Decadent Non-Being

The title of this essay, “The Russian Image of the Black,” is partly borrowed from David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s The Image of the Black in Western Art. But unlike Bindman and Gates’s project, which surveys many types of images of Blacks, mine takes literally the implication that there is a circumscribed mode of picturing blackness in nineteenth-century Russia. There is not one way, but there is the way: through the Moor, dislocations of Black life to and within the Russian empire are crystallized into a generic image-idea of blackness. The title, then, lays bare the Moor’s constitutive parts: the collapse of geographic, ethnic, and cultural distinctions among Black persons, refusal of Black personality, and epidermal codification of Black corporeal value as fungible.Footnote ¹²

Within the pictorial spaces observed below, this antiblack ordering of visual perception is already underway in the compositional and figural fissures at once separating and binding Black and white subjects.Footnote ¹³ Together these factors preclude the possibility of Black vitality, in place of which a moribund ontological status is pressed upon the overdetermined Black body. Orlando Patterson terms this status “social death,” which David Marriott has since elaborated as “decadent nonbeing” in his theory of blackness “possessed of capital.” A figure of reiterative and immaterial labor, the Moor contains within its image a decadence it does not possess but that is imputed by its master, be it the tsar, merchant, or artist, who desires to consecutively possess the Black as a mark of ascendancy, wealth, and reach, and to disassociate from the decadent nothingness it signals. As Marriott writes, “it is because blackness expresses the sign or movement of a slavish enjoyment that it is assumed to be naturally enslaving.”Footnote ¹⁴ The Moor’s racialized ornamentality is a function of its infinite capacity to absorb the master’s slavish excesses and symptomatic of its social death: the Moor is eternally held captive and conscripted to unproductive servitude within a narrowly demarcated space of exclusion made seen—or inclusion made unseen.

How can the obedient and disavowed Moor be posited as an example of racial emancipation and uplift? I refer here to Alain Locke’s contention that within European traditions of picturing Black servants, exoticist representations offer a dignified alternative to images of Black abjection: “even the late 17th and 18th century tradition of the Negro page attendant, though grounded in slavery, still preserved something of the glamor of the exotic, investing that frequent figure with gaiety and charm.”Footnote ¹⁵ But the “gaiety and charm” Locke sees in orientalized blackness originates, Saidiya Hartman tells us, in the “ascription of excess and enjoyment to the African [that] effaces the violence perpetrated against the enslaved.”Footnote ¹⁶ Exoticism might offer an alternative aesthetic syntax of Black captivity but is not itself separate from the violence of enslavement and colonization. A deracinated, mobile signifier of acquisitional power, the Moor lends visual evidence to the narrative of its own violent capture through extraction, taming, domestication, and assimilation.Footnote ¹⁷ It belongs everywhere and to everyone yet is made to project fealty when it appears.

This is also true when the Moor appears on the nineteenth-century Russian canvas, where we find a persistent inflexibility in developing a perspectival and thematic field that could accommodate or even imagine Black life outside of the Moor’s deferential positioning to the white centralized subject, implied and actualized.Footnote ¹⁸ To be fair, the Black’s limited figural capacity in the Russian context is to some extent a question of population and the slave trade.Footnote ¹⁹ Russia simply did not take part in the violent, oceanic reconstitution of Black life. As Allison Blakely explains, “it was mainly through the subsequent expansion of contacts with the outside world that Blacks came to be involved in the Russian experience.”Footnote ²⁰ The contacts Russia made that enabled the importation of Black servants did not constitute a major demographic phenomenon.Footnote ²¹

Blackness was also ornamental to Russia’s agrarian economy and estate system: relative to the U.S. settler-colonial and European maritime empires, Black servants in Russia were not a constitutive segment of labor with national socioeconomic repercussions. In the Euro-American context, images of Black bodies in captivity were imbricated in models of agricultural and industrial production.Footnote ²² Moors imported into Russia did not manifest the same Black body problem the art historian, Janine Boldt, identifies in her study of portraiture from Colonial Virginia. In the Antebellum South, Boldt argues, the presence of slaves “on plantations and in white colonists’ houses forced planters to reckon with the need to erase references to slavery in order to uphold an ideal of gentility and assert their authority.”Footnote ²³

The question of what to do with captive Black life was a calculus being worked out on canvases where plantation economies shaped the visual landscape of everyday life. The Russian canvas adopted, in Nicole Fleetwood’s words, “the problem of the black body in the field of vision” even though it was scarcely visible on Russian soil.Footnote ²⁴ Because the Moor’s utility inheres expressly in its decadent ornamentality, we make sense of its inclusion primarily through the master, the one whom the Moor adorns. How else might the ornamental Black body be oriented on the canvas and within its visual narrative without directives, such as the spatial logics of the carceral plantation? How do we determine the Black point of view—what the Black figure sees and how the Black figure is seen—without the locally apprehensible cartography of a racialized political economy? The Moor is a figure of labor, unproductive or not, whose inclusion and troubled visibility projects a potentially irreducible formal difficulty evidenced in perspective and the Moor’s compositional alienation.

