Viktor Vasnetsov’s New Icons

Experiment ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-144
Author(s):  
Wendy Salmond
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Paris Exposition ◽  
The Many ◽  
Modern Orthodox ◽  
Human Hands

Abstract This essay examines Russian artist Viktor Vasnetsov’s search for a new kind of prayer icon in the closing decades of the nineteenth century: a hybrid of icon and painting that would reconcile Russia’s historic contradictions and launch a renaissance of national culture and faith. Beginning with his icons for the Spas nerukotvornyi [Savior Not Made by Human Hands] Church at Abramtsevo in 1880-81, for two decades Vasnetsov was hailed as an innovator, the four icons he sent to the Paris “Exposition Universelle” of 1900 marking the culmination of his vision. After 1900, his religious painting polarized elite Russian society and was bitterly attacked in advanced art circles. Yet Vasnetsov’s new icons were increasingly linked with popular culture and the many copies made of them in the late Imperial period suggest that his hybrid image spoke to a generation seeking a resolution to the dilemma of how modern Orthodox worshippers should pray.

‘Our Greatest Riches’: Horses at the Intersection of Settler and Kazakh Society in the Late Imperial Period

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-228
Author(s):  
Sean McDaniel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Land Use ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seasonal Migration ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Migration Routes ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article examines interactions between Slavic peasant migrants and mobile pastoralist Kazakhs within the setting of the Kazakh Steppe during the period of heaviest resettlement to the region beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing into the early twentieth century. It considers how the importance of horses to both settlers and Kazakhs alike dictated these interactions and how the sedentary world of the settlers disrupted the seasonal migration routes of Kazakh horse herders. Particularly with concern to the greatly expanded horse market, issues regarding land use, and increased instances of horse theft throughout the region, the Russian state’s encroachment into the steppe forever altered the social and economic makeup of the region.

Zava Damdin’s Beautifying Ornament for the Mind of the Faithful: A Praise-Biography of My Root Lama Vajradhara, He Who Possesses the Three Types of Kindness, the Great Mahāpaṇḍita Endowed with Excellent Discipline and Learning Named “Sanjaa”

2020 ◽  
pp. 99-120
Author(s):  
Matthew W. King
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Summer ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Cultural Interface ◽  
The Mind

This chapter presents a unique devotional biography from Khalkha by Zava Damdin Luvsandamdin (1867–1937) about his beloved guru Sanjaa (1837–1906). Completed in the late summer of 1914, some three years after the collapse of the Qing and the formation of a perilous Mongolian autonomous theocracy in 1911, Beautifying Ornament provides rare details about the life of an otherwise little-known Mongolian luminary from the late imperial period. Written in Tibetan and employing literary genres shared by that time across the Tibeto-Mongolian cultural interface, Beautifying Ornament sets narrative details proper to an “outer biography” (Tib. phyi rnam) into devotional verse (Tib. bstod) joined with a concluding “seven-limb prayer” liturgy directed to the departed Sanjaa for regular recitation by his disciples. Beautifying Ornament also illuminates the understudied globalisms of nineteenth-century Mongolian Buddhist life that sustained zones of contact and exchange between Mongol, Chinese, Tibetan, Nepalese, Japanese, Russian, and Indian Buddhist communities, scholastic institutions, and pilgrimage sites.

scholarly journals Revolt from the Right: Russia’s Right-Wing Students Between Conservatism and Radicalism

2016 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54
Author(s):  
George Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Moral Education ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Spiritual Renewal ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
The Right

The article examines the Academist movement between 1900 and 1914 – the student branches of a number of right-wing groups that emerged in the Russian Empire between 1900 and 1905 and endured throughout the late imperial period. It will argue that these groups arose separately from the Russian autocracy, and formed part of an independent, ‘right-wing’ approach to the problems facing Russian society in the late imperial period. It is particularly concerned with the idea, widely present on the right, that the Russian present was in a period of crisis and a more drastic approach to moral and spiritual renewal was needed. It will consider the nature of the Academists’ conceptions of moral education, spiritual renewal of society, and also their violence, anti-Semitism and emergence of an ethno-populist politics. The contention is that the emergence of an independent right-wing movement contributed to the wider instability in the Russian autocracy in the late imperial period.

All the Folk Art News Fit to Print

Experiment ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 244-257
Author(s):  
K. Andrea Rusnock
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Folk Art ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Cultural Milieu ◽  
Broad Audience ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Pattern Books

Abstract Neo-nationalism was concerned with a new aesthetic, not just in the fine arts but also in the crafts, particularly needlework. One way that this aesthetic was disseminated for needle art was through publications—magazines, pattern books, how-to-manuals, guides for schools, and the like. Publications on needlework were produced throughout the nineteenth century, and their output increased toward the end of the 1800s, with many portraying peasant imagery and patterns associated with this new style of Neo-nationalism. This article explores how needlework publications propagated Neo-nationalist art to a broad audience and the key role they played in shaping the cultural milieu of the Russian late Imperial period.

