Russia Under the Volcano

By Patricia Blake

THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE: A PORTRAIT IN PHOTOGRAPHS by Chloe Obolensky; Random House; 345 pages; $24.95

In a typical 19th century Russian novel, "We open the door and find ourselves in a room full of Russian Generals," said Virginia Woolf, who evidently failed to read on. Just as disconcerting is the immediate impression created by the pictures of prerevolutionary Russians in this remarkable book. Some have an aura that seems to owe more to taxidermy than to photography. In some respects, no medium was less appropriate for chronicling old Russia than the primitive camera. The dead stillness required of the subject, though unnatural to everyone, was singularly unsuited to the Russians' vitality, spontaneity and general rambunctiousness. How stolid they look, gathered silently and ceremoniously around the samovar in the garden at tea time, when, as we can guess from Chekhov and Turgenev, they were surely spellbinding talkers. The trouble with such snapshots from a nation's family album is that they must be viewed with a head full of literary and historical associations, while fiction may draw even the most unknowing into its universe.

Russia's early photographers were sometimes responsible for distorting reality. Many were foreigners who roamed the gigantic empire seeking ethnographic oddities, the odder the better. Precursors of Soviet socialist realism, these photographers turned real people into "typical specimens" for the fashionable genre pictures of the times. The wandering holy man, the street musician, the Cossack and especially the peasant, in all his scruffy permutations, were persuaded to assume artful poses. One French photographer of the 1880s in Russia was fixated on funny-looking hats, which he set askew on his subjects' heads when it suited his composition. The result often verged on caricature.

In one way, however, the petrified images produced by late 19th and early 20th century photography are tragically apposite. The Russian people were living under a volcano: "A rumbling, fire-spitting mountain, down whose sides, behind clouds of ashes, roll streams of red-hot lava," as the poet Alexander Blok perceived Russia in 1908. When the final eruption came in October 1917, it engulfed the nation's past. The Russian Empire's vigorous intellectual life, its fantastic cultural diversity--even the distinctive imprint of its history--were effaced.

Thus the picture that emerges from this book is of Pompeii on a far vaster scale. The photos are imbued with more than the familiar charm of things past; they are reflections of Russia's interrupted life story. That would explain the particular poignancy of the emotion experienced by the book's editor, Chloe Obolensky, as she studied the many photos she had unearthed from various libraries and private collections. She recalls in her preface that as the volume took shape, she was moved to see the photographs assume an unexpected "coherence and truth." Few readers can fail to be moved as well.

Obolensky calls her book "a portrait in photographs" of the Russian Empire between the mid-1850s and 1914. Her selection is, as it should be, highly personal, with quality and design elements as the governing considerations. Large, thick, and superbly laid out on beautiful paper, the book is a triumph of commercial publishing.

The Russian Empire has been conceived as a journey traversing what was the largest empire in modern history. Obolensky has charted the course from St. Petersburg and Moscow, across the Volga, the Urals and Siberia to the empire's frontier on the Pacific Ocean. The photographs then take the viewer back through Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Crimea to Russia's western borderlands at the Carpathian Mountains and the Baltic Sea. This approach permits Obolensky to include some of the exotic peoples and tribes that, like the Russians who colonized them, have long since lost much of their cultural distinctiveness. Another kind of excursion was plotted by the late English scholar Max Hayward, whose introduction covers the entire span of Russian history, with diverting digressions on such topics as peasant life, Cossack lore, the liberal intelligentsia and Russian tycoons. A 15-page miracle of compression, the essay is a learned, graceful and witty commentary on the book's fugitive images of every day life.

Viewers will recognize many of the photographs from their reading of Russian literature. One magnificent, sprawling landscape of the Dikanka estate in the Ukraine, complete with manor house, onion-domed church and clusters of khaty, or peasant huts, is a breathtaking evocation of Gogol's stories, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. So many Russians of genius spent their childhoods in such manor houses, with their colonnaded porticoes and vast, cool rooms teeming with relatives, family retainers and hangers-on. Nearly all of Russia's 19th century writers were members of the much maligned gentry, and their fiction is full of portraits of country squires doing what they do in these photographs, picnicking under the birches, hunting bear, playing whist or idling away time. Though many landowners were deeply in debt, as they complained in countless novels, a few of the noble Russian families possessed highly conspicuous wealth. A glimpse of the sumptuous Sheremetev Palace in St. Petersburg recalls the astonishing fact that before Russia's serfs were emancipated in 1861, the Sheremetev family owned more than 200,000 of them.

The most mesmerizing pictures are those of the Russian Empire's peasants, who became the object of a near mystical cult in the latter part of the 19th century. Illiterate, impoverished and much abused, the peasants were known for their generous nature and a predilection for violence that sometimes led them to burn down the manor house, or even murder the squire, as happened to Dostoyevsky's serf-owning father. To foreigners they seemed a dismal, squalid lot--the men with their scraggly beards and hair, the women with their inevitable head scarves. Though the peasants were in fact a rich repository of folklore and folk art, intellectuals invested them with other qualities. The populists believed them to possess primitive virtues that were unadulterated by the venality of the outside world. Conservatives hailed the village commune, or mir, as a cohesive force binding the empire, while the radicals perceived the mir as a ready-made basis for socialism. In his later years, Tolstoy saw the peasant as a religious figure possessing a pure and particularly Russian spirituality--a view now shared by Solzhenitsyn.

For their part, the peasants treated their admirers with skepticism, often jeering at the intellectuals who came to extol their virtues, explain their plight to them and exhort them to action. The peasants were equally skeptical in their reaction to yet another set of admirers, the Bolsheviks, who set out to collectivize the country's cultivated land, most of which had been owned by the peasantry on the eve of the Revolution. Many of the peasants pictured in The Russian Empire no doubt became victims of the enforced collectivization of 1929, whose mass deportations and man-made famine cost some 20 million lives. Only their images remain to haunt the present and bear witness to the past.

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