It is within the subordination of background to foreground that racial difference and structural position are manifest, with the Black figure occupying and marking the point of recession. In some cases, we find that the Black figure does not merely designate or guide us to the point of pictorial recession but becomes indistinguishable from it. Stressing the alabaster whiteness of the central subject’s skin, Ivan Grigorievich Adolʹskii’s Empress Catherine I with Arap (1725–26) (Fig. 1) uses high-voltage contrast to visually obscure without completely erasing Black personhood, distilling it down to a vestigial epidermal logic. Adolʹskii’s coronation portrait of Catherine I is a harbinger of the dramatic development and deployment of the light and shadow technique that Irina Novikova coins “racial chiaroscuro.”Footnote ²⁵ Adolʹskii’s portrait actually predates William Hogarth’s William Wollaston and his Family in a Grand Interior (1730). Hogarth’s is a family conversation piece that combines racial chiaroscuro, racialized perspective, and muted tonality to reduce the servant, as David Dabydeen observes, to “barely more than a blob of black paint, a shadowy figure with no personality or expression.”Footnote ²⁶ Visual disarticulation, in another sense, is a hyperbolic essentialization of blackness achieved by pushing the figuration of Black bodies to the edge of legibility; the edge being both the material and conceptual plane of visuality.Footnote ²⁷

Figure 1.

Ivan Grigorievich Adolʹskii, Empress Catherine I with Arap, 1725–26. Oil on canvas, 264 x 200 cm. The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

Briullov: Moors and the Russian Canvas

Briullov’s Portrait of the Volkonsky Children with Blackamoor (1843) (Fig. 2), further exemplifies this relationship between blackness, visibility, and perspective. But there is something peculiar about his placement and figuration in comparison to the western motif, which typically shows the Moor gazing longingly at the master and wearing various embellishments that allude to their colonized native land. Here, the plainly dressed Black figure marks pictorial extremity and resides in an outer limit of the composition and visual narrative. Volkonsky Children abysmally fashions the Black figure’s point of view: his line of sight and relationship to the central action, as well as the viewer’s ability to discern his figure. It attempts this through a combination of formal elements that conspire against the Black body’s visibility. For one, the Moor’s position is nearly inscrutable: he is present on the scene but barred from entering it by a decorative metalwork grille that permits and obstructs our view of him and his view of the children, Sofia and Elizaveta. Ornamentality is where the Black figure begins and ends; it is the means through which he comes to occupy space on the canvas in this scene of noble domesticity. The darkened palette delimiting the Moor’s proximity to the center of the terrace renders his face both one-dimensional and contiguous with his surrounding environment: he fills the gap in the ornamental gate, completing the ironwork and natural background. His corporeality is made into a formal maneuver.

Figure 2.

Karl Briullov, Portrait of Volkonsky Children with Blackamoor, 1843. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Moreover, his bodily proportions are improbable and undermine the composition’s claim to spatial intelligibility: the children appear to stand on elevated ground while the Moor is on lower footing yet somehow towering over the scene from below. We are witnessing a struggle to assimilate the captive Black into a mimetic pictorial architecture. His entranced, evacuated, and petrified gaze lacks direction and leads the viewer’s eye nowhere, throwing more doubt on the compositional logic of his inclusion in this scene and further highlighting his unseemly position on the canvas. Petrification freezes the Moor in time, belaboring his temporal and cultural distance from the modernized white subjects at the center and pressing him deeper into moribundity.

Whereas the Black servant attending to the Volkonsky children is strangely immobile, frozen into a static image of blackness like a mise en abyme, the Moor in Briullov’s Portrait of the Shishmarev Sisters (1839) (Fig. 3) is a hypermobile, turbulent figure. His movements stir the canvas into a whirlpool careening towards the very edge of the composition, the very edge of planar legibility. His barely visible gaze stares upwards as he grabs a horse’s snout while a dog races down the steps to join the chaos; trees bend towards the center of the canvas. The sisters, Alexandra and Olga, might as well be in another portrait; their calm demeanor and placid, internally illuminated faces do not register the disorder a few steps away from their family dacha, though their silk hat veils continue the swirling, eruptive motion. The emphatic whiteness of their skin, pastel hues on the steps and the horizon, and the golden halo-like hat on the sister to the rear reinforces this asymmetrical and racialized division of pictorial space.

Figure 3.

Karl Briullov, Portrait of the Shishmarev Sisters, 1839. Oil on canvas, 284 × 213 cm. The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

As in the Volkonsky portrait, an ornamental railing separates the Shishmarevs from the Black servant, erecting a boundary that is neither fully porous nor indeterminate but keeps the Moor and his animality, set off by the horses and dog, in check. Why include a Moor in this portrait, anyway? Though unverified, there has been contention concerning whether the family was wealthy enough to actually afford a Black servant, and he makes it into the frame only enough for the viewer to witness a fragment of his body and his tenuous grasp on the horse he has been ordered to tame.Footnote ²⁸ In the middle of a maelstrom, the sisters remain still and comported, either ignorant of or accustomed to this scene of everyday life in the Russian upper class with an everyday Moor waiting in attendance. Yet, the Moor does not quite fit; he disrupts the scene and calls our attention to his partial presence and denied personhood. These two examples from Briullov highlight a notable feature, or symptom, of figuring the Moor in which the margins and background act as magnetic forces that pull the Black figure away from a more complete pictorial recognition in a reiterative gesture that denies, to cite Sharon Patricia Holland, “the centrality of black bodies to modernity’s reimagining of the white self.”Footnote ²⁹

Finally, turning to Briullov’s Portrait of Countess Iulia Samoilova and her adopted daughter Giovanina and a Black Page (1832–34) (Fig. 4), we encounter a composition that pushes the Black figure closer to the center of the scene and canvas, but that still keeps his body, swaddled in sumptuous fabrics (again, ornamentalized), at a distance. This takes place on a few levels. The countess’s left arm is wrapped around her adopted daughter, intimately welcoming Giovanina into pedigreed domestic abundance. Meanwhile, the countess’s right arm stops in front of the Black page, acting as a barrier to his full entry into the scene and into the family. Yet, the Moor’s body is enmeshed in that very domestic abundance, beginning with the red velvet shawl he holds out for the Countess. This is the same piece of cloth that prevents their skin from touching—whereas Samoilova and Giovanina hold hands. The boy’s face is nearly indecipherable in the profusion of crimson and burgundy velvets, paisleys, and silks. Materiality threatens to occlude the raced body.

Figure 4.

Karl Briullov, Portrait of Countess Iulia Samoilova with Foster Daughter Giovannina and Black Servant, 1832–34. Oil on canvas, 268.1 x 200 cm. Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens, Washington D.C.

The three collars—the countess’s, the dog’s, and the page’s—produce a visual rhyme that enforces the Black servant’s animality and the hierarchy among the figures: the Black boy, dog, and adopted daughter all gaze up at the countess begging for her continued largesse, with the page falling somewhere between the dog standing on its hind legs and the adopted daughter who stands tallest relative to Samoilova. The art historian Maria Taroutina has called attention to the attendant’s anachronistic collar, writing: “Briullov’s depiction of the demeaning slave collar around the boy’s neck is strikingly incongruous in light of the provisional elimination of slavery by 1834 throughout most of Europe.”Footnote ³⁰ Taroutina’s point about the collar’s historical imprecision is consequential and invites a disciplinary intervention from Saidiya Hartman, who writes of Black life in the Americas: “Indeed, there was no relation to blackness outside the terms of this use of, entitlement to, and occupation of the captive body, for even the status of free blacks was shaped and compromised by the existence of slavery.”Footnote ³¹ What the collar indexes is the condition of being and living in the afterlife of slavery, in centuries of “migration, exchange, conquest, servitude, and exile.”Footnote ³² The servile Moor does not escape this condition.

Imperial Sublimations

In Critique of Black Reason, Achille Mbembe writes that for the Moor to “emerge into the realm of the visible, his face could not show traces of the fundamental violence that from the beginning had stolen his humanity and reconstituted him as Black.”Footnote ³³ Following Mbembe, I suggest the Moor gives rise to a generic image of blackness in imperial Russian portraiture, in part, because he is fashioned as immanently deracinated through his embodied decadence: the ornamental Moor is not supposed to evince those “traces of the fundamental violence” from which he is extracted. From this point of view, the Moor should fit neatly into the persistent claim that Russia had and has nothing nefarious to do with Africa; but as the disquieting positionality of blackness on the Russian canvas attests, the Moor cannot be unmoored from the extractive processes enabling its mobility and transnational recognition. His presence in the Russian Grand Manner tradition is marked by a remainder, an untranslatable excess: the Volkonsky’s Black servant exceeds perspectival credulity; the Shishmarev Sisters’ Black servant is excessively mobile; and Samoilova’s Black servant is lost in excessive materiality. These excesses, expressions of Black “decadent non-being” and dislocation, restate the impossibility, or at least the problem, of fully assimilating the Black onto the Russian canvas.

The compositional subordination of the Moor discussed here holds broader implications for Russia’s status as a “historically innocent” global power.Footnote ³⁴ By importing and domesticating slaves into respectable state and private servants, Russia joined the circuit that trafficked Africans to surveilled spaces of European imperial power, becoming another landing site for Black life extracted out of Africa, never to return, and haunted by the specter of the Atlantic (the slave collar in Briullov’s Countess Samoilova).Footnote ³⁵ Despite its purported exceptionality on matters of race, slavery, and colonialism, the Russian empire played an active part in shoring up these legacies through indirect material and symbolic accumulations from the African continent, stretching rather than bridging, in Hartman’s words, “the gulf between the sovereign and the fungible.”Footnote ³⁶ This is what the visual record shows.

Nonetheless, a strange symmetry exists between the Moor’s depressed figuration and Russia’s own imperial status: the Russia of Briullov’s era found itself subordinated in a geopolitical order ruled by plantation and industrial economies. In aesthetic terms, the Russian image of the Black, captured through neither the chain nor the whip but through the ornament, projects an idea of blackness articulate with constructions of Slavic whiteness as liminal, decadent, and enigmatic—orientalized, in a word. The Moor’s job is to metabolize this perceived “not-quite-whiteness” of Slavic ethnicity into its congenital abjection, driving Russia towards a more complete identification with Europeanness and disidentitifcation with Atlantic violence. And yet, as a dual figure of African and Asian alterity, the Moor reconfirms the territorial contiguity of Russia’s violent expansions into Central Asia and the Caucasus and, in turn, its status as a formidable player among the colonizing maritime empires.

Behind its “gaiety and charm,” per Alain Locke, the Moor is a cipher of the empire’s capacity to civilize the wayward and unruly, those subjects of Russia’s “own orient,” in Vera Tolz’s words.Footnote ³⁷ And so we find in the struggle to work out the paradox of the free(d) but servile Black body on the Russian canvas that those “traces of the fundamental violence,” which, in her explications of Hortense Spillers and Frantz Fanon, Rizvana Bradley may call the uncooperative and “obdurate materiality of flesh,” betray the exorbitant epidermalizations of skin and ornament that should render originary and ongoing violence invisible.Footnote ³⁸ Blackness, in this reading, is not merely the material onto which anxieties about illegitimacy are displaced in search of resolution. It is the pliant matter of disassembled personhood into which the excesses of Russian colonial violence, imperial liminality, and racial impurity are absorbed: in the images above, everything slavish about the Slavs is off-shored to the Black African in Orientalia.

In absenting the Moor from Africa in Russian Art, and thus from the soft-power narrative of Russian-African relations, the state’s cultural apparatus diverted attention from this complicated social and representational history of Moors in imperial Russia. Liza Knapp writes that “given the way that Marina Tsvetaeva read Aleksandr Pushkin and poetry in general, one can assume that the Russian word arap (blackamoor) conjures up its Pushkinian rhyme, a ne rab … for Tsvetaeva, embedded in the arap (blackamoor) was the ability not to be a slave.”Footnote ³⁹ But does the “ability” to not be a slave mean to not be a slave? It would seem the (pre)condition of blackness, that is of being property, is not figuratively eradicated in the dislocated arap but amplified by its excessive(ly) slavish capacity—or as Hartman says, “the dissolute uses of slave property [that] came to define the identity of the captive and hence the nature of the Negro.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The arap, collared or not, is burdened with the free-floating signification of racialized captivity, put to both aesthetic and ideological use in the making of the Russian empire, much more so than it is buoyed by the dream of its potentially immanent emancipation through an exalted, singular figure of racial uplift (like Pushkin).Footnote ⁴¹

In the final analysis, the Russian image of the Black is captured in a racial regime of aesthetics, to borrow from David Lloyd, that perpetuates imperial-colonialist modes of visuality: ways of imaging and imagining blackness operationally correspondent to the material degradation, “the decadent non-being,” of blackness, and the rendering of Black life into (auto)biographical vacancy.Footnote ⁴² This is perhaps one reason why the scarcely visible arapy in Adolʹskii’s Empress Catherine I and Briullov’s Shishmarev Sisters, both housed in the State Museum’s permanent collection, were not invited to the Second Russia-Africa Summit.