Journal articles on the topic 'Russian Portrait painters'

The second half of the 15th century in the Russian Church history marked a strong decline of spiritual life, which naturally found its reflection in the icon painting. The feeling of integrity of an image, its depth were lost. At the same time, the weakening influence of the Orthodox Balkans and the Byzantine Empire gave way to the influence of the Catholic West with its profoundly different principles of religious art.In this transitional period of the Russian cultural life, characterized by the transformation of the medieval worldview and the formation of new artistic ideals, appeared parsuna (a rough Russian transliteration of the Latin word “persona”) - an early secular portrait of a lay person in the iconographic style that represents an important transition in Russia’s art history. The first pasruna were painted, most probably, by the iconographers of the Moscow Kremlin Armoury in the 17th century. The painters of these portraits were usually monks that tended to be anonymous, showing a humility.Although the stylized forms used in parsuna reveal a lack of concern with preserving the actual features of a person, but rather their overall image (special attributes and signatures allow to define represented), it still can be viewed as one of the very first attempts to look at person not only through the rigid iconographic canons, but also through a prism of psychological interpretation. Thus, this transitional image may be concerned as the initial fundamental step on the way to the further introduction fo the European portrait tradition in Russia.In this study, we would like to consistently trace how parsuna, thanks to its completely new stylistic value, can be considered one of the earliest stages on the way to the secularization of the Russian art in the early 17th century, which led to the separation from the strict iconographic religious canons and, consequently, to the rapprochement with the European art.

In the field of Russian portraiture in the second quarter of the 19th century, a new «type» of children’s portrait images emerged, which the author conventionally calls «exemplary children». According to him, young models were portrayed as educational models for both the portrayed themselves and their peers and potential descendants. This «type» was formed at the junction of romantic ideas about the virtue of childhood, Christian ideals and, at the same time, growing realistic trends in art. It became widespread among both metropolitan and provincial portrait painters, which testifies to its compliance with the tastes and needs of the public of that time. The article examines portraits of children from the Tomilov families by A. G. Varnek and Kapnist, made by E. F. Krendovsky. They were created at the beginning and end of the specified time period, respectively, which allows tracing the development of the «type» in dynamics. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the portraitists combined the images of real boys and girls, shown in the natural setting of home activities, with a complex spiritual and moral content. The latter was achieved through the use of the universal language of Christian symbolism, bold comparison of images of children with images of Christ, the Mother of God, angels and saints.

The article describes thought core of design made for publication project “Altai in the Works of Scientists and Travelers, the 18th the Beginning of the 20th Century” by Shishkov Altai Regional Universal Scientific Library (Barnaul, Russia), the basic element of which became colors and surface type of the Altaian semiprecious stones. Reproduction of little known pictural works made in portrait genre, rare landscape water-colors, esquisses by Russian and foreign painters lived around this time are also used in artistic design of five-volume issue. On the issue’s editorial board’s idea, selection of illustrations should help to a reader to trace a dynamics of interests took by domestic and foreign researchers and travelers in Altai.

The article focuses on a comprehensive study of Alexander Melamid’s portraiture included in his first independent project after thirty years of collaborative creativity with Vitaly Komar. Throughout the entire thirty-year period of cooperation, the painters signed their works with the Komar and Melamid trademark making it difficult to determine the artists’ individual characters. A detailed analysis of the solo works of the 60-70s, before the beginning of collaborative creativity, is presented; it helps us to detect individual traits in the works of the duet and to better identify the artists’ personalities, to reconstruct the technical features of each artist’s painting style. In 2007, Alexander Melamid began creating a large-scale series of paintings which would become his new conceptual line of creative work; later, in 2009, the artist developed and supplemented the series with portraits of Italian clergy and Russian oligarchs. Characteristic features of the Holy Hip Hop! portrait series, exhibited at the Detroit Museum of Modern Art in 2008, are studied in the article. The artist paid special attention to the psychological characters of the portrayed, the entire series is painted in one color scheme, within one scale. The pictorial series is an integral conceptual statement. The purely plastic qualities of the paintings fade into the background. They are not so important for Alexander Melamid - he uses academic painting as a tool to convey more accurately the psychology of the portrayed whom he treats with ironic interest. It is important to note that Alexander Melamid erases the line between the classical and the marginal art, just as Francois Millet did in his time. The article succeeded in updating sociocultural issues with the help of contextual comparison with portraiture by Diego Velazquez and contemporary American artist Kehinde Wiley whose creative life has deeply integrated into the socio-political realities of the United States of the beginning of the 21st century and the African-American cultural tradition. Kehinde Wiley is known for his realistic large-scale portrayals of African-Americans in poses borrowed from works of classical European painting of the 17-19th centuries. The artist openly propagandizes, deliberately emphasizing the didactic function of his paintings. It is in the context of contemporaries’ works and the political situation in the USA of the 2000-2010s that Alexander Melamid’s work should be considered.