Powderly Will Go to Paris: The Paris Exposition 1889 and the Knights of Labor

2017 ◽  
Vol 92 ◽  
pp. 183-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Parfitt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Global History ◽  
Knights Of Labor ◽  
Labor Activists ◽  
History Of ◽  
Paris Exposition ◽  
Leadership And Organization ◽  
The Many ◽  
International Events ◽  
At Home

AbstractThis article deals with one of the many neglected chapters of the global history of the Knights of Labor: the events that led the Knights to participate in one of the great international events of the age, the Paris Exposition of 1889, and their attempts to found their assemblies, as they called their branches, on French soil. Drawing on voluminous correspondence between the leaders of the Knights of Labor and their enthusiasts in France, and on the Order's own journal and the proceedings of its conventions, this article analyzes the reasons why the Knights failed to capitalize on their participation in the Exposition, illustrates many of the failings of leadership and organization that afflicted the Order both at home and abroad, and demonstrates some of the problems and potential solutions that faced French labor activists at the end of the nineteenth century.

scholarly journals Women’s Issue in the Worldview of the Russian Right-wingers in the Late Imperial Period

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 742-754
Author(s):  
Andrey A. Ivanov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Social Foundations ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Party Activists ◽  
The Right ◽  
Women Rights

The paper addresses and analyzes the attitude towards women and the question of women’s rights of the Russian right-wing politicians in the early 20th century. The paper demonstrates the views of the right-wingers on the place of women in the Russian society; their attitude toward feminism and fight for women’ rights; place and role of women in the right monarchical movement. The paper introduces some new sources into the scholarship which enable to reconsider conventional viewpoints on the attitude of rightists toward the question of women’s rights and to enhance the perception of the place of this question in ideology and practice of the pre-revolutionary Russian conservatism. Based on church and patriarchal convictions, the right-wingers largely limited women’s activities by family life, but their views on the issue of women’s rights did not rule out progress in this area. Right-wingers were not opposed to extension of women’s participation in labor activity, albeit with significant reservations. Being foes of feminism and emancipation of women, they tried to shapre a negative image of women’s rights activists, connecting this fight with the revolutionary attacks on traditional social foundations and statehood. At the same time, the right-wingers were utterly alien to misogyny; they celebrated an ideal of womanhood corresponding to their conservative worldview. The right-wingers willingly admitted women into their unions, but tended to perceive them not as party activists and leaders but as a force that would quell political tension inside the monarchical movement and would primarily deal with issues of culture, philanthropy, education, and other “womanish” matters.

scholarly journals Religious tolerance: A view from China

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 469-476
Author(s):  
Francesca Tarocco
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Belief Systems ◽  
Religious Tolerance ◽  
Short Article ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
Private Matter ◽  
The Many

European and North American cultures are awash in stereotypes about religion. The recently published volume Stereotyping Religion: Critiquing Clichés (2017) tackles several of these and shows why scholars find them to be clichéd. By describing their origins and elucidating the social or political work they rhetorically accomplish in the present, the authors of the volume address some important clichés, namely, that religions are belief systems, that religion is a private matter or that it exclusively concerns the transcendent. In the same way, scholars of religion in the Chinese speaking world find themselves often having to dispel the many myths that surround it. Does China have religion? What does it look like? And where does it stand vis-à-vis religious tolerance? In this short article, I take a comparative look at the late imperial period in China and the substantive changes that took place at the end of it. What does religious tolerance – and its opposite – mean in the context of China’s modern epistemic order?

Popular Culture in Late Imperial China

1985 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith A. Berling ◽  
James Hayes ◽  
Robert E. Hegel ◽  
Leo Ou-fan Lee ◽  
Victor H. Mair ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial China

Applying the Devil's Works in a Holy Cause: Working-Class Popular Culture and the Salvation Army in the United States, 1879-1900

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-223
Author(s):  
Lillian Taiz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
Salvation Army ◽  
Public Meeting ◽  
The Many ◽  
Sunday Evening

Forty-eight hours after they landed in New York City in 1880, a small contingent of the Salvation Army held their first public meeting at the infamous Harry Hill's Variety Theater. The enterprising Hill, alerted to the group's arrival from Britain by newspaper reports, contacted their leader, Commissioner George Scott Railton, and offered to pay the group to “do a turn” for “an hour or two on … Sunday evening.” In nineteenth-century New York City, Harry Hill's was one of the best known concert saloons, and reformers considered him “among the disreputable classes” of that city. His saloon, they said, was “nothing more than one of the many gates to hell.”

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