Icon and Devotion: Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia by Oleg s> Tarasov Robin Milner-Gulland (review)

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

332 SEER, 84, 2, 2006 Mira Mendel'son-Prokofev, covers 1948 and 1949, years which witnessedthe composer'sseparationfrom Lina Codina (who was subsequentlyarrestedand incarcerated),a full-scaleattackby the Party, the failureof the opera Stogy of a RealMan and enforced revisionsto WarandPeace,as well as poverty and ill health. Yet even in those terribleyears, Prokof'evwas stillcapable of defending himselfagainstthe chargesof formalismthat were levelled againsthim, as his letters whethernaive or cunning,brusqueor penitent,confidentor even egotistical make clear. The transcriptsof debates about Prokof'ev's late operas are particularlyfascinatingfor the light they shed on a culturewhere works of art were 'worked over' (as in English, the Russian prorabotat' has multiple connotations) even before they were revealed to the public. That artistswere themselves responsiblefor interpretingand shaping the doctrine (notwithstandingperiodic and dramatic incursions on the part of the state) makes its implementationno less terrifying. Mira'smemoirs are followedby those of Nina Lamm, adopted daughterof the musicologist Pavel Lamm. These, like all memoirs, contain their share of partisangossip,but like those of Prokof'ev'swife, they also evoke an atmosphere of panic, terror, sadness and incomprehension, reminding modern readersjust how hard it is tojudge what was genuine help, cautiousequivocation , bitter jealousy or opportunisticparty-minded persecution on the part of Prokofev's contemporaries. Both accounts are replete with vignettes of composers,critics,performersand functionariesand illustratethe networksof patronage, support and hostility that functioned at the time. This is a stoiy worth telling and not just that of the solitaryhero-artistand his tormented relationswith the state. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies PHILIP Ross BULLOCK University College London Tarasov, Oleg. IconandDevotion: Sacred Spaces inImperial Russia.Translatedand edited by Robin Milner-Gulland.ReaktionBooks,London, 2002. 416 pp. Illustrations.Notes. Bibliography.Index. L29.OO: $40.00. OLEG TmRAsov and his Englishlanguageeditor and translator,Robin MilnerGulland have offered an ambitious and ground-breakingwork in kon and Devotion: Sacred Spacesin Imperial Russia.It is a translation and reworking of a more specialized Russian study, Ikonai blagochestie: Ocherki ikonnogo delav imperatorskoi Rossii(Moscow, I995), to make it accessible to an educated lay audience. Its subjectmatteris the 'popular',mass-producedicon and a variety of related genres such as the picture-icon and the print-icon. The narrative is organized around well-chosen and beautifullyreproducedvisual material, some of which is from archivalsourcesand privatecollections.Tarasov'sstudy is the first extensive treatment of the non-elite Russian icon in the modern period from the point of view of artisticorigins,style, ideological content and popular craft culture. Tarasov is concerned with the varied and culturally determinedways the mass-producedicon articulatesa collectivemyth of Holy Russia while itself servingas a focal point and vehicle of holiness. (He argues REVIEWS 333 that in certain Old Believer contexts it even takes the place of the Church itself.)He presentshis study in two parts with three chapterseach. Part One, 'The Icon and the World', describes the saturationof Russian Muscovite and imperial cultural space with icons, codes of behaviour and belief related to icons and also the principalcentres of icon mass-production in Vladimir-Suzdal province. Tarasov's evidence, besides the icons themselves ,is eclectic:it includespassagesfromthe Churchfathers,from Byzantine emperors and from Muscovite books, Russian tracts on icon painting, icon pattern books, travellers'accounts, writingsof Russian observersand of Old Believers,decreesof MetropolitanFilaretDrozdov, nineteenth-centurysecular paintingsand newspaperarticles.The narrativemoves freelybetween the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to different periods of imperial Russia, since Tarasov considersthe Muscoviteperiod to be formativefor the language and function of the popular icon. Tarasov notes how the theocratic ideology of the 'Third Rome' trickled down to the popular milieu where the icon evinced utopian mythologies of Holy Russia beginning in the late sixteenthcentury.Afterthe Church Schism of i666-67, mass-produced icons reflected either archaizing Old Believer or Westernizing official Church tradition. Tarasov hypothesizes that the icons under Old Believerinfluencewere closestto the collectiveconsciousness because the people remained faithfulto the traditionsof the forefatherseven when they consideredthemselvesofficiallyOrthodox. Two of the three chaptersof PartOne, therefore,deal in detailwith Old Believertraditions,disputes and eschatologicalworldviews,especiallyof the more eschatologicalpriestless sects. Tarasov's methodology in Part One is also eclectic: it combines culturological, social historical and art-historicaldiscourse. His vocabulary draws from semiotics, symbolic anthropology, Bakhtinian poetics and the Annalesschool of history. Large synthetic but undefined categories...