Abstract
In the first decades of Russian photography, Katherine Reischl tells us, the Greek term fotografia coexisted with the etymologically Russian term svetopis’ (light writing): a term that echoes the Russian word for manuscript, rukopis’. In this volume, Reischl explores photography alongside literary practice through case studies of some of Russia’s foremost literary figures and their attitudes to, and relationship with, the camera. Photography may have ‘flattened’ nineteenth-century figures (as Vladimir Nabokov later described it), but the potential of the camera to record, shape and augment both the image of the writer and the subjects of an author’s writing was rapidly realised. By the early 1920s, Soviet Commissar for Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky declared (in the first issue of a Soviet photography journal) that ‘just as every forward looking comrade must have a watch, so must he be able to handle a camera’ (p. 8).
Reischl’s case studies are carefully chosen, as each tells us something about the literary era in which the subject lived, as well as the technical development of photography and its uses as art form, public statement or documentary record. Lev Tolstoy grew up in the decades during which the camera was first introduced. He learned to take his own photos. As a (perhaps unparalleled) literary celebrity, photographs of him taken by others circulated widely. Tolstoy’s wife Sofia and his chief disciple Vladimir Chertkov fought over his visual representation (as family man or prophet), just as they did over his literary legacy. Leonid Andreev, who in partnership with Maximillian Voloshin and Vasily Rozanov is the focus of the second case study, blurred the distinction between the domestic and the public, collecting images of himself and his family in scrapbooks but also projecting these domestic images outward for a public audience. Mikhail Prishvin was a naturalist, working in the early years of the Soviet Union, when photography seemed to have great potential. His short-form documentary writing combined photos with text. Yet he found himself curiously at odds with the spirit of the time: his naturalist text about Karelia (In The Land of Unfrightened Birds, 1907) was referenced as an antiquated commentary on the region where the White Sea Canal was now being constructed and documented. In Ilya Ehrenberg’s My Paris (1933), and in Ilya Ilf’s photographs documenting American cities, photography created space for readers to form alternative interpretations about the capitalist West to those presented in the accompanying text. In the concluding chapter we learn about the role of photography in literature in emigration: the role photographs played in bridging past and present worlds in Nabokov’s memoirs of pre-revolutionary and early émigré life; and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s correction of the photographic narrative presented in Soviet images of the White Sea Canal project, in his Gulag Archipelago (1973), published in Paris.
Through these case studies Reischl asks a range of different questions. Who is the author of a photograph? How were the images of Russia’s literary greats shaped by their photographs? How did they think about photography in relation to their literary work, or in documenting their lives and careers? How did they reference photography in their work? Not all of these questions can be answered by each case study. Tolstoy suffered photography rather than embracing it. Although there are a couple of examples of his referencing photography in his novels, there is no evidence that his ability to record a scene with a ‘camera eye’ (as Reischl terms it) was a result of his having lived through the first decades of photography. It is only really in the later chapters that the subjects under discussion used photographs in or alongside their work. The questions asked and answered in each chapter are (quite rightly) contingent both on the progress of photographic practice across the chronology presented in this book and on the development of Russian or Soviet life, politics and literature. The threads of these case studies and their relationships with their photographic image are very carefully woven and the chapters make neat connections with each other: the relationship between Prishvin’s White Sea Canal and Solzhenitsyn’s is just one example. Reischl illustrates both the connections and the spaces between the camera and the written word and shows us how Russian authors have employed and been influenced by photography, both in their lives and in their literary practice.