• New Post Alerts By Email

  • Syndication

    RSS
    Atom

  • Tags

    A. N. Maikov archive.org art Bakunin Bulgakov Chaadaev Chekhov Chernyshevsky Crime and Punishment Crystal Palace Demons Dickens Digital Humanities Dostoevsky Fet George Kennan Gogol Google books Grossman Gulag Herzen Kharms Kropotkin Lenin London Moscow Notes from the House of the Dead Notes from Underground Ogarev Pushkin Russia Russkii vestnik Shalamov Siberia Solov'ev Solzhenitsyn Sovremennik Stalin Stepniak-Kravchinsky St Petersburg The Brothers Karamazov The Idiot Tolstoy Turgenev women

  • Archives

Four short links: Soviet design

The promised posts on Herzen are still in preparation, but in the meantime, a few recent features on Soviet design have reminded me that their poster art wasn’t an isolated phenomenon (incidentally, good sites for Soviet posters keep cropping up – I found this French one after I published my four short links post). Favourite of all is:

1. Soviet fabrics, 1920s-1930s, via The Retronaut. Some truly beautiful pieces here, with both pictorial and abstract designs containing typical motifs of construction and agriculture as well as massed ranks of workers and sportsmen. I like this five-year plan design, combining tractors, factories and mines:

Some of these fabrics really counter the usual view of the Soviet Union as the ultimate in drabness, but I wonder how much of this type of stuff actually got made. There were lots of brilliant design ideas around in the 1920s in particular, aimed at transforming everyday life, but an awful lot of them, it seems, never got further than the drawing board. But I think these are fabulous nevertheless.

2. From the sublime to the ridiculous, with adverts for Soviet groceries from English Russia. Appetizing, eh? Food packaging never received quite the same attention of other (more aspirational?) areas of Soviet life, but there are some typical examples here, including a few that sparked off an unexpected bout of nostalgia…

3. I have far fewer nostalgic feelings about Soviet cigarettes (again from English Russia), doubtless because I have smoked far too many of them in my time. But you can’t deny the quality of some of the package designs. That alone should tell you something about the relative importance of eating and smoking in Soviet culture, but if you’re still unconvinced, this article from Russian Life gives plentiful background on the Russian smoking epidemic. Dieselpunks also has some good Soviet cigarette posters.

Connoisseurs will have noticed the big omission from the English Russia collection: the classic Belomorkanal design:

First produced to celebrate the opening of the White Sea Canal – built by slave labourers provided by the Gulag – and containing without doubt the most vile cigarettes known to mankind (‘5th class’ tobacco, the packets proudly proclaim), with a cardboard tube that seems to have the opposite effect of a filter, smoking these things is an experience I would not recommend to anyone. There was always that depressing point in the night when everybody had run out of decent cigarettes and there was only a packet of Belomorkanal left, and you knew very well that eventually you’d end up having one, and you knew beforehand how much you’d regret it… Possibly the best thing about giving up smoking is knowing that I will never taste Belomorkanal again. But the longevity of the brand is quite remarkable, and I can’t help admiring those babushki who still puff away on them, if not with a look of enjoyment, then at least without the appearance that they’re overdosing on toxic chemicals.

4. Finally, this review of Made in Russia: unsung icons of Soviet design on brainpickings brought back memories of a few gems, including the dialless telephone, and the collapsible communal drinking cup, ‘a telescopic beacon of hope in an icky world of strangers’ germs.’

2 Comments
by on October 9, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Russia
Tagged , ,
Posted by Sarah Young on October 9, 2011

https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/10/09/four-short-links-soviet-design/

E. H. Carr on women

I’ve been re-reading parts of E. H. Carr’s The Romantic Exiles (1933) in preparation for a couple of forthcoming posts on Alexander Herzen, and it’s left an unpleasant taste that I have to address before I can even get onto Herzen. Clearly I’m far from being the first person to take issue with Carr – Norman Stone’s damning review for the LRB of The Twilight of the Comintern (25% of the article is available without subscription), as well as some the correspondence it provoked, and a review of Jonathan Haslam’s biography of Carr, give a flavour of some of the bile he has inspired – so I don’t think I’m going to say anything particularly new here. Nevertheless, because of the subject of my next posts, it has to be said: Carr’s attitude to women was appalling.

My main concern, because of the period I’m going to be writing about, is his treatment of Natalia Ogareva and Malwida von Meysenbug. I’ve previously felt a bit uncomfortable with his portrayal of Ogareva, both here and in his Bakunin biography, because he seems happy to blame her for the love triangle, whilst absolving Herzen and viewing Ogarev merely as a pitiable patsy. What got to me this time was how condescending Carr is. This is already apparent in the fact that he always refers to women by their first names, as though they are children, whilst the men are addressed by surname, like proper grown-ups. But it’s also evident in other ways. His snide commentary on the first days of the Ogarevs’ life together reveals what he really thinks of Ogareva:

Natalie rapidly exhausted the pleasing novelties of housekeeping. She tried self-education, and found herself a dull pupil. She tried her hand at fiction, and sent one of her stories to the popular journal Notes of the Fatherland; but the editor returned it with the comment – surely written with his tongue in his cheek – that a tale about the mistress of a married man was unfit for insertion in his respectable columns. She tried gardening, and found more satisfaction than she had anticipated in the sheer physical labour of digging. (p. 161)

This sort of insinuation, branding Natalia Ogareva with the soul of a navvie whilst apparently discussing her search for an outlet for her creative energies, seems quite typical. Back-handed character assassination is, in fact, something of a speciality: introducing Malwida von Meysenbug, who played such a central role in raising Herzen’s daughters, Carr notes, ‘A light touch and a careless joie de vivre were qualities which she neither possessed herself nor admired in others.’ (p. 128). Why is the absence of such traits deemed so noteworthy? I don’t get the impression that Herzen, particularly after the death of his wife and son, had much joie de vivre either, but Carr overlooks that. Presumably women’s only role in life was to be decorative, and certainly Malwida failed to qualify, as Carr goes on to make clear:

She was not […] destined to inspire a lasting passion. Her photographs suggest a strikingly handsome woman. But dignity of profile was nullified by a poor complexion and weak, obviously myopic, eyes; and her contemporaries did not find her attractive. Herzen, a few years later, bluntly refers to her as ‘an awful fright’. (pp. 128-9)

Emphasizing the failure of her love-life, Carr makes no reference to Meysenbug’s talent as an artist (this will become relevant to the story in my forthcoming posts), or the importance of her very interesting Memoirs of an Idealist.

