizhny Novgorod. See discussion and reproduction of the album in Elena Barkhatova, Russkaia svetopis′: Pervyi vek fotoiskusstva, 1839–1914 (Saint Petersburg: Al′ians—Liki Rossii, 2009), 192–93.

260

NOTES TO PAGES 108–110 25. The fin-de-siècle saw a rise in Karelian nationalism. Karelian lands were long contested

by Sweden, Finland, and Russia, with Finns making a particular claim to native Karelians as their near kin. For more on the region and its history see Marina Vitukhnovskaya, “Cultural and Political Reaction in Russian Karelia in 1906–1907: State Power, the Orthodox Church, and the ‘Black Hundreds’ against Karelian Nationalism,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 49, no. 1 (2001): 24–44; and in the long view: W. R. Mead, “Finnish Karelia: An International Borderland,” Geographical Journal 118, no. 1 (1952): 40–54. Soviet Karelia would come to the forefront of the Soviet consciousness through the White Sea Canal project, to be treated in more detail later in this chapter. 26. Robert H. Allshouse, Photographs for the Tsar: The Pioneering Color Photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Commissioned by Tsar Nicholas II (New York: Dial Press, 1980), xiii. Utilizing his own signature process of color photography, based on special chemically treated plates exposed at intervals, Prokudin-Gorsky was limited in his choice of subjects to those that were entirely still or fixed objects. And as we know, while on the surface this ethnographic survey was undertaken as a pedagogical project, like Prishvin’s, this was not the ultimate goal. Rather, Prokudin-Gorsky hoped that it would lead to the official recognition of photography as an art, the equivalent of painting or literature. See chapter 1. 27. This references not only the transformation of photographic material into drawing but also the soft photographic portraits by photographers such as Miron Sherling. He often embellished his portraits of famous artists by etching on the photographic negative, creating an effect that rendered the final photograph much more like a painting. Many of his portraits were commissioned by Solntse Rossii. See reproductions in Barkhatova, Russkaia svetopis′, 324–25. 28. In 1905 Mikhail Prokudin-Gorsky became the editor of the journal Amateur Photographer (Fotograf-liubitel′), which presented technical discussions of photographic technologies, reviews of artistic exhibitions, and translations of foreign photographic publications. See chapter 1. 29. The majority of these, from what can be reconstructed from his albums of proofs, were bridges and other at-risk structures. Prokudin-Gorsky noted that these images “were of little interest to the broad public . . . not bound together by a common idea or system.” Victor Minachin, “The Spendors of the Russia Collection” at the Library of Congress (“Kollektsiia dostoprimechatel′nostei Rossii” v biblioteke Kongressa), 42–43, http://www.prokudin-gorsky. ru/downloads.shtml. 30. Anatolii Lunacharskii, Sovetskoe foto, no. 1 (1926): 2. Just as this quotation was actually reprinted several times throughout the mid-1920s, I have chosen to do so in my own text. See introduction. 31. As Parrott states, “The artistic ocherki of the period . . . tend to focus on the problem of the individual faced with the reality of this transformation. A major theme is the dichotomy between new and old values occasioned by the country’s sociopolitical upheaval.” Parrott, “Questions of Art,” 471. 32. For more on literatura fakta and the term “factography,” see October 118 (Fall 2006), and especially Devin Fore’s introduction to the issue, pp. 3–10; Literatura fakta: Pervyi sbornik materialov rabotnikov Lefa, ed. Nikolai Chuzhak (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1929).

NOTES TO PAGES 110–113

261

33. Elizabeth Papazian, Manufacturing Truth: The Documentary Moment in Early Soviet Culture (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Press, 2009), 15. 34. Prishvin, Moi ocherk, 201. 35. For a more extensive exploration on the meaning of “documentary” in the works of Tret′iakov and film of this period, see Elizabeth Papazian’s Manufacturing Truth, 3–22, 13–15, 64, 120, and particularly relating to photography, 7–8, 13–15, 60–61, 134–35. 36. Entry from July 18, 1939, in Prishvin, Dnevniki 1930–1931, 161. 37. Sergei Tret′iakov, “The New Leo Tolstoy,” October 118 (Fall 2006): 48. Maria Gough argues that this view of authorship was most likely influenced by Yury Tynianov’s essay “The Literary Fact,” where he argues that literary fact was “underwritten by the convention of the author’s name, the ‘final stroke that gives this stylistic persona literary specificity.’” Gough’s introduction to Tret′iakov’s “New Leo Tolstoy,” 1. 38. “Na kolkhozy!” Novyi Lef 11 (1928): 9, cited in Maria Gough, “Radical Tourism: Sergei Tret′iakov at the Communist Lighthouse,” October 118 (Fall 2006): 166. 39. Erika Wolf, “The Author as Photographer: Tret′iakov’s, Erenburg’s, and Il′f’s Images of the West,” Configurations 18 (2010): 385. 40. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 223. 41. Ibid. 42. Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” 232. 43. Each of these authors will be treated in chapter 4. 44. Sergei Tret′iakov, “Moi zritel′nyi dnevnik,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 2 (1934): 25. 45. Ivan Romanov in Lichnoe delo, Prishvin Mikhail Mikhailovich: Vospominaniia sovremennikov, ed. L. A. Riazanova and Ia. Z. Grishina (St. Petersburg: Rostok, 2005), 87. 46. Anatolii Lunacharskii, “Nasha kul′tura i fotografiia,” Sovetskoe foto no. 1 (1934): 6. This text is reprinted from an earlier speech. 47. The journal Sovetskoe foto (known as Proletarskoe foto from 1931 to 1933), which reprinted many of Lunacharsky’s early articles and speeches on photography, helped to fashion this multifaceted and largely reportage-based vision for photography. Like prerevolutionary journals, it promoted new methods of camera work and amateur photography. 48. Sergei Tret′iakov, “Evoliutsiia zhanra,” Nashi dostizheniia, no. 7–8 (1934): 161. “Evolution of the Genre” also marks a departure in Tretyakov’s thinking about the ocherk and documentary. Papazian notes that 1934, the moment of the codification of socialist realism, is the “dead end of Tretiakov’s utopian model” as “the point where ‘documentary’ and ‘fiction’ meet.” Papazian, Manufacturing Truth, 65. The All-Union Congress of Ocherkists took place in June 1934, before the First Congress of Soviet Writers in August of that year. See more on socialist realism in chapter 4. 49. Mikhail Prishvin, “Boevaia forma literatury,” Nashi dostizheniia, no. 7–8 (1934): 164–65. 50. Ibid., 165. 51. M. M. Prishvin, “Zhuravlinaia rodina,” in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4 (Moscow: GIKhL, 1957), 389–90.

262

NOTES TO PAGES 113–119 52. Prishvin, “Boevaia forma literatury,” 165. 53. Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” 233 (emphasis in the original). 54. Prishvin, Moi ocherk, 203–4. 55. Ibid., 210. 56. Entry from August 17, 1935, in Mikhail Prishvin, Dnevniki: 1932–35 (St. Petersburg:

Rostok, 2009), 769. 57. Mikhail Prishvin in Iana Grinshina’s commentary, Dnevniki: 1928–29 (Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 2004), 513. 58. Entry from November 8, 1930, in Prishvin, Dnevniki: 1930–1931, 275. There is an additional level of intimacy that might be added to this understanding of photography and photographic material. Prishvin developed all his photographs at home. These first photo proofs might be read as drafts or notes to be transformed by Prishvin’s literary hand to achieve this expressiveness. 59. Through the early 1930s, Prishvin devotes several passages in his diary to his musings on the works, diaries, and image of Tolstoy. In the 1930s he also reads Sophia Tolstoy’s diaries, which become the subject for several passages on a feminine and domestic ideal. 60. Istoriia zavodov, 3–4 (published pamphlet), RGALI, f. 562, op. 1, no. 96. The adage is drawn from a toast made to writers gathered at Maxim Gorky’s house in 1932. See Cynthia Ruder, Making History for Stalin: The Story of the Belomor Canal (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 44; Papazian, Manufacturing Truth, 3–4. For more on its origin: Omry Ronen, “‘Inzhenery chelovecheskikh dush’: K istorii izrecheniia,” Lotmanovskii sbornik, vol. 2 (Moscow: O.G.I, Izd-vo RGGU, 1997), 393–400. 61. Belomorsko-Baltiiskii Kanal imeni Stalina: Istoriia stroitel′stva, ed. Maksim Gor′kii et al., 23 cm (Moscow: OGIZ, 1934), 79. References to History of the Construction in this work differentiate between the two editions: 23 cm and 30 cm. The 30 cm edition (the rarer of the two) features more photographs and diagrams than the 23 cm edition. 62. This erasure of the authorial signature extends to the White Sea Canal book’s archive. Several of Prishvin’s photographs were apparently considered alongside those included in the official White Sea Canal book, but his name figures nowhere. In the archive this image has Prishvin’s own caption, as included in his 1934 In the Land of Unfrightened Birds: “Vyg River. Photograph by the author 28 years ago,” State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), f. 7952, op. 7, d. 94. The title of Prishvin’s work is used at other points to describe old visions of Karelia in The History of the Construction. See Belomorsko-Baltiiskii Kanal, 23 cm, 232, 555. 63. Belomor: An Account of the Construction of the New Canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea, trans. Amabel Williams-Ellis, ed. Maxim Gorky et al. (New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1935), 105 (translation altered for clarity); BelomorskoBaltiiskii Kanal, 23 cm, 247. 64. Prishvin, V kraiu nepuganykh ptits (1934), 11. 65. Entry from March 12, 1909, in Prishvin, Rannii dnevnik, 211. The title is clearly drawn from the work of Turgenev, the author whom Prishvin called in this same entry “Pan.” 66. Prishvin, V kraiu nepuganykh ptits (1934), 28. Here, the old Karelia of Prishvin’s 1907 text is placed alongside the descriptions of the changed environment and people now living and toiling on the canal. Prishvin also includes portraits of tattooed prisoners in this 1934 edition

NOTES TO PAGES 119–122

263

of In the Land of Unfrightened Birds. Some of these images are also reproduced in Mikhail Prishvin, “Lesa k ‘Osudareve doroge,’” Nashe nasledie 2 (1990): 61. 67. Sergei Tret′iakov, “From the Photo-Series to the Extended Photo-Observation,” October 118 (Fall 2006): 75, 77; Sergei Tret′iakov, “Ot fotoserii—k dlitel’nomu fotonabliudeniiu,” Proletarskoe foto no. 4 (December, 1931): 45. 68. See also Parrott, “Questions of Art,” 473. 69. Dimitrios Latsis, “Landscape in Motion: Muybridge and the Origins of Chronophotography,” Film History 27, no. 3 (2015): 35n55. Latsis also deploys Henri Bergson to demonstrate the effect of Muybridge’s work on the spatialization of time (2, 17). 70. Tom Gunning, “Never Seen This Picture Before: Muybridge in Multiplicity,” in Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement, ed. Phillip Prodger (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 224–25. 71. At times, as is the case with Muybridge, the re-creation of movement in the series was not faithful to the order of the moments photographed; thus scientific objectivity was at times eschewed in favor of aesthetic concerns. 72. Sam Rohdie, Montage (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2006), 3–4. Rohdie begins this compendium on montage by describing the term most simply as “the joining together of different elements of film in a variety of ways, between shots, within them, between sequences, within these” (1). 73. Gunning, “Never Seen This Picture,” 224. 74. “Optical unconscious” is taken from Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and is discussed in Gunning, “Never Seen This Picture,” 224. 75. Gunning, “Never Seen This Picture,” 238. 76. Parrott, “Questions of Art,” 473. 77. Valeriia Prishvina, “Ot nauki k iskusstvu,” in Puti v neznaemoe: Pisateli rasskazyvaiut o nauke, vol. 2 (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1962), 377–80, 383, cited in Parrott, “Questions of Art,” 474. 78. Dziga Vertov, “From Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 88. 79. “Redaktsii al′manakhov ‘god XVI–XVII’: Prishvin M. M. ‘Ottsy i deti’ (ocherk) 27.10.1933,” RGALI, f. 622, op. 1, d. 233, 5. 80. Dimitrios Latsis argues for a closer investigation of the spatialization of Muybridge’s landscapes. See his “Landscape in Motion.” 81. Prishvin, V kraiu nepuganykh ptits (1934), 27. 82. Vertov, “From Notebooks, Diaries,” Kino-Eye, 222. 83. Rohdie, Montage, 136. This distinction is made in comparing Muybridge’s photographic series and Marey’s motion studies, rendered into a single photographic space. See also Latsis, “Landscape in Motion.” 84. Mikhail Prishvin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6 (Moscow: GIKhL, 1957), 93. 85. David Gillespie, “First Person Singular: The Literary Diary in Twentieth-Century Russia,” Slavonic and East European Review 77 (October 1999): 622.

264

NOTES TO PAGES 123–124 86. These dialogues are paralleled in the literary sphere by groups such as RAPP and Sergei

Tret′iakov’s LEF (Levyi front iskusstv) group. While there were certainly points of exchange and continuity, artistic factions curated a voice in their respective journals: ROPF in Sovetskoe foto (begun in 1926; Proletarskoe foto, 1931–33) and Oktiabr′ later on the pages of Novyi LEF (1927–29). 87. Aleksandr Rodchenko, “Protiv summirovannogo portreta za momental′nyi,” Novyi LEF 4 (1928): 14–16. 88. As the opening essay of Ilya Erenburg and El Lissitzky’s short-lived Constructivist journal Veshch′/Objet/Gegenstand states, “Veshch′ will champion constructive art, whose mission is not, after all, to embellish life but to organize it.” Erenburg and Lissitzky, “Blokada Rossii konchaetsia: Poiavlenie Veshchi,” Veshch′, nos. 1–2 (1922): 1. 89. See A. N. Lavrent′ev, ed., Rakursy Rodchenko (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1992), 70–150; Aleksandr Rodchenko, Experiments for the Future: Diaries, Essays, Letters, and Other Writings, trans. Jamey Gambrell (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005), 187–98. 90. The “navel level” point of view was determined by early camera technology and the fact that cameras would necessarily be placed on tripods at navel level; but, as Rodchenko shows in the course of his article, the practice of shooting from the navel continues as a stylistic practice, representative of a traditional, painterly viewpoint. 91. Rodchenko, “Krupnaia bezgramotnost′ ili melkaia gadost′” and “Puti sovremennoi fotografii,” in Lavrent′ev, Rakursy Rodchenko, 203–8; Rodchenko, “Large-Scale Illiteracy or Dirty Little Tricks” and “The Paths of Contemporary Photography,” in Experiments for the Future, 204–12. 92. Rodchenko in Lavrent′ev, “Puti sovremennoi fotografii,” 206; Rodchenko, “Paths of Contemporary Photography,” in Experiments for the Future, 208. This directive is also noted earlier in Rodchenko, “Zapisnaia knizhka LEFa (1927),” in Lavrent′ev, Rakursy Rodchenko, 209. 93. A hint at the idea of photographic mapping is also present in Mayakovsky’s “This Is Why a Peasant Needs an Airplane” (1925): “This is why a peasant needs an airplane. / The entire village is as if on the palm of your hand. / The airplane rises up with a photographer, / He takes a photo and there you go: a map.” 94. László Moholy-Nagy, “Image Sequences: Series,” in Vision in Motion, ed. Paul Theobald (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1946), 208 (emphasis in the original). This phrase was deployed and redeployed by Moholy-Nagy in his writings after its first appearance in Bauhaus 2 in 1928. See also Moholy-Nagy “Photography Is Creation in Light,” in Moholy-Nagy, ed. Krisztina Passuth, trans. Mátyás Esterházy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 302–5. 95. Moholy-Nagy, “Image Sequences: Series,” 208. Generally the terms “photo-ocherk” and “photo-series” are interchangeable. Though the Filippov series, treated in detail in chapter 4, is initially referred to as photo-ocherk in the publication Proletarskoe foto, most often, in the photo-series, photographs tend to dominate, while in the photo-ocherk, they supply something more like illustrations to a text. On the German photo-series see Daniel H. Magilow, The Photography of Crisis: The Photo Essays of Weimar Germany (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012). As noted by Robert Lebeck, “By about 1930 the photographic