The article is devoted to the study of the coat of arms on the portraits of the military ataman of the Don ar-my Danila Efremovich Efremov, the formation of the nobility in the southern outskirts of Russia. The first portraits of D. Efremov were painted in the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra and on the Don under the influence of the Polish, Malorussian and Russian artistic traditions. The painting of the coat of arms was based on the status of the military ataman D. E. Efremov, the award of the ranks of Major General and privy councilor, the acquisition of the nobility. The author characterizes the controversial issues of the origin of the portrait gallery of D. E. Efremov, and suggests a new dating of its painting based on the study of imperial grants, military and political events on the Don and in Russia. The composition and symbolism of the portraits are revealed, some anthropometric data of the military ataman are described, it is shown that the portraits of D. E. Efremov and his armorial images had a huge impact on the development of the Don ceremonial ataman and senior (starshina) portrait. It is stated and argued that the portrait from the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra in 1752 was preceded by other, not preserved works, from which “freeˮ copies were made. The latter can be independent creations. The author examines the government's attitude to the Don elder, the legal framework that regulated the sta-tus of the regional elite, individuals and positions.

AbstractVisual arts in Russia languished through most of her history, partly because the Orthodox Church frowned on pictorial representation, partly because there was virtually no middle class to purchase paintings. In the mid-eighteenth century Russia acquired an Academy of Arts which produced works largely in classical style and content. This changed in the 1870's when, under western influence, a group of Russian artists formed a society of "Itinerants" committed to painting in the realistic mode and to exhibit their works in various cities of the Empire rather than solely in the capital cities of St. Petersburg and Moscow, as had been the custom until then. Their canvasses depicted everyday life in Russia as well as historical scenes; they also painted portraits of contemporaries. This special issue deals with the lives and work of nine leading Itinerant painters. The movement gradually lost popularity toward the beginning of the twentieth century as Impressionism and Abstract art replaced it, but it revived in the Soviet period. Today it is greatly favored by the Russian public which swarms the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the largest collection of Itinerant art.

The article is devoted to the study of three ceremonial portraits of Prince Peter Lvovich Wittgenstein, a general of the Russian army and the richest landowner in Belarus in the 19th century. Most of ceremonial portraits of 19th century military men were perished in the whirlwind of wars and revolutions of the 20th century. Finding each such work, even outside our country, is of great interest.The prince’s maternal ancestors were representatives of the most famous aristocratic family in the history of Belarus. His father was the son of a Russian field marshal, hero of the war with Napoleon. Prince Peter did not leave children, all of his portraits are now outside Belarus about the descendants of his sister and brother.The paintings were revealed by the author himself, have not been studied before.The earliest portrait dates from the 1850s. and represents the prince in the uniform of a junior officer of the Horse Guards Regiment. The author’s name is not known, there is a copy of J. N. Bernhardt. The next portrait was painted by an unknown artist around 1864. The latest portrait represents a prince in a general’s uniform, completed by the Austrian artist Z. L’Alleman in 1888 after the death of his hero. Two copies of this portrait are also kept in private collections of his descendants.The article presents descriptions of portraits and their copies, analysis of the history of creation and existence in the context of the prince’s biography and his iconography, through the prism of the Russian and European tradition of writing ceremonial portraits of government officials.

