‘The awakening of our taste for natural science’: the magic lantern and popular education in imperial Russia (1721–1871)

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn the early twentieth century, a well-known Russian botanist and physiologist, Kliment Timiriazev, reflected on the development of natural science in the 1860s in Russia. In a footnote, Timiriazev noticed that the public interest in natural science could have stemmed from a number of magic lantern lectures on related subjects that took place in the hall of the St. Petersburg Passage in 1858. In fact, by the late 1850s public magic lantern spectacles had been around for more than a century, although they had never before provoked such a large public response. In the following decades, the magic lantern was considered an all-purpose visual aid and widely used in popular education, above all in ‘popular readings’, probably the most widespread form of extramural education in the Russian Empire. Unlike previous scholarship that has focused on pedagogical applications of the magic lantern in late Imperial Russia, this article offers a broad, 150-year history of this tradition. The central aim of this work is to reveal the different stages of the magic lantern’s acceptance as a tool of education, beginning with its arrival in St. Petersburg in the early eighteenth century.