Picturing Russian Empire goes a long way to demonstrate how we imagine and view the Russian empire(s). It consists of fifty-six essays authored by scholars of art, literature, film, history, and related fields, which collectively produce a fascinating overview of the peoples, landscapes, representations, and ideologies of the Russia’s empire from the early medieval Rusˊ to Vladimir Putin’s post-Soviet Russia. The book represents an innovative look at Russian history and culture from the perspective of visual studies, a scholarly field that views seeing as an embedded practice and hence instead of simply illustrating, integrates images into historical and cultural analysis. The key theoretical construct underlying these essays is “pictosphere,” defined as “the space of the visible world represented in images made by human hands or technologies” (4). The images discussed in this volume help the reader understand how Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet empires were created, represented, experienced, and challenged. In the words of its editors, Picturing Russian Empire offers the reader “a visual tour of the lands and peoples that constituted the Russian empire and those that confronted it, defied it, accommodated to it, and shaped it at various times over more than a millennium of history” (1). Taken together these essays convincingly demonstrate how malleable and multivocal the meanings of visual images often are. In other words, they challenge any simple interpretation of the meaning of the images in question, even when the meaning might appear quite obvious. In addition, being non-verbal visual images often have a stronger emotional power than written texts. The pictorial objects discussed here, represent a wide range of media. In addition to paintings, illustrated books, manuscripts, newspapers, postcards, posters, and photographs contributors to the volume examine films, embroidery, wine labels, statues, dioramas, and pixels on the screen.

In the spirit of the recent efforts to “decolonize” Russian studies the book aims at avoiding Russocentrism by shedding light on the diversity of depictions of the imperial Russian multiethnic population. In fact, many of the essays focus on the ways in which ethnic Russians depicted the non-Russians, as well as how the latter understood and portrayed the former. At the same time, by focusing on Russia as an empire they show how the Russian state tended to dominate the country’s shared visual space by means of administrative control or brute violence. The state and its major ethnicity also exercised a degree of cultural dominance and control, thus supporting its own sense of cultural superiority paralleling the political one. This work also shows that when the non-Russian subjects of the empire created their own visual images, they did so not simply as members of ethnic groups but as imperial subjects. The “big” question the volume addresses is whether there has been something uniquely Russian and uniquely imperial about the images produced in the Russian empire and the ways in which they were and continue to be understood.

The effectiveness of the volume’s individual essays in answering this complex question varies. Thus some of them are more descriptive than analytic, while others raise larger general and theoretical questions. Thus, in my view, one of the most interesting essays is by Valerie Kivelson. Focusing on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Russian representations of Mongols and Tatars, Kivelson explores whether those creating these images understood the concept of physical difference in corporeal form in the same way western Europeans dominating the Atlantic world did during this time as a result of their encounter with the non-European and especially the African “Other.” In other words, she asks whether the Russians of the era in question were developing a concept of race resembling the west European one. Her answer is not straightforward but nuanced. Examining several depictions of the battles between the Russian and Tatar-Mongol warriors found in illustrated historical chronicles, as well as an icon depicting devils cast out of heaven, Kivelson argues that these images identified these non-Russian peoples not with their facial features, but with the “infernal allegiances that the artist could make visible” (63). Thus these enemy warriors were depicted with a sideway eye, which for the Russian Orthodox believers of that time indicated “infernal corruption on display” (63). Hence the images in question illustrated difference not by introducing any objective physical or biological markers, “but in the visual equivalence of Orthodox dog-whistles” (63). To further support her argument Kivelson points out that only those nomads who were Russia’s definite enemies were so depicted; thus Tatar women were not. Consequently these images both reflected and supported the imperial policies of the Russian state: the non-Russian peoples conquered by it tended to be seen and portrayed as non-threatening members of the Russian imperial realm as long as they agreed to be dominated and ruled by Muscovy. In conclusion, Kivelson argues convincingly that the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Russian view of the non-Russian/non-European Other may “only partially satisfy some definition of race, but race viewed through a distorting mirror, reflecting religion and partisanship rather than hereditable biology, subject to change according to religion and political affiliation, and manifest only in the male line” (65). Thus her essay, as well as many others in this volume suggest that despite some important similarities with its European equivalents, the Russian imperial “pictosphere” has had its own unique characteristics, reflecting the country’s culture and historical experience.

As far as the volume’s shortcomings are concerned, my only criticism is the brevity of the essays, which does not always allow their authors to provide sufficient support for their interpretations of Russian imperial visual culture. This limitation is probably inevitable in a very substantial collection which aims at tracing and representing this culture over a thousand-year time period. Taken together the essays in this volume should be of special interest to scholars seeking to discover new ways of seeing, understanding, and teaching the multiethnic and multicultural dimensions of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet imperial history and culture.