The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia, 1757–1881 by Rosalind P. Blakesley (review)

Abstract

SEER, 97, 4, OCTOBER 2019 774 death is subtly explored by Klaudia Łączyńska in her essay on Leśmian, and by Joanna Skolik in her study of Ewa Lipska. The critical section of the book ends with an interesting and thoroughly enjoyable contribution by Bill Johnston on translating the poems of Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki — it may not fit in with the rest of the volume thematically, but as the editors explain in their introduction, its purpose is to provide a bridge to the final part of the book, a mini-anthology of English translations of some of the key poems discussed in the preceding sections. It is precisely this mini-anthology that helps the reader realize what constitutes the main achievement of the book: it broadens the perspective from which Anglophone readers perceive Polish literature by bringing to their attention a range of new and unexpected dimensions of Polish poetry, some of which are unfamiliar even to well-educated but non-specialist Polish readers: how many people have actually ever heard about, let alone read, Maurycy Szymel or Maurycy Schlanger? The credit for this is due, in large measure, to the sterling work done by the translators, not just of the poems included in the mini-anthology, but also of the numerous quotations across the volume: led and supported by the volume’s main editor, Jean Ward, they have done a spectacular job in translating some of the most lexically and stylistically idiosyncratic passages of Polish verse. The volume is on the whole carefully edited and helpfully annotated, with just a few minor inaccuracies: Poland regained independence after the defeat of the Central Powers rather than ‘the Central State’ (p. 103), the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was not formally created, as a dual state, until 1569 (p. 135), and Stanisław Brzozowski’s translation of Newman’s Grammar of Assent could not have been published, in 1915, by Brzozowski himself (p. 220) given that he had died in 1911. But these are minorissues:ultimately,impressionistic,idiosyncratic,sometimesuneven,and occasionally brilliant as the book is, it remains a thoroughly sincere attempt to bring to the attention of a wider audience some hitherto neglected areas of Polish poetry — and it discovers a few gems in the process. A serendipity of essays indeed. School of Arts and Humanities Jan Jędrzejewski University of Ulster Blakesley, Rosalind P. The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia, 1757– 1881. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2016. xiii + 365 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $75.00: £50.00. In recent decades Western scholarship on Russian painting has largely concentrated on a period spanning the 1870s to the 1950s, book-ended by the REVIEWS 775 early stages of modernism at one end of the timeline, and the Soviet policy of Socialist Realism on the other. Building upon previous research in a territory that Blakesley has almost single-handedly carved out as her own — Russian art of the eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries — this groundbreaking monograph seeks to fill what could be described in simple terms as a ‘two-century-gap’ in Russian art history between the Petrine and modernist eras. It is during this period that a tradition of secular painting takes up its place in Russian visual culture alongside icon painting, architecture, printmaking and folk craft; the author’s fundamental aim for The Russian Canvas is to trace the evolution of ‘the Russian artistic school […] by exploring the production, patronage and display of painting in Russia’ (p. 2). This Blakesley achieves with considerable verve and panache, skilfully weaving into a rich and compelling narrative her razor-sharp art-historical analysis, close visual readings, well-researched biographies, institutional histories and cultural contexts. The account begins in the seventeenth century when secular painting first starts to emerge, the initial task being to chart the formative events which led up to the establishment of the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1757 (under Empress Elizaveta) and the inauguration of a professional artistic training system after a Western model (under Catherine II). The timeframe ends somewhat arbitrarily, but pragmatically, in 1881, with the assassination of Alexander II, thereby allowing for a discussion of the first decade of activity...