“The Only Pictures in Memory of the Great War”: The Heroic Spirit, Orientalism, and the Problems of Representational Depictions of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878

Abstract

The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 spawned a request from both the government and the public for an appropriate pictorial representation to be evaluated in the categories of ‘high art’, a request which revealed the inability of the predominant aesthetics to be satisfied. The paintings on the subjects of the preceding Balkan Crisis of 1875–1876 easily appealed to the existing reserve of descriptive means in primarily appealing to Orientalist motives by using the international Oriental-artistic language. In this case, painters such as K. Makovsky or V. Polenov did not need to resort to some inversions in the “Turkestan Series” by V. Vereshchagin: the developed artistic language allowed the conveying of the desired content without loss. On the contrary, attempts to present pictorial representations of the Russo-Turkish War found that the old military art was no longer perceived as genuine “art”. Thus, in not being regarded as a proper fixation of “memorable events”, the prevailing new aesthetics was unable to convey the pathos and heroics desired by the authorities. At the same time, it was found that a strong aesthetic effect in military plots was achieved through “seriality”, the interpretation of similar plots as isolated and independent. However, this did not produce a significant effect, that is to say, painting as such was not self-sufficient since it required the assistance of the text, the sequence of images, etc. The problem was reduced significantly with the new aesthetics of the 20th century, and in the last decades of the 19th century, in connection with mentioned above difficulties of painting, historical plots acquired new value, providing new opportunities for the representation of heroic themes while simultaneously giving greater aesthetic freedom.