MONARCHY AND THE MUNDANE: PICTURE POSTCARDS AND IMAGES OF THE ROMANOVS, 1890–1917

Abstract

In mid nineteenth‐century Europe, the emerging market for new paper products facilitated, for the first time, the widespread circulation of mass‐produced depictions of royalty. This article uses picture postcards to explore this process of commodification as well as some of the implications of it. In particular, the author focuses on the depiction of members of the Romanov dynasty and examines the unwitting desacralization that accompanied their efforts to employ a new form of mass media. From objects of awe, the Romanovs were transformed into something much more mundane: an ordinary bourgeois family. Existing scholarship has looked at this shift in terms of the impact of ceremonial occasions, of pornographic images of the tsar, the tsarina and Rasputin and of such major events as Bloody Sunday or the Lena Goldfields massacre. The contribution of such ephemeral items as picture postcards has so far been overlooked. It is argued herein that the production of literally millions of such items – albeit that they were things that could be defaced or thrown in the bin – had ramifications on the popular perception of the tsar.