Most significantly, Carr repeatedly tars both women with the same brush: hysteria, arising from their maternal instincts. Upon first realizing how attached she was Herzen’s younger daughter Olga, whilst on holiday apart from the family in Broadstairs, Meysenbug ‘became almost hysterical with loneliness.’ (p. 132) When the Ogarev’s arrive in London, Ogareva and Meysenbug are presented as mirror-images of each other: ‘The two childless women, both sexually unsatisfied and both possessed by an almost hysterical yearning for children, were predestined rivals.’ (p. 164) This rivalry ultimately causes the break-up of Herzen’s family: ‘Before Natalie returned from the Continent, Malwida asked and obtained permission to take Olga with her to Paris for the winter. The child never returned, except as an occasional visitor, to her father’s house. Herzen had to thank Natalie for the loss of one of his children’ (p. 177). Evidently Herzen himself was incapable of intervening and bore no responsibility for the arrangement of his own household.

Ogareva’s hysteria is not only seen as the root of everything, but also provides additional scope for insinuations about her character:

The years of social ostracism had made her morbidly sensitive. The first symptoms of the hysteria of later years began to appear. She felt herself, probably without reason, ignored and despised. She was sure that Turgenev, who years ago had dedicated a story to her, now hated her. Tolstoy, when invited by Ogarev to their lodgings, failed to appear; and she took his absence as a personal slight to herself. The only one of her husband’s literary friends with whom, curiously enough, she was completely at home was the rather simple-minded Ostrovsky, the popular author of bourgeois comedies. (p. 162)

Am I alone in spotting the echoes of Anna Karenina in this description? It really makes me wonder how close it is to the reality of the situation. These similarities re-emerge in later rifts with Herzen over the sacred memory of his wife, caused by Ogareva’s ‘frenzy of self-pity and self-assertion’ (p. 219), and again, Herzen is presented as entirely passive and blameless.

Perhaps these are accurate descriptions – it’s impossible to tell because of the absence of proper references. But when the same accusation is levelled against two of the key female figures in the story as the cause of all the problems of the innocent, piggy-in-the-middle, man, one has to be suspicious. If nothing else, the constant criticisms of the characters and actions of Malwida von Meysenbug and Natalia Ogareva are completely uncalled for. I’ve had my fill recently of biased and judgemental biographies, as they do not do justice to their subjects even if they believe they are defending them. Carr’s misogyny is bad enough in itself, but it also skews his portrait of Herzen, and I’m bloody annoyed on both counts.

3 Comments
by on September 25, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Russian History
Tagged , , , , , , , , ,
Posted by Sarah Young on September 25, 2011

https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/09/25/e-h-carr-on-women/

Vasily Grossman: links

Vasily Grossman in 1945

The BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Life and Fate is in full swing, but I’ve been away/really busy, so I haven’t managed to listen to any of it yet (perhaps later today, if I finish the article I’m working on…), or write the follow-up post I was intending about the conference. But as Grossman mania sweeps the country (okay, that may be a slight exaggeration), I can at least provide a few links to round up the best offerings on the web (this is clearly displacement activity, as I really should be trying to finish that article).

Grossman’s works: Many of the original texts can be found on the inevitable Biblioteka Maksima Moshkova (where would we be without it?), but apart from ‘The Hell of Treblinka’ (which for some reason is categorized as a povest’), it doesn’t include much of his war writings. For some these go to the Voennaia literatura website, where you will find War stories and Sketches, Years of War (in RAR format – to extract the files, use unrarx for mac, 7-zip for Windows), and For a Just Cause. English translations of a small number of stories and reports are available on SovLit: In the Main Line of Attack, In the War, In the Country, A Tale about Happiness, and The Resident. But of course, if you haven’t already discovered Grossman, you should read Robert Chandler’s translations, Life and Fate, Everything Flows, and The Road, and Anthony Beevor/Luba Vinogradova’s A Writer at War.

Other resources: For Russian readers, there are various links here on Grossman’s life and works. There’s brief biography on SovLit and an essay on The Berdichev Revival. The website of the Centre for the study of Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate and the Battle of Stalingrad in Turin brings together various resources, and is is playing an increasing role in promoting the life and work of Grossman, by coordinating publications and conferences, and through its travelling exhibit.

On Life and Fate – the book and the adaptation: Among the many pieces that have appeared to accompany the production, see Anthony Beevor in the Radio Times, a preview and review of the first plays in the Telegraph, reviews of the adaptation in the Economist and the book in the London Review of Books, and an article on Grossman and the adaptation on Prospect – there’s also an earlier essay by Robert Chandler on Grossman and the novel for Prospect. In the last couple of weeks, the Guardian has published a number of articles and comment pieces, including and article by Francis Spufford, Pass Notes on Life and Fate, In Praise of Life and Fate, and a review of Journey, the fifth play of the adaptation, which follows Sofya Leviton into the gas chamber. Previous pieces include this article by Luke Harding on Grossman’s life, work and reputation. Keith Gessen’s article in the New Yorker is good for background. Among the blogs, Trewisms has good posts about the novel both in response to recent events and previously, as well as commenting on the Grossman-fest in Oxford. See also Shiraz Socialist, and openspace.ru for a Russian perspective on the sudden growth of interest in Grossman in Britain. A new blog, The Faculty of Useless Knowledge, has also written about the meaning of the ‘arrest’ of the novel.

Other stuff: Reviews of Robert Chandler’s translation of Everything Flows from the Independent and the Los Angeles Times, plus a couple of essays by Robert himself on Grossman and the novel from Vulpes Libris and the Book addict’s guide to good books. Robert’s article on translating in this week’s New Statesman arose out of concerns about the lack of recognition given to translators – including the BBC’s failure to give proper acknowledgement to him as the translator on which their adaptation was based until a campaign rectified the situation. The Independent also reviewed The Road, Robert’s collection of Grossman’s short stories and essays, and to mark the publication of that volume, I published an interview with Robert Chandler.

11 Comments
by on September 20, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Russian Literature
Tagged , ,
Posted by Sarah Young on September 20, 2011

https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/09/20/vasily-grossman-links/

Life and Fate on the BBC

I’m still recovering from a couple of memorable days at St Peter’s College Oxford, where the BBC’s event to celebrate the Radio 4 adaptation of Vasily Grossman’s vast and still under-appreciated novel Life and Fate was followed by an interdisciplinary conference on Grossman. I’m still gathering my thoughts on the latter, so I’ll save that for another occasion, and focus on the BBC day for now.

