Влияние результатов Галицийской операции 1914 г. на специфику развития неорусского стиля на примере археологии и иконографии Фёдоровского городка

Abstract

The conquest of Galicia, thought as a necessary stage to take the Rusins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire into Russian citizenship, influenced the archaeological and iconographic program of the Fedorov town and the Ratnaya Palata (Martial Chamber), the largest pre-revolutionary neo-Russian monuments. The article proves that the Galician operation and the Battle of Łódź had symbolic significance for the renewal of the Martial Chamber exposition, with the former standing for fearlessness in the face of both military and civil dangers. It meant the need to equip the Slavic world not only on the imperial principles of subordination of different peoples to the emperor, but also on the national pre-Peterian ones, when the Slavs, including the Rusins, had a common language and a understanding of symbols. The Battle of Łódź meant a miracle to which even enemies submit. Both ideas, “peace” and “miracle”, turned out to be key in the development of a complex iconographic program of paintings and interior of the Fedorov town, so that its real meaning became clear only after the Emperor had visited the construction site and talked to the artists. The analysis of the original documents on this visit, including the recordings of the tsar’s dialogues, as well as the insightful contemporary reflections by the poet Stratanovsky, demonstrates that the Fedorov town represents a complex dialectical synthesis of imperial and national styles, different from the national romanticism, which makes the reduction of the Fedorov town to national romanticism untenable. On the contrary, the images and symbols from the architecture and books related to the first Romanovs were updated by the First World War. The new program of Slavic unification differed from the periovious projects and required a special approach to the unification. Quoting the contexts of religiosity of Russian symbolism and the influence of artistic impressionism clarifies this program and specifies how Nicholas II thought the future of the Russian people, including Rusins, shortly before the political catastrophe of February 1917.