Valentin Aleksandrovich Serov, Girl With Peaches
Yesterday I visited an old friend, Devochka s persikami (Girl With Peaches), one of my favorite paintings at Moscow’s Tretiakov Gallery. Given the serenity of the canvases that Valentin Serov (1865-1911) painted in the late 19th and early 20th century, it’s hard to imagine that Russia was only a few years away from the violent apocalyptic change brought about by the Revolution of 1917. His gentle portraits of the wealthy and powerful and their families offer an interesting window into the world of late Imperial Russia. While wandering through the galleries, I thought about the ways that I might better incorporate artifacts from Russia’s rich visual culture into my Russian history surveys.
During a two week visit to Moscow and St. Petersburg, part of a year-long research leave, I’ll be considering ways to enrich my Russian history courses. Much of this will involve speaking with Russians about their views of the US, the world and current events in their own country as well as the ways that these larger events have shaped their everyday lives. As in the years following the Revolution, Russians in the post-Soviet years are living through another period of radical social and political transformations.
I’ll also be talking with Russian historians about my research on perspectives on history in contemporary cinema. Here’s an image from a current project on films about the most controversial epoch in Russia’s recent past, the Stalin period. A young girl looks through the windshield of an automobile at her father, who is being arrested by the secret police. Too young to understand what is happening, she admires the limousine that is taking him away and tries to impress the “nice men” who are accompanying him with her pretty dress and good manners. Perspectives on the legacy of Stalin continue to influence Russian domestic and foreign policy even today. Although it is hard for Americans to imagine, Russians are divided over the value of this legacy. Many if not most see it as positive. I use film as a way of studying this perplexing phenomenon.
Nikita Mikhalkov, Burnt By the Sun (1994)
Your comments on the film remind me of Ian Frazier’s New Yorker article “On the Prison Highway” about his trip to visit abandoned Siberian prison camps in 2005. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_frazier He makes similar observations about Stalin’s legacy and popular opinion in Russia.
Thanks for the reference. Interesting article!