The article explores the peculiarities of literary portraits and studies the interconnections and contrasts between painted and written portraits. The recognizability of a portrait in pictorial art is attained not only through physical resemblance but also through “artistic deformations” that the author introduces to the appearance of the portrayed. In a literary portrait, identification is achieved both by verbal and plastic detailing and by addressing the reader’s inner experience and imagination. Traditionally, the literary portrait in the Russian literature of the 19th century is based mostly on plastic characteristics, comparisons, and color accents, and because of this, it is often defined as “pictorial”. However, portraits by Pushkin and Dostoevsky stand out as exceptionally original, as if created from a different material. Pushkin avoids detailing, instead, he presents a “suggestive” portrait, i.e., a dynamic outline of the personality. The reader’s imagination is influenced not by details, but rather by the dynamic nature of Pushkin’s characters. Dostoevsky does not inherit Pushkin’s methods, though he also turns to a dynamic principle in describing the heroes of his novels. When they first appear, he presents them as if from different angles of vision, and their features may often be in discord, which makes the reader sense a contradictory impact of their personalities, as well as of their portraits. This kind of portrait is a dynamic message, where the reader follows the hero along unexpected and contrasting paths that the author previously mapped for him. From the beginning to the very end of their works, these two classics of Russian literature present the human personality as a being in a state of life-long development, always changing and always free in its existential choice.

Abstract This essay explores the circumstances which led the Russian painter Vasilii Maksimov to compose an unusual group portrait in the early months of 1864. The work was painted shortly after fourteen students withdrew from the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg and formed a cooperative association known as the St. Petersburg Artel of Artists, a commune spearheaded by the painter Ivan Kramskoi. Shortly after these events, Maksimov would join an Artel of artists established by the Academy graduate Pёtr Krestonostsev. Few scholars discuss this Artel but exploring the ways it mirrored collective ideals for artistic practice then prevalent in Paris sheds light on how homosocial networks of support rose to the fore in this historical moment. Maksimov’s 1864 group portrait records the productive conflict that resulted from artists’ desire to work with one another through discourse and collaboration in both eastern and western Europe in the period.

The novel The Captain's Daughter by Pushkin has been acknowledged by researchers as a prose encyclopedia about Russian life in the late 18th century. In this work, Pushkin proved himself not only a responsible historian, but also a talented portrait painter. This article is aimed at clarifying the art of creating the portrait of the character Pugachev in Pushkin's novel The Captain's Daughter. By making a comparison between the original and the translation by Professor Cao Xuan Hao, we have found that the translator has made fairly accurate depictions of the characters. However, there remain some limitations in the Vietnamese translation, including the incorrect translation of several portrait features of the characters and the omission of some details. These drawbacks, on the one hand, have reduced the expressiveness of the characters’ portraits; on the other hand, they have hindered the readers from fully perceiving the spirit of the original work.

The subject of this research is the artworks of the Flemish painter Jan Philipp van Thielen – a prominent author of the pieces depicting flower garlands in the XVII century, but so little-known nowadays. His name is unjustly forgotten in Russian historiography, although his paintings exhibited in the national museums; although in Western historiography, his popularity has grown in recent decades. Special attention is given to the painter’s works in different genres (religion, portraits, mythology), which are framed by a flower garland accentuating and symbolizing the central images. The scientific novelty of consists in ratification of art of the once renowned and now almost forgotten painter Jan Philipp van Thielen, as well as in the proof that he was one of the most popular flower painters in Flanders, and his patrons and customers were such high-rank aristocrats as Diego Felípez de Guzmán 1st Marquess of Leganés (1580-1655), and Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria (1664-1662), both art lovers and philanthropists. The acquired results demonstrate that Jan Philip van Thielen painted flower garlands in different genres. In the art of Flanders of the XVII century with remarkable success the showed the beauty of garlands and their use for enhancing the religious or moralizing meaning of the central images. His works are widely exhibited not only in museums, but also in auctions, which once again proves his important role in the painting of the XVII century.

