“Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia” | Open Indiana

Nineteenth-Century Russian Caricature

John E. Bowlt

THE RUSSIAN GRAPHIC ARTS

THE FOCUS of this chapter is the evolution of the Russian caricature, particularly of the first half of the nineteenth century and within the broader context of the Russian graphic arts in general. The development of the Russian graphic and illustrative arts from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries has been neglected at the hands of Western critics, and we should take this opportunity to help redress an obvious historical imbalance. Even Russian discussions of the subject have not always been comprehensive—for example, the collector and senator Dmitrii Rovinsky ignored wood and steel engraving and lithography in his imposing Podrobnyi slovar’ russkikh graverov (Detailed Directory to Russian Engravers) of 1895. Unfortunately, an investigation into the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century graphic arts in Russia does not reveal a treasure house of artistic talent, except for the Napoleonic caricatures of 1812-14. Rather, it reinforces the general assumption that secular Russian art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was largely derivative from Western models. Soviet historians tend to disregard these sources and stimuli, but pre-Revolutionary critics such as Nikolai Vrangel and Vasilii Vereshchagin were fully aware of Russia’s status as apprentice rather than mentor, and their many excellent essays published in the journal Starye gody (Bygone Years) or under the patronage of the St. Petersburg Circle of Lovers of Fine Russian Editions are still reliable guides to the history of the Russian graphic arts.¹

A few words on the general position of the Russian graphic arts in the eighteenth century and before are necessary before we can approach the more specific discipline of caricature. It is generally held that the first Russian wood engraving for a book was of the Apostle Luke for an Apostol (Books of the Apostles) of 1564, and throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, numerous ecclesiastical books were published with engravings, most of them dependent on Western images borrowed from Italy, Germany, and Holland. As a matter of fact, these early Russian book illustrations perhaps belong more to a Polish and Ukrainian tradition than to a Russian one, and this point should be emphasized, for, until the end of the eighteenth century, if not later, leading “Russian” artists were more often than not Ukrainian. But however we categorize these first engravings, they are often identifiable by a curious duality: on the one hand, they rely on conventional Western models imported mainly through Poland; on the other, they retain a spontaneity and naïvete typical of the effusive, folkloristic spirit of Slavic art. This combination of sophistication and simplicity is particularly evident in the eighteenth-century wood and metal engravings of the Ukrainians Ivan Migura and Grigorii Levitsky (father of the portrait painter Dmitrii), and it dominates the Ukrainian and then Russian graphic arts at least until the Napoleonic caricatures. This dichotomy is reflected further in the parallel traditions of the Russian visual arts— the vulgar, primitive lubok or broadsheet with its tawdry imagery and blatant message coexisted comfortably with the academic, classical portrait.

It would be wrong, however, to think wistfully that the lubok was exclusively Russian. Many of the lubok compositions were borrowed from the West, especially from the German Flugblätter and the English broadsheets: the favorite motifs of current fashions in clothing and scenes of overindulgence or compromising behavior often derived from such sources. Of course, there were some original and distinctive lubki, such as the famous “Mice Burying the Cat” (fig. 12.1) or “An Old Believer Having His Beard Cut Off,” both of the early eighteenth century. The former is actually a parody of Peter the Great’s funeral and contains sardonic illusions to his innovations and reforms. One mouse smokes a pipe and pulls a barrel of tobacco (Peter prohibited the free sale of tobacco), some mice represent regions conquered by Peter during the Russo-Swedish War, and there is a one-wheeled carriage (new in Russia and Peter’s favorite mode of transport). Although we can assume that other lubki might offer political translations just as astonishing, “Mice Burying the Cat” was an exception and, in fact, was not deciphered until the mid-nineteenth century (by Rovinsky). But in the light of its allegorical function and critical purpose, this particular lubok might be regarded as the first Russian political cartoon and departure point for social and political caricature.

As for the professional graphic arts of Russia in the eighteenth century, especially book illustration, Western influence was also paramount. Under Peter the Great a number of Dutch and German engravers settled in Russia and were among the first artists there to favor secular subjects, mostly battle scenes, firework displays, and atlases of the world. They, in turn, introduced copper engraving into Russia, and the important engraver and etcher Aleksei Zubov, working in the early eighteenth century, owed much to these foreign masters. This imposed Western tradition of the graphic arts was maintained throughout the eighteenth century, mainly as a result of the continuous importation of Western artists, especially after the foundation of the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts in 1757. French engravers such as Le Lorrain, Le Prince, and Moreau illustrated Russian books, headed Russian workshops, and compiled textbooks for draftsmen during their long or short residences in St. Petersburg. Their principles were reinforced by the steady influx and translation of Western European books, sometimes illustrated with original Russian prints. Russian subject matter was certainly used for engravings and etchings in the eighteenth century, but, again, it was treated and interpreted through a peculiarly Western vision. In fact, one reason for the “mysteriousness” of Russia, as conceived by the Western public from the eighteenth century onward, is to be found in the exotic and often ludicrous renditions of everyday Russian life that foreign artists in St. Petersburg engraved and sold abroad: the exuberant portraits of Russian peasants dressed in fantastic clothes, wearing Greek sandals, or dancing with bears that continued to be produced into the twentieth century find their genesis in the heady, if not diseased, imaginations of those zealous, but bored, Frenchmen living in St. Petersburg in the mid-eighteenth century.

Why did the professional graphic arts remain secondary in Russia throughout the eighteenth century? The answer to this question is to be found not only in the lack of competent Russian engravers and etchers but also in the cultural backwardness and crass ignorance of eighteenth-century Russian society. Essentially, that society did not read and was not interested in the fine arts. In the mid-eighteenth century, even the Moscow Synod Publishing House was so overburdened with unsold books that it was forced to donate whole warehouses of books to paper factories, and the so-called St. Petersburg Academic Bookstore had such a large unsold stock that civil servants were forced to buy books there by having 5 percent deducted from their salaries.²

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, things had changed for the better. Books began to appear with illustrations by fine Russian engravers, who relied on a disciplined, classical elucidation of the text rather than on the rococo allegories and mythological motifs used in many eighteenth-century Russian books and reminiscent of a latter-day Boucher or Watteau. With the consolidation of the academy program in St. Petersburg, an important generation of graduates in engraving (Ivan Chesky, Stepan Galaktionov, et al.) began to advance their careers as book illustrators and as engravers of topographical views and portraits. The period of the 1780s-1800s, of course, marked the flowering of the engraved portrait rendered after Russian portraits (by Fedor Rokotov, Levitsky, Anton Losenko, and Vladimir Borovikovsky) or, more frequently, after Western portraits (by Roslin, Torelli, Tocqué, et al.). In the 1810S, with the appearance of Aleksandr Orlovsky, who arrived in St. Petersburg from Poland in 1802, Ivan Terebenev, and Aleksei Venetsianov, the book illustration and decoration achieved unprecedented heights in Russia, especially after Orlovsky’s application of the lithographic process from 1816 onward.³ Important publications date from this period, such as the 1824 edition of Pushkin’s Bakhchisaraiskii fontan (Fountain of Bakhchisarai) with illustrations by Galaktionov, and the periodicals Poliarnaia zvezda (Polestar) of 1825-26 and Nevskii al’manakh (Nevsky Almanac) of 1826-29. All these items carry vignettes, head-and tailpieces, and capitals engraved by Chesky, Galaktionov, etc., but the number of full-scale illustrations is limited, rarely exceeding five per book. But this custom changed in the 1840s, when a number of copper-engraved albums and suites were undertaken by St. Petersburg and Moscow publishers, even though they were expensive, were not very popular, and often were not completed (such as the unfinished Dead Souls cycle drawn by Aleksandr Agin and engraved by Estafii Bernadsky in the 1840s). By the 1860s the traditional engraving, whether copper, steel, or wood, had begun to yield to the cheaper processes of zincography, phototype, and photoengraving. The result was a rapid and broad dissemination of the image, a process that accounts for the sudden flowering of the social caricature journal in Russia at this time.

RUSSIAN CARICATURE BEFORE 1812

At this juncture it is appropriate to turn attention to the development of caricature per se and to examine it within the framework of the graphic arts. A peculiar feature of Russian caricature, as of the graphic and illustrative arts as a whole, is that it is a relatively recent development. While Hogarth, for instance, was already creating his masterpieces of the 1730S, or Fragonard was deriding French mores under Louis XV, Russia could boast no counterparts. In other words, before 1800 a tradition of professional caricature did not exist, but there were occasional attempts to criticize the status quo by artistic and literary methods—although these were vulgar and imitative and derived frequently from Western sources such as Piscator’s Theatrum Biblicum, introduced by Peter the Great, Kopievsky’s important Simvoly i emblemata (Symbols and Emblemata, Amsterdam, 1705), and Picard’s engravings to Ovidievye figury (Figures from Ovid, St. Petersburg, 1721). Also relevant to this context, although outside the accepted understanding of political and social caricature, was the lubok, a medium that played a key role in the dissemination of motifs and ideas connected with ecclesiastical, social, and military life. However, the lubok rarely made a direct reference to a specific dignitary or a particular order, inasmuch as the censorship laws, however uneven and inconstant, forbade contravention of the “law of God, the Government, morality or the personal honor of any citizen.”⁴ The presence of the censorship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also serves to explain, in part, why the Russian fine arts resorted to inordinate flattery and delusion rather than to the exaggeration of negative features. This might explain in turn why Russian caricature, such as it existed, including the lubok, used general themes or supported an Aesopian interpretation of persons and events. “The Mice Burying the Cat” is a case in point. Krylov’s fables of the early nineteenth century constitute a literary extension of this method.

Suddenly, with the onslaught of the Napoleonic campaign of 1812, Russian caricature flowered with exceptional strength. How can this unexpected development in the Russian graphic arts—from a desultory and derivative condition at the end of the eighteenth century to a high esthetic standard in the 1810s—be explained? One answer to this question lies in the change in attitudes toward the drawing, the sketch, and the cartoon that was witnessed in Western Europe and in Russia at the end of the eighteenth century.

During the eighteenth century, at least within the perimeters of the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts, the arbiter of Russian taste, the drawing was regarded as the basis of the painting, a preparatory and component part of the finished oil. Orthodox artistic practice entailed drawing exclusively from plaster or live models, thus providing the necessary details for the mythological or historical subject and for the portrait—the braced muscle, the outstretched arm, the noble head. Inasmuch as academy painting disregarded “real life,” it had no need for the rapid documentation of the passing scene that the pen or pencil can achieve. However, the 1790s brought a new mood to the academy, and both faculty and students turned increasing attention to nature. Andrei Ivanov, father of the painter Aleksandr, who began teaching at the academy in 1798, even went so far as to assert that the understanding of nature and the literal re-creation of nature on the pictorial plane was the aim of art.⁵ Priorities shifted as the laws of nature and the physical world attained primacy over the laws of design. On a philosophical or perhaps psychological level, Russian society seemed now to reject its introspective, contemplative mood of the eighteenth century and to take up the European fashion for plein air and spontaneous sentiment. This was paralleled by a number of auspicious technical improvements in the 1800S and 1810s. For example, the introduction into the academy of the rubber eraser in place of the traditional pellet of bread, and the new diversity of instruments and paper (Italian and lead pencil in place of sanguine; white, erasable paper in place of toned paper) prompted a wider recognition of the graphic art in Russia. With the ascendancy of Karl Briullov, Orest Kiprensky, Orlovsky, et al. during the 1810S-20S, the pencil drawing achieved independent status.

By 1810 Russian artists were ready to redefine the criteria and demands of the visual arts. The graphic method supplied them with an alternative tradition, just as the eighteenth-century caricaturists of England provided an esthetic or, rather, antiesthetic parallel to the arguments of Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Royal Academy in London. Dissatisfaction with the established order—artistic as well as social—was manifest in Venetsianov’s Journal of Caricatures for 1808. This collection was “unartistic” not only because of its concentration on the present tense (which entailed the dismissal of classical perspective, the classical positive hero, and the historical genre) but also because of its complete dependence on the graphic art.

NAPOLEON AND RUSSIAN CARICATURE

The Napoleonic caricatures, therefore, did not appear in a vacuum. It was as if a satirical force, previously latent, suddenly unleashed itself with an acuity second only to that of Gillray or Rowlandson. As the critic Vereshchagin wrote a century later: “In an atmosphere charged with malice and hate, artistic satire could only have been biting and unpleasant.”⁶ After the Aesopian tradition of the caricature, such as it had existed in Russia, the figure of Napoleon provided an exceptional and acceptable target for caricature, a subject supported by the Russian government. About 200 hundred caricature sheets of Napoleon and his entourage, etched and colored by hand, were produced in Russia during 1812-14, bringing to the fore the first generation of professional Russian caricaturists, led by Ivan Terebenev, Ivan Ivanov, and Aleksei Venetsianov.⁷

A common feature of such caricatures was that these artists combined academic or classical principles with certain elements of the lubok. For example, Terebenev’s and Ivanov’s caricatures reflect Western attitudes toward graphic illustration, especially in the endeavor to present correct proportion and perspective, to follow harmony and measure in composition, and to paraphrase classical heroes, but they also rely on the sharpness of the lubok coloring and line. This gave the Russian caricatures a clarity and conciseness often absent in the more complicated English counterparts, which, to a large extent, owe their effect as much to verbose captions as to the drawings themselves. Establishment of an immediate link with the lubok ensured that the Napoleonic caricatures became directly comprehensible to the Russian populace. Indeed, just as the Russian peasant suddenly enjoyed official favor and acknowledgment in 1812, thanks to his patriotic harassment of the retreating French army, so he became a subject worthy of artistic interpretation and recognition. In the same context, one might contend that this “democratic” effect of 1812 on Russian society contributed to Venetsianov’s establishment of the naturalist school of painting in the 1820s, in which artists from the lower classes played a crucial role.

The very proscription of the personal caricature in Russia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries might explain the disproportionate attention that Terebenev, Ivanov, et al. gave to the figure of Napoleon rather than to the French nation as a whole. The first Napoleonic caricatures passed the censor in Moscow in July 1812 and in St. Petersburg in August, and by early 1812 they were available in large numbers. It is dangerous to generalize, but the finest pieces seem to have been produced in St. Petersburg, while the Moscow ones were often vulgar imitations of lubki, useful as posters rather than as subtle commentaries on personalities and events. Despite assumptions to the contrary, Western caricatures of Napoleon did not come to Russia in substantial quantities, and many of the Russian pieces were original in subject and intention. Certainly, Terebenev owed some of his ideas to English caricature, especially to Rowlandson, but many of Terebenev’s caricatures were published in England and one, at least, was later copied by Cruikshank.⁸

In his forty Napoleon sheets, Terebenev, like Ivanov, followed two essential approaches. Either he exaggerated the positive, national characteristics of the Russians, contrasting them with the dismal condition of the Grande Armée, or he exposed the foibles of Napoleon himself. Terebenev’s several versions of “The Russian Scaevola”—a Russian peasant at the center of the composition is about to chop off his arm branded by his French captors as they react in horror and incredulity—belong to the former category (fig. 12.2). This immediacy and simplicity of idea and design are evident in Terebenev’s caricatures of Napoleon such as “The Consultation,” in which doctors announce that Napoleon’s “tongue is off-white (as a punishment for telling so many lies in his bulletins); his pulse is hardly beating (from too much bloodletting); his head is in an awful fever (because of the failure of his crazy plans)”; Napoleon replies that he ought, therefore, to return to Paris as quickly as possible since the Russian climate was not entirely beneficial to him. In contrast to such ridicule of Napoleon, the common French soldier is presented in a more sympathetic, more human light. Terebenev and Ivanov regarded the French army as the victim of Napoleon’s transgression rather than a manifestation of an innate cruelty or lust for power. The caricatures of the retreating army show soldiers eating birds and sporting absurd clothes, such as ladies’ high-heeled shoes and bonnets, in their desperate endeavor to alleviate their hunger and cold. But the sheets also depict the Russians giving food to their French prisoners, or jovial scenes such as French soldiers fleeing from a babushka who, in response to their demand for food, says koza (goat), which they misinterpret as kazak (Cossack).

To a considerable extent, the above characteristics are also identifiable with the work of Ivanov, an artist of uneven talent whose caricatures have sometimes been misattributed to Terebenev. Ivanov’s interpretations of Napoleon demonstrate the deep national resentment toward the invader and progenitor of human suffering. For example, “Napoleon Forms a New Army from Various Freaks and Cripples” shows the figure of Napoleon at the axis of the composition elevated on a mound of earth and encircled by a group of maimed or insane mercenaries. In “Hospitality Is a Distinctive Feature of the Russian Character,” however, Ivanov shows the traditional Russian virtue of hospitality being extended to French prisoners, one of whom kisses his warder as the latter guides him to a tureen of soup. Ivanov did not possess Terebenev’s artistry, but his caricatures are still “action packed,” transmitting a sense of rapid movement through the inclusion of several strata of narrative: in “Napoleon Forms a New Army” Napoleon is not only at the center of the formal and thematic structure, but he is also the main link in the zigzag progression of events—from enforced conscription and mobilization to imminent entry into battle. In his dependence on a rhythmical sequence of “stills,” Ivanov provides a diversity of commentary and interpretation within the frame of a single cartoon, thus anticipating the modern-day comic strip.

While Terebenev tended to rely on understatement and Ivanov on the varied narrative, both artists attained their goals with remarkable effect. Their incisive wit is encountered only occasionally in the caricatures and cartoons of their less familiar contemporaries such as Martynov and Shifliar. With notable exceptions (Martynov’s “Napoleon’s Guard Marches Back via Vilnius” and Shifliar’s “Triumphant Entry into Paris of the Unconquerable French Army), their work suffers from excessive detail or script. Terebenev and Ivanov were rarely guilty of these defects, and it is to their credit that most of their caricatures can be readily understood without reference to a supporting story, even though many of the sheets appeared as illustrations in the journal Syn Otechestva (Son of the Fatherland) and thus relied on an accompanying elucidation.

It is not generally appreciated that Venetsianov was a gifted caricaturist and that his more famous paintings of serene rural life reflect only one aspect of his artistic career. Venetsianov’s caricatures were not concerned with specific political themes but interpreted issues of a more universal nature, especially Russian Gallomania, which he depicted in several scenes from 1812 onward. By that time Venetsianov had considerable experience as a social satirist, since in 1808 he had prepared the first and only number of his Zhurnal karikatur na 1808 god (Journal of Caricatures for 1808). The contents immediately provoked the censor’s objection because of one picture in which an aristocrat (unidentified, but, no doubt, an actual personage) is asleep beside his mistress while petitioners wait in the anteroom and a cat plays with their letters. Because of this particular item, evidently, Alexander I himself demanded that the journal be closed, recommending that Venetsianov “direct his talents to a much better subject and use his time more advantageously to school himself in his employment.”⁹ Despite the premature death of the caricature journal (it was never published), Venetsianov continued to ridicule certain aspects of the Russian upper class, especially their love of French fashions, of which “A French Pomade and Perfume Shop” and “The Expulsion of the French Actresses from Moscow” are typical. Still, these later pieces (1813) had little of the sardonic humor found in Terebenev and Ivanov and, in some instances, were no more than genre scenes. Indeed, Venetsianov’s second experiment in popular editions—Volshebnyi fonar’, ili zrelishche S.-Peterburgskikh raskhozhikh prodavtsev, masterov i drugikh prostonarodnykh promyshlennikov, izobrazhennykh vernoiu kist’iu v nastoiashchem ikh nariade i predstavlennykh razgovarivaiushchimi drug s drugom, soo-tvetstevenno kazhdomu litsu i zvaniiu (The Magic Lantern, or Spectacle of St. Petersburg Hawkers, Artisans and Other Common Manufacturers Depicted by an Accurate Brush in Their Authentic Costumes and Presented Conversing with Each Other as Befits Their Person and Station) — published in 1817, was an innocent panopticon of city types. Despite his initial service to the development of Russian caricature, Venetsianov is now remembered for his landscapes and portraits, assertive not subversive; idealized, not ironic.

DEVELOPMENTS IN RUSSIAN CARICATURE AFTER 1812

Venetsianov’s concern with documentary description of social types was indicative of the relative neglect into which Russian caricature fell after 1814. As the Napoleonic campaign passed into history, a key stimulus to political caricature and satire also disappeared, although lubki connected with the period continued to be published throughout the nineteenth century. After the Decembrist revolt of 1825, Russian censorship was considerably tightened, culminating in the so-called Cast Iron Statute, and not until October 1905, with the tsar’s edict of liberties (which included the ostensible freedom of the press) did the Russian political caricaturist use the frankness and acuity that he had used during the Napoleonic era. Thereafter, at least until the late nineteenth century, Russian political and social caricature survived in the form of book and periodical illustration, particularly after the appearance of Gogol’s Dead Souls in 1842. However, the lack of a solid and continuous tradition of Russian book illustration and design made itself known in the low level of graphic technique and the frequent lack of coordination between the visual image and the text, defects identifiable, for instance, with the nineteenth-century editions of Pushkin.

Still, mention should be made of Aleksandr Agin, who illustrated Dead Souls (1846-47), Mikhail Bashilov, who illustrated Griboedov’s Woe from Wit (1862 edition) and worked on ilustrations for Tolstoi’s War and Peace in 1866-67 (original plates destroyed by fire). The Agin illustrations to Gogol are worthy of attention, especially the group scenes, (fig. 12.3), and they work well as commentaries on Chichikov and the gallery of landowners. Between 1846 and 1847 Agin published seventy-two separate illustrations lithographed by the engraver Estafii Bernadsky. Although Agin (curiously enough, he was a former student of Briullov’s) is credited with the production of all the sheets, it is essential to remember that Russian caricaturists and book illustrators of the mid-nineteenth century did not work in isolation but in groups. Agin, Bernadsky, Pavel Fedotov, and Nikolai Stepanov formed a close association in the 1840s, and they were in communication with Vladimir Dal’, Dostoevsky, Ivan Panaev, etc. The exact role of Fedotov in this fraternity has yet to be delinated, but suffice it to say that a number of illustrations and cartoons by Agin and other graphic artists of the 1840s and 1850s echo the thematic and formal concerns of Fedotov’s paintings and drawings, especially of his Scenes from Everyday Life (1840s).

Of course, the above endeavors were beyond the immediate confines of political caricature. The Crimean War (1853-56) and the Russo-Turkish War (1877-78) did provide brief occasions for the restoration of the caricature and cartoon as vehicles of political criticism, although the vacillations in government policy made the visual and literary distortion of enemy officials an unreliable venture. The Crimean War did not prompt a repetition of the success of the Napoleonic caricature, but it did coincide with a period of intense publishing activity in the late 1850s and 1860S that saw the establishment of several caricature journals and albums. These included Stepanov’s Znakomye (Acquaintances, 1856-58), an improved revival of Mikhail Nevakhovich’s Eralash (Jumble, 1846-49), and his more famous Iskra (Spark, 1859-72).¹⁰ Iskra deserves separate examination, for it expressed in graphic form the delusions of foibles of the Russian intelligentsia and the middle class. Stepanov, its chief editor, was also its main caricaturist, and he produced about 1600 individual caricatures during the period 185964. But, in contradistinction to the Napoleonic caricatures, the Iskra pieces were rarely political and treated more of the musical and artistic worlds, of the St. Petersburg press and the new industrialist class. Unfortunately, most of the Iskra caricatures, like those for contemporaneous magazines, were badly executed and banal, even though Stepanov himself had professional training as a draftsman and direct experience as a bureaucrat in the State Exchequer in St. Petersburg. Stepanov’s intimate caricatures of friends and colleagues such as Briullov, Dargomyzhsky, and Aleksandr Serov are probably of more value and amusement than his often hurried contributions to Iskra.

One of the most successful illustrators and caricaturists of the new generation was George Wilhelm Timm, a Lithuanian by birth, who attained a high level of proficiency.¹¹ Although influenced by Daumier and Gavarni, Timm was obliged to resort to the genre tradition of Venetsianov and Fedotov rather than to outspoken political caricature, and his endeavors ridendo castigare mores invite comparison with the more genial parodies of Punch (fig. 12.4). Still, even with Timm, Russia could boast no counterpart to Daumier, Gavarni, or Philipon, and during the late nineteenth century the Russian artists and writer labored under conditions that discouraged criticism of the political machine. What Alexander II said when he came to the throne in 1881 summed up the position very well: “A Constitution?” he exclaimed, “That a Russian Tsar should swear allegiance to a bunch of cattle?”¹²

Only at the end of the nineteenth century did Russian caricature again assert itself as an independent and potential art form, functioning neither as a decoration to a text nor as a simple source of entertainment for an idle public. A gifted fin-de-siècle caricaturist was Pavel Shcherbov, whose renditions of celebrities such as Sergei Diaghilev, Princess Mariia Tenisheva, and Fedor Shaliapin appeared under his pseudonym “Old Judge” in the magazine Shut (Buffoon), making a key contribution to the renaissance of the Russian arts at this time.¹³ Shcherbov’s caricatures of literary and artistic contemporaries deserve a prominent place in the gallery reserved for the works of Western masters such as Beerbohm and Gulbransson, and they prepared the way for caricatures of a more political persuasion. Shcherbov, in fact, was a close associate of the St. Petersburg World of Art group (fig. 12.5), whose artists such as Alexandre Benois, Lev Bakst, Ivan Bilibin, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Evgenii Lancéray, and Konstantin Somov helped refurbish Russia’s decorative and illustrative arts at the beginning of the twentieth century. Moreover, some of the World of Art members, including Bilibin, Dobuzhinsky, and Lancéray, were directly involved in political caricature for the revolutionary journals of 1905-1906, as well as in the stage and book designs for which they are more famous.¹⁴

CONCLUSION

In 1905 the St. Petersburg censor received a cartoon intended for publication in Strekoza (Dragonfly), a dissident journal. It depicted a man of bourgeois status playing solitaire and bore the caption: “For the life of me, I can’t understand all this, but it’s certainly very interesting.” The censor rejected this drawing on the grounds that it was a “tendentious illustration of the indeterminateness of the present internal situation of Russia.”¹⁵ This drawing and the censor’s reaction have a broad symbolic meaning. Russian caricature of the nineteenth century, like Soviet caricature of the twentieth, operated under a totalitarian regime. It is logical to assume, therefore, that the venom directed at Napoleon, the exposure of a depraved landowning class and a dachnaia burzhuaziia, are but the products of a subtle, psychological game, and that Russian caricature was, and is, directed not so much at an external or an isolated enemy as at the corrosive forces within the whole of Russian society. As the Mayor shouted at the end of Gogol’s play The Inspector-General, “What are you laughing at? You’re laughing at yourselves.”

But even beyond this element of inversion, there seems to be a further characteristic identifiable in particuar with nineteenth-century Russian caricature—i.e., caricature as the parody of an established artistic esthetic. In this context, a favorite term of the twentieth-century Russian avant-garde can be employed with some benefit—that of sdvig (shift, displacement)—and application of this concept to Russian culture of the first half of the nineteenth century brings surprising results. The essence of caricature is displacement or deliberate misplacement of emphasis. This element of distortion or rupture can be associated with many literary and artistic phenomena of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Russia, from the parsuna to Gogol’s Dead Souls. When these works first appeared, they were deviations from the norm—”displaced” vis-à-vis the accepted esthetic, creating in turn an “antiesthetic.” The distorting mirror in Venetsianov’s drawing of an aristocrat beside his mistress might be taken as an allegory of this entire procedure.

How did the caricature manifest this alternative esthetic? It did so by breaking with academic canons, which meant rejecting the past tense in favor of the present, concentrating on factual reality and not on abstracted history, exaggerating certain features and thereby undermining pictorial harmony and symmetry. Consequently, the caricature emerges not only as the interpretation of a given personage, e.g., Napoleon, but also as the caricature of the fine arts themselves, the parody of an entire genre. This notion of the pictorial caricature as artistic parody finds immediate parallels in nineteenth-century Russian literature, where many of the central masterpieces of fiction are also distortions or hyperboles of the genres they represent. For example, Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin (1823-30) is a long poem, although it is subtitled a “novel in verse”; Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time (1840) defies literary categorization inasmuch as it incorporates elements of the travelogue, the diary, and the picaresque novel; Gogol’s Dead Souls (1830S-40S), subtitled poema (epic poem), can hardly be accommodated under the rubric of novel.

Thematically, all three of the above literary works depend on caricature as a narrative device: Onegin is the caricature of the St. Petersburg gentleman, Pechorin of the romantic hero, Chichikov and his acquaintances of their real-life counterparts. In Hero of Our Time and Dead Souls, in particular, the “antiesthetic” principles identified with pictorial caricature are central to the progression of the texts: both rely substantially on the present tense, both pretend to describe actual situations, both distort that reality. Moreover, just as the pictorial caricature deals with a single, specific item of transient importance, so Hero of Our Time and Dead Souls depend largely on the episode or “still” for their effect, so that page sequence is of secondary value and separate sections can be interchanged without harming the textual fabric. Other elements of the pictorial caricature can be readily associated with Hero of Our Time and Dead Souls. In the Napoleonic caricatures, Napoleon is the center of a gigantic deception, although he himself is not aware of ridicule or incongruity. Similarly, Pechorin, in the chapter entitled “Taman’,” is unable to recognize the real nature of his environment and is duped by the blind boy and his sister. The landowners described in Dead Souls are doubly grotesque since they do not perceive their own absurdity and degradation. Finally, if pictorial caricature operates by a constant interchange of affirmation and negation (e.g., “Napoleon Forms a New Army—from Various Freaks and Cripples”), both Hero of Our Time and Dead Souls function in the same way, with negative modifiers playing a crucial role in the progression of the text. In Hero of Our Time, for example, we read: “I spare you a description of the mountains, I spare you exclamations that express nothing, pictures that depict nothing particularly for those who have not been there, or statistical remarks that absolutely no one will read. . . .”¹⁶ The constant detonation of the image reaches absurd proportions in Dead Souls, which, as its title suggests, makes extensive use of the double negative (“he was not a handsome man, but was not ugly either, he was not too fat and not too thin”; “And often unexpectedly, in a remote, forgotten out-of-the-way place, in an uninhabited place without people”).¹⁷ The result is a displaced, perverse world in which normal sequences are broken, in which insignificant phenomena take on hyperbolic proportions.

If Dead Souls marked the culmination of the literary “antiesthetic” in the first half of the nineteenth century, then what was its visual counterpart? The answer to this question is to be found in the last drawings of Fedotov, an artist who satirized Russian mores in paintings such as The Major’s Marriage Proposal (1849). Fedotov’s pencil studies for his canvas The Gamblers (1852; fig. 12.6), executed shortly before his death, contain the same progression of negations evident in Dead Souls. The only difference lies in the fact that Gogol provides light relief and exotic entertainment whereas Fedotov forces the viewer to remain within a claustrophobic interior. As if in a dream or distorting mirror, each component in these drawings is affirmed and then immediately negated: in “Gambler at the Table” the table misses a leg, the gambler and his chair are out of line, his companion has no head. This work is a parody of pictorial rules, just as Dead Souls is a paraody of literary form.

The nineteenth-century Russian caricature, whether as a direct sociopolitical comment or as a critical paraphrase of the fine arts, constituted an alternative and dissident tradition. One might even argue that Russian realism of the 186os-8os, indebted to Fedotov, was the culmination of this process of parody. By its very nature, Russian realism was antiesthetic, a distortion of the sacred and noble art, even though its content, or course, was “true to life.” In other words, nineteenth-century Russian caricature assumed the role formerly allotted to the lubok and other popular arts and contributed directly to the whole notion of “antiart,” including realism and the twentieth-century avant-garde.

NOTES

1. Mention should be made of the following: N. Vrangel’, Orest Adamovich Kiprenskii (St. Petersburg: Sirius, 1912) (exhibition catalog); Venetsianov (St. Petersburg: Sirius [1911 ]) (exhibition catalog); “Stranichka iz khudozhestvennoi zhizni nachala XIX veka,” Starye gody (St. Petersburg), May 1907, pp. 155-62; “Dvenadtsatyi god i inostrannye khudozhniki XIX veka v Rossii,” ibid., July-September 1912. Vereshchagin’s critical works are of particular value to the study of the Russian graphic arts. See Russkie illiustrirovannye izdanniia XVIII I XIX stoletii (St. Petersburg: Kirshbaum, 1898); Russ kata karikatura: V.F. Timm (St. Petersburg, 1911); Russkaia karikatura II: Otechestvennaia voina (St. Petersburg: Sirius, 1912); Russkaia karikatura III: A.0. Orlovskii (St. Petersburg: Sirius, 1913); Pamiati proshlogo (St. Petersburg: Sirius, 1914). Of the several editions issued by the Circle of Lovers of Fine Russian Editions in St. Petersburg, Vereshchagin’s Materialy dlia bibliografii russkikh illiustrirovannykh izdanni, 1908-10, is of considerable value. For a list of relevant editions, see V. Vereshchagin, “Kruzhok liubitelei iziashchunykh izdanii,” in Vremennik Obshchestva druzei russkoi knigi (Paris, 1928), no. 1, pp. 73-84.

2. This according to Vereshchagin. See his Russkie illiustrirovannye izdaniia, p. XIX.

3. Orlovsky was one of the first artists in Russia to produce caricatures of prominent personalities and, beginning in 1816, to reproduce satirical scenes in lithograph. Among his more famous caricatures is the one of the architect Quarenghi of 1810-12. For information on Orlovsky, see Vereshchagin, Russkaia karikatura III; E. Atsarkina, Aleksandr Orlovskii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1971); Alexander Orlowski ( 1777-1832): A Slection of His Works from the Collection of Dr. R. Krystyna Tolcznska Dietrich and the Late Albert George Dietrich (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College, 1973) (exhibition catalog).

4. I. Andreevskii, ed., Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (St. Petersburg: Brokgauz and Efron, 1890-1904), vol. 74 (1903), p. 951.

5. This according to N. Moleva and E. Beliutin, Russkaia khudozhestvennaia shkola pervoi poloviny XIX veka (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1963), pp. 82-83.

6. Vereshchagin, Russkaia karikatura II, p. 97.

7. The most detailed source of information on all three artists is Vereshchagin’s Russkaia karikatura II. See also T. Cherkesova, “Politicheskaia grafika epokhi Otechestvennoi voiny 1812 goda i ee sozdateli,” in Russkoe iskusstvo XVIII-pervoi poloviny XIX veka, ed. T. Cherkesova (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1971). PP. 11-47; A. Kaganovich,I. I. Terebenev (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1956); A. Savinov, Venetsianov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1955). Information and illustrations concerning the Russian caricatures of the Napoleonic era will also be found in J. Bowlt, “Art and Violence: The Russian Caricature in the Early Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” in 20th Century Studies (Canterbury, England, 1973). no. 13-14, pp. 56-76 (the present article uses some of the data published there); A. Sidorov, Risunok starykh russkikh masterov (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1956); Russische Graphik des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Nürnberg: Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft, 1977) (exhibition catalog).

8. The titles of the Terebenev caricatures published in England are given in Cherkesova, p. 46, note 40. Cruikshank copied Terebenev’s Napoleonova slava (The Glory of Napoleon).

9. Quoted from Vereshchagin, Russkaia karikatura II, p. 58. It seems probable that this particular caricature, entitled Vel’mozha (The Grandee), was a free illustration to Gavriil Derzhavin’s ode of the same name (1794). For information on this possible parallel, see Savinov, Venetsianov, p. 28.

10. For information on these illustrated satirical journals, see S. Trubachev, “Kratkii ocherk istorii karikatury v Rossii,” in Istorria karikatury, ed. A. Shevyrov (St. Petersburg: Panteleev, 1903), pp. 369-404; K. Kuz’minskii, Russkaia realisticheskaia illiustratsiia XVIII i XIX vv. (Moscow: Izogiz, 1937); G. Lebedev, Russkaia knizhnaia illiustratsiia XIX v. (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1952); A. Sidorov, Risunok russkikh masterov (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1960); Russische Graphik.

11. For information on Timm, see Vereshchagin, Russkaia karikatura: V.F. Timm.

12. Dnevnik A. S. Suvorina (1923). Quoted in V. Botsianovskii and E. Gollerbakh, Russkaia satira pervoi revoliustii 1905-1906 (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1925), p. 11.

13. For information on Shcherbov, see A. Savinov, P. E. Shcherhov (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1969).

14. For information on their contributions to the 1905-1906 journals, see Botsianovskii and Gollerbakh, Russkaia satira; V. Shleev, Revoliutsiia 1905-1907 godov i izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo (Moscow: Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo, 1977).

15. The incident is reported in Botsianovsky and Gollerbakh, Russkaia satira, p. 13.

16. M. Lermontov, Geroi nashego vremeni (Moscow-Leningrad: Detskaia literatura, 1948), p. 80. I am indebted to Professor Frantisek Galan for drawing my attention to the incongruous literary form of this literary work and to the disproportionate number of negatives.

17. N. Gogol’; Mertvye dushi (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1964), pp. 5, 333.

11.1 Vasilii Popov, Gilded silver and niello kovsh presented by Alexander I to Ataman Mikhailov

11.2 Three gilded silver and niello boxes, one including a view of Arkhangelsk

11.3 Ivan Zaitzov, Gilded silver “coronation” platter intended for Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich

11.4 D. Andreyev, Monumental silver icon of the “Tsar of Tsars”

11.5 Carl Johann Tegelsten for Nichols and Plinke, one of a pair of silver jewel chests made for the marriage of Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna, eldest daughter of Nicholas I, and the Duke of Leuchtenberg

11.6 Pavel Sazikov, Gilded silver “copy of the Bradna of the Boyar Izmailov conserved in the Moscow Arms Palace”

11.7 Russian Imperial Porcelain Factory, Pair of Alexander I gilded and painted porcelain urns

11.8 Russian Imperial Porcelain Factory, Gilded and painted military plate with green border

11.9 Kornilov Porcelain Factory, Rococo revival porcelain tea set—blue, coral, and gilt with flowers

11.10 Yusoupov Porcelain Factory, Porcelain plates decorated with roses after Redouté

11.11 Sergei Batenin Porcelain Factory, Gilded and painted porcelain cup and saucer

11.12 Russian Imperial Glass Factory, Cut crystal plate with yellow center depicting the “Victory over the Brig Mercury, 1829,” modeled by Count Fedor Tolstoi