NOTES TO PAGES 124–128

265

essay—a kind of cinematic short story using static pictures—had gained acceptance as the most attractive means of expression of modern photojournalism in all leading magazines. At the same time, originality, new ideas and experiments were spreading.” Lebeck, Kiosk: Eine Geschichte der Fotoreportage, 1839–1973/A History of Photojournalism (Göttingen: Steidl, 2001), 122. The terms will be used interchangeably throughout. 96. Vladimir Griuntal′ and Grigorii Iablonovksii, Chto eto takoe? (Moscow: OGIZ, 1932). See also Mikhail Karasik, The Soviet Photobook 1920–1941 (Göttingen: Steidl, 2015), 580–83. 97. This game is like the “simplification” tasks designed by Rodchenko for his students at VKhUTEMAS. See Rodchenko, “The Material Design of the Object,” in Experiments for the Future, 194–95. 98. Griuntal′ and Iablonovksii, Chto eto takoe? 99. Sergei Morozov, “‘Chto eto takoe’: O detskoi fotoknige V. Griuntalia i G. Iablonovskogo,” Proletarskoe foto no. 10 (1932): 18. This language of “sensation” further recalls the central avant-garde tenet of faktura. See Maria Gough, “Faktura: The Making of the Russian Avant-garde,” RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 36 (1999): 32–59. 100. Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” in Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998), 6. Margarita Tupitsyn also identifies an affinity between Shklovsky’s notion of the very purpose of art (that is, to make the familiar unfamiliar) and the early photographic avant-garde. Tupitsyn, The Soviet Photograph, 1924–1937 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 5–6. 101. Sara Pankenier Weld, Voiceless Vanguard: The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-Garde (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 107–10. 102. Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” 5. See also Weld, Voiceless Vanguard, 108. 103. Sergei Morozov would go on to pen several Soviet histories of photography in Russia in the coming decades including Pervye russkie fotografy-khudozhniki (Moscow: Goskinoizdat, 1952), and Sovetskaia khudozhestvennaia fotografiia: 1917–1957 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1958). 104. Sergei Morozov, “‘Chto eto takoe,’” 18. 105. Ibid. It is unsurprising that the foto-zagadka and foto-vopros were ubiquitous features in children’s journals, including the pages of Pioner and Znanie-sila, in just this period. Griuntal′ was himself a frequent contributor, as was Rodchenko. 106. Lunacharskii, “Nasha kul′tura i fotografiia,” 6. 107. Ibid. 108. Rodchenko in Lavrent′ev, “Puti sovremennoi fotografii,” 208; Rodchenko, “The Paths of Contemporary Photography,” Experiments for the Future, 212. 109. Ot redaktsii, “Gruppa ‘Oktriabr′ dolzhna nemedlenno perestroit′sia, esli ona ne khochet postavit′ sebia vne riadov proletarskoi fotografii,” Proletarskoe foto no. 1 (1932): 12; partial citation in Tupitsyn, The Soviet Photograph, 105–6. 110. Quoted in Smith, “Enigma of Mikhail Prishvin,” 80. 111. Erika Wolf has written on the journal USSR in Construction, focusing on the editorial staff and the audience for the journal. She identifies the aesthetics of the photomontages in the journal as evidence of an extended avant-garde in Soviet photography, which lasted years beyond the dominance of formal experimentation in literature. Wolf, “USSR in Construction:

266

NOTES TO PAGES 128–132

From Avant-garde to Socialist Realist Practice,” 2 vols. (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1999); and “When Photographs Speak, to Whom Do They Talk? The Origins and Audience of SSSR na stroike (USSR in Construction),” Left History 6, no. 2 (1999): 53–82. Margarita Tupitsyn makes similar observations about photographic aesthetics in the late 1930s in The Soviet Photograph. 112. Evgeny Dobrenko shows that the Soviet popular press at the end of the first FiveYear Plan not only reflected an interest in a “new geography” that lauded “our achievements” but also constituted a reflection of a “new spatial perception,” requiring a response in print of “entertaining geography.” Dobrenko, “The Art of Social Navigation: The Cultural Topography of the Stalin Era,” in The Landscape of Stalinism, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 189. 113. For more on the extended photo-observation, see Sergei Tret′iakov, “From the Photo-Series to the Extended Photo-Observation” October 118 (Fall 2006): 71–77; “Ot fotoserii k dlitel′nomu fotonabludeniiu,” Proletarskoe foto no. 4 (1931): 20, 45. These subjects are also treated in detail in chapter 4. 114. Prishvin might be added to the number of “prominent authors” who contributed to the journal’s text as listed by Margolin: Isaac Babel, Nikolai Fadeyev, and Sergei Tretyakov. Victor Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy 1917–1947 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 166–67. 115. Mikhail Prishvin, Zolotoi rog (Leningrad: Izdatel′stvo pisatelei, 1933), 5. Many of his other photo-ocherki of the period, published in Oktiabr′ and Russkie vedemosti, featured developments in Soviet fur farming on the outskirts of Moscow. 116. He goes so far as to call his camera a “photo-rifle” and his work in the field “hunting with a camera” (okhota s kameroi, okhota s fotografiei). Dnevniki 1930–1931, 161. 117. USSR in Construction, no. 10 (1935). The English provided is from the English issues of the journal. 118. “Mountain Sheep,” USSR in Construction, no. 10 (1935). 119. “Caracul” refers to the loose, almost curled fur of juvenile mountain sheep. 120. USSR in Construction, no. 10 (1935). 121. Emma Widdis, Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 103. 122. Ibid. On the interest in a “new geography” of spaces and production at the end of the First Five-Year Plan, see Dobrenko, “The Art of Social Navigation,” 189. 123. On the subjects of documentary and creative geography, see Papazian’s Manufacturing Truth and Widdis’s Visions of a New Land. 124. In particular see the scenes of squirrel and sable hunting, mountain sheep markets, and sable, montaged with dynamic factory scenes—including a thematically disconnected scene of oil drilling and refining—and wool sorting (both by the mechanized arm of the factory and by hand). It was these hard-to-read juxtapositions in Vertov’s montage that also provoked criticism of the film. See Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); Yuri Tsivian, ed., Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).

NOTES TO PAGES 132–134

267

125. Prishvin’s archive reveals that that this approach was characteristic of his photographic process: he often took several images of the same subject from many different angles. Personal archive of M. M. Prishvin at the Dom-muzei M. M. Prishvina, Dunino. 126. See Tom Gunning on Muybridge’s time-lapse photography as montage in “Never Seen This Picture,” 222–57. 127. Vladimir Shmerling, “Zametki o dvukh zhurnalakh,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 2 (1936): 9. It was also in this year that Prishvin adapted his Ginseng (1933) into yet another screenplay (RGALI, f. 1125, op. 2, d. 284). 128. Shmerling, “Zametki o dvukh zhurnalakh,” 9. 129. Ibid. 130. Thematic parallels can certainly be drawn between this issue of USSR in Construction and Dziga Vertov’s filmic exploration of the outer republics of the Soviet Union in his One-Sixth of the World (Shestaia chast′ mira, 1926), including, most centrally here, the depiction of the fur industry. 131. At an exhibition of the author-photographer’s work at MAMM (Mul′timedia Art Muzei Moskva) in December 2015 (the first and only to date at a major gallery), five photographs displayed Prishvin’s prowess at the delicate capture. Spider webs also appear as part of a short piece by Prishvin in Pioner under the title “Okhota s fotoapparatom,” no. 13 (1933): 8. See also diary entry, August 31 (1930), in Prishvin, Dnevnik 1930–31, 201–4. 132. The photographers included M. Prekhner (Oratia), D. Debabov (West Siberia), G. Shashalski (Central Asia), N. Shestakov (Pushkino and Saltikovka), S. Bamuner (Leningrad), and N. Shekutyev (Kazan, Kirov, and Moscow). All “other photos” are credited to Prishvin. The cover photograph is probably not Prishvin’s but is like many “textural” photographs (of ploughed earth, for example) in his archive at his house museum in Dunino. 133. Grishina, “Stat′i o M. M. Prishvine,” 7. 134. The filmmaker Lev Kuleshov lauds the (early) American cinematic montage over that of the Russian precisely for its speed. See, for example, Lev Kuleshov, Iskusstvo kino: Moi opyt (Leningrad: Tea-Kino-Pechat′, 1929), 19–20. I posit that speed was never Prishvin’s aim in the construction of his montage. 135. By the late 1930s, as the use of montage was rising and editors such as Rodchenko, Stepanova, and Lissitzky were orchestrating many issues, the journal, in large part, did not accept photographs as they were submitted; rather they were altered, collaged photographs taken by different photographers and joined together into a single montaged image. Sources were at times a long list of photographers and/or a general credit to Soiuzfoto. However, we might also cite Rodchenko’s dynamic Parachuters issue (no. 12, 1935) or his White Sea Canal issue (no. 12, 1933) as authorially/artistically dominated and directed issues. Both, we should note, are the last issues of the year. They also feature photomontage and experimental layout, but not the “totalizing” montages I will discuss here. These issues are later lauded, along with Prishvin’s issue, in the pages of Sovetskoe foto as ones that had their own “point of view.” Vl. Shmerling, “Zametki o dvukh zhurnalakh,” Sovetskoe foto 2 (1936): 9. 136. In this issue the photomontages are credited to Es and El Lissitzky, while the photographs are credited to a long list of photographers, as well as local museums and cultural centers.

268

NOTES TO PAGES 134–138 137. Boris Agapov, “The Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic,” USSR in Construction

12 (1937). 138. Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 212. 139. Serguei Oushakine has written on the posterization of illustration in children’s books in the postrevolutionary environment in “Translating Communism for Children: Fables and Posters of the Revolution,” boundary 2 43, no. 3 (August 2016): 159-219. 140. Favorsky was a guest artistic editor for another issue (no. 3, 1936), which follows a similar layout and form; he also contributed a color illustration to the Stalin Constitution issue of 1937. It is likely that Favorsky’s involvement with USSR in Construction facilitated Prishvin’s involvement in the fur issue. 141. Entry from July 29, 1935, in Prishvin, Dnevniki: 1932–1935, 759. 142. Dziga Vertov, “Artistic Drama and Kino-Eye,” in Michelson, Kino-Eye, 47. Osip Brik also defines the role of photomontage as the combination of facts (which are necessarily more forceful than painting) that “influence the spectator in a certain way.” Brik, “Photomontage,” in “Selected Criticism, 1915–1929,” October 134 (Fall 2010): 86. 143. Papazian, Manufacturing Truth, 100. 144. See Margarita Tupitsyn in Margarita Tupitsyn, Matthew Drutt, and Ulrich Pohlmann, El Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 43–44. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers was credited as Es Lissitzky in her photomontage work with her husband. 145. Ibid, 43. The structure of this issue, like microcosm itself, recalls Vertov’s A Sixth Part of the World. Just as USSR in Construction drew from a collective of local photographers (as well as well-known photographers who edited issues and contributed the bulk of content), Vertov’s A Sixth Part of the World as well as his Stride, Soviet! relied on local cameramen for their exotic material. GOSTORG (the state trade agency) had originally commissioned the films as advertisements for Soviet production. See Leyda, Kino, 200. 146. To be treated in more detail in the conclusion. See also Ruder, Making History for Stalin, 107. 147. Varvara Stepanova, “Photomontage,” trans. John Bowlt, in Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940, ed. Christopher Phillips (New York: Aperture, 1989), 235–36; see also Varvara Stepanova, “Foto-montazh: Aleksandr M. Rodchenko,” Fotografie, no. 3 (1973): 18–19. The planar composition on white ground is a reference to Rodchenko’s photomontages for Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Pro eto (1923). 148. Vik. Afanas′ev, “Foto i fotomontazh,” Sovetskoe foto 11 (1935): 18. 149. Gustav Klutsis, “Fotomontazh kak novyi vid agitatsionnogo iskusstva,” in IZOFRONT: Klassovaia bor′ba na fronte prostranstvennykh iskusstv, ed. P. I. Novitskii (Moscow: OGIZ, 1931), 126 (emphasis in the original). The article is heavily illustrated with examples of Klutsis’s photomontages alongside selections by Lissitzky and Heartfield. 150. Entry from November 8, 1930, in Prishvin, Dnevniki: 1930–1931, 275. By contrast, see Tret′iakov’s “The New Leo Tolstoy.” 151. Entry from August 11, 1932, in Prishvin, Dnevniki: 1932–1935, 163. For more on the images of byt and the Soviet family, as well as notions of posterization, see chapter 4.

NOTES TO PAGES 138–144

269

152. Favorsky, in the course of his polemic discourse with the Constructivists, was quoted as saying: “No more engineers at VKhUTEMAS! IF we do need engineers (and there is such a need), then we should go and find them at MVTU [Moscow Higher Technical Institute]!” Cited in Pavel Florensky, Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art (London: Reaktion, 2002), 82. 153. Vladimir Favorsky, “Temporal Problem,” in Poetics of Space: A Critical Photographic Anthology, ed. Steve Yates (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 54; Vladimir Favorskii, “O kompozitsii,” Literaturno-teoreticheskoe nasledie (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1988), 213. 154. Cited in Paul Valliere, “Theology of Culture in Late Imperial Russia,” in Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia, ed. Mark D. Steinberg and Heather J. Coleman (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2007), 383. 155. Favorsky, “Temporal Problem,” 53; Favorskii, “O kompozitsii,” 211. Prishvin records a conversation with Favorsky in which the author places his photographic practices in parallel with this model of time-lapse photography. He writes, “Yesterday Favorsky said that photography conveys an incident, while painting conveys an event . . . and that on this path photography can, of course, be considered an independent art. Life is unity, and not only events, but each incidence in it is also a manifestation of the whole. But, of course, it is necessary to understand the whole in advance, in order to recognize its appearance in the particular (or, if not understand, then at least to accept it). To take photography as an example, then the whole is like an invisible image, but the developed image is like the appearance of the whole in the part” (entry from February 9, 1932, in Dnevniki: 1932–1935, 58). 156. Favorskii, “O kompozitsii,” 212–13. 157. Favorsky, “Temporal Problem,” 56; Favorskii, “O kompozitsii,” 214. 158. There could also be an undercurrent here against Stalin’s formulation of authors as “engineers of human souls.” 159. Zhen′-Shen′ was a modest success and was translated into English; the English edition was also accompanied by Favorsky’s illustrations. 160. Mikhail Dolgopolov, “Koren′ zhizni,” Smena, no. 6 (July 1935): 17. The review includes photo stills from the project and refers to the film as The Root of Life (Koren′ zhizni) rather than the more commonly attested title, Old Luven’s Hut. 161. RGALI, f. 1125, op. 2, d. 284, 1. 162. Many parallels might be drawn between Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman” (Mednyi Vsadnik, 1833) and Tsar’s Road. Prishvin had in mind Pushkin’s masterpieces while writing his novel: the little man Evgeny, the flood, and of course, Peter the Great. See Prishvin, “Lesa k ‘Osudarevoi doroge,’” 70–75. 163. Valeriia Prishvina, quoted in Prishvin, Sobranie sochinenii, 6:820. 164. Prishvin, Sobranie sochinenii, 6:86–87. 165. Prishvin, “Lesa k ‘Osudarevoi doroge,’”67–68. Prishvin goes on to explicitly link the origin of the canal with the birth of the boy, Zuek. Zuek is the grandson of a folk storyteller— the subject of the first version of In the Land of Unfrightened Birds. Here Prishvin once again links time and geography, creating that distinctive Prishvin chronotope: “Zuek, the grandson

270

NOTES TO PAGES 144–152

of the Navoitsky storyteller Sergei Mironovich, was born and grew up near the Navoitsky waterfall on the Lower Vyg river at its very source” (67). 166. Prishvin, Sobranie sochinenii, 6:822. This is, of course, a reference to Stalin’s mandate that socialist realism should be national in form and socialist in content.

4. Look Left, Young Man! 1. Margaret Bourke-White, Eyes on Russia! (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931), 19. 2. See “Soviet Panorama,” Fortune, February 1931, 60–68. Excerpts also appeared in the New York Times in 1932; see, for example, “Silk Stockings in the Five-Year Plan,” February 14, 4–5; “Where the Worker Can Drop the Boss,” March 27, 8–9. Some of her most iconic images of Russia would include the construction at Magnitogorsk and Dnieprstroi (Dniepr Dam Construction Project), the first to be taken by an American photographer. 3. See Bourke-White’s memoir, Portrait of Myself (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 40; and Bourke-White, Eyes on Russia! 4. Soiuzfoto was the body responsible for Soviet press pictures generally, with the exception of those relating strictly to the scientific and technical spheres. It also centralized photographic equipment, producing photochemicals and paper. Further, it assigned photographic subjects and disseminated the shots. Numbers of runs of photographs range from fifty to six hundred copies, which were to be printed in Soviet newspapers and in the foreign press. See Leah Bendavid-Val, Propaganda and Dreams: Photographing the 1930s in the USSR and the US (New York: Edition Stemmle, 1999), 57. 5. James Abbe, I Photograph Russia (New York: Robert McBride, 1934), 131. Abbe’s book contains the captivating account of his capture of the first photographic portrait of Stalin. 6. In darker terms, as Michael David-Fox observes, the “interwar ‘pilgrimage to Russia’ is one of the most notorious events in the political and intellectual history of the twentieth century.” David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1. 7. “O perestroike literaturno-khudozhestvennykh organizatsii,” Partiinoe stroitel′stvo, April 23, 1932, 62. 8. In Dobrenko’s characterization, art would replace life. Evgeny Dobrenko, Political Economy of Socialist Realism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 280. 9. “O perestroike literaturno-khudozhestvennykh organizatsii,” 62. 10. The decree seemed to link foreign goods and foreign artistic forms (all that might be classified as “foreign elements” or “alien elements” [chuzhdye elementy]). This idea of a closed socialist realist totality is central to the work of Boris Groys. See in particular, “The Art of Totality,” in The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 113. 11. See Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), and David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment.

