E-mail: boitsova@gmail.com Tel.: +7 (812) 328-08-12
3, Universitetskaya emb., St. Petersburg, 199034, Russian Federation
PhD (History), researcher, Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (the Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences
This paper is financially supported by the Russian Fund for Basic Research project No. 17–83–01003 “The Civil War in Russia in the images of visual propaganda: a reference book”.
The paper is based on children’s drawings of 1917–1918 collected in the State Historical Museum (Moscow). These drawings were granted to the museum in 1919 by V. Voronov, who was a drawing and calligraphy teacher in two Moscow boys’ schools until 1918. The drawings are divided by researchers into groups, one of which represents types (e. g. Bolshevik). In the paper, drawings of types are regarded with a special focus on their iconography.
Children’s drawings of revolutionary types were based not only on children’s experience but also on their visual literacy and visual stereotypes of the time describing representatives of diffe- rent groups and parties. Not surprisingly, we find both fat and thin bourgeois in children’s drawings, because in the mass culture of 1917, a big belly wasn’t a feature of a so-called “burzhuy”— exploiter yet.
Although the “Bolsheviks” in children’s drawings display a variety of visual types, some drawings contain iconographic features, which are typical for stereotypical Russian commies. Iconographic analysis helps to highlight these features.
Iconography shows that caricatures in satirical magazines influenced children’s views of the Bolsheviks. Children acquired messages “the Bolsheviks are highwaymen”, “the Bolsheviks are people of low culture”, without reading texts only by viewing pictures. Some cases of borrowing iconographic features from satirical magazines are registered in the paper together with a case of accurately copying a caricature from Strekoza (namely Dragonfly) magazine.
Aksenov V. B. (2017) Zhurnal’naya karikatura kak zerkalo obshchestvennykh nastroeniy v 1917 godu [Magazine caricature as a mirror of social attitudes in 1917]. Vestnik TverGU. Seriya “Istoriya” [Tver State University Review. History Series]. 2017. No. 1. Pp. 4–16. In Russian.
Balashov E. M. (1999) Rossiyskie revolyutsii i shkolnik [Russian revolutions and a schoolchild]. In: Istorik i revolyutsiya [A historian and a revolution]: Coll. papers in honor of the 70th anniversary of O. N. Znamenskiy. St. Petersburg. Pp. 61–68. In Russian.
Bogdanov I. (2007) Dym otechestva, ili Kratkaya istoriya tabakokureniya [Smoke of the Fatherland or a brief history on tobacco smoking]. Moscow. In Russian.
Bonnell V. (1997) Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin. Berkeley. In English. Filippova T. A. (2015) “Vrag vnutrenniy” — “vrag vneshniy”. Obrazy revolyutsii 1917 g. v russkoy satiricheskoy zhurnalistike [“Inner enemy” — “outer enemy”. Images of the Revolution of 1917 in Russian satirical periodicals]. Rossiyskaya istoriya [Russian history]. 2015. No. 6. Pp. 90–98. In Russian.
Lukyanov E. (2017) Revolyutsiya dlya samykh malen’kikh. Mitingi, ocheredi i boi na mos- kovskikh ulitsakh v risunkakh i vospominaniyakh shkol’nikov 1917 goda (o vystavke detskikh risunkov “Ya risuyu revolyutsiyu” v Gosudarstvennom istoricheskom muzee, Moskva, 19.04– 19.06.2017) [Revolution for the most underaged. Rallies, queues and fights in Moscow streets in drawings and memories of schoolchildren of 1917 (On the exhibition “I’m drawing the Revolution” in the State Historical Museum, Moscow, 19.04–19.06.2017)]. URL: http://arzamas.academy/materials/1262 (retrieved: 10.10.2017). In Russian.
Osorina M. V. (2010) Risovannye istorii v izobrazitelnom tvorchestve detey i ikh zritelskom opyte [Drawn stories in the visual art of children and their viewing experience], Russkiy komiks [Russian comic strips]. Moscow. Pp. 107–170. In Russian.
Panofsky E. (1955) Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History. Garden City, N. Y. In English.
Boitsova O. Yu. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8284-8915 E-mail: boitsova@gmail.com Tel.: +7 (812) 328-08-12 3, Universitetskaya emb., St. Petersburg, 199034, Russian Federation PhD (History), researcher, Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (the Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences
Vashik K., Baburina N. (2004) Real’nost’ utopii: iskusstvo russkogo plakata XX veka [Rea- lity of utopia: Art of the Russian poster of the 20th century]. Moscow. In Russian.
Voronov V. S. (2014) Voyna v risunkakh detey [War in children’s drawings]. Comp. by E. A. Lu- kyanov. Moscow. In Russian.