From Russian palace to peasant hut

Press, 20 September 1980, Page 17

From Russian palace to peasant hut

The Russian Empire: A Portrait in Photographs. By Chloe Obolensky. Introduction by Max Hayward. Cape, 1980. 346 pp. $27.50.

(Reviewed by

John Goodliffe)

In recent years many photographs of pre-Revolutionary Russia have come to light for the first time as the estates of those who left Russia before,- during, and after the Revolution yield up some of their last remaining treasures. "The Russian Empire ( 1855 - 1914 )” is the third rich collection of photographs to be published since 1975. Its two predecessors “Nicholas 11, the Last Tsar” by Marvin Lyons (New York, 1975) and "Before the Revolution” by Kyril Fitz Lyon and Tatiana Browning (London, 1977) were of considerable interest and value, but this latest addition is nothing short of superb, surpassing the earlier volumes in scope and depth. Its 477 photographs (many of them appearing for the first time) cover not merely the reign of Nicholas 11, but the whole period from the midnineteenth century to the Revolution. It takes the fascinated viewer on a Grand Tour of the Russian Empire from West -to East and back again, and also through nineteenth-century Russian society from top to bottom, from royal palace to peasant hut, from city to village, from cottage industry to town factory. As if these riches were not enough, the collection is preceded by an introductory essay which, in 15 incredible pages, brilliantly encompasses practically the whole of Russian history and society from its earliest beginnings. Its author, Max Hayward, was an Oxford scholar of high international reputation, a Russian and Soviet specialist, and an outstanding translator (he was notably responsible for the English version of “Dr Zhivago” and Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs). His untimely death last year at the age of 54 was an incalculable loss to Russian scholarship, but "The Russian Empire,” which he did not live to see in print, stands as a fitting tribute and memorial to him.

The introductory essay begins with an anecdote, possibly apocryphal, concerning a Frenchman who, in his account of his travels in Russia, wrote that he had on one occasion been sitting "under the shady branches of a majestic kliukva tree.” The “kliukva” is in fact a cranberry, a fruit which grows on low bushes, not "majestic trees,” and the story’ is the supposed origin of the colloquial use of "kliukva” in Russian to mean the kind of bizarre fabrication to which credulous travellers and others are notoriously prone. “Cranberries” about Russia have always been plentiful, and one has only to read the correspondence columns of this newspaper to realise that even today New Zealand provides fertile soil for their growth. "The Russian Empire” could not, perhaps, cure the strain of "cranberryitis” which afflicts many _ so-called observers of the Soviet Union and its political system, but its pages might well help to dispel certain persistent illusions. Above all the photographs reveal that, to quote an 'old Russian proverb, "Russia is not a State, but a World.’ The people who live there were not and are not all Russian; indeed today only just over half of them are. The others come from some hundred different ethnic groups: they include Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Armenians, Georgians, Moldavians, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Tadzhiks, Azerbaydzhanis, to name only the largest The "dickey-bird watching” faces in the photographs tell the reader this more clearly than a thousand words, and even though the clothes and the surroundings are nineteenth century, the people have not changed very much, if at all. One thing has changed: the society in which, they live. “The Russian Empire” shows us vivid images of . preRevolutionary society: the . coronation of Nicholas 11, the high-ranking Russian nobility in sumptuous costume or inconguously got up as peasants, elegant young people at exclusive educational establishments, the upper class idling away the summer days on the family estate.

At the other end-of the scale there are street vendors in the cities, including a woman (with cow) selling milk door to door in Moscow, street musicians, peasants in their tumbledown villages and homes, pilgrims and wanderers, holy men, and last, but by no means least, workers in rural and urban factories whose numbers were increasing rapidly on the eve of the Revolution. This is what gives the collection its remarkable emotional force. In it we see frozen in time people who, not very long after the camera shutter clicked, were to be plunged into possibly the greatest social upheaval of all time. The still photographs thus become a kind of pictorial metaphor for apparent calm before storm. The reader finds himself wondering what thoughts were in the heads of the people whose images are fixed motionless before him. For example, plate 112 shows a vast group of workers at a locomotive factory in the 1890 s. There they stand, dozens of them, on ground, on railway engine, even on rooftop. These were some of the people who, less than 20 years later, were to help topple the social scaffolding of Russia which had seemed for so long unshakeable, but which had gradually weakened beyond repair. Two small criticisms. The captions and photographs are not as neatly matched as they might be and it is thus difficult to know sometimes which caption refers to which photograph. And one would dearly love to know more about the people whose faces stare out from the photographs on the pre-title pages, simply captioned "faces of the 1860 s”. The doubie-page spread of some photographs also irritatingly obscures some of the detail. But these are minor quibbles. This book is an essential purchase for anyone even remotely interested in Russia past and present. The price is very reasonable by modern standards, when for one’s money one is getting what amounts to a pictorial encyclopaedia of nineteenth-century Russia and a spectacular; social document into the bargain.