Rowley, Alison. Open Letters: Russian Popular Culture and the Picture Postcard, 1880–1922 (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 767 literary works authored by Dmitrii Kaigorodov, whose influence on such writers for children as Bianki and Prishvin was immense. Costlow’s definition of Nesterov’s paintings as being synonymous with ‘a certain kind of Russian of sentimental Slavophilism’ (p. 147) can be easily extended to the images of Russian woodlands found in the paintings produced by Ivan Shishkin who is still highly praised in his native Elabuga for creating the most powerful images of the Russian landscape that continue to inspire post-Soviet viewers today. During my own visit to Elabuga in August 2012, I was stunned to hear from the guide working for the Shishkin museum that his images of pine trees were supposed to make me feel both spiritually enlightened and physically healed from the wounds inflicted by the modern lifestyle. Clearly, the guide in Elabuga might have been influenced by the views of Dmitrii Kaigorodov, a professor of forestry, whom Costlow discusses in detail in her last chapter. In addition to teaching and researching forestry sciences in the forestry institute in St Petersburg, Kaigorodov authored many popular essays on natural history, birds and fishing, music and on Russia’s forests. He advocated the need to teach children about natural history and the importance of taking them on field trips. His public lectures on Russian environmental issues and on nature were very popular among Soviet peasants and workers in the early 1920s. As a lover and protector of nature, he also influenced several writers for children, including Bianki, who dedicated his Calendar of Nature to Kaigorodov. In the Conclusion, Costlow also pays tribute to Andrei Tarkovskii’s film, Mirror, in which the final scene featuring the field and the forest reinforces many traditional beliefs discussed in her book. Costlow’s pioneering study, one that displays her amazing erudition, is an important contribution to an environmental understanding of Russian culture that also enables the reader to see many complexities of the relationship with nature not only as part of the Russian system of beliefs but also as part of human development. It will appeal to everyone who is interested in Russian studies as well as environmental and anthropological studies. School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures Alexandra Smith University of Edinburgh Rowley, Alison. Open Letters: Russian Popular Culture and the Picture Postcard, 1880–1922. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, Buffalo, NY and London, 2013. xii + 323 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $65.00. The title of Open Letters is the literal translation of the Russian word for ‘postcard’ — otkrytoe pis´mo, or otkrytka for short. However, Alison Rowley’s SEER, 92, 4, OCTOBER 2014 768 study says relatively little about the fin-de-siècle Russian postcard as an epistolary form, a means of correspondence, a mode of person-to-person communication. Instead, this book focuses on the picture postcard as a particular kind of mass visual medium that emerged and blossomed at the turn of the twentieth century, finding a whole range of different uses and purposes — from philanthropic fundraising and political propaganda to tourist promotion and business advertising, from celebrity manufacture and sexual titillation to personal memorialization and journalistic documentation. Rowley links the postcard to other types of mobile and reproducible media associated with popular culture, old and new — the lubok, the carte-de-visite, the photograph, the illustrated magazine, the advert, the poster and the cinema. She seeks to establish the meanings that postcards conveyed as visual artefacts, irrespective of what (if anything) was written on the back, while at the same time scrutinizing the broader contexts and functions of their production and distribution, purchase and circulation, collection and display. The book’s introduction specifies the essential infrastructural and technological preconditions for the rise of the postcard in Western Europe as well as Russia — the development of a faster and more reliable postal system, the international standardization of the postcard format, rapid innovations in cheap printing and mass photo-reproduction. Yet these seem less important to the analysis that follows than the elaboration of the political, social and cultural contexts of late imperial and revolutionary Russia, in which the postcard, as a new visual medium and tool of communication, was embedded. It was the...