NOTES TO PAGES 152–155

271

12. The notion of this “look to the left” or movement to the left as (radical) political symbolic act might be heard in Mayakovsky’s “Left March” (“Levyi marsh,” 1918). While the language was ubiquitous, we might also think of the Left Front of the Arts, or LEF group, whom Alfred H. Barr (future founder of the Museum of Modern Art in New York), writing for the American public on his trip to the Soviet Union in 1928, described thus: “The word LEF is formed from two Russian words meaning left front. In Russia the left front is no longer revolutionary. The Third Internationale is now inconspicuous, its program for the time being abandoned. The most strenuous effort is concentrated upon political stabilization and the economic organization of the vast and disparate sixth part of the world, the Soviet Union.” Barr, Transition, no. 14 (Autumn 1928): 267. 13. “Cherez perestroiku k dal′neishemu pod″emu,” Proletarskoe foto, no. 6 (June 1932): 2. 14. The project originated with a proposal by the Austrian Society of Friends of the USSR to Soiuzfoto, who then commissioned the work. The Soviet authorities had high hopes for the project as it was “being produced for a European audience and because it communicated vital propagandistic information about workers’ lives” in the USSR. Margarita Tupitsyn, The Soviet Photograph, 1924–1937 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 85. 15. See note 95 on the photo-series and photo-ocherk, chapter 3. 16. Translation in Tupitsyn, Soviet Photograph, 85–88; Maks Al′pert and Arkadii Shaikhet, “Kak my snimali Filippovykh,” Proletarskoe foto, no. 4 (December 1931): 46. In Tupitsyn’s discussion, and the characterization of ROPF’s representatives, these series were maximally “packed” but also fragmented. Thus they presented photographic spaces that defied definitive meaning and were hard to read. Tupitsyn, Soviet Photograph, 66–98. 17. See also Erika Wolf, “As at the Filippovs’: The Foreign Origins of the Soviet Narrative Photographic Essay,” in The Worker Photography Movement (1926–1939): Essays and Documents, ed. Jose Ribalta (Madrid: Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2011), 124–30. This concretization of time was of particular importance for Boris Zherebtsov in his review of the photo-series, which claimed that the attention to exactitude of time was essential in the documentary character of the Filippov photo-series. He lamented that some photographs were clearly also anachronistic. Zherebtsov, “Montazh fotograficheskoi serii, O serii ‘sem′ia Filippovykh,” Proletarskoe foto, no. 9 (September 1932): 8. 18. Cited in Erika Wolf, “As at the Filippovs’,” 124. The most often noted impossibility is that the number of riders on the tram car as pictured there couldn’t possibly be so few. This observation is made by Tretyakov in his commentary, “Ot fotoserii—k dlitel′nomu fotonabliudeniiu,” Proletarskoe foto, no. 4 (December 1931): 45. 19. Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 8. 20. Zherebtsov, “Montazh fotograficheskoi serii,” 6. 21. “Den′ iz zhizni moskovskoi rabochei sem′i,” Proletarskoe foto, no. 4 (1931): 21. 22. Sergei Tret′iakov, “From the Photo-Series to the Extended Photo-Observation,” October 118 (Fall 2008): 77; Tret′iakov, “Ot fotoserii,” 45. 23. The title is a play on the meanings of dom. The title might be interpreted as “a building made up of sixteen homes/houses” or “a home made up of sixteen homes.” “Den′ iz zhizni,” 21.

272

NOTES TO PAGES 155–159 24. Zherebtsov, “Montazh fotograficheskoi serii,” 6–9. 25. Al′pert and Shaikhet, “Kak my snimali Filippovykh,” 47. 26. “24 chasa iz zhizni moskovskoi rabochei sem′i: Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ),”

Pravda, October 24, 1931, 2. 27. Tret′iakov, “From the Photo-Series,” 75; Tret′iakov, “Ot fotoserii,” 45. 28. Katerina Clark states, “The Soviets focused on the primordial attachments of kinship and projected them as the dominant attachment for social allegiance. . . . The new root metaphor for society provided the state with a single set of symbols for enhancing its increasingly hierarchical structure by endowing it with a spurious organicity.” This attachment to a symbolic family would not, however, weaken the ties of the nuclear family, which “was to be strengthened because it was regarded as a microcosmic auxiliary to the state.” Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 114–15. 29. Maxim Gorky, “Soviet Literature,” in Problems of Soviet Literature (Moscow: Cooperative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR, 1935), 65–66; Maksim Gor′kii, “Doklad A. M. Gor′kogo o sovetskoi literature,” in Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s″ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, 1934: Stenograficheskii otchet, ed. I. K. Luppol, M. M. Rozental′, and Sergei Tret′iakov (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1934), 17. 30. Tret′iakov, “From the Photo-Series,” 73; Tret′iakov, “Ot fotoserii,” 20. 31. Zherebtsov, “Montazh fotograficheskoi serii,” 8. 32. Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 208. 33. See Tretyakov’s monograph on Heartfield: Dzhon Khartfil′d (Moscow: Ogiz, 1936). Heartfield also worked with Alpert and Shaikhet on USSR in Construction. He contributed a cover to the journal in 1931 and gave a lecture at the Polygraphic Institute in Moscow in the same year. See Victor Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917–1946 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 171; Erika Wolf, “SSSR na stroike: Constructivist Visions to Construction Sites,” in USSR in Construction: An Illustrated Exhibition Magazine, ed. Petter Õsterlund et al. (Sundsvall, Swed.: Fotomuseet Sundsvall, 2006), 2–3. 34. VOKS was established in 1925. For more on Tretyakov in Germany and the influence of his work there, see Katerina Clark, “The Author as Producer: Cultural Revolution in Berlin and Moscow (1930–1931),” in Moscow, the Fourth Rome, 42–77. 35. For more on the differences between these two texts see Wolf, “As at the Filippovs’,” 124–30. 36. Leonid Mezhericher, “Za operativnuiu bol′shevistskuiu fotoseriiu,” Proletarskoe foto, no. 4 (1931): 13. 37. “24 Hours in the Life of a Moscow Worker Family (AIZ),” in The Worker Photography Movement, 150; “24 chasa iz zhizni moskovskoi rabochei sem′i: Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ),” Pravda, October 24, 1931, 2. 38. The cover of the Filippov issue of Proletarskoe foto shows the two sisters reading their issue of A-I-Z with broad smiles on their faces. 39. Karl Radek, “James Joyce or Socialist Realism?” in Problems of Soviet Literature, 157; Karl Radek, “Dzhems Dzhois ili sotsialisticheskii realizm,” in Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s″ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, 1934, 317.

NOTES TO PAGES 159–162

273

40. Vladimir Papernyi calls architectural mobility characteristic of Culture 1, which is rooted rather earlier in the 1920s (pre-Stalin) but I would claim is still echoed in the continued language of mobilization that we see well into the early 1930s before a turning away from the “uprootedness” of Culture 1. Papernyi, Kultura “dva” (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985). In Papernyi’s Culture 2 we see what Susan Buck-Morss describes as cosmopolitanism becoming “synonymous with betraying the motherland.” Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2002), 122. 41. Radek, “Where to Direct the Eyes of Literature,” in Problems of Soviet Literature, 181; Radek in Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s″ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, 1934, 373. For Wedgwood’s critique, see chapter 1. 42. See Gorky, “Soviet Literature,” 54–55; Gor′kii, “Doklad A. M. Gor′kogo o sovetskoi literature,” 13–14. 43. These are largely parenthetical quotes from Lenin, framed by Leonid Mezhericher in “S″ezd pisatelei i zadachi fotoiskusstva,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 1 (1935): 5. Mezhericher also penned an overview of the photo-series, including a long list of examples of the genre as expositions and as a printed form, “O fotoseriiakh voobshche, o leningradskikh v chastnosti,” Proletarskoe foto, no. 1 (1933): 27–34. 44. Leonid Mezhericher, “O realizme v sovetskom fotoiskusstve,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 1 (1935): 5 (emphasis in the original). 45. David Shneer discusses the iconization of socialist realist photo production in his Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 45–53. Katerina Clark also calls the Filippov family the “poster family” for the “good life of the Soviet Union.” Clark, Moscow the Fourth Rome, 68. 46. Leonid Mezhericher, “O realizme v sovetskom fotoiskusstve,” 7. 47. Ibid. 48. Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes, 22–23 The journal Ogonek was a significant site of photographic publication following its reestablishment in 1923, by Mikhail Koltsov, with a focus on photoreportage. 49. As Andrei Fomenko has also noted, this is the herocentric model (unlike the photography of the October group, which lacked an explicit hero in their frames). Fomenko, Montazh, Faktografiia, Epos (St. Petersburg: Izdat. S-Peterburgskogo universiteta, 2007), 209. It also echoes Gorky’s address on Soviet literature at the 1934 Congress: “As the principal hero of our books we should choose labor, i.e. a person, organized by the processes of labor, who in our country is armed with the full might of modern technique, a person who, in his turn, so organizes labor that it becomes easier and more productive, raising it to the level of an art. Gorky, “Soviet Literature,” 54; Gor′kii, “Doklad A. M. Gor′kogo o sovetskoi literature,” 13. 50. A. Gerdt, “Zazhitochnost′,” Ogonek, no. 3 (1936): 18–21. 51. Il′ia Erenburg, in Vospominaniia ob Il′e Il′fe i Evgenii Petrove, sbornik (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1963), 179. 52. While enamored of Lenin and the tenets of communism at the time of his removal to the West, shortly before the revolution and during the civil war, Ehrenburg temporarily lost

2 74

NOTES TO PAGES 162–167

faith with the Bolshevik Party. See Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (New York: Basic Books, 1996). 53. Nikolai Bukharin, “Predislovie,” in Il′ia Erenburg, Neobychainye pokhozhdeniia Khulio Khurinto i ego uchenikov (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo, 1927), 5. 54. Only two issues were published. 55. Here “INTERNATsIONAL′NO” calls to mind “The Internationale,” the anthem of socialism. Il′ia Erenburg and El Lissitzky, “Blokada Rossii konchaetsia,” Veshch′, Objet, Gegenstand nos. 1-2 (1922): 1. 56. Ibid., 56. 57. Il′ia Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn′, vol. 1 (Moscow: Tekst, 2005), 585. 58. See an overview in Boris Frezinskii, Il′ia Erenburg s fotoapparatom, 1923–1944 (Moscow: Mosty kul′tury, 2007). 59. Ilya Ehrenburg, Men, Years, Life, trans. Tatania Shebunina and Yvonne Kapp (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1963), 181; Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn′, 1:580. 60. Ehrenburg refers to the work in his memoirs as “an album of my photographs, with some text I wrote in Moscow.” Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn′,1: 584. 61. Erika Wolf, “The Author as Photographer: Tret′iakov’s, Erenburg’s, and Il′f’s Images of the West,” Configurations 18 (Fall 2010): 384. 62. See chapter 3. “Na kolkhozy!” Novyi Lef 11 (1928): 9, cited in Maria Gough, “Radical Tourism: Sergei Tret′iakov at the Communist Lighthouse,” October 118 (Fall 2006): 166. 63. John Boling, “The Face of a City,” New Masses, September 18, 1934, 24. 64. Ehrenburg, Men, Years, Life, 182; Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn′, 1:582. Paul Strand also used a “trick camera” from 1913 to 1917 to capture his subjects on the streets of New York. Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002), 200. Though Ehrenburg was most likely familiar with or at least aware of Strand’s work, I have not located any clear references to it in Ehrenburg’s writings. 65. Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 41. 66. Ibid., 49. 67. David Zaslavskii, “Parizh, zapechatlennyi Erenburgom,” Literaturnaia gazeta, July 17, 133, 3. This is the same Zaslavsky who infamously accused Mandelstam of plagiarism in 1928, likely penned the famous attack on Shostakovich in Pravda in 1936, and would later call Pasternak “a weed.” Laurel E. Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 386; Dennis Kozlov, The Readers of Novyi Mir (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 205. “Tearing off the masks” was a ubiquitous contemporary phrase, most often used to expose class enemies who might be masquerading as upstanding Soviet citizens. See Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome, 56–57. For the most complete discussion of masks, class, and imposture, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in TwentiethCentury Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 68. Il′ia Erenburg, Moi Parizh (Moscow: Izogiz, 1933), 8. Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida points to this awareness as an inherent characteristic of photography: “Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of

NOTES TO PAGES 167–171

275

‘posing,’ I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image.” Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), 10. While this posed stance for Barthes is conceived negatively, it is a positive attribute in the ideal of the operative writer. Thus Ehrenburg’s approach to both photography and literature can be viewed in stark contrast to that of the operative writer, as Benjamin characterizes Tretyakov, who makes an imperative of active engagement in the labor at hand to shape the way in which image and documentary text are produced. There is also, perhaps, a contradiction in Tretyakov’s own thoughts about photography here. However, I would posit that Tretyakov makes himself unseen or unnoticed by fully integrating himself into the documentary subject—that is, the proletarian laborer, in his operative writing at sites such as the Communist Lighthouse (see chapter 3). 69. Ehrenburg, Men, Years, Life, 183; Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn′, 1:583. 70. Al′pert and Shaikhet include images of letters and documents in the Filippov essay by way of underscoring the documentary and “concrete” in their undertaking. 71. Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn′, 1:582–83. 72. Laura Katzman, “Ben Shahn’s New York: Scenes from the Living Theater,” in Ben Shahn’s New York: The Photography of Modern Times, ed. Deborah Martin Kao, Laura Katzman, and Jenna Webster (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, 2000), 18. Ehrenburg knew of at least one outraged letter from one of his subjects who saw herself reproduced in the French magazine Vu. Ehrenburg in Frezinskii, Il′ia Erenburg s fotoapparatom, 67–68. Susan Sontag responds to this problem too: “Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. And photographs are a species of alchemy, for all that they are prized as a transparent account of reality.” Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 81. 73. This notion of objectification and valorization is drawn from Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 346. 74. Erenburg, Moi Parizh, 15. 75. Ibid., 60. 76. Ibid., 67. 77. Leonid Mezhericher, “U nikh i u nas: Fotootkrytka kak sredstvo bol’shevistskoi informatsii,” Proletarskoe foto no. 3 (1932): 11. 78. Ibid. 79. Photo credit is given to the American Workers Photo League. This credit likely refers to the Workers Film and Photo League or simply the Photo League, a group of variously affiliated, largely urban-based, social documentary photographers and filmmakers, including at different times Paul Strand, Berenice Abbott, and Margaret Bourke-White. 80. Their impressions were published in several different forms, including the photoillustrated vignettes in Ogonek and later as a book, Odnoetazhanaia Amerika (Single-Storied America, 1937). Their book (published in English translation as Little Golden America) became “for decades to come the main source Russians . . . had for understanding the United States.” Clark, Moscow the Fourth Rome, 188. Erika Wolf states that though the photographs were

276

NOTES TO PAGES 171–175

prepared for the book publication, they were omitted for unknown reasons. Wolf, in Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip, trans. Anne O. Fisher (New York: Cabinet Books, 2007), xiv. 81. Il′ia Il′f and Evgenii Petrov, “Amerikanskie fotografii: III. Amerikantsy,” Ogonek, May 10, 1936, 10. 82. Ilf and Petrov, Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip, 28; Il′f and Petrov, “Amerikanskie fotografii: III. Amerikantsy,” 10. 83. Ilf and Petrov, Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip, 28–33; Il′f and Petrov, “Amerikanskie fotografii: III. Amerikantsy,” 12. The account of the encounter with Roberts is also captured in minute detail in Ilf’s diary. The entry’s length speaks to the impact and novelty of the meeting. See Il′ia Il′f, Zapisnye knizhki, ed. Aleksandra Il′f (Moscow : Tekst, 2000), 451–52. 84. Ilf and Petrov, Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip, 27; Il′f and Petrov, “Amerikanskie fotografii: III. Amerikantsy,” 10. 85. Ilf and Petrov, Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip, 27; Il′f and Petov, “Amerikanskie fotografii: III. Amerikantsy,” 10. This overabundance of inauthentic laughter is also satirized in Ilf and Petrov’s short story written at the same time as Single-Storied America, entitled “Christopher Columbus Reaches the Shore.” Il′ia Il′f and Evgenii Petrov, “Kolumb prichalivaet k beregu,” in Kak sozdavalsia Robinzon: Fel′etony i rasskazy (Moscow: Il′fiada, 2007), 349–58. 86. Valery Stigneev, “The Text in Photographic Space,” in Poetics of Space: A Critical Photographic Anthology, ed. Steve Yates (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 61. 87. Rodchenko, quoted in Ilf and Petrov, Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip, 149; originally published as Aleksandr Rodchenko, “Amerikanskie fotografii Il′i Il′fa,” Sovetskoe foto no. 8 (1936): 26–27. 88. Ibid., 152. Echoing this assessment in his memoirs, Erenburg states that although he could have tried to capture a more “objective” blanket image of Paris, photographing everything in sight, he “took only those which expressed [his] thoughts and feelings” to create a uniquely intimate album. Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn′, 1:585. 89. Aleksandra Ilf, Il′ia Il′f i fotografiia/Ilya Ilf and Photography, trans. Anne Fischer (Moscow: Punktum, 2007), 10. 90. Sergei Morozov, Sovetskaia khudozhestvennaia fotografiia, 1917–1957 (Gosizdat “Iskusstvo” Moscow, 1958), 142. 91. Ilf and Petrov, Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip, 57; Il′ia Il′f and Evgenii Petrov, “Amerikanskie fotografii: V. Pustynia” Ogonek, May 30, 1936, 16; also noted in Anne Nesbet, “Skyscrapers, Consular Territory, and Hell: What Bulgakov and Eizenshtein Learned about Space from Il′f and Petrov’s America” Slavic Review 69 (Summer 2010): 387. 92. Ilf and Petrov, Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip, 57; Il′f and Petrov, “Amerikanskie fotografii: V. Pustynia,” 16. 93. Nesbet, “Skyscrapers, Consular Territory, and Hell,” 388–90. 94. This theme is also reiterated in the play of heights. While the famous Rodchenko perspective often featured dizzying downward-facing angles from the tops of buildings and balconies, Ilf found himself incapable of capturing that same perspective in the lens of his own camera: “I’m staying on the 27th floor, from the windows this desperate city is visible. . . . No

NOTES TO PAGES 175–180

277

photographs, of course, could give any idea [predstavlenie] of it. I’m afraid that it’s impossible to speak about it such that it would be understandable.” From a letter by Ilf to his wife (October 8, 1935) in Il′ia Il′f and Evgenii Petrov, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1961), 534; passage also cited in Nesbet, “Skyscrapers, Consular Territory, and Hell,” 387. 95. Ilf and Petrov, Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip, 13; Il′ia Il′f and Evgenii Petrov, “Amerikanskie fotografii: Doroga,” Ogonek, April 20, 1936, 6. 96. Ilf and Petrov, Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip, 13; Il′f and Petrov, “Amerikanskie fotografii: Doroga,” 6. 97. Ilf and Petrov, Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip, 23; Il′f and Petrov, “Amerikanskie fotografii: Doroga,” 9. 98. Nesbet, “Skyscrapers, Consular Territory, and Hell,” 384. 99. Ilf and Petrov, Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip, 128; Il′ia Il′f and Evgenii Petrov, “Amerikanskie fotografiia: XI. N′iu-Iork,” Ogonek 23, August 20, 1936, 5. 100. This gaze is met in Bourke-White’s serially published pieces in the New York Times four years earlier. Her own photo-essays on Russia looked for the links between America and Russia. In the final lines in the cheeky “Silk Stockings in the Five-Year Plan” she writes, “Moscow or New York? Leningrad or Paris? Fundamentally woman and fashion are the same in all of them.” Bourke-White, “Silk Stockings in the Five-Year Plan,” New York Times, February 14, 1932. 101. Boling, “Face of a City,” 24. 102. John Roberts, The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography, and the Everyday (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1998), 87. 103. These were the questions posed by Beaumont Newhall, here paraphrased by Alan Trachtenberg, in the retrospective of Lewis Hine’s work in 1937 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1938, Lewis Hine would also call his subjects human documents. Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 235. Trachtenberg writes about the difficulty of pinning down the term “documentary” at this moment, particularly as regards a viewer’s engagement with the photograph. Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 191. 104. Boling, “Face of a City,” 24. 105. Ibid., 25. 106. Ibid., 24. 107. Deborah Martin Kao, “Ben Shahn and the Public Use of Art,” in Kao, Katzman, and Webster, Ben Shahn’s New York, 55; John Hill, Walker Evans: Lyric Documentary (Gottingen: Steidl Publishers, 2006), 31. Jay Leyda (1910–88) was not only a historian of Soviet film but a photographer and eventually a documentary filmmaker himself, deeply immersed in the documentary photography and film scenes of the 1930s in both Russia and America. 108. Laura Katzman, “Ben Shahn’s New York,” 16–18. 109. Katzman criticizes Ehrenburg’s capture in contrast to that of Shahn, stating that the American’s “eye tended to be more selective, finding greater appeal in people as individuals. . . .

278

NOTES TO PAGES 180–185

Shahn conveyed a stronger sense of affirmation in the ordinary lives that came into view as he paced the pavements of New York.” Ibid., 18. However, as is visible in figure 4.16, there are numerous affinities in both subject and composition. 110. Ilya Ehrenburg, “Continuous Performance,” New Theatre, November 1934, 6–7. The article is an English translation by Nicholas Wirth from the German, “Die Traumfabrik.” 111. Il′ia Erenburg, “Bel′vil′” Prozhektor, no. 5 (1932): 15. 112. David Zaslavskii, “Parizh, zapechatlennyi Erenburgom,” Literaturnaia gazeta, July 17, 1933, 3; translated in part in Wolf, “The Author as Photographer,” 395–96. Ehrenburg also cites Zaslavskii’s criticism in his memoirs. Ehrenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn′, 1:585. 113. K. F., “Il′ia Erenburg—Moi Parizh,” Zvezda, no. 9 (1933): 181–82. 114. Moi Parizh, 226. 115. Ibid. 116. Ibid., 227. 117. Il′ia Erenburg, “O Moem Parizhe,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 4–5 (1934): 34. Though it is likely a coincidence, the title of Walker Evans’s lecture in 1964 at Yale University was “Lyric Documentary.” See John Hill, Walker Evans, 12. 118. For example, Ehrenburg’s My Paris cost ten rubles (eleven with dust jacket), while an issue of Prozhektor in the same year was seventy-five kopeks; Sovetskoe foto was forty kopeks. An issue of Ogonek in 1933 would run twenty-five kopeks or a subscription for one year, eight rubles. On the Paradnaia kniga see Mikhail Karasik, The Soviet Photobook: 1920–1941 (Göttingen. Ger.: Steidl, 2015), and his highly posterized Paradnaia kniga Strany Sovetov (Moscow: Kontakt-kul′tura, 2007). This suggestion also draws the analysis into the sphere of periodical studies. See Sean Latham and Robert Scholes, “The Rise of Periodical Studies.” PMLA 121 (2006): 517–31. And for studies in the Russian context, see Robert Maguire, Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the 1920s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968). 119. Erenburg, “O Moem Parizhe,” 34. 120. Karl Schlögel, Moscow 1937, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 101. Schlögel shows how the rising threat of fascism coincided with the height of the Moscow show trials and Stalinist terror of 1937: “In this and subsequent trials the indictment was formulated increasingly with an eye to the international situation” (102). 121. The first documents the civil war’s devastation; the second focuses on the proletariat’s potential to build a new socialist Spain out of the war’s ashes. 122. Ehrenburg is known to have taken eighteen photographs included in UHP and fourteen of those for No Pasaran! Frezinskii, Il′ia Erenburg s fotoapparatom, 116–17. See also select reproductions of Ehrenburg’s images, ibid., 113–17. A 2010 publication, The Mexican Suitcase, has identified the authorship of many images from the Ispaniia volumes (most notably those by Chim [David Seymour], Robert Capa, and Gerto Taro), as well as many formerly anonymous film stills and photographs taken during the Spanish Civil War. See Cynthia Young, ed., The Mexican Suitcase: The Rediscovered Spanish Civil War Negatives of Capa, Chim, and Taro (New York: International Center of Photography, 2010). Ehrenburg was actually working largely with the agitational film brigade showing films from an agitgruzovik. Frezinskii, Il′ia Erenburg s fotoapparatom, 115.

NOTES TO PAGES 185–190

279

123. From Izvestiia, December 3, 1937, cited in Frezinskii, Il′ia Erenburg s fotoapparatom, 117. 124. Il′ia Erenburg, “Fotografy na frontakh respublikanskoi Ispanii,” Sovetskoe foto, nos. 5–6 (1938): 35. 125. See David King, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997); Mia Fineman, “Politics and Persuasion,” in Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012), 89–115; Lee Ann Daffner, “Retouching Revealed: Finishing Practices Observed in the Thomas Walther Collection,” in Object:Photo. Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walther Collection 1909–1949, ed. Mitra Abbaspour, LeeAn Daffner, and Maria Morris Hambourg (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014), an online project of the Museum of Modern Art, http://www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/assets/essays/Daffner.pdf. The photographer Vladimir Griuntal, a subject of study in chapter 3, was himself a photo-retoucher. See his Tekhnika obrabotki fotoilliustratsii (Moscow: Goskinoizdat, 1951). 126. I. Rerberg quoted in Jan Plamper, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 183. 127. In some cases it was also used to make the down-and-out appear more down-andout. See Ilf and Petrov, Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip. 128. Bendavid-Val, Propaganda and Dreams, 75. Bourke-White’s techniques are detailed throughout Eyes on Russia! as she accounts for her lighting setups and her interactions with subjects on the factory floor, but they are most pronounced in her staged scenes in her collaboration with husband, Erskine Caldwell, You Have Seen Their Faces (New York: Modern Age Books, 1937). 129. See Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes, 54–55. 130. In lauding Heartfield, Tretyakov would again assert that the power of the hybrid image overcomes the “weak” documentary image—to the most agitational effect. Tret′iakov, Dzhon Khartfil′d, 59. An analysis of this poster is also included in Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans, “Representing the Past in Photomontage: John Heartfield as a Visual Historian,” Modernist Cultures 3 (2010): 154–72. 131. Republican Spanish posters are included at the heading of each chapter of No Pasaran! 132. Boris Grishanin, “Parizh glazami burzhuaznogo esteta,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 6 (1934), cited in Frezinskii, “Il′ia Erenburg s fotoapparatom,” 72. 133. Victor Erlich suggests that the prototype for the hero of The Second Day, Safronov, is Ehrenburg himself. Thus the novel can be read as the “reeducation” of Ehrenburg, “a public burial of his old, intractable, historically doomed self and an unveiling of his new, ‘positive’ stance.” Erlich, Modernism and Revolution: Russian Literature in Transition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 249. 134. Il′ia Erenburg, “Rech′ na pervom vsesoiuznom s″ezde sovetskikh pisatelei,” in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1965), 522. 135. Tret′iakov, “Dzhon Khartfil′d,” 59. 136. Evgeny Petrov, “Padenie Parizha,” in Il′ia Il′f and Evgenii Petrov, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo, 1961), 488–95.

280

NOTES TO PAGES 190–196 137. Interview by Olga Carlisle, “Ilya Ehrenburg, The Art of Fiction,” Paris Review

26 (Summer–Fall 1961), http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4636/the-art-of-fictionno-26-ilya-ehrenburg. 138. As Erika Wolf argues, it was a failed experiment. See Wolf, “The Author as Photographer.” 139. Despite being posthumously rehabilitated in 1956, Tretyakov is missing from Morozov’s 1958 history of photography, Sovetskaia khudozhestvennaia fotografiia, 1917–1957 (Moscow: Gosizdat “Iskusstvo,” 1958). It is only in the last two decades that we have seen a resurgence of interest in Tretyakov, largely through the work of Devin Fore, Elizabeth Papazian, Katerina Clark, and Erika Wolf. 140. Karl Schlögel, “Road Tripping across the Ideological Divide,” http://www.signandsight. com’features/2217.html; originally published in German as “Der Kommunismus und die Poesie des Highways,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, January 28, 2012, http://www.nzz.ch/der-kommunismusund-die-poesie-des-highways-1.14611102. Capa was born Endre Friedmann in Hungary. 141. John Steinbeck, A Russian Journal (New York: Viking Press, 1948), 5. 142. Ibid., 78. 143. Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes, 53. 144. It is also possible that one of the figures with his back to the camera in the photograph adorning the back of the dust jacket is Ehrenburg. 145. Steinbeck, Russian Journal, 217. After Steinbeck reiterates the overarching goal of their publication—to “tell the objective truth about what we had seen”—Ehrenburg is reported to have said that if they “could do that they would be more than happy.” But such a statement, made among those by other (unnamed) authors, does not go uncontested. Another author jumps up to expound on the existence of “several kinds of truth” and that the most important goal of such a book must be “to further good relations between the Russian and the American people.” 146. Edward Steichen, introduction to The Family of Man (published for the Museum of Modern Art by Maco Pub. Co., 1955), 3. 147. The phrase “vast photo-essay” is from Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 325, cited in Fred Turner, “The Family of Man and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America,” Public Culture 24 (2012): 55–84. 148. See Ralph K. White, “Soviet Reactions to Our Moscow Exhibit: Voting Machines and Comment Books,” Public Option Quarterly 23 (Winter 1959–60): 464. 149. See Turner, “The Family of Man and the Politics of Attention,” 55–56. 150. The exhibition catalog does not reference Steinbeck and Capa’s book but credits the photographs to their first publication in Ladies’ Home Journal, in which prepublication excerpts from A Russian Journal were published in 1948. The title of the piece for February, “Women and Children in Soviet Russia,” invites direct comparison with Margaret BourkeWhite’s pieces on the same subjects, published in the New York Times in 1932. Another shortened and more general piece was also published in the magazine Illustrated in May 1948 under the title “Russian Journey.” 151. Steinbeck, Russian Journal, 105.

NOTES TO PAGES 198–204

281

152. Ibid., 139–40. 153. Carl Sandburg, prologue to The Family of Man, 5.

Conclusion 1. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, vol. 1, trans. Thomas Whitney (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2007), 220; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag GULag, 1918–1956: Opyt khudozhestvennogo issledovaniia, vol. 1–2 (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1973), 226. For the Russian editions of the text, each of the three books carries two volume numbers (vols. 1–2, 3–4, 5–7). 2. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956, 1:262–63; Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag GULag, 1–2: 268. 3. As Yuri Leving writes, “The schism of Russian literature into Soviet and émigré halves forced most writers abroad to remain somehow frozen in time—the evolution of their art was cut short, and their reception by readers remained unchanged.” Leving, “‘Nabokov-7’ Posthumously: Russian Postmodernism in Search of a National Identity,” in Marketing Literature and Posthumous Legacies: The Symbolic Capital of Leonid Andreev and Vladimir Nabokov, by Yuri Leving and Frederick H. White (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 199. 4. Hilton Kramer, “A Talk with Solzhenitsyn,” New York Times, May 11, 1980, https:// www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/01/home/solz-interview.html 5. Nabokov, quoted in Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 648. 6. John Szarkowski remarks that Nabokov’s writings on photography, comprising “wonderful brief asides. . . . are worth whole fascicles of most of the stuff that passes for photographic criticism.” From a letter to Jane M. Rabb in Literature & Photography: Interactions 1840–1990, ed. Jane Rabb (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 243. 7. Walker Evans, “Photography,” Massachusetts Review 19 (Winter 1978): 644. 8. Evans quotes up to “deathless precision” in Evans, “Photography,” 644–45; “Cloud, Castle, Lake” in Atlantic Monthly (June 1941), digital archive, https://www.theatlantic.com/ magazine/archive/1941/06/cloud-castle-lake/305003. 9. Vladimir Nabokov, “Anna Karenin,” in Lectures on Russian Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1981), 166. 10. Vladimir Sirin, Mashen′ka: Roman (Berlin: Knigoizd-vo “Slovo,” 1926); Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 43, 396–409; Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Vintage International, 1997), 11; See also Jane N. Rabb, “Vladimir Nabokov” in Rabb, Literature & Photography, 244n2. On Lolita and Bend Sinister, see Beci Dobbin, “Nabokov and Colour Photography,” Essays in Criticism 64 (2014): 415–35. Further, we should remember that the title of the Russian novel Kamera obskura (1932) was first translated as Camera Obscura and only later as Laughter in the Dark. As Thomas Seifrid has also shown, the paradigm of vision (a solitary eye gazing through an

282

NOTES TO PAGES 204–207

aperture) structures the world of the work. Seifrid, “Nabokov’s Poetics of Vision, or What Anna Karenina Is Doing in Kamera obskura,” Nabokov Studies 3 (1996): 1–12. 11. John Bertram and Yuri Leving, eds., Lolita—The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design (Blue Ash, OH: Print Books, 2013). 12. The use of “photobiography” is from Laurence Petit, “Speak, Photographs? Visual Transparency and Verbal Opacity in Nabokov’s Speak, Memory,” NOJ/NOZh : Nabokov Online Journal 3 (2009): 3, http://www.nabokovonline.com/uploads/2/3/7/7/23779748/v3_04_ petit.pdf. 13. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (New York: Vintage, 1989), 11. The Russian translation, Drugie berega (Other Shores) was published in New York in 1951. Unless otherwise noted, my references will be to the first American edition to include photographs: Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966). The pagination of the photographs and their placement vary from edition to edition, which might change the interpretation of these all-important paratextual elements. 14. Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 9. Nabokov described the autobiography to Edmund Wilson in a letter in April 1947 as “a new type of autobiography—a scientific attempt to unravel and trace back all the tangled threads of one’s personality—and the provisional title is The Person in Question.” Cited in Brian Boyd’s introduction to Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, by Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Everyman’s Library/Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), ix. This is certainly not the “scientific” approach that he methodically brought to his lepidopter; however, this title is suggestive of the detective story that Speak, Memory becomes. 15. Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 9. The first excerpt was “Mademoiselle O” in Mesures in 1936. 16. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 76 (emphasis in original). 17. The most applicable come from Nabokov’s early novels, including Mary and The Eye. Svetlana Boym says of Nabokov, emigration, and his characters, “The writer seems to travel back almost in every text—but illicitly, in the guise of his characters, under a false name, crossing borders in the text, not in life.” Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 262. 18. Gisèle Freund, The World in My Camera, trans. June Guicharnaud (New York: Dial Press, 1974), 221. 19. Nabokov, foreword to Speak, Memory, 9–16. 20. Nabokov’s authorial process was well known at this time. In 1959 he posed for a photograph for Life magazine—a staging of the writing process for Lolita. See Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, inset photographs between pages 226 and 227. He later said in an interview, “The pattern of the thing precedes the thing. I fill in the gaps of the crossword at any spot I happen to choose. These bits I write on index cards until the novel is done. My schedule is flexible, but I am rather particular about my instruments: lined Bristol cards and well sharpened, not too hard, pencils capped with erasers.” Nabokov interview with Herbert Gold, “Vladimir Nabokov, The Art of Fiction No. 40,” Paris Review 41 (Summer–Fall 1967), http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4310/the-art-of-fiction-no-40-vladimir-nabokov.

NOTES TO PAGES 207–209

283

21. See also Brian Boyd on the archivization of Nabokov and his own hand in the collection of the papers in Stalking Nabokov (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 25–56. 22. Nabokov frequently cites Rozanov and in particular, the metaphor “moonlight people” that was likely taken from Rozanov’s writings on homosexuality. See Eric Naiman, Nabokov, Perversely (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 175; Aleksandr Etkind, Tolkovanie puteshestvii: Rossiia i Amerika v travelogakh i intertekstakh (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001), 393–99. 23. Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 11–12. 24. The Nabokov archive consulted is housed in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library: “Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory. Changes. Holograph Index Cards” (card 2 notes the misrecognition); “Nabokov Vladimir, [Speak Memory] Notes for illustrations. Holograph draft, unsigned and undated, 14 pgs”; “Nabokov, Vladimir, Speak, Memory: an autobiography revisited. Typescript, with published pages from Conclusive Evidence, all with the author’s ms corrections. Setting copy.” 25. Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 16. Michael Nieto Garcia has argued that the index of Speak, Memory “serves primarily as a thematic key, a tiffany window through which the reader can expect to find on display . . . the more prominent Nabokovian themes taken up in the memoir.” Nieto Garcia, “Nabokov’s Index Puzzle: Life and Art Transcendent in Speak, Memory,” Nabokov Studies 13 (2014–15): 172. He suggests that the key to the riddle of the epigraph lies in the image of the rose, its relationship to the index, and the transcendent—Nabokovian— butterfly metaphor. 26. Two of the above-mentioned critiques of illustration are central to Yuri Tynianov’s essay “On Illustration,” in which he objects to illustrations that simply bolster plot points or embellish a story while adding nothing to it or, in the worst case, distracting from the poetic work itself. Tynianov, “Ob illiustratsii,” Kniga i revoliutsiia 4 (1923): 15–19. 27. Dabney Stuart, “The Novelist’s Composure: Speak, Memory as Fiction,” Modern Language Quarterly 36 (1975): 190. This limited summation prefigures the much longer theoretical exploration of the genre and form of notes and indexes as paratext in Gerard Genette’s seminal Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 319–44. And as D. Barton Johnson has shown, the identity of the narrator of Pale Fire is found in an anagram laid out through clues in the author’s index, or rather, Kinbote’s index. Johnson, “The Index of Refraction in Pale Fire,” in Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985), 60–77. 28. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 315. 29. In the Vintage edition (1989), this page is the imaginative map of the location of the Vyra estate outside St. Petersburg and on the reverse, the photograph of the Nabokov family home in St. Petersburg. The transition of these “content” pages to the blank index entry could lead the less discerning reader to assume that this is the solution to the puzzle. Further, the map includes one of Nabokov’s butterflies hovering in the southeast quadrant. Part of Svetlana Boym’s interpretation of the autobiography is based on the proximity of the map and photograph in the Vintage edition. Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 263.

284

NOTES TO PAGES 209–214 30. Brian Boyd, “Nabokov’s Fallibility,” in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook, ed.

Ellen Pifer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 59. 31. On Herzen and photography, see chapter 1. The photographer was a friend of the family who gave the photo to Nabokov’s sister, Elena Sikorsky. See Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 264, and Vladimir Nabokov, Perepiska s sestroi (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985), 93. 32. Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 264. 33. Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 18. 34. Boyd, Stalking Nabokov, 26. 35. Nabokov, “Anna Karenin,” Lectures on Russian Literature, 138. However, this voyeurism is also “witnessed” in action in Pale Fire, described as an “orgy of spying.” Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 87. 36. Nabokov, Speak, Memory, illustration facing page 257. 37. As John Pilling remarks of the memoir in general, the details provided are made so “physically present that the reader stumbles over them and has to reorient himself.” Those details are not in the photographs themselves but in the captions. Pilling, “A Tremulous Prism: Nabokov’s Speak, Memory,” in Autobiographical Statements in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature, ed. Jane Gray Harris (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 158. 38. “Lantern Slides” was first published in the New Yorker in February 1950. 39. Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 164. 40. Ibid., 166. 41. Ibid., 166–67. 42. Ibid., 99–100. The “passportless spy” is the impetus for Boym’s own Nabokovian memory chase. See Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 259–84. 43. W. G. Sebald, “Dream Textures: A Brief Note on Nabokov,” in Campo Santo, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library, 2005), 146. 44. Robert Alter, “Mirrors for Immortality, Review of Transparent Things” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 369, Vladimir Nabokov, A Documentary Volume, ed. Matthew Beedham (Detroit: Gale Cengage Learning, 2013), 312. 45. Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 19. 46. See also Petit, “Speak, Photographs?” 47. “Nabokov, Vladimir, Speak, Memory: an autobiography revisited. Typescript, with published pages from Conclusive Evidence, all with the author’s ms. corrections. Setting copy.” Item: “Discarded motto to the First Edition, 1951,” 30, Berg Collection. 48. Similar themes, and a surreal transversal to Soviet space, are also treated in Nabokov’s “A Visit to the Museum” (“Poseshchenie muzeia,”), first published in Sovremennye zapiski, no. 68 (1939). 49. Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 279. 50. Ibid., 276. Amitava Kumar describes the violence of being “read” as an immigrant through the passport and passport photograph: “If it can be allowed that the passport is a kind of book, then the immigration officer, holding a passport in his hand, is also a reader. Like someone in a library or even, in the course of a pleasant afternoon, on a bench beneath a tree. Under the fluorescent lights, he reads the entries made in an unfamiliar hand under categories that

NOTES TO PAGES 214–219

285

are all too familiar. . . . You notice all this if you are an immigrant.” Kumar, Passport Photos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 3. The theme of this all-important document is to be found throughout Soviet literature, especially in the 1920s, and in Nabokov’s novels on émigré themes. Most remarkable is the description of the passport and material life in Mary in Ganin and Potyagin’s trip to the central police headquarters: “An arrow on the wall pointed across the street to a photographer’s studio, where in twenty minutes one could obtain a miserable likeness [zhalkoe izobrazhenie] of oneself: half a dozen identical physiognomies, of which one was stuck onto the yellow page of the passport, another one went into the police archives, while the rest were probably distributed among the officials’ private collections.” Nabokov, Mary (New York: Vintage International, 1989),79; Nabokov, Mashen′ka, 119. 51. Nabokov, Speak, Memory, illustration inset facing page 289. 52. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, 164. 53. Ibid., 164–65. 54. Nieto Garcia, “Nabokov’s Index Puzzle,” 178, 186. 55. W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions Books, 1996), 15–17. 56. Sebald, “Dream Textures,” 142. 57. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1977), 24. 58. Anne Applebaum, “Album from Hell,” New York Review of Books, March 24, 2005. 59. See Erika Wolf, “USSR in Construction: From Avant-garde to Socialist Realist Practice,” 2 vols. (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1999); and “When Photographs Speak, to Whom Do They Talk? The Origins and Audience of SSSR na stroike (USSR in Construction),” Left History 6 (1999): 53–82. Tomasz Kizny’s album GULAG features images of the sites of former camps as ruins, or in some cases only the suggestion of their past existence. Kizny, GULAG: Life and Death inside the Soviet Concentration Camps (New York: Firefly Books, 2004). See also Michael Kunichika, “Landscape and Vision at the White Sea-Baltic Canal,” in Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture, ed. Valerie A. Kivelson and Joan Neuberger (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 254–58. 60. Anne Applebaum, “Album from Hell.” Applebaum’s review paints haunting pictures of the handmade Gulag photo albums that she encountered in the Russian State Archive. 61. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 88–89. 62. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1:xvii; Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag GULag, 1–2:6. 63. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1:xvii; Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag GULag, 1–2:6 (emphasis in the original). Ilya Kukulin also writes about this opening metaphor as an example of Solzhenityn’s synthesis of the grotesque, which has affinity with Eisensteinian montage effects. See Kukulin, Mashiny zashumevshego vremeni: Kak sovetskii montazh stal metodom neofitsial′noi kul′tury (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2015), 330. 64. In his introduction to the land of the White Sea and the Solovetsky Islands, Solzhenitsyn quotes Prishvin: “‘In all this brightness it is as if there were no sin present. . . . It is as if nature here had not yet matured to the point of sin’ is how the writer Prishvin perceived the Solovetsky Islands.” Solzhenitsyn goes on to describe a Prishvin-inspired natural landscape: “Without us these isles rose from the sea; without us they acquired a couple of hundred lakes

286

NOTES TO PAGES 219–223

replete with fish; without our help they were settled by capercaillies, hares, and deer, while foxes, wolves, and other beasts of prey never appeared there” Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:25; Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag GULag (1974), 3–4:24. 65. This formulation can also be likened to Bakhtin’s description of the function of the Roman autobiography/memoir, which turns the Stalinist formula of the great Soviet family on its head: “Such autobiographies are documents testifying to a family-clan consciousness of self. But on such family-clan soil, autobiographical self-consciousness does not become private or intimately personal. It retains a deeply public character.” Of crucial import for reading Solzhenitsyn, the Roman patrician family “is the symbol for all that can be private and intimate. The Roman family, precisely as a family, fuses directly with the state.” Here ancient autobiography, fusing the private and intimate with the form of the family, is a means of depicting a “public self-consciousness” into which the reader is also invited. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1981), 137–40. 66. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1:xvii–xviii; Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag GULag, 1–2:6. 67. Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 39; Lev Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 15 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1985), 79. See chapter 1. 68. See also Cynthia Ruder, Making History for Stalin: The Story of the Belomor Canal (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1998). 69. State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), f. 7952, op. 7, d. 31. 70. Belomor: An Account of the Construction of the New Canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea, trans. Amabel Williams-Ellis, ed. Maxim Gorky et al. (New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1935), i. 71. Vsevolod Ivanov, “Rech′ V. V. Ivanova,” Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s″ezd sovetskikh pisatelei 1934, stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Gosizdat Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1990), 231. 72. Sergei Eisenstein himself in 1929 ruminates about the perceived impossibility of depicting an “actual man” through montage, speculating on how this might be done but without directed solution. See Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, 1977), 59. 73. Dariusz Tolczyk, See No Evil: Literary Cover-Ups and Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 177. 74. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, trans. Henry Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 31; Solzhenitsyn, Odin den′ Ivana Denisovicha (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1963), 30. 75. Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag GULag (1975) 5–7:61. 76. Varlam Shalamov, Sobranie sochinenii v 4-kh tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1998), 66–68. 77. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:58; Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag GULag, 5–7:61. 78. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1:xx; Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag GULag, 1–2:1. 79. In my own copy of the book, Yagoda’s name is violently scratched out with black ink.

NOTES TO PAGES 223–225

287

80. The chapter also contains reproductions of the officials from the project, including N. A. Frenkel, who is a main target of attack for his repressive tactics. Photographs are included on pages 77, 80–81, 83, 88–89, 91, 94, 106, 109, 110–12, 114, 118. Here too Genrikh Yagoda is brought back into the picture, following his purge from history—one of the very reasons why The History of the Construction itself was blacklisted (83). While their placement was likely an editorial decision on the part of YMCA Press, their inclusion was clearly intended by Solzhenitsyn. 81. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:105; Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag GULag, 3–4:106n34–35. 82. The microfilm first left the USSR in the hands of Vadim Andreev—the son of Leonid Andreev. His daughter, Olga Carlisle, was given authority as trustee of the text abroad. She was tasked primarily with the English translation of The First Circle and The Gulag Archipelago. The fallout from the timing of the translation of The Gulag Archipelago led to a libel lawsuit against Solzhenitsyn. Carlisle’s story is the focal point of her memoir Solzhenitysn and the Secret Circle (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). A description of the photographs’ placement at the end of chapters in the microfilm is included in Liudmila Saraskina, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ZhZL (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2009), 603. 83. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Invisible Allies, trans. Alexis Klimoff and Michael Nicholson (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1995), 14; Aleksandr Solzhenitysn, “Bodalsia telenok s dubom: Nevidimiki, Nikolai Ivanovich Zubov,” Novyi mir 11 (1991): 123. It was routine that upon release camp prisoners would remain exiled (restricted from urban centers) for a set number of years. 84. In the first years of its production it also bore the initials NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), the initials of the Soviet secret police. The Cheka, GPU/OPGU (AllUnion State Political Administration), and NKVD were the evolving acronyms for the state intelligence service (secret police) and labor camp administration in the Soviet Union. On the FED camera and secret police, see Christina Vatelescu, Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 139. See the enthusiastic announcement of the camera in A. Agich, “Est′ sovetskaia ‘Leika’!” Proletarskoe foto, no. 1 (1933): 20. 85. The inexpensive Smena camera, which was a 35 mm camera that went into production in the Soviet Union in 1953. 86. Although this photograph is the largest, most prominent, and most suggestive of the Solzhenitsyn photographs in The Gulag Archipelago, it is but one of five images of the author included in the work. Volume 1–2 (the first book) opens with three progressive portraits of Solzhenitsyn: the first before his arrest as an officer in 1944 (“nezadolgo pered”), the second as a Gulag prisoner in Moscow in 1946 (“tam”), and finally a companion self-portrait to the image included in volume 3 upon his release (“tol′ko chto osvobodias′”). In this third image (the self-portrait) in the first volume, Solzhenitsyn stares directly and confrontationally at the camera and, in contrast to the self-portrait included in volume 3–4 (the second book), sits rigidly straight. See Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag GULag, 1–2:12–13. Volume 5–7 (the third book) features another staged photograph—and is identified as such—illustrating the search process. It is

288

NOTES TO PAGES 225–229

simply entitled “na shmone” (body search). Solzhenitsyn also uses this photograph to explain the significance of the zek’s identifying number, which figures prominently in the self-portrait in the volume. He states, “This photograph (photo 3) and the one at the beginning of the book were taken while in exile, but the padded jacked, and the numbers are true living, camp devices. I went all around Ekibatuz with my number Shch-262. I took these numbers secretly out of Ekibatuz, and have kept them.” Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag GULag, 5–7:62. 87. The caption reveals that this photograph was taken “immediately upon release,” 1953. Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag GULag, 5–7: 5. 88. Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 346 (emphasis in the original). 89. One of the portraits included in The Gulag Archipelago was a camp portrait (see note 88). In some camps, inmates could sit for formal portraits which could be sent to family outside the camp. 90. Sontag, On Photography, 178. 91. Such is also the conclusion of Harriet Murav, who states that “Solzhenitsyn cannot claim mastery over his subject. . . . There is no end, Solzhenitsyn tells us, to the supplements that could be added to it. Out of the work there emerges an image of its author broken and remade, but always scarred by the Gulag and by the writing of the Gulag.” Murav, Russia’s Legal Fictions (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 190–91. 92. Harrison E. Salisbury “The Russian Writer as World Conscience,” Saturday Review of the Arts, July 1974, 20. Salisbury served as the New York Times Moscow bureau chief. See Eric Page, “Harrison E. Salisbury, 84, Author and Reporter, Dies,” New York Times, July 7, 1993. 93. Salisbury, “Russian Writer as World Conscience,” 18. 94. For more details on their miscommunication see Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, 648–49. The two were almost constantly brought together by others’ pens, and Nabokov was called on at least once to write a public letter to Solzhenitsyn. A characteristically scathing note in Nabokov’s correspondence from March 1974 to the New York Times editor Harvey Shapiro, penned by Vera Nabokov, reads, “[My husband] regrets he cannot write a ‘Letter to Solzhenitsyn’—not only because he cannot interrupt work on a new novel he is writing but also because writing such a letter would interest him as little as reading it would Solzhenitsyn.” Letter to Harvey Shapiro, in Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940–1977, ed. Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 529. 95. Mikhail Shishkin, “Nabokov’s Inkblot,” in Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories, trans. Mariya Bashkatova (Dallas: Deep Vellum Publishing, 2015), 108; Mikhail Shishkin, “Kliaksa Nabokova,” Znamia 4 (2015): 10–11. 96. Shishkin, “Nabokov’s Inkblot,” 105; “Kliaksa Nabokova, 9. 97. The never-pictured photograph of Barthes’s mother in the Winter Garden is the springboard for his treatise on photography, Camera Lucida. 98. “Lord Snowdon Pays a Visit to Montreux and Penetrates the Isolation of Vladimir Nabokov,” Saturday Review of the Arts, January 1973, 37. The First Earl of Snowdon (Antony Armstrong-Jones) was given his title upon his marriage to Great Britain’s Princess Margaret in 1960. He was a popular and talented portraitist, often capturing celebrity subjects.

NOTES TO PAGES 229–230

289

99. “Lord Snowdon Pays a Visit to Montreux,” 37–39. 100. See chapter 1 for Levitsky’s “Herzen versus Herzen” and chapter 2 for examples of Voloshin’s mirror doubling. 101. Letter to Edmund White in Nabokov and Bruccoli, Nabokov: Selected Letters, 504–5. He also notes that the “double” photograph is out of focus in the magazine. 102. “Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The producing of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images.” Sontag, On Photography, 179.

INDEX

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Abbe, James, 149 Abbott, Berenice, 275n79 Afanasiev, Viktor, 137 Agapov, Boris, 113 A-I-Z (journal; later Illustrierte Zeitung), 128, 153, 158, 191, 193, 272n38 AKhR (Association of Artists of the Revolution), 123 Alekseevsky, Arkady, 59 All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers (1934), 128, 157, 159–60, 189, 220, 261n48, 273n49 Alpert, Max, 10, 128, 179, 272n33; “A Day in the Life of a Moscow Working Class Family” (with Arkady Shaikhet; 1931), 153–60, 155, 156, 189, 271n14, 271nn17–18, 273n45; “The Giant and the Builder” (1931), 186 Alter, Robert, 213 Andreev, Daniil (son), 60, 62, 249n39, 250n56 Andreev, Leonid, 14, 56–76, 79, 80, 86–98, 108, 209, 210, 212, 216, 223, 225, 267n152; anti-Soviet stance in later years, 74, 95–96; as author-photographer, 11; color (Autochrome) photography of, 86–93; costumes used in photographs of, 88, 255n118, plate 11; crucifix, self-portrait with, 87–88, plate 10; dacha in Vammelsuu, Finland, 61–62, 75, 80, 95, 96, 97, 257n151, 257n154, plate 5, plate 9; death of, 96; diaries of, 15, 60, 86, 88, 89, 94, 96–97, 97; double-exposed images, 93, plate 15; on film and cinema, 90–91, 94–96, 257n146; Goya sketch of demon and, 68–70, 69, 70, 225; “In the Office,” 92, plate 12; life and career, 57–64; manic depression of, 58,

63; as neorealist, 75, 251n75; Poe and, 55, 58, 90–91, 93, 247n16; public image of, 56, 59, 62–63, 68, 69, 70; Repin portrait of, in red shirt, 251n68; scrapbook albums, 65–68, 66, 67, 70, 73; Solntse Rossii, photos and drawings published in, 70–76, 71, 72, 250n60, plates 6–7; stereoscopes and stereographs, 93–94, 257n141, plate 9; studio portraits, postcards, and cartes de visite, 52, 64, 65; as Symbolist, 56, 58–59, 63, 75, 251n75; Tolstoy and, 57–58, 95, 246–47n15, 256n127; windows, in work of, 88–90, 89; “Winter on the Sea,” 92, plate 14; WWI and Bolshevik Revolution, 95–96; Zhar-ptitsa (Berlin émigré journal) article and photos (1921), 96–97, 97 Andreev, Leonid, literary works: “Abyss” (1902), 58; Anathema (1909), 62; Anfisa (1912), 59, 62, 88; “Bargamot and Garaska” (1898), 59; The Black Maskers (1908), 59, 62, 88; A Book about Leonid Andreev (1922), 58–59, 60; “Darkness” (1907), 58; Ekaterina Ivanovna (1912), 92, 256n134; first Collected Works (1909), title page with image of Andreev pasted in, 68, 69; He Who Gets Slapped (1915), 62; He Who Gets Slapped (film version, 1924), 95; “Judas Iscariot and the Others” (1907), 58–59, 60, 74–75, 92, 253n93, plates 7–8; “Lazarus” (1906), 58, 60–61, 93, 248n30, 248n33; The Life of Man (1906), 60, 62, 87, 88, 253n93; “Marseillaise” (1903), 59; “The Red Laugh” (1904–5), 61, 75, 248n34, 256n131; “The Seven Who Were Hanged” (1908), 62, 251n68; To the Stars, 88

292

INDEX

Andreev, Leonid, sketches and pastels: demon on scrapbook cover, 66, 67; photographic capture of, 251n70; “Portrait of Judas” (pastel), 74–75, 92, 251n68, 251n70, plates 7–8; “Someone in Gray,” 62 Andreev, Rimma (sister), 249n38, 257n154 Andreev, Savva (son), 249n39, 252n78, plate 13 Andreev, Vadim (son), 60, 87–88, 96; appropriation of first scrapbook as diary by, 73, 73–74, 250n56; birth of, 59, 65, 249n39; Childhood (1963), 74; in dacha in Finland, 62, 68; in father’s scrapbook albums, 65, 66, 67, 68, 251n78; The History of One Journey (1974), 74, 250–51n64; legacy of Leonid Andreev and, 250–51n64, 250n56, 287n82; Solntse Rossii, photos published in, 70–73, 72; Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago microfilm entrusted to, 287n82 Andreev, Vera (daughter), 249n39, 250n56, 251–52n78, 255n118; House on the Black River (1974), 75, 88–89 Apollon (journal), 80 Applebaum, Anne, 218, 285n60 Arago, Dominique, 24 archives, 13, 16, 17, 220; of Leonid Andreev, 14, 68, 85, 88, 89, 93, 223, 246n13, 251–52n78; of Ehrenburg, 190; of History of the Construction, 220, 262n62; of Kupchenko, 253n96; of Nabokov, 14, 207, 213, 283n24; of Prishvin, 122, 133, 141, 267n125, 267n132; of Rozanov, 86; of Voloshin, 80, 257n154 Arnheim, Rudolph, 75 art (painting and drawing), 7, 11, 23, 24–25, 29, 30–31, 41, 49, 74, 87, 108, 123, 124, 157, 187, 235n17, 237n36, 260n27, 269n155 Atget, Eugène, 179 author-photographer movement, 10–11, 111–15, 123, 181, 229 authorship, literary, 23, 48; Andreev’s public image, 56, 59, 62–63, 68, 69, 70; anxieties, authorial, 18, 229–30; Ehrenburg, photography defining authorial persona of, 163–64; “literature of fact” movement and, 110–15; operativity and operative authors, 111–14, 127, 144, 159, 165, 185, 220, 275n68; photographs of authors as popular commodities, 31, 39–40, 41, 42, 43–45, 47, 64, 250n53; self-formation, authorial, for non-author-photographers, 15–16; Solzhenitsyn’s assertion of, 225; Tolstoy’s crisis of authorship, 23, 40–42, 45, 48, 51 authorship, of photographs: copyright for, 48, 49, 51; Mezhericher on, 160; Prishvin’s claims regarding, 107–8, 133–34, 137–38, 139, 262n58; Prokudin-Gorsky color photo of Tolstoy, 48–49; sun/technology, authorship attributed to, 7, 30, 232n11, 237n31; Tolstoy photographs by Chertkov and Sophia Andreevna Tolstoy, disputes over, 48, 49–50; Tolstoy postcards, Chertkov’s assertion of photographic authorship of, 47; Tolstoy’s self-portrait, 38–39, 39

Autochromes, 57, 86–88, 90, 91, 93, 98, 243n113, 251n70, 254n107, 254n114, 257n142 avant-garde photography, Soviet, 11, 16, 123–28, 125, 127, 128, 131, 135, 144, 264n11, 265n99 Babel, Isaac, 167, 266n114 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 286n65 Balmont, Konstantin, 248n25 Bamuner, S., 267n132 Barkhatova, Elena, 235n5 Barr, Alfred H., 271n12 Barthes, Roland, 5, 14, 205, 228–29, 240n68, 256n139; Camera Lucida (1981), 74, 247n21, 274–75n68, 288n97 Baudelaire, Charles, 25, 164 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 232n10 Bauhaus 2, 8 Bayley, John, 240n73 Bazin, André, 10, 237n31 Belousov, Ivan, 248n25 Bely, Andrei, 56, 58, 59, 63–64, 105; Petersburg (1905), 245n7, 247n23 Benjamin, Walter, 5, 10, 104, 158, 159, 254n106, 263n74, 275n68; “The Author as Producer” (1970), 111; “Little History of Photography” (1931), 21, 23–24 Berger, John, 15, 29, 106 Berman, Marshall, 10 Bernstein, Herman, 68–70, 70, 247n16 Biriukov, Pavel, 45 Bitov, Andrei, “Pushkin’s Photograph (1799–2099)” (1987), 1, 3–4, 5, 7, 13, 231nn2–4 Black Hundreds, 59 Blasing, Molly Thomasy, 249n41 Blok, Alexander, 58–59, 96, 105 Boling, John, 166, 179–80 Bolshevik Revolution, 95–96, 103–4, 109–10, 257n152 Bourdieu, Pierre, 245n4 Bourke-White, Margaret, 17, 149, 186, 270n2, 275n79, 277n100, 280n150; Eyes on Russia! (1931), 149, 279n128; Trade Winds cover (1929), compared to Rodchenko’s industrial photos, 150, 151; “World’s Highest Standard of Living” (1937), 178, 178–79 Boyd, Brian, 209, 214–16 Boym, Svetlana, 154, 209 Brik, Osip, 268n142 Briusov, Valery, 248n25 Brooks, Jeffrey, 40 Brunner, François, 31 Bukharin, Nikolai, 162–63 Bulgakov, Sergei, 46 Bulla, Karl and Victor, 49 Bunin, Iuly, 248n25 Caillois, Roger, 92, 93 Caldwell, Erskine, 279n128 calotypes, 24, 235n9 Campbell, Craig, 16

INDEX Capa, Robert: No Pasaran! (1936), 185, 193, 278n122; A Russian Journal (with John Steinbeck; 1948), 147, 193–98, 194, 196, 197, 280n145, 280n150 Carlisle, Olga, 89, 90, 91, 190, 255n121, 287n82 Carrick, William, 25, 235n12 Caws, Mary, 12 Certeau, Michel de, 14 Cheney, Lon, 95 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 27 Chertkov, Vladimir: Alexandra Tolstoy and, 244n120; as confidant and follower of Tolstoy, 40, 43–45, 242n96; disputes with Sophia Andreevna Tolstoy, 43–45, 48, 49–51, 242nn96–97, 244n120; The Living Corpse (Tolstoy) sold by, 236n27; manuscripts of Tolstoy, assertion of role in editing, 243n107; photographs and postcards of Tolstoy, 42, 43–45, 47, 48, 49–50, 250n53; recording and transcribing Tolstoy, 242n102; smuggling Tolstoy’s works between England and Russia, 242n102 Chim (David Seymour), 185, 278n122 chronophotographie, 122, 132, 137, 139, 142, 223 Chukovsky, Kornei, 58, 62, 63, 86, 87, 88, 91 Cinefono (film journal), 90, 94 cinema. See film and cinema Clark, Katerina, 272n28, 273n45 colored, painted, or retouched photographs, 38, 108, 185–86, 235n12, 236n22, 260n27, plate 1 Constructivism, 123, 163, 183, 264n88, 269n152 copyright: for literary works, 243n115; for photography, 48, 49, 51, 109; Tolstoy’s rejection of copyright for his literary works, 40, 45, 48, 51 Crary, Jonathan, 17 Crone, Anna Lisa, 79, 253n90 Daguerre, Louis, 24, 25, 235nn7–8 daguerreotypes, 17, 23, 24, 30, 90, 235nn8–9, 237–38n40 David-Fox, Michael, 270n6 Davies, Richard, 87 death, 37, 60, 73, 91, 92, 213, 214; of Leonid Andreev, 96; photography and, connection between, 55–56, 61, 63–64, 73, 74, 93, 247n21; spirit photography, 93; of Tolstoy, 13, 23, 49–50, 242n97 Debabov, D., 267n132 defamiliarization (ostranenie), 34, 61, 79, 103–4, 123–26, 134, 144 Delacroix, Eugene, Liberty Guiding the People (1830), 187, 188 Denisevich, Anna Ilinichna, 62, 96, 255n116, 257n154 diary writing, 15–16; Leonid Andreev, 15, 60, 86, 88, 89, 94, 96–97, 97; Vadim Andreev, 73, 73–74, 250n56; Ilya Ilf, 276n83; Metro diary project (1930s), 15, 103; Mikhail Prishvin, 15, 16, 103, 110, 114, 122, 133, 135–36, 262n59;

293

for public projects, 103; Lev Tolstoy, 38, 45, 47, 50, 262n59; Sophia Andreevna Tolstoy, 42, 43, 241n91, 262n59; Voloshin’s The Story of My Soul as, 80–85, 81 Didi-Huberman, Georges, Images in Spite of All (2001), 201 Dobrenko, Evgeny, 266n112 documentary, 17, 28, 261n35, 261n48; Ehrenburg and, 164, 166, 179–80, 185, 187, 189; Nabokov and, 207, 213, 214, 216; Prishvin and, 16, 103–10, 112, 115, 126, 132, 136; socialist realism and, 152–53, 155, 179, 185, 186, 189, 195, 271n17, 275n70, 275n79, 277n103, 277n107; Solzhenitsyn and, 221, 225; Tolstoy and, 33, 34, 42, 49; Tretyakov and, 261n35, 261n48, 275n68, 279n130 domestic photography, 14, 57, 78, 80, 97–98, 245n4, 249–50n52, 249n41. See also Andreev, Leonid; Rozanov, Vasily; Tolstoy, Sophia Andreevna Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 7, 55, 70, 232n13, 236n17; The Adolescent (1875), 7; The Idiot (1868), 7 Drankov, Alexander, 95, 257n147 Dukhobors, 241n79 Dzerzhinsky, Felix Edmundovich, 225 Eastlake, Lady Elizabeth, 25 Eastman, George, 250n52 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 17, 160–64, 174, 175, 210, 264n88; authorial persona of, 163–64; as author-photographer, 11, 16, 111, 152–53, 162, 163–64, 167, 191; ideological perspective of, 162–63; lateral viewfinder, use of, 165–67, 180, 190, 210, 225; politics of, 162, 273–74n52; Steinbeck and Capa’s Russian Journal (1948) and, 193–95, 280n145; Veshch′/Objet/Gegenstand (journal), 163, 164, 264n88 Ehrenburg, Ilya, My Paris (1933), 17, 152, 163–68, 165, 169, 184; critical reception of, 166, 179–85; Ilf’s “American Photographs” compared, 174; as intimate space, 164, 166, 167, 184, 189, 276n88; not republished in Soviet Union, 191; Parisian montage from, 165, 166; as photobook, 184, 278n118; prepublication excerpts, titled “Belleville” (1932), 180, 182 Ehrenburg, Ilya, works: Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples (1922), 162; The Factory of Dreams (1931), 180; The Fall of Paris (1942), 189–90; Out of Chaos, 189; The Second Day (1933), 163, 189, 279n133; Summer of 1925, 190; The Tempest, 190; The Thaw, 190; UHP and No Pasaran! (1936), 185–87, 186–88, 193, 278n122; Without Stopping to Take a Breath (1935), 163, 189 Eisenstein, Sergei, 158, 285n63, 286n72 Emerson, Caryl, 241n86 émigrés and émigré literature, 14, 18, 57, 95–96, 203, 205, 210, 214, 216, 223, 250n64, 281n3, 285n50

294

INDEX

Erlich, Victor, 279n133 ethnic portraiture, 31–32, 32, 134, 160, 258n11 Evans, Walker, 179, 180, 186, 192, 203–4, 278n117 Evtuhov, Catherine, 28, 80 “extended photo-observation,” 119, 122, 128–29 Fadeyev, Nikolai, 266n114 Favorsky, Vladimir, 134, 135, 138–39, 268n140, 269n152, 269n155, 269n159 FED cameras, 225 Filippov family (Alpert and Shaikhet, “A Day in the Life of a Moscow Working Class Family,” 1931), 153–60, 155, 156, 189, 271n14, 271nn17–18, 273n45 film and cinema: Leonid Andreev and, 90–91, 94–96, 257n146; Cinefono (film journal), 90, 94; Alexander Drankov, 95, 257n147; Ehrenburg, The Factory of Dreams (1931), 180; Gorky on, 256n124; kino-eye, concept of, 120, 121, 167; Kinofot (film journal), 16; Lumière brothers and, 257n142; Prishvin’s photo-illustrated screenplay of Ginseng, 139–42, 140, 142; stereoscopes and stereographs compared, 257n141. See also Vertov, Dziga; specific films Five-Year Plans, 110, 131, 132, 149, 160, 266n112, 266n122 Fomenko, Andrei, 273n49 formalism, 5, 153, 160, 175 Fortune magazine, 149 Fotograf (journal), 30 fotografiia, as term, 7, 30, 114 Fotograf-liubitel′ (journal), 16, 30, 48, 243n110, 260n28 Foucault, Michel, 232n9 framing/lack of frame, 11–13, 14, 15, 78–79, 135 Frank, Seymour, 91 Frenkel, N. A., 287n80 Freud, Sigmund, 90, 245n2. See also uncanny Freund, Gisèle: James Joyce in Paris (1965), 204, 205; The World Is My Camera (1970), 205, 205–6, 206 Ge, Nikolai, 36, 41; The Last Supper (1863), 25, 235–36n17 Genette, Gerard, 283n27 Gippius, Zenaida, 60, 106, 61248n30 Gogol, Nikolai, “Portrait” (1835), 55 Goncharov, Ivan, 25 Gorbunov-Posadov, Ivan, 45 Gorky, Maxim, 58, 59, 60, 105, 115, 220, 248n25, 256n124, 262n60, 273n49 Gough, Maria, 261n37 Grekov, Aleksei Fedorovich, 235n14 Grishina, Iana, 133, 259n19 Griuntal′, Vladimir: children’s journals, contributions to, 265n105; What Is This? (with Grigory Iablonovksy; 1932), 124–26, 125, 130 Groys, Boris, 270n10 Gulag camps: in The History of the Construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, 218, 220–21, 222, 223; photos of, 217–18; Shalamov,

Varlam, “Children’s Drawings,” 221–22; in USSR in Construction, 218. See also Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, The Gulag Archipelago Gumilev, Nikolai, 80 Gunning, Tom, 120 Hamsun, Knut, Pan (1894), 259n17 He Who Gets Slapped (film, 1924), 95 Heartfield, John, 158, 272n33, 279n130; “Freedom itself struggles in its ranks” (1936), 187, 188 Hellbeck, Jochen, Revolution on My Mind: Diary Writing Under Stalin (2006), 14–15 Herzen, Alexander, 25–28, 26, 27, 229, 235–36n17, 236n20 Hine, Lewis, 277n103 The History of the Construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal (1934), 115–16, 117, 185, 262nn61–62; blacklisting of, 223, 287n80; on Gulag camps, 218, 220–21, 222, 223, 224; Prishvin and, 115–16, 117, 262nn61–62; Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and, 223–24, 224, 225; Zoshchenko, Mikhail, “Story of One Reforging” (1934), 220–21, 222 Hitler, Adolf, 214 Hoffmann, E. T. A., “The Sandman” (1816), 92, 245n2 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph” (1859), 53 Hunter, Jefferson, 10 Hutchins, Stephen, 32, 33, 236n27 Iablonovsky, Grigory, and Vladimir Griuntal′, What Is This? (1932), 124–26, 125, 130 Ilf, Ilya: “American Photographs” (with Evgeny Petrov; 1936), 17, 152, 170–79, 172, 173, 176, 177, 191, 193, 276–77n94; as authorphotographer, 11, 16, 111, 152–53, 162; “Christopher Columbus Reaches the Shore” (with Evgeny Petrov; 1937), 276n85; diary of, 276n83; Single-Storied America (with Evgeny Petrov; 1937), 171, 191, 275–76n80; Steinbeck and Capa’s Russian Journal (1948) and, 193 illustrations, photographs as, 16, 78, 111, 207–9, 283n26 Illustrierte Zeitung (journal; formerly A-I-Z), 128, 153, 158, 191, 193, 272n38 index to Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, 207–9, 211–12, 283n25 international influence: of Alpert and Shaikhet’s “A Day in the Life of a Moscow Working Class Family” (1931), 158–60; of authorphotographer movement, 191; Ehrenburg on, 163; of Ehrenburg’s My Paris, 179–85; foreign photo-journalists in Russia, 149; VOKS (All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries), 158, 272n34 Ivanov, Alexander, 53, 55, 245n1, 245n3, 245n6, 248n33, 253n94 Ivanov, Viacheslav, 35, 105, 220–21, 240n66 Ivanov-Razumnik, 106, 107, 108, 259n17 Izvestiia (newspaper), 113, 164, 185

INDEX Jay, Martin, 61 Kaganovsky, Lilya, 234n37 Kandinsky, Vasily, 258n11 Karelia, 57, 61, 105, 106, 108, 115, 121, 143, 190, 250n68, 260n25, 262n62, 262n66 Karelin, Andrei, 25, 28–30, 29, 80, 237n28, 259n24 Katzman, Laura, 167–68, 180, 277–78n109 Kaun, Alexander, 63 Kertész, André, 179 kinetoscopes/peepshows, 38, 240nn73–74 King, David, 13 kino-eye, 120, 121, 167 Kinofot (film journal), 16 Kittler, Friedrich, 17, 75 Kizny, Tomas, 218, 285n59 Klutsis, Gustav, 137, 268n149 Kogan, Alexander, 49, 96 Kracauer, Siegfried, 61 Krauss, Rosalind, 93, 257n141 Kruglikova, Elena, 83, 84, 254n101 Kukulin, Ilya, 285n63 Kuleshov, Lev, 267n134 Kumar, Amitava, 284–85n50 Kunichika, Michael, 218, 285n59 Kupchenko, Vladimir, 56, 253n96 Kuprin, Aleksandr, 248n25 Langford, Martha, 78, 246n13 Langman, Eleazar, 126–28, 127, 131 The Last Station (film, 2009), 242n97 lateral viewfinder, 165–67, 180, 189–90, 210, 225 Lavrov, Aleksandr, 243n110 LEF group, 264n86, 271n12 left, look to/left front, 149, 152, 158, 160, 164, 174, 189, 191, 271n12 Leica cameras, 111, 152, 164, 183, 185, 225 Lenin, Vladimir, 137, 273n43 Lermontov, Mikhail, 212 Leving, Yuri, 281n3 Levitsky, Sergei, 25–28, 26, 27, 30, 34, 35, 45, 236n22 Leyda, Jay, 94, 180, 277n107 Life magazine, 178, 193 Lissitzky, El: Ehrenburg’s My Paris and, 163–65, 165, 166, 169, 189; UHP and No Pasaran! (1936), 185; USSR in Construction, work for, 134, 135, 136, 267n136, plate 20; Veshch′/Objet/Gegenstand (journal), 163, 164, 264n88 Lissitzky, Es (Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers), 134, 135, 136, 185, 267n136, plate 20 “literature of fact” movement, 110–15 Literaturnaia gazeta, 167 Litvinov, Alexander, 139 lubochnaia literatura (chapbooks), 40 lubok, 47, 239n58 Lumière brothers/Lumière Company, 86, 88, 95, 254n107, 257n142 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 8, 10, 109, 111–12, 261n47

295

magic lanterns, 37–38, 211–12, 240n69 Mayakovsky, Vladimir: “About That” (1923), 16, 268n147; Bedbug (1928–29), 231n3; “Left March” (1918), 271n12; “This Is Why a Peasant Needs an Airplane” (1925), 264n93 Mayo brothers, 185 McDuff, David, 238n41 McReynolds, Louise, 47, 64, 242n105, 250n53 Medzhibovskaya, Inessa, 235–36n17 Merezhkovsky, Dmitri, 61, 249n45 Metro diary project (1930s), 15, 103 Mey, Albert, 43 Meyer, Michael, 12–13, 233n29 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 60, 87 Mezhericher, Leonid, 158, 159–60, 189, 273n43 microgeography: in Alpert and Shaikhet’s “A Day in the Life of a Moscow Working Class Family” (1931), 155; of Ilf’s photographs, 177; of Prishvin, 11, 16, 104, 106–8, 132–44, 144–45, 155, 162, 210, 259n19; in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, 219 Minkowski, Eugène, 93 Mitchell, W. J. T., 17, 233n29 modernism/modernity, 8, 10, 14, 16, 17, 31, 37, 97, 109, 129, 195, 246n10; on Leonid Andreev, 56–57, 58, 59, 62, 90, 96, 97, 98, 247n21; of Ehrenburg, 152, 162, 183. See also avant-garde photography, Soviet Moholy-Nagy, László, 8, 124, 135, 139, 158; Vision in Motion (1946), 147 montage, 221, 262n72, 267n134, 267n135; of Ehrenburg and El Lissitzky, 164, 165, 166, 167; Eisenstein and, 285n63, 286n72; of Ilf and Petrov, 175–76, 193; Muybridge and, 119, 267n126; Prishvin and, 116–17, 119–21, 123, 132–33, 135–39, 266n124, 267n134; socialist realism and, 154–55, 158; Solzhenitsyn and, 221, 222, 285n63. See also photomontage Morozov, Sergei, 28, 125–26, 174, 265n103, 280n139 Morson, Gary Saul, 51, 238n52, 239n63, 240n69, 240n72 movies. See film and cinema Murav, Harriet, 288n91 Murmansk Railroad, 121 Muybridge, Eadweard, 119, 119–20, 154, 263n71, 263n83 Nabokov, Dmitri (son), 211, 214, 215, 216 Nabokov, Sergei (brother), 213 Nabokov, Vera (wife), 210, 214, 215, 216, 288n94 Nabokov, Vladimir, 15, 203–16, 231n2; on editorial board of Measures (1937), 205; Freund photograph (1967), 200, 206; index cards used by, 206, 207, 209, 282n20; Rozanov cited by, 283n22; Sebald’s use of photo of, 216, 217; Snowdon’s double-image photo of, 228–29; Solzhenitsyn, missed meeting with, 18, 203, 228, 229, 288n94 Nabokov, Vladimir, Speak, Memory (1966), 14, 203–16; family photos and copies in Nabokov

296

INDEX

Nabokov, Vladimir, Speak, Memory (continued) archives used in, 207, 208; index, 207–9, 211–12, 283n25; on magic lantern, 211–12; map, 209, 283n29; Nabokov on, 282n14; on Nazis and WWII, 213–14; paratextual materials, 207–9, 283n29, 283nn25–27; on passports and move from Europe to America, 214–16, 215; privacy in, 210–11, 211; publication history, 282n13; Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago compared, 224; St. Petersburg house in which Nabokov was born in, 209–10, 210, 213; stereoscopic imagery used in, 212–13 Nabokov, Vladimir, works: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969), 204; Camera Obscura/Laughter in the Dark (1932), 281n10; “Cloud, Castle, Lake” (1941), 204; Conclusive Evidence (1951), 204–5, 213; The Defense (1930), 96–97; The Eye (1930), 282n17; Invitation to a Beheading (1936), 201, 226–27; Lolita (1955), 204, 206; Mary (1926), 204, 282n17, 285n50; Pale Fire (1962), 204, 283n27; “Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible” (1937), 1, 3, 6–7; Transparent Things (1972), 213; “A Visit to the Museum” (1939), 284n48 Naiman, Eric, 15, 103 Namut, Hans, 185 Nansen passports, 216 Nappelbaum, Moisei, 49 Nashi dostizheniia (journal), 112 Nature (magazine), 219 “navel level” viewpoint, 123, 124, 135, 264n90 Nazis, 213–14, 218 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir, 236–37nn27–28; Along the Volga: Sketches and Impressions of a Summer Excursion (1877), 28, 236n27 Nesbet, Anne, 175, 177 New Masses (journal), 166, 179 New Theatre (journal), 180 Newhall, Beaumont, 94, 277n103 Nicholas II (tsar), 25, 47 Nickell, William, 242n97, 243n107, 244n120 Niecpe, Isidore, 24, 235n6 Niecpe, Joseph Nicephore, 235n6, 237n30 Nieto Garcia, Michael, 283n25 Norris, Stephen, 239n58 Novyi LEF (journal), 124 Novyi mir (journal), 203 objectivity, 12, 30, 106–7, 190, 225, 230, 263n71 ocherk/ocherki, 16, 33, 103, 128, 184, 258–59n12, 260n3, 260n31; in “literature of fact” movement, 110; photo-ocherki, 264n95; Prishvin and, 103, 105–6, 112–13, 115, 120, 122, 129, 130, 132, 139, 266n115; Tretyakov on, 111, 261n48 October group, 123, 124, 126, 153, 273n49 Ogonek (journal), 160–62, 170–71, 174, 184, 186, 191, 273n48, 278n118 Ol, Andrei, 62, 249n38 Old Believers, 105, 258n10

Old Luven’s Hut (film, 1935), 139–41 “On the Restructuring of Literary-Artistic Organizations” (1932), 149–52, 153 operativity and operative authors, 111–14, 127, 144, 159, 165, 185, 220, 275n68 Orwin, Donna, 37 ostranenie (defamiliarization), 34, 61, 79, 103–4, 123–26, 134, 144 “ours and theirs” photo-series, 169–70, 170, 192 painted, retouched, or colored photographs, 38, 108, 185–86, 235n12, 236n22, 260n27, plate 1 Pan, figure of, 106, 107, 259n17, 262n65 Papazian, Elizabeth, 261n48 Paperno, Irina, 90, 233n34 Papernyi, Vladimir, 273n40 paradnaia kniga, 184, 278n118 paratext, 207–9, 283n29, 283nn25–27 Parrott, Ray J., 260n31 passports, 214–16, 215, 284–85n50 Pasternak, Leonid, 45 peepshows/kinetoscopes, 38, 240nn73–74 Peter the Great (tsar), 143 Petrov, Evgeny, 162, 189–90, 191, 193; “American Photographs” (with Ilya Ilf; 1936), 17, 152, 170–79, 172, 173, 176, 177; “Christopher Columbus Reaches the Shore” (with Ilya Ilf; 1937), 276n85; Single-Storied America (with Ilya Ilf; 1937), 171, 191, 275–76n80 photo albums, 65–68, 66, 67, 70, 73, 78, 246n13 photo collages, 27, 68, 69 photographic essays, 264–65n95 photographic literacy in Russian literature, 3–18; author-photographer movement, 10–11; diary writing and, 15–16 (See also diary writing in Russia); domestic photography, 14, 57, 78, 80, 97–98, 245n4, 249–50n52, 249n41; framing/lack of frame, 11–13, 14, 15, 78–79, 135; historical introduction of photography in Russia, 23–31; nineteenth-century challenges of, 7, 55; remediation of image through text, 11; Soviet avant-garde photography and, 123–24; “space” as “practiced place” and, 14–15; technologies, impact of, 7, 17; text’s role in photographic discourse, 16; twentiethcentury embrace of, 8–11, 55; writing and photo-image-making, etymological link between, 30, 237n30. See also Bolshevik Revolution; socialist realism; technology, impact of; specific authors and authorphotographers photomontage: of Heartfield, 158, 187, 188, 268n149; theories and concepts of, 135–39, 265n111, 268n142; in USSR in Construction, 115, 128–35, 130, 131, 267–68nn135–136, 267n135; White Sea Canal photos and, 221, 222 photo-series, 153, 155–59, 179, 264–65n95 Pilling, John, 284n37 Poe, Edgar Allan, 58, 90–91, 93, 247n16; “The Daguerreotype” (1840), 256n128; “Oval Portrait” (1850), 55

INDEX Polzunov, P. P., 108 Popov, Sergei, 45 Posrednik (press), 40–41 posterization, 135, 137, 179, 191, 268n139, 278n118 Pravda (newspaper), 157, 159 Prekhner, M., 267n132 Prishvin, Mikhail, 16, 103–45, 164, 207, 210, 212, 223, 258n9; as author-photographer, 11, 13, 107–8, 111–12, 114–15, 123; as children’s author, 103; chronophotographie of, 122, 132, 138, 139, 142, 223; as diarist, 15, 16, 103, 110, 114, 122, 133, 135–36, 262n59; “literature of fact” movement and, 110–15; microgeographies of, 11, 16, 104, 106–8, 132–44, 144–45, 155, 162, 210, 259n19; novelistic form, turn to, 191; ocherk format and, 103, 105–6, 112–13; photographs, authorial claims regarding, 107–8, 133–34, 137–38, 139, 262n58; photomontage, theories and concepts of, 135–39; as realist, 114–15; Shishkin-Karelin collaborative work and, 259n24; Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago citing, 285–86n64; Soviet avant-garde photography and, 123–28, 125, 127; on Tolstoy, 262n59; Tretyakov and, 110, 112–13, 122; Vertov on, 121–22; White Sea-Baltic Canal Project (1930s) and, 13, 115–16, 121–22, 122, 128, 143, 144, 146, 262n62; WWI and Bolshevik Revolution, 103–4, 109–10 Prishvin, Mikhail, works: Cranes’ Homeland (1929), 113; “Fathers and Sons” (1934), 116–19; “The First Wood Grouse” (1935), 132, plate 18; Ginseng: The Root of Life (1933), 104, 139–42, 140, 142, 269n159; Golden Horn (1933), 129, 139, 140; Kashchei’s Chain (1927), 113; In the Land of Unfrightened Birds (1907), 104–9, 105, 116, 123, 143, 269n165; In the Land of Unfrightened Birds (1934), 104, 115–23, 117, 118, 122, 262–63n66; My Ocherk (1933), 105–6, 110, 114; “Nadvoitsky Waterfall” photos (1934), 117–19, 118; “Povenets. The Start of the Canal” (1934), 121, 122; Tsar’s Road (unfinished), 143–44, 269–70n165, 269n162; USSR in Construction, photo-narratives in, 128–35, 130, 131, 139, plate 19; “Vyg-Lake” (1934), 100, 116, 117 Prishvina, Valeriia, 120, 143 Prokudin-Gorsky, Sergei, ii, 16, 23, 42, 48–49, 51, 108–9, 212, 243n113, 254n104, 260n26, 260n29, plate 3, plate 16; Fotograf-liubitel′ (journal), editorship of, 243n110, 260n28 Proletarskoe foto. See Sovetskoe foto/Proletarskoe foto “Prosperity” photo-series (1936), 160–62, 161, 170 Prozhektor (journalism), 180, 278n118 punctum, 247n21 Pushkin, Alexander, 1, 3–7, 5, 6, 8, 13, 228, 231nn2–4, 248n26, 269n163 Radek, Karl, 159, 160 Rajewsky, Irina O., 11

297

Rancer, George, 185 RAPP, 264n86 realism, 7, 9, 25, 31, 36, 75, 114–15, 137, 220, 251n75, 259n12. See also socialist realism Regards (journal), 193 Repin, Ilya, 41, 45, 251n68 retouched, painted, or colored photographs, 38, 108, 185–86, 235n12, 236n22, 260n27, plate 1 Revolution of 1917, 95–96, 103–4, 109–10, 257n152 Rodchenko, Alexander, xx, 8, 9, 16, 115, 123–24, 131, 134, 135, 138, 146, 151, 160, 174, 265n97, 265n105, 267n135, 276n94 Rohdie, Sam, 120, 263n72 Romanov, Ivan, 112 Ronen, Omry, 246n11 ROPF (Russian Association of Proletarian Photographers), 123, 126–28, 153, 271n16 Rozanov, Vasily, 11, 15, 57, 76–80, 78, 82, 86, 97, 133–34, 207, 252n88; Fallen Leaves (1913–15), 76, 76–78, 77, 80, 82, 86, 207, 252n79, 252n82; Ivanov’s “Appearance of Christ to the People,” analysis of, 248n33; letter to Leonid Andreev on Bolshevik Revolution, 96, 257n152; Nabokov citing, 283n22; Prishvin tutored by, 104, 258n9; Solitaria (1912), 76–78, 79–80 Rubins, Maria, 84 Russian Geographical Society, 32 Russian (Bolshevik) Revolution, 95–96, 103–4, 109–10, 257n152 Russo-Japanese War, 139, 248n34 Saarinen, Eliel, 61 Sabashnikova, Margarita, 80, 82, 83–84, 253n94, 253n97, 254n104 Salisbury, Harrison, 228 Saturday Review of the Arts, 229 Schlögel, Karl, 185, 193, 278n120 Schneer, David, 273n45 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 38 Sebald, W. G., 213; The Emigrants (1992), 216, 217 Seifrid, Thomas, 37, 38, 281–82n10 self-portraits: Leonid Andreev, 87–88, 89, plate 10; Lev Tolstoy, 20, 38–39, 39, 225, 240n75; Sophia Andreevna Tolstoy, 43, 44, 241n92; Voloshin, 81, 82–85, 83, 85 Senfeldt, Wilhelm, 31 Seymour, David (Chim), 185, 278n122 Shahn, Ben, 17, 167, 180, 181, 277–78n109; “Scenes from the Living Theatre-Sidewalks of New York” (1934), 180, 181 Shaikhet, Arkady, 10, 128, 179, 186, 272n33; “A Day in the Life of a Moscow Working Class Family” (with Max Alpert; 1931), 153–60, 155, 156, 189, 271n14, 271nn17–18, 273n45; “Uzbek female worker form the Tashkent Textile Combine” (1935), 160, 191, 192 Shalamov, Varlam, “Children’s Drawings” (1959), 221–22 Shapiro, Harvey, 288n94

298

INDEX

Shashalski, G., 267n132 Shekutyev, N., 267n132 Sherling, Miron, 49, 260n27 Shestakov, N., 267n132 Shishkin, Ivan, 259n24 Shishkin, Mikhail, “Nabokov’s Inkblot” (2012), 228 Shklovsky, Viktor, 78–79, 80, 113, 115, 253n88, 265n100; “Art as Device,” 126 Shmerling, Vladimir, 132 Silver Age, 57, 246n11 Smena cameras, 224, 225 Smith, Alexander, 258n9 smychka, 151, 152, 159 snapshots, 64, 249–50n52 Snowdon, Lord, 228–29, 288–89n98 Snyder, Joel, 232n11 socialist realism, 17, 128, 149–98, 150, 151, 161, 170, 192, 194, 196, 197, 261n48, 270n166, 280n145, 280n150; Alpert and Shaikhet’s “A Day in the Life of a Moscow Working Class Family” (1931), 153–60, 155, 156, 189, 271n14, 271nn17–18, 273n45; authorphotographer movement and, 10, 191; foreign spaces and, 190–91; heroic subject in, 160, 191, 273n49; photography and, 159–60; photoseries, as genre, 153, 155–59, 179, 264–65n95; retouching and staging photos, 185–86; social documentation, photography as, 179–87. See also Ehrenburg, Ilya; Ilf, Ilya Soiuzfoto, 149, 157, 160, 270n4, 271n14 Solntse Rossii (journal), 4–6, 5, 6, 14, 49–50, 64, 70–76, 71, 72, 96, 250n60 Soloviev, Vladimir, 138 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 217–28; exile of, 203; Nabokov, missed meeting with, 18, 203, 228, 229, 288n94; on Nabokov, 203; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), 203, 221; photography and authorial self-formation, 15; White Sea-Baltic Canal project and, 13 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, The Gulag Archipelago (1973), 15, 203, 217–28, 224; History of the Construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal and, 223–24, 224, 225; photoreproduction and microfilm transportation of text, 224–25, 287n82; portraits of Solzhenitsyn as prisoner in, 225, 226, 227, 287–88n86, 288n89; Prishvin cited in, 285–86n64 Sontag, Susan, On Photography (1977), 217, 226–27, 229, 242n95, 275n72, 289n102 Sovetskoe foto/Proletarskoe foto (journal), 8, 112, 125, 128, 132, 137, 153, 155–59, 170, 184, 185, 189, 191, 261n47, 272n38, 278n118 SovFoto, 195 Spanish Civil War: Capa in, 193; Ehrenburg in, 185–87, 193; Heartfield’s “Freedom itself struggles in its ranks” (1936), 187, 188; photobooks UHP and No Pasaran! (1936), 185–87, 186–88, 193, 278nn121–22 Spiridonov, Vassili, 243–44n116, 244n123 spirit photography, 93

staging photographs, 186, 279n128 Stalin, Joseph, 115–16, 128, 134, 137–39, 185–86, 269n158, 270n166 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 60, 87 Stasov, Vladimir, 29, 30 Steichen, Edward, “The Family of Man” (exhibition, 1955), 195–96, 280n150 Steinbeck, John, and Robert Capa, A Russian Journal (1948), 193–98, 194, 196, 197, 280n145, 280n150 Stepanova, Varvara, 134, 136–37 stereoscopes and stereographs, 53, 55, 93–94, 212–13, 245n1, 245n3, 245n6, 257n141, plate 9 Stigneev, Valery, 173–74 Strand, Paul, 274n64, 275n79 subjectivity, 7, 11, 14–15, 18, 152, 229, 230, 250n64; of Leonid Andreev, 59, 63, 91, 97; of Prishvin, 103–4, 107, 109, 112, 115, 139, 144–45; of Solzhenitsyn, 220, 221, 225, 227. See also objectivity Svetopis′ (journal), 30 svetopis′, as term, 7, 30, 87, 114, 237n30 Symbolists, 16, 35, 56, 58–59, 63, 75, 104, 106–9, 138, 251n75, 259n17 Sytin, Ivan, 40 Szarkowski, John, 281n6 Tagg, John, 12 Talbot, Henry Fox, 24, 235n9, 237n30 Tapsell, Tomas, 47, 243n107 Tarkovsky, Andrei, Sculpting in Time (1986), 101 Taro, Gerto, 278n122 Tatlin, Vladimir, 163 technology, impact of, 7, 17; anti-technological concept of art, 24; anxieties about, 41–42; art, photography understood through existing discourse of, 24–25, 30–31, 41, 49; Autochromes, 57, 86–88, 90, 91, 93, 98, 243n113, 251n70, 254n107, 254n114, 257n142; calotypes, 24, 235n9; daguerreotypes, 17, 23, 24, 30, 90, 235nn8–9, 237–38n40; FED cameras, 225; lateral viewfinder, 165–67, 180, 189–90, 210, 225; Leica cameras, 111, 152, 164, 183, 185, 225; Lumière brothers/Lumière Company, 86, 88, 95, 254n107, 257n142; magic lanterns, 37–38, 211–12, 240n69; peepshows/kinetoscopes, 38, 240nn73–74; Smena cameras, 224, 225; Solzhenitsyn’s photoreproduction/microfilming of text, 224–25; sun/technology, authorship of photographs attributed to, 7, 30, 232n11, 237n31; time-lapse photography, 119, 119–20, 153, 269n155. See also film and cinema; stereoscopes and stereographs Teleshov, Nikolai, 248n25 “theirs and ours” photo-series, 169–70, 170, 192 time-lapse photography, 119, 119–20, 153, 269n155 Toland, Kristina, 238n40, 252n81 Tolstoy, Alexandra (daughter), 244n120

INDEX Tolstoy, Alexei (son), and Zhemchuzhnikov brothers (as Koz′ma Prutkov), “Iunker Schmidt” (1854), 251n64 Tolstoy, Lev, 13–14, 15, 23–51, 44, 46, 95, 111, 115, 137, 237–38n40, 239n63, 241n79, 242n96, 242n97, 244n122, 246–47n15, 256n127, 262n59, plate 4; as amateur photographer, 38–39, 39; censorship of, 241n79, 241n82; Chertkov’s photos, 42, 43–45, 47, 48, 49–50; copyright and, 40, 45, 48–51, 243n113; memory and public perception of, 49–51; Prokudin-Gorsky’s color photograph of, ii, 42, 48–49, plate 3; selfportrait, 20, 38–39, 39, 225, 240n75; views on photography, 41–42; at Yasnaya Polyana, 39, 40, 42, 43, 49, 243n107 Tolstoy, Lev, works: Anna Karenina (1877), 21, 35–36, 40, 203, 239n63; “First Step” (1908), 41, plate 2; Hadji Murad (1912), 38, 240n73; The Living Corpse (1911), 236–37n27; Sebastopol Sketches (1855) and The Cossacks (1863), 31–34, 32, 238n41, 238n48, 239n56, 239n58; “Slaughter-Free Diet or Vegetarianism,” 41; War and Peace (1869), 37–38, 40, 239n56, 239n58, 240n69, 240n73; What Is Art? (1897), 41, 219–20, 241n82 Tolstoy, Sophia Andreevna (wife), 43, 45, 60, 242n95, 249n43; diary and children’s stories illustrated with photographs, 241n91; diary of, 42, 43, 241n91, 262n59; disputes with Chertkov, 43–45, 48, 49–50, 242n97, 244n120; manuscripts of Tolstoy, assertion of role in editing, 243n107; marriage to Tolstoy, 38; My Life, 50–51, 243–44n116, 244n123; photographs of Tolstoy, 42–47, 46, 48, 49–50; presentation of Tolstoy by, 50–51, 244n123; publication of photographs by, 242n98; selfportraits, 43, 44, 241n92 Tolstoy, Vanechka (son), 43, 44 Trachtenberg, Alan, 277n103 Tregubov, Ivan, 45 Tretyakov, Sergei, 12, 119, 122, 155, 189, 271n18, 279n130, 280n139; as authorphotographer, 10–11, 111–12; Benjamin on, 10, 111; LEF group, 264n86; “literature of fact” movement and, 110–15; “The New Leo Tolstoy” (1927), 110–11, 261n37; ocherk, 261n48; on operativity and operative authors, 111–14, 127, 144, 159, 275n68; on photoseries, 158, 179; Prishvin and, 110, 112–13, 122; “The Socialist Village and the Writer” (1931), 158; on Tolstoy, 111, 115; in USSR in Construction, 266n114 Troshin, Nikolai, 134 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 80, 254n101 Tupitsyn, Margarita, 128, 265n100, 271n16 Turgenev, Ivan, 25, 116, 262n65; Hunter’s Sketches (1852), 105; “Klara Milich” (1883), 55, 245n6 Tynianov, Yuri, 261n37, 283n26

299

Ulitskaya, Liudmila, The Big Green Tent (2011), 254n104 the uncanny (unheimlich), 55–56, 57, 68, 90, 92–93, 245n2, 257n140 Uspensky, Alexander, 116 Uspensky, Gleb, 105 Uspensky, Nikolai, 7, 232n13 USSR in Construction (journal), 115, 128–35, 130, 131, 139, 152, 191, 218, 266n114, 267n135, 268n140, 272n33, plate 17, plates 19–20 Veligorskaya, Alexandra Mikhailovna, 59, 60, 65, 73, 74 Veresaev, Vikenty, 248n25 Vertov, Dziga, 101, 120–22, 136, 137; Eleventh Year (1928), 117; Man with a Movie Camera (1929), 167; A Sixth Part of the World (1926), 132, 266n124, 267n130, 268n145 Veshch′/Objet/Gegenstand (journal), 163, 164, 264n88 Vesy (journal), 63, 80 Vetoshnikov, Pavel, 25–27, 236n20 Vidler, Anthony, 57, 68 VOKS (All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries), 158, 272n34 Voloshin, Maximilian, 11, 57, 80–85, 88, 97, 253n93, 253n94; dacha at Koktebel, 80, 84, 96; “Dom poeta” (1926), 254n104; Ivanov’s “Stereoscope: A Twilight Story” reviewed by, 53, 55, 245n1, 245n3, 245n6; Kruglikova, Elena, self-portrait with, 83, 84; Kupchenko on, 56; “Mirror” (1905), 82; reflected selfportrait, 81, 82; reflection and mirrors in work of, 81, 82–84, 83, 229, 253n100; Margarita Sabashnikova (wife) and, 80, 82, 83–84, 253n94, 253n97, 254n104; The Story of My Soul (1904-16), 80–85, 81, 253n96; Taiakh (Egyptian bust), self-portrait with, 84–85, 85, 254n104 Voznesenky, A. S., 250n54 Vu (journal), 193 war, images of, 33–34, 185, 193, 239n56, 239n58, 278n121 Wedgwood, Frances Julia, “Count Leo Tolstoi” (1887), 36–37, 41, 159, 236n23, 239n64 Wedgwood, Thomas, 239n64 Weld, Sara Pankenier, 126 White, Edmund, 229 White, Frederick, 58, 63, 245n7, 250–51n64, 250n55 White Sea-Baltic Canal Project (1930s), 13, 115–16, 121–22, 122, 128, 136, 143, 144, 267n135, plate 1. See also History of the Construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal Widdis, Emma, 132 Wilson, Edmund, 282n14 Wolf, Erika, 128, 164, 265–66n111, 275–76n80 worker photography movement, 8 Workers Film and Photo League, 275n79

300

INDEX

World War I, 95–96, 109 World War II, 189, 191, 213–14, 218 Writers’ Congress (All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, 1934), 128, 157, 159–60, 189, 220, 261n48, 273n49 Yagoda, Genrikh, 223, 286–87nn79–80 Yasnaya Polyana (Tolstoy’s estate), 39, 40, 42, 43, 49, 95, 243n107 Zaitsev, Boris, 58, 62–63 Zamyatin, Evgeny, 251n75; We (1921), 231n3 Zaslavsky, David, 167, 183, 274n67

Zhar-ptitsa (Berlin émigré journal), 96–97, 97 Zhemchuzhnikov brothers and Alexei Tolstoy (as Koz′ma Prutkov), “Iunker Schmidt” (1854), 251n64 Zherebtsov, Boris, 154, 158, 271n17 zhiznetvorchestvo, 56, 63, 88, 246n9 Zhukov, Pavel, 75 Zhurnalist, xx, 8, 9 Zolotoe runo (journal), 80 Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 115; “Story of One Reforging” (1934), 220–21, 222 Zubov, Nikolai, 224 Zvezda (newspaper), 183

Plate 1. Heavily retouched photograph from the White Sea Canal photographic archive, no date. State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), f. 7952, op. 7, ed. kh. 94.

Plate 2. Lev Tolstoy, “First Step” (1908); courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, Collection of Russian Popular Press, University of Chicago.

Plate 3. Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, “Lev Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana” (1908); permissions and image courtesy of the State Museum of L. N. Tolstoy, Moscow.

Plate 4. “A Day with Tolstoy” with photographs by Vladimir Chertkov, Solntse Rossii, no. 46 (1912).

Plate 5. Leonid Andreev, dacha in Vammelsuu, Autochrome (early 1910s). Image courtesy of the Leeds Russian Archive.

Plate 6. Leonid Andreev, “From a color photograph, the work of L. Andreev,” Solntse Rossii, no. 1 (1912).

Plate 7. Leonid Andreev, “Portrait of Judas,” drawing and Autochrome (early 1910s). Image courtesy of the Leeds Russian Archive.

Plate 9. Leonid Andreev, stereographic view of the dacha grounds in Vammelsuu, Autochrome (1910s). Image courtesy of the Leeds Russian Archive.

Plate 8. Leonid Andreev, dacha interior with Judas portrait, Autochrome (early 1910s). Image courtesy of the Leeds Russian Archive.

Plate 10. Leonid Andreev, self-portrait with crucifix, Autochrome (1910s). Image courtesy of the Leeds Russian Archive.

Plate 11. Leonid Andreev, “In Oilskin,” Autochrome (1910s). Image courtesy of the Leeds Russian Archive.

Plate 12. Leonid Andreev, “In the Office [Vadim],” Autochrome (1910s). Image courtesy of the Leeds Russian Archive.

Plate 13. Leonid Andreev, Savva, Autochrome (1910s). Image courtesy of the Leeds Russian Archive.

Plate 14. Leonid Andreev, “Winter on the Sea,” Autochrome (1910s). Image courtesy of the Leeds Russian Archive.

Plate 15. Leonid Andreev, double-exposed self-portrait, Autochrome (1910s). Image courtesy of the Leeds Russian Archive.

Plate 16. Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, “Side View of the Kivach Waterfall [Suna River in Karelia],” glass, black and white, and three-color separation (1915). Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

Plate 17. Cover for USSR in Construction, no. 10 (1935). Uncredited. Image courtesy of Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

Plate 18. Mikhail Prishvin, “A Typical Place for Woodsnipe” and “Head of a Woodsnipe,” USSR in Construction, no. 10 (1935). Permissions courtesy of L. A. Riazanova, M. M. Prishvin Estate. Image courtesy of Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

Plate 19. Mikhail Prishvin, details of sables, USSR in Construction, no. 10 (1935). M. Prishvin’s own copy of the journal with penciled signature. Permissions courtesy of L. A. Riazanova, M. M. Prishvin Estate.

Plate 20. El Lissitzky, “The Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic,” USSR in Construction, no. 9–12 (1937). © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy of Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.