A nation on display: Russian museums and print culture in the age of the Great Reforms.

摘要

"A Nation on Display" examines the development of a public discourse on national self-representation in nineteenth-century Russia as it was fashioned by museum culture, literature, and the press. During the age of the Great Reforms, a museum boom and newspaper boom led to a remarkable explosion of public culture in Russia. The exhibitions and museums of the 1850s--1870s---annual shows at the Academy of Fine Arts, the Ethnographic and the Polytechnical Expositions, the Rumiantsev and the Hermitage Museums, as well as the Russian department displays at the first world's fairs in Europe---helped represent Russian cultural identity in tangible terms. The national Historical Museum in Moscow, designed in a recognizable Russian style, became its symbolic expression. The periodical press routinely covered these public displays and spread the ideas behind them to broader audiences. In combination, the museum and the popular press succeeded in fashioning and capturing Russia's elusive image of self.This interdisciplinary thesis identifies a unique symbiotic relationship between visual and verbal modes of representation and their complimentary roles in articulating the Russian idea. It was at this intersection of public display and writing---two sets of mirrors that in the 1860s followed the nation-building cause launched by literature---that popular images of the Russian nation were created and disseminated for broad audiences. The form that this symbiosis took in the 1860s was what I call "public museum discourse," a body of writing that expanded the boundaries of the museum walls and brought art closer to the public. Various styles and genres of writing contributed to its formation: catalogues and guidebooks (e.g., Svin'in, Grigorovich), critical articles and reviews (Batiushkov, Chernyshevsky, Stasov), works of fiction (Gogol, Dostoevsky, Goncharov, Shevchenko, Leskov, Garshin), travelogues, memoirs, advertisements, and feuilletons---widely-read newspaper columns given over to popular culture. The printed word was the main vehicle by which institutions of culture reached the broader educated public. As this study demonstrates, popular writing about art was ultimately more important than the exhibits themselves in delivering images of the nation to ordinary Russians and fostering patriotic spirit.