I found the first session of the day the most interesting: a discussion of the dramatization of the novel for the radio, chaired by Bridget Kendall and featuring the director of the adaptation, Alison Hindell, and the dramatizers Jonathan Myerson and Mike Walker. It gave a good insight into the process, from the initial decision to reject a straightforward chronological adaptation in favour of a more mosaic-like approach, turning the novel into 13 plays, to keeping a 15-minute slot empty until the overall production could be assessed to see what needed adding – the decision was to incorporate a condensed version of the Gulag story to balance out the comparison of Nazism and Stalinism. What became apparent was how important characters are to radio drama, and that changing the entire structure to being together different characters’ stories in single plays rather than spreading them throughout episodes was probably the right decision, but will it end up a bit like a soap opera because of this? is that an inevitable result of the process of adaptation? That remains to be seen, but I think the restructuring of the novel for the adaptation has the potential to reveal aspects of the original that are not immediately apparent. The fact that you can download all the plays and listen to (most of) them in any order also excites my interest, as well as generally being a good thing for people who can’t just drop everything to listen to it all next week. You have to applaud the BBC’s ambition in bringing the production to the radio, and I’m very much looking forward to it, even though some of it will be difficult listening.

From my point of view, the rest of the day was less compelling, as discussions of Grossman’s biography and the significance of Life and Fate didn’t really tell me anything new. But it was revealing in another respect. Working in literary studies, I’m used to academic conferences with tiny audiences, where we’re basically talking to ourselves. I’m not sure how many people attended, but particularly for the main attraction, the appearance of Andrew Marr to record Start the Week, the chapel was pretty packed. I’m sure there were a few radio 4 aficionados who didn’t have any specific interest in Grossman, or had heard about the adaptation and wanted to find out more, but there were also clearly quite a lot of people there who were really engaged with the topic and had read or were reading the novel. For a literary scholar constantly fighting against (and being worn down by) the perception – not only in government, but also in parts of the academic establishment – that what we do has no value or wider purpose, it was good to see evidence to the contrary: people are interested in literature and want to know more about it. The Amazon Movers and Shakers page provides confirmation: sales the new edition of Robert Chandler’s brilliant translation that was used as the basis for the adaptation increased by 17,450% in 24 hours, and other editions/translations of Grossman have also shot up.

The day ended with one of the stars of the adaptation, Janet Suzman, reading Anna Semenovna’s letter to her son Viktor from the Berdichev ghetto, on the eve of the massacre of the town’s 20,000 Jews. It was extraordinary, powerful, terrible and moving. This week sees the 70th anniversary of that massacre, in which Grossman’s mother was killed. I can think of no better way of marking it than introducing a new audience to Life and Fate. The first play is on Sunday 18 September.

9 Comments
by on September 12, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Russian Literature
Tagged , , ,
Posted by Sarah Young on September 12, 2011

https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/09/12/life-and-fate-on-the-bbc/

Gulag Voices: two books

This year has seen the publication of two books titled Gulag Voices: an anthology of memoirs edited by Anne Applebaum, and a collection of oral histories by Jehanne Gheith and Katherine Jolluck, so this seems like a good opportunity to look at both of them.

I had previously read all but one of the extracts included in Applebaum’s Gulag Voices: An Anthology, so it was a chance to remind myself how remarkable some of these works are. It’s a well-chosen selection, with one reservation: the decision to exclude Shalamov. In the introduction, Applebaum states that, along with Solzhenitsyn and Evgeniia Ginzburg, Shalamov is sufficiently readily available in English to make his inclusion unnecessary (pp. xiv-xv). I disagree; not even half of his stories have been translated into English, and even now far fewer readers are aware of him than of Solzhenitsyn. One might suggest the fictionalized status of Shalamov’s stories should exclude them from this selection of mainly more straightforward memoirs, but I think he would have contributed an important extra dimension.

The book is structured loosely to mirror the individual’s progress through the system, from arrest to release, but the choice for the first extract is slightly disappointing. Dmitry Likhachev’s memoir does indeed give a clear account of arrest and initial imprisonment, but it differs little from other reports, and as Applebaum herself comments (p. 2), his work is most notable for its description of the early stages of the labour camp system during his imprisonment on Solovki, so including one of the most typical sections at the expense of one of the most unusual seems like a missed opportunity. It looks as though the same thing is going to happen in the next extract, by Alexander Dolgun, when we read:

Dolgun was interrogated in Sukhanovka, a prison and torture chamber from which few emerged alive or sane. Other prisoners considered Dolgun’s survival so exceptional that Solzhenitsyn sought out his testimony when writing The Gulag Archipelago. The selection that follows describes an earlier period of Dolgun’s interrogation, at Lefortovo Prison. (p. 14)

Fortunately, what follows proves fascinating, as Dolgun records the practical and psychological techniques he uses to survive interrogation and isolation.

The extracts are generally quite short (the book is just under 200 pages long) and cover different areas such as informers (Lev Kopelev), camp bosses (Lev Razgon), faith communities (Nina Gagen-Torn), and a prisoner’s transformation, changing sides to become a guard after her release (Isaak Filshtinsky). Two of the most harrowing pieces of writing to emerge from the Gulag are necessarily included: Elena Glinka’s ‘The Kolyma Tram’, which depicts mass rape, and Hava Volovich’s description of the death of her child. Hard though it may be to believe after reading those, humanity is apparent elsewhere. Gustav Herling’s chapter ‘The House of Meetings’, with its detailed observation and understanding of the psychological and emotional challenges facing prisoners and their relatives, ends with the news that a child has been conceived in the ‘normal’ surroundings of a rare conjugal visit (p. 122); the depth and warmth of feeling he describes here indicates that the sense of community normally associated with women’s memoirs of the Gulag at least at times existed amongst male convicts as well.

By the time I’d finished the book, I wanted to re-read several of the memoirs featured in full, and I hope that readers who are new to the subject will similarly be inspired to seek out some of these works. They are of profound historical importance, but still relevant today, even as ‘living memories of the society which created the Gulag are beginning to disappear’ (p. xiv). That this generation is fast dying out is immediately apparent in Gheith and Jolluck’s Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Incarceration and Exile, as several of the subjects interviewed have since died; even those who were imprisoned as children under Stalin are now elderly.

The interviews, which were evidently conducted with great sensitivity and are frequently very moving, by and large cover different areas from the usual trajectory of arrest, imprisonment, transport, camp and exile, to which we have become accustomed through reading so many published memoirs. The camps do feature, but  so do life as ‘special settler’ exiles, and in orphanages as children of ‘enemies of the people’ – aspects of the experience that are generally less documented in memoir literature. The particular value of oral testimony is that it can mediate the experience of those who are more marginalized and less educated, and therefore unlikely to write or publish memoirs – although that is not the case with all the interviewees included here – so we gain significantly different perspectives than those of the intelligentsia, whose experience is well known. In many ways the picture that emerges from these interviews is very similar to that of published narratives. But by looking, for most of the testimonies, beyond the dissident movement and the writings associated with it, we get a significantly different view of the attitudes towards the Soviet regime of those who were persecuted by it; for most, their internalization of Soviet values survived their frequently horrific experiences, and it is remarkable how little bitterness is expressed by most of the interviewees.

Gheith and Jolluck are very clear-sighted about the problems of oral history, such as the presence of incorporated memories (pp. 8-9), which is quite refreshing, as the current popularity of oral history seems to have led in some circles to the assumption that such testimonies are automatically superior to or more authentic than written accounts, as though they represent the holy grail of scholarly knowledge, for which memoirs by the likes of Evgeniia Ginzburg are but a poor substitute. That idea seems to be based on the supposition that oral history is in some way more directly mediated than a narrative that premeditatedly orders experience into a story, which is, frankly, dubious; the former may have a greater sense of immediacy or spontaneity, but the gap between the experience and the telling is no less present, and the process of mediation is merely different. While it can often give voice to testimony that would otherwise remain unheard, at other times the proximity of an interviewer may in itself create a problem. For example, it is quite noticeable that the interviews here do not touch on intimate questions. This may, as the authors note, be due to a greater reticence normal in Russian life (p. 11), but the contrast with the testimonies of Glinka and Volovich in Applebaum’s book, and indeed Czelawa Greczyn’s written account of her son’s death in the documents section of Gheith and Jolluck’s, suggests that distance from an audience makes it possible to write about experiences that cannot be spoken of.

This is not remotely to question the validity or significance of Gheith and Jolluck’s work. It’s an important and useful book that increases our knowledge and understanding of the experience of Stalinism by providing access to different dimensions and perspectives. But reading it alongside the written accounts in Applebaum’s collection gave a clear insight into the strengths and limitations of both types of testimony. As I said, Gheith and Jolluck are very alive to the issues surrounding oral testimony, and aim for maximum transparency with regard to the interview transcripts, indicating, for example, where the order has been changed to aid comprehension. This was very welcome, emphasizing the intrinsically interpretative nature of the editing process which, even if it was undertaken for entirely practical reasons, in itself exposes the fallacy of direct mediation. But at the same time it did also reveal what was lost in that process, and on a couple of occasions I was left wishing for unedited transcript.

The other thing I felt was missing was analysis. I don’t mean this in a negative way, as the book is essentially a collection of primary source material. But having heard Jehanne Gheith speak at AAASS (as it was then) a few years ago, and read her article, ‘“I never talked”: enforced silence, non-narrative memory, and the Gulag,’ Mortality, 12.2 (2007), 159-75, I know she interprets her material in really interesting ways. I hope more of that will come soon.

  • Anne Applebaum, Gulag Voices: An Anthology (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011)
  • Jehanne M. Gheith and Katherine R. Jolluck, Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Incarceration and Exile (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
1 Comment
by on September 5, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Gulag
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted by Sarah Young on September 5, 2011

https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/09/05/gulag-voices-two-books/

Judging books by their covers

As part of some work on Vasily Grossman (about which more anon), I’ve been catching up with my reading on Gulag history. Stephen Cohen’s The Victims Return finally arrived at the library, so I went to get it out.

The first thing that struck me was how similar its cover was to another recent book on Gulag survivors, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer by Miriam Dobson (2009).

The sketch on Dobson’s book is by B. Sh. Mkrtchian, ‘Out of the Camp’ (1955, Ivdel’lager, Museum of the International Organization Memorial). Cohen’s cover is a reproduction of ‘Aleksandr Istomin’s Crown of Thorns’, by Igor Soldatenkov. The double image on Cohen’s book, of the present Soviet citizen and former zek, is in the original (also reproduced on p. 56), whereas on Dobson’s the replication of the image is part of the cover design. In the former case, the idea of the past life still affecting the victims is obvious, but the shadowy duplication of the image in the background of Dobson’s cover expresses a similar idea, in a more subtle form, of the separation of the survivor from himself. It’s a concern that dominates Shalamov’s writing, as he attempts to work out how the person he is now can write about the things he experienced then (see, for example, Sententious and Glove, or the section Memory from his Memoirs). At the very least, I think, it must have been experienced by many former convicts as a sense of disruption or discontinuity. That isn’t remotely the theme of either of these books, which is a pity, although I shall try not to complain that other people haven’t written the books I wanted them to write.

Cohen’s is a much more traditional book, describing a historical narrative from the death of Stalin to the post-Soviet era. It is aimed more at a general than a scholarly audience, but it has unusual features, in that it functions not only as a collective biography of returnees, but also as an autobiography. Many of the author’s insights come from his relationships with Gulag survivors in the Soviet Union since the 1970s, most significantly Nikolai Bukharin’s widow Anna Larina and her son Yuri, to whom Cohen became very close whilst working on his biography of Bukharin. Charting this background and how he came to write the book adds an interesting dimension and places the subject in the context of East-West relations and scholarship.

But as a ‘collective biography’ I found the book problematic. Cohen is very clear-sighted about the fact that ‘Lives after the Gulag were almost as diverse as the human condition itself’ (p. 57), and there is certainly no facile generalization at work here. But in avoiding that pitfall, the book ends up becoming merely anecdotal, and there is no real attempt to theorize the experience or draw any conclusions from his rich material. There is not even a great deal of analysis of, for example, the cultural effects of the returnees’ presence that he describes. In fact the book seems more effective to me when it is focused more on political events, as in its discussion of Khrushchev’s role in restoring survivors, and the changing fates of returnees from the sixties till glasnost’. It’s a shame that a work based primarily on witness testimonies and questionnaires proves better at top-down history. It has to be said that Cohen gave Nanci Adler access to his archive, and she based her 2002 study The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System on this material, so there was clearly no point in Cohen simply repeating her findings, but I still felt a bit more could have been made of it.

One other significant criticism: there is a tendency to assume that narrative voices and views expressed in fictional or fictionalized works can be uncomplicatedly equated with the author (e.g. a quotation from Everything Flows is prefaced with ‘As Vasily Grossman recalled…’, p. 41, and the words of character in Shalamov’s story Epitaph are put into the author’s mouth, p. 72). Cohen is far from the only historian I’ve come across who makes this mistake, but the concept of the real and implied author, and the narrator, is really not that difficult – essentially, it’s only a question of being careful in one’s wording. This is not a trivial matter, particularly in an area of study that relies so heavily on written testimony, of survivors and others, in both memoir and fictional form.

Miriam Dobson’s book, although dealing with a shorter time-frame (1953-64), has a wider scope, in that her emphasis is on the impact of criminal as much, if not more, than political returnees, and she explores more broadly responses within different levels of Soviet society to the death of Stalin, changes in the political culture, and attempts at reform. The picture she paints of the reintegration (or otherwise, as was frequently the case) of Gulag returnees into Soviet society is ‘complicated and messy’ (p. 237), with no overarching narrative of return emerging, but it does become clear that while many Soviet citizens welcomed the end of the Stalin era, significant parts of society still had difficulties in accepting the changes that were being made, were antagonistic towards former convicts, and fearful that Soviet values were being undermined.