The subject of this article is the portraits of the members of Vorontsov family – a Russian family of diplomats inseparably connected with Great Britain and Russia. These works were painted by the British artist Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830) in the early XIX century, featuring the portraits of S. R. Vorontsov (in 1805-1806), Y. S. Pembroke (in 1808), M. S. Vorontsov and graphic painting of E. K. Vorontsova (in 1821). The method of research consists in a detailed comprehensive examination of the depiction of the members of Vorontsov family. Main emphasis is made on the comparative analysis of reminiscences of the contemporaries on the model and artistic style of T. Lawrence’s works. The scientific novelty consists in viewing these portraits from one of the perspective of Russian-British artistic ties of the early XIX century – the connection between Lawrence and Russia, and broadening of catalogue descriptions with new records. The comparison of graphic and painting works of T. Lawrence with written reminiscences on the presented models proves that portraits of his authorship minutely reflect the inner world of the models and the impression they created on their contemporaries.

The occasion for the present article was the appearance for sale in a London auction of the portrait, apparently by the Scottish painter Sir William Allan 1782–1850), reproduced here on p1. I. It represented a young Persian gentleman in mid-nineteenth-century dress. On the back was a label in a later hand, which read:‘Muzjd [read Mirza?] Mohammed AH Bey / Professor of Oriental Languages / University of Hazan / Painted by Sir William All…’.On 26 March 1987 the present writer received an inquiry from the cataloguer, Karen Taylor, seeking help with the identification of the sitter and his place of residence. Some rapid inquiries were made at the time, from which it appeared that the university was probably that of Kazan in eastern Russia, and that the sitter may have had some connexion with a teacher of Persian known to the celebrated Russian Orientalist V. V. Bartol'd. However, records relating to Kazan then available in London were insufficient to support a definite identification. The portrait was sold as Lot no. 352 in the auction held on 4th November 1987, and was reproduced in the catalogue of the sale.Subsequent research, and inquiries in Russia, have brought forth fuller information about the sitter, a person whose career was unusual and distinguished, and who may be considered one of the founders of Oriental Studies at St. Petersburg. In spite of the time which has passed since the sale, it seems worth while to put the resulting information on record.

Irkutsk Regional Art Museum exhibition opened in September 2018 commemorated the 90th anniversary of the birth of Boris Timofe­evich Bychkov, Russian folk artist, corresponding member of Russian Art Academy, member of Irkutsk Regional Union of Artists and master of decorative glass. He had lived and worked in Irkutsk since 1962. A native of Moscow he graduated from Mukhina Leningard Higher Arts and Crafts College. For many years, he was an art director of Gusev glass manufacturing plant in Gus-Khrustalny. In 1962, he moved to Irkutsk and dedicated his whole life to Siberia. These are some of his art works known to natives of Irkutsk: stained glass windows «Irkutsk» in the hotel «Inturist», «The Blue Bird» in Bratsk community center, chandeliers in Irkutsk Music Theater, «Vostoksibsantechmontazh» and «Agrodorspecstroy» companies, and ornamental designs «Frozen sounds» and «Victory» in Irkutsk Art Museum Collection. Most of his designs and artifacts are stored in warehouses and are on exhibit in Irkutsk Art Museum, and all of them were featured in an exhibition. Besides the artist’s works, there were two other art works on display — «Portrait of B.T. Bychkov. Mural» and «Portrait of B.T. Bychkov on the optical glass» by painter-jewelers Natali and Arkadyi Lodyanovyh. This article is about the creative works of the glassware art artist himself and the story behind his portrait.

The complicated political and cultural position of the Serbs who migrated to the Habsburg Monarchy in the early eighteenth century caused the rise of popularity of Russian rulers, who were recognized as protectors of the Orthodox against religious persecution. Political ties were accