Dianina, Katia. When Art Makes News: Writing Culture and Identity in Imperial Russia (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 359 and Czechoslovakia caused the Soviet leadership no end of trouble in the years after Pomerantsev published his article. As Kozlov sums it up: ‘“Sincerity” as an emblematic term for a new relationship between experience and language became a code word for the entire epoch of the Thaw’ (p. 87). There is, alas, no space left here to discuss Kozlov’s approach to readers’ or editors’ understanding or misunderstanding of works by Dudintsev, Pasternak, Ehrenburg, Solzhenitsyn, Paustovskii, Simonov, Chukovskaia, Siniavskii and the unjustly forgotten Nikolai Voronov. Those interested in the work of any of these writers should definitely read this splendid book. Department of Slavonic Studies Martin Dewhirst University of Glasgow Dianina, Katia. When Art Makes News: Writing Culture and Identity in Imperial Russia. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2013. xii + 399 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. $45.00. After visiting the Paris Exposition in 1867, the director of the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art, Thomas Archer, declared in his report for The Art Journal (1868) that ‘it was seen unmistakably that Russia has a true school of Art, essentially national’. Responses to Russian displays at international exhibitions were an important measure of the development of the ‘national school’; moreover, they shaped Russia’s mid- to late-nineteenth-century campaigntoestablishagreatersenseofnationalidentityinculturalproduction, the subject of Dianina’s monograph. Although there is already a considerable amount of scholarship on this period — when the campaign for Russianness in art and architecture reached its height — the author’s primary aim is to bring new elements of the picture to the fore. Specifically, she seeks to show how the national idea was propagated through the arenas of public discourse: not only exhibitions, but print culture, monuments, newly-founded art museums and other public events (p. 69). Dianina deftly explores untapped sources and re-examines more familiar material to build a strong line of argument through her seven chapters, introduction and epilogue. Conceptually, she divides the book into two parts: ‘The Predicament of Russian Culture’ (defining the roots of the nationalist debate and explaining the importance of such developments as the rise of journalism in the 1860s) and ‘Discursive Practices’ (tackling, among other things, the role of institutions, critical debates over realist art and nationality, the Russian style and the neo-national revival). It is the central chapters which are the most innovative and thought-provoking. For example, extensive sections in chapter three examine the impact of the feuilleton and the writings SEER, 93, 2, APRIL 2015 360 of the critical community in artistic discourse surrounding national identity; similarly, chapter four uses contemporary media responses to state-sponsored projects (the Millennium Monument of 1862, the Imperial Hermitage and the Imperial Academy of Arts) to shed new light on these. By the next chapter we are on familiar territory, with an historical overview of the Association of Travelling Art Exhibitions (‘Itinerants’), though Dianina’s emphasis is upon the role played by the critical intelligentsia in its (their) success. Her subsequent discussion of galleries and museums foregrounds lesser-known aspects of the history. Thus, in a brief account of the emergence of the ‘Russian style’, Moscow’s centrality to the debate is stressed by attention to such events as the relocation of the Rumiantsev museum from St Petersburg (1862), the Ethnographic Exhibition (1867) and the Russian National Polytechnical Exhibition of Industry and the Arts (1872). The final chapter, on the neo-national revival centred around Abramtsevo and Talashkino, is an important strand of the history which Dianina seeks to weave; however, drawing heavily from previous accounts, it is the least effective. The danger of attempting an interdisciplinary study is that inevitably there are errors. A quotation by the leading protagonist of the neo-national revival, Elena Polenova (p. 228), is wrongly attributed to her sister-in-law, Natal´ia. Moreover, there are generalizations, such as the binary assertion that ‘the Itinerants aimed to imitate life as closely as possible, in all its ugly and vulgar details’, unlike the neo-nationalists, for whom ‘the aesthetics of revived Russian antiquity was defined by the opposite scenario, life copying art’ (p. 227); this analysis is simply not borne out by the facts, as recent scholarship on the Itinerants...