The result of extensive archival work, Dobson’s methodology is in large part based on analysis of unpublished letters to the Soviet press and petitions to political figures, showing the extent to which they conform to, or diverge from, official rhetoric. She demonstrates convincingly the importance of the language of these letters, as citizens tried to adopt the new discourse of legality (zakonnost’ – a key term in the Khrushchev era), or persisted with the old, more militant rhetoric, adapted to the requirements of the new situation. As she states, discussing the perception that criminality was out of control following the release of so many prisoners, ‘The Stalinist vision of a world beset by deadly foes provided a template for further vilification of the criminal as an alien and enemy to Soviet society. Although these visions of the offender were not articulated in official sources in the 1950s, they recur with remarkable similarity in a large number of citizens’ writings.’ (p. 170)

For me, some of the most interesting sections were those dealing with cultural questions. The exploration of the importation of a ‘Gulag subculture’, in the form of tattoos, songs, etc, and its effects on mainstream Soviet society, particularly amongst the young, reminds us that far more criminal than intellectuals were incarcerated in, and returned from the Gulag. One only has to imagine some of the thieves Shalamov depicts released into society to understand the consequences and the alarm of many ordinary people. Dobson completes her study by examining popular attitudes to two significant (counter-)cultural figures in the early 1960s, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky. The publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, unsurprisingly, provoked a good deal of correspondence, with many readers horrified at the vulgarity (poshlost’) of his language, which awakened fears that ‘respectable’ Soviet culture was being forced out (pp. 219-22). The persecution and prosecution of Brodsky as a parasite, meanwhile, is shown to have been motivated as much by a determined volunteer (druzhinnik) disgusted at the poet’s unconventional lifestyle and behaviour as by the KGB (pp. 228-32). Looking at the Soviet Union from the perspective of the Cold War, figures such as Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky assumed huge importance; Dobson balances that view by showing that their marginalization within Soviet society was not solely the product of official policy.

Covering judicial, social and cultural changes as much as attitudes towards Stalin and the Party both before and after Khrushchev’s not-so-secret speech, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer provides some fascinating and unexpected insights into a society in transition, and disturbed not only by revelations about the past, but also the instability of the present and future. It also depicts a citizenry endowed with far more diversity and agency than is frequently assumed to be the case in studies of Soviet history and politics.

  • Stephen F. Cohen, The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2011)
  • Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2009)
No Comments
by on August 29, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Gulag
Tagged , , , , , , , ,
Posted by Sarah Young on August 29, 2011

https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/08/29/judging-books-by-covers/

Four short links: Soviet posters

Soviet poster art was truly remarkable, and some amazing examples are available on the internet. My favourite sites are:

1) Plakaty.ru. A huge gallery with a wide range of subjects, from military to entertainment and advertising, including this one from the propaganda section, which reads: ‘Stalin’s mood makes our army and country strong and solid!’ If you had to choose a single site on this subject, this would be it. I’ve been browsing it intermittently for a while now, and I know there is still a lot I haven’t seen. I suspect some other poster sites take their material from here. The ones that do so are in many ways more manageable, so they’re still worth a look.

 

 

2. Duke University Library’s russian poster collection. A comparatively small but perfectly formed collection. It features political posters from the early Soviet era that are essentially typical, but actually they represent relatively unusual examples – quite a lot of them I’d never seen before. There are also glasnost’-era posters, and, perhaps most strikingly, a series of statistical posters from the 22nd Communist Party Congress, 1960-62, including this one, showing numbers of delegates and party members. If socialist realist pie charts and bar graphs float your boat, this is definitely the place to come.

 

 3. Soviet space programme propaganda posters, a recent post on The A Word. Contains some images that are stunning by any measure, and generally easier to like because they celebrate a positive Soviet achievement, and they’re not associated with Stalinism. That said, I think I particularly like this one, ‘In the name of peace’, because it adopts the image of Mat’-rodina (the motherland personified) that features in so much earlier Soviet poster art.

 

 

4. The Museum of Anti-Alcohol Posters. The apparently endless Soviet battle against excessive alcohol consumption (‘The enemy of production’, as this one states) is celebrated in this great series of posters.They’re quite varied in terms of the harmful effects (physical, social etc) they highlight, but frankly while other types of poster campaign may have had the desired effect, the Soviet attachment to vodka seems to have  outweighed any attempts to propagandize it away.

 

 

Finally, a couple of honourable mentions: Soviet movie posters by the Sternberg brothers, currently the subject of an exhibition at a New york gallery, Theatre posters by Nikolai Akimov, on the sadly no longer active Ephemera Assemblyman blog, and Soviet World War II posters, from an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago.

1 Comment
by on August 25, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Russia
Tagged ,
Posted by Sarah Young on August 25, 2011

https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/08/25/four-short-links-soviet-posters/

Doroshevich on Sakhalin

I had other plans yesterday, but was feeling far too tired and depressed to concentrate on the writing I was supposed to be doing. So, to take my mind off present-day violent criminality at home, I started thinking about violent criminality more than a hundred years ago on the other side of the world…

I recently wrote a review (for Slavonica) of the new translation by Andrew Gentes of Vlas Doroshevich’s Sakhalin (the 1903 edition is on archive.org, although there seem to be some problems with duplicate pages/pages missing). It was quite a welcome task, as it meant I finally had to sit down and read the whole thing. For some reason I’ve only ever dipped into it before, and never found the time or energy to get through it all (it’s a hefty book – the translation is over 450 pages long – and despite being on the middle-brow side, it’s not the easiest read). I’m not actually sure in retrospect that it benefits from a start-to-finish reading (its original form as feuilletons in fact makes it ideal for reading occasional snippets), but it’s an important book I need to know and a gap I should have filled in before now.

I don’t want to repeat here what I’ve written in my review, but there’s one aspect I’d like to devote a bit more attention to: the comparison I kept making while I was reading between this book and Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales. This surprised me a good deal. It’s well known that the colony on Sakhalin was the most brutal part of the Tsarist penal system, but it’s generally very easy to see the differences between descriptions of hard labour and conditions in prisons and camps in the pre- and post-revolutionary eras. Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island, based on his visit only a couple of years before Doroshevich’s, certainly does not evoke comparisons with the Stalinist Gulag. And yet Doroshevich’s account, whilst containing sufficient similarities to Chekhov’s to show that the system – and in particular the levels of corruption it maintained – had not changed to any great extent between their visits, seems closer to Shalamov’s descriptions of the harshest and most violent part of the Gulag.

I don’t think this is down to sensationalism. Both writers are concerned to make maximum impact, but Doroshevich’s book is generally more measured than its lurid reputation suggests, and while Shalamov undoubtedly depicts extremes, his descriptions, in the sense of what is actually portrayed and the language that is used, are often surprisingly low-key. Rather, the similarity seems to be the product of their mutual preoccupation with the criminal mentality.

Doroshevich’s focus on the criminals he encounters on Sakhalin far outstrips Chekhov’s, and even Dostoevsky’s in Notes from the House of the Dead (although Doroshevich himself evokes the latter on several occasions). Shalamov contends that Dostoevsky never knew real thieves and that those he depicts in House of the Dead would be held in contempt by the real criminal world. My assumption was always that this signified a fundamental change in the criminal world between Shalamov’s time and Dostoevsky’s (and Shalamov himself suggests this in The Tatar Mullah and Fresh Air). But reading Doroshevich makes me realize there’s something else at work, because you can see that, whether because of Dostoevsky’s narrator’s emphasis on the impossibility of knowing the peasant convicts, or because the author’s idea of the god-bearing Russian peasantry (which was, after all, developed as a result of his encounter with this world in the prison stockade) prevented him from addressing certain questions, he does not – and I do not say this lightly – match the clarity and detail of Doroshevich’s insight into criminal mores.

And, particularly in its discussion of the thieves’ law, that detail frequently echoes what we see in Shalamov, suggesting a continuity in the make-up of the criminals between the Imperial and Soviet eras (the idea of continuity is generally accepted as far as mechanics of the system are concerned, but there seems to an assumption among both eye witnesses and commentators that the particularly vicious type of criminal with a highly evolved code of honour seen in the Gulag was a specifically Stalinist phenomenon). For example, many pre-revolutionary texts refer to the convicts’ habit of concealing their identities, but even where it is accepted that anonymity is a deliberate strategy rather than a form of amnesia, as in George Kennan’s Siberia and the Exile System (vol 1 | vol 2), there’s a general sense that the practice, and the brodiagi themselves, are harmless – in fact, Kennan presents such figures as being rather more civilized and educated than the average (see, e.g. vol 1, pp. 372-3). Not so in Doroshevich, where we read:

If a penal laborer escapes, is captured, returned again to the same prison and calls himself a “brodiaga, origins-forgotten,” no one knowing him has the right “to recognize” him, that is, to reveal his true name, under pain of death. Subject to this immutable law are not only penal laborers but guards, who almost never identify the brodiagi jailed under them. Other officials keep this law in mind, “recognizing” a returned fugitive only reluctantly. “Now just wait for the knife in your back!” (p. 239)

This resembles not other nineteenth-century texts, where we generally get little reference to the violent code governing criminal life, but is close to the world Shalamov depicts. For example, in A Piece of Meat, when the author’s alter-ego, Golubev, encounters the thief Kononenko, who is using the name Kazakov, he knows that: ‘If Kononenko was Kazakov, then there was no hope for Golubev. If Kononenko even suspected, Golubev would die.’

In his attention to this and other aspects of convict behaviour, Doroshevich shows that he understands the workings of katorga law in a way that many other writers from that period do not. And it is this that gives him some quite striking insights into the personalities of the criminals he encounters. Thus, in a manner similar to Shalamov’s focus in the collection Sketches of the Criminal World, Doroshevich discusses katorga songs and poet-murderers to emphasize not the humanity of his subjects (although that question is addressed elsewhere – unlike in Shalamov), but the way their sentimentality feeds their violence (see, for example, pp. 247-53 and 416-37). It’s penetrating stuff (I particularly liked the description of sentimentality as the “margarine of emotion,” p. 417), and this does make up for what the book lacks, in places, in artistic refinement.

For me the comparison with Shalamov brings to light a number of features that make this work a valuable historical document (I don’t have time to discuss the others now). In its focus on the criminals, it offers a perpective we do not see in other pre-revolutionary texts on the Russian penal system. Thanks to Andrew Gentes, and Anthem Press, for bringing it back to public attention, and to an English-language audience for the first time.

Russia’s Penal Colony in the Far East: A Translation of Vlas Doroshevich’s “Sakhalin”, trans. Andrew A. Gentes (London and New York: Anthem, 2009)

 

1 Comment
by on August 10, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Gulag
Tagged , , , , , , , , ,
Posted by Sarah Young on August 10, 2011

https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/08/10/doroshevich-on-sakhalin/

Russians in London (ish)

Walking though the city the other day, I came across this sculpture set into the wall of the BBVA bank at 108 Cannon Street:

Sensing a certain Russianness about it, I stopped for a closer look, and discovered that the sculptor was none other than Zurab Tsereteli, monument builder extraordinaire and president of the Russian Academy of Arts (the mind boggles), to whom I’ve referred in a previous post. My first reaction was to breathe a sigh of relief that this piece was not on the scale of some of his better known efforts, and only then realized quite how curious it was. The plaque provides some detail:

Does the title, ‘Break the wall of distrust’, refers to the growing bonds of friendship between Britain and the USSR, and presage the end of the Cold War? If that’s the case, why was it commissioned by Speyhawk, which was apparently a property development company (now long gone)? The idea of a People’s Artist of the USSR taking on a commission for a PLC  seems incongruous, to say the least, but at least it’s matched by the different elements of the sculpture: the rippling muscles of the socialist realist hero, in front of a cross and with a couple of rather Orthodox angels above his head. The symbolism of the whole ensemble, particularly as it now adorns a bank, is striking: a communist artist (I use the word ‘artist’ loosely in Tsereteli’s case), a capitalist context, and a quasi-religious theme. There are many indications in Soviet and post-Soviet history that communist ideology was so much window dressing (the fact that today’s oligarchs were yesterday’s Komsomol leaders suggests that the country’s elite, official and otherwise, wouldn’t look so very different if the USSR still existed), but this statue may be the perfect realization of that idea.

1 Comment
by on August 1, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Russians in London
Tagged ,
Posted by Sarah Young on August 1, 2011

https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/08/01/russians-in-london-ish/

Russian perspectives on the Great Exhibition (6)

I’m going to skip one report, from Sovremennik, 29 (September 1851), Sovremennye zapiski pp. 63-4, which consists only of a rather dry description of works in gold, silver and precious stones (my plan is to publish the articles and translations separately, and this one will be included then). Instead I shall move straight to the final article, from the November-December issue, which covers the closing ceremony and awards. My initial reaction to it was that it wasn’t as interesting as the other reports, and certainly in its list of medals it doesn’t offer any special perspective. But then I realized that I’d actually come across very few descriptions of the closing ceremony (in contrast to the copious ink spilled on the opening), so it does have value from that point of view. The copy of the journal on Google books has the promised image of the Crystal Palace, so I’ve included that as well.

If you’re wondering about Mme Bocarm, mentioned in the final paragraph as one of the subjects of P. T. Barnum’s invitations, this refers to the case of Belgian count Hippolyte Visart de Bocarm and his wife Lydie, tried for poisoning her brother over a disputed will earlier in 1851 – the count was convicted and executed, but his wife was acquitted. The case was sensational enough to have made the pages of Sovremennik – in fact, in a couple of previous issues the story immediately followed the report from the Great Exhibition – which acts as a reminder that whatever we now tend to think of these journals and their reflection of Russian intellectual life, it was not all high-brow literature and penetrating philosophical debate.

ВЕСТИ ИЗ ЛОНДОНА: Всемирная выставка.
Современник, 30 (1851), Иностранние известия, 51-3.

Многие надеялись, что Лондонская выставка продлится еще несколько месяцев; но эти надежды не сбылись. В последних числах сентября, по распоряжению Исполнительной Коммиссии, в Кристальной Палате прибиты были объявления, что выставка закроется 11 сентября, и что после этого дня вход в Кристальную Палату открыть будет только для экспонентов. Тогда только все уже убедились в неосновательности слухов о продолжении выставки. Наконец наступило и 11 октября. В этот день вход в Кристальную Палату открыть был с девяти часов вместо двенадцати. Экспоненты суетились около своих произведений и спешили укладывать их. В четыре часа по полудни пятьдесят тысяч человек столпились вокруг хрустального фонтана и с нетерпением ожидали торжественного закрытия выставки. В пять часов раздалось торжественное пение народного гимна: “God save the Queen”, под звуки большого органа г. Дюхроке. Своды здания задрожали от нескольких тысяч голосов и как будто готовы были обрушиться. По окончании гимна, со всех сторон раздались аплодисманы и крики: ура! В двадцать минут шестого во всех галлереях зазвонили в колокола. Это значило, что пора уже расходиться по домам. Но публика все еще аплодировала и кричала: ура принцу Альберту, лорду Гранвилю, Пакстону, Королевской Коммиссии! и проч., и никто не думал уходить. Только в семь часов уже все разошлись, ито не без содействия полиции.

В понедельник и вторник, т.е. 13 и 14 октября, вход в Кристальную Палату открыть был только для экспонентов, которые должны были убирать свои произведения. В среду 15 октября все экспоненты в последний раз собирались в Кристальной Палате. В 12 часов прибыл принц Альберт. Виконт Каннинг, президент совета присяжных, прочитал отчет и решения присяжных о наградах медалями.

Из отчета, представленного президентом совета присяженых, видно, что число всех лиц, выставивших свои произведения в Кристальной Палате, простиралось до 17,000, и в том числе: из Англии и из всех английских колоний 9,734; из Франции и Алжира 1,736; из Германского Таможенного Союза и из различных государств Северной Германии 1,364; из Австрии 746; из Соединенных-Штатов 557; из Бельгии 512; из России 384; из Испании и Португалии 289; из Швейцарии 270; из Италии 148; из ганзейских городов 148; из Нидерландов 114; из при-балтийских стран 106; из Сардинии 92; остальное число из Индии, Северной Америки, Китая и проч. По определению совета присяжных роздано, в виде премии за лучшие произведения, 164 большие золотые медали; из них Англия получила 79; Франция 56; и всех прочие государства 37.

Большие медали распределены между различными государствами по классам, следующим образом:

1 класс. Руды и минералогические произведения: Франция 2: Великобритания 2, Пруссия 2; Австрия 1.
2 класс. Произведения химические и аптекарские: Франция 2: Великобритания 1: Тоскана 1.
3 класс. Произведения природы, употребляемые в пищу: Франция 4; Великобритания 1: Соединенные-Штаты 1.
4 класс. Произведения животных и растения: Франция 3: Великобритания 2.
5 класс. Машины: Великобритания 4; Франция 1; Бельгия 1.
6 класс. Механические инструменты и орудия лля мануфактур: Великобритания 15; Франция 4; Пруссия 2.
7 класс. Архитектура и проч.: Великобритания 3. (Эти три медали присуждены были: принцу Альберту, за выставленную им модель дома для рабочихъ; г.г. Фоксу и Гендерсону за постройку, и г. Пакстону за план Кристальной Палаты.)
8 класс. Судостроение, орудия и пр.: Великобритания 5; Франця 3; Австрия 1.
9 класс. Земледельческие орудия и инструменты : Великобритания 4: Соединенные-Штаты 1.
10 класс. 1 отд. Физические инструменты: Великобритания 16. Франция 9; Соединенные-Штаты 1: Пруссия 1: Швейцария 1: Тоскана 1: Голландия 1: Бавария 1.— 2 отд. Музыкальные инструменты: Великобритания 4; Франция 4; Бавария 1. — 3 отд. Часы: Франция: 2: Великобритания 1: Швейцария 1.
По 11, 12, 13, 14 и 15 классам не выдано ни одной большой медали.
16 класс. Шали: Франция 1.
17 класс. Книгопечатание, переплет и бумага: Императорская Венская Типография 1.
По 18 классу не выдано ни одной большой медали.
19 класс. Ковры, кружева, шитье и проч.: Великобритания 1: Франция 1.
По 20 классу не выдано медалей.
21 класс. Ножи и проч. Великобритания 1.
22 класс. Мелочные товары металлические и проч.: Великобритания 5: Франция 4; Пруссия 1; Бавария 1; Бельгия 1.
23 класс. Золотые, серебряные и брильянтовые вещи: Великобритания 6: Германский Таможенный Союз 3; Россия 1.
24 класс. Стеклянная посуда: Франция 1.
23 класс. Фарфор, фаянс и проч.: Великобритания 1; Франция 1.
26 класс. Мебель, обои и проч.: Франция 4: Австрия 1.
27 класс. Обработка минералов. Великобритания 2: Папская область 1: Россия 1.
28 класс. Выработанные произведения из растений и проч.: Велобритания [sic] 2; Соединенные-Штаты 1.
29 класс. Различные произведение: Франция 2.
30 класс. Изящные искусства, скульптура, модели и проч.: Великобритания 2; Франция 1; Пруссия 1.

Так окончился этот великолепный промышленный юбилей, на который собрались представители всех стран земного шара. Что теперь будет с Кристальной Палатой? останется ли она на прежнем месте, или разобрана будет на мелкие части? — об этом еще нет положительных сведений. (Во всяком случае здание Выставки так замечательно, что мы думаем сделать удовольствие нашим читателям, представив им фасад его, которого с часу-на-час ждем из Лондона.) Рассказывают, что один американец, некто г. Барнум, недавно приехал в Лондон с тем, чтобы купить у англичан великолепное здание Всемирной выставки и перевести его в Нью-Йорк. Г. Барнум, как видно, принадлежит к числу самых предприимчивых людей. Он обращался с своими предложениями ко всем театральными знаменитостям, бывшим в Лондоне, приглашая их в Америку. Говорят, он даже приглашал г-жу Бокарме дать несколько концертов въ главнейших городах Соединенных-Штатов и Мексики, хотя г-жа Бокарме нисколько не отличается артистическим талантом: она сделалась известною только по уголовному процессу, с которым уже знакомы наши читатели. Неизвестно, приняты ли эти предложения.

Image of the Crystal Palace from Sovremennik vol 30

News from London. The World Exhibition

The Contemporary, 30 (1851), Foreign News, 51-3

Many had hoped that the London exhibition would last several more months, but those hopes were not realized. In late September, on the instruction of the Executive Committee, an announcement that the exhibition would close on 11 September [sic] was fixed to the Crystal Palace, and that after that day, entrance to the Crystal Palace would be open only to exhibitors. Only then was everybody persuaded that the rumours about the continuation of the exhibition had no foundation. Finally 11 October arrived. On that day, the entrance to the Crystal Palace was opened from nine o’clock instead of twelve. The exhibitors were scurrying around their products and hastening to pack them. At four o’clock in the afternoon and fifty thousand people crowded around the Crystal Fountain, and awaited impatiently the exhibition’s closing ceremony. At five o’clock rang out the celebratory singing of the national anthem: ‘God save the Queen’, accompanied by the sound of Du Croquet’s large organ. The vaults of the building shook from several thousand voices, and it was as though it was ready to come crashing down. At the end of the anthem, from all sides rang out applause and cries of Hurrah! At twenty minutes past five bells began ringing in all the galleries. This meant that it was already time to go home. But the audience still cheered and shouted: Hurrah to Prince Albert, Lord Granville, Paxton, the Royal Commission! and so on., and no one thought of leaving. Only at seven o’clock had everybody departed, and then not without the assistance of the police.

On Monday and Tuesday, that is, 13 and 14 October, entrance to the Crystal Palace was only open to exhibitors who had to pack up their works. On Wednesday 15 October all the exhibitors gathered in the Crystal Palace for the last time. At 12 o’clock Prince Albert arrived. Viscount Canning, president of the jury, read the report and decisions of the jury on the award of medals.

From the report submitted by the president of the jury, it was apparent that the number of people who had exhibited their work in the Crystal Palace had reached 17,000, including: 9,734 from England and from all the British colonies; 1,736 from France and Algeria; 1,364 from the German Customs Union and from various states of Northern Germany; 746 from Austria; 557 from the United States; 512 from Belgium; 384 from Russia; 289 from Spain and Portugal; 270 from Switzerland; 148 from Italy; 148 from the Hanseatic cities; 114 from the Netherlands; 106 from the Baltic states; 92 from Sardinia; and the remainder from India, North America, China and so on. On the basis of the jury’s rulings, prizes were distributed for the best products, in the form of 164 large gold medals, of which Britain received 79, France 56, and all other states 37.

Large medals are distributed amongst the various states according to classes, as follows:

Class 1. Ore and mineralogical works: France 2: Great Britain 2; Prussia; 2 Austria 1.
Class 2. Chemical and pharmaceutical products: France 2: Great Britain 1: Tuscany 1.
Class 3. Products of nature, edible: France 4; Great Britain 1; The United States 1.
Class 4. Animal and plant products: France 3; Great Britain 2.
Class 5. Machines: Britain 4; France 1; Belgium 1.
Class 6. Machine tools and instruments for manufacturing: Great Britain 15; France 4; Prussia 2.
Class 7. Architecture and so on: Great Britain 3. (The three medals were awarded to: Prince Albert, for the model home for workers exhibited by him, Mssrs Fox and Henderson for the construction, and Mr. Pakston for the plan of the Crystal Palace.)
Class 8. Shipbuilding, tools, etc.: Great Britain 5; France 3; Austria 1.
Class 9. Agricultural implements and tools: Great Britain 4; The United States 1.
Class 10. 1st div. Physical tools: United Kingdom 16 France 9; United-States 1: Prussia 1: Switzerland 1: Tuscany 1: Netherlands 1: Bavaria 1. 2nd div. Musical instruments: Great Britain 4; France 4; Bavaria 1. 3rd div. Clocks: France 2; Great Britain 1; Switzerland 1.
No medals were awarded for classes 11, 12, 13, 14 or 15.
Class 16. Shawls: France 1.
Class 17. Printing, binding and paper: the Imperial Viennese Printing House 1.
No medals were awarded for class 18.
Class 19. Rugs, lace, embroidery and so on: Great Britain 1; France 1.
For class 20 no medals were awarded.
Class 21. Knives and so on: Great Britain 1.
Class 22. Petty metal goods and so on.: Great Britain 5; France 4; Prussia 1; Bavaria 1; Belgium 1.
Class 23. Gold, silver and diamond objects: Great Britain 6; The German Customs Union 3; Russia 1.
Class 24. Glassware: France 1.
Class 23. Porcelain, pottery and so on: Great Britain 1; France 1.
Class 26. Furniture, wallpaper and so on: France 4; Austria 1.
Class 27. Processing of minerals: United Kingdom 2; the Papal States 1; Russia 1.
Class 28. Products developed from plants and so on: Great Britain 2; United States 1.
Class 29. Various products: France 2.
Class 30. Fine arts, sculpture, models and so on: Great Britain; 2 France 1; Prussia 1.

So ended this great industrial jubilee, which brought together representatives from all countries of the globe. What will happen now to the Crystal Palace? Will it remain in the same place, or will be dismantled into small parts? – On this there is still no positive information. (In any case, the exhibition building is so remarkable that we would like to offer some pleasure to our readers by presenting them with a view of its facade, which we await hourly from London.) It is said that a certain American, one Mr Barnum, recently arrived in London in order to buy the magnificent building World’s Fair from the British and move it to New York. Mr Barnum, apparently, is one of the most enterprising of people. He addressed his proposals to all the theatrical celebrities who were in London, inviting them to America. They say he was even invited Mme Bocarm to give several concerts in the major cities of the United States and Mexico, although Mme Bocarm in no way stands out for her artistic talent: she became famous only through the criminal trial with which our readers are already familiar. It is unknown whether these proposals have been taken up.

Creative Commons License
This translation by Sarah J. Young is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

No Comments
by on July 28, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Crystal Palace, Russian journals
Tagged , , , ,
Posted by Sarah Young on July 28, 2011

https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/07/28/russian-perspectives-on-the-great-exhibition-6/

« Older Posts
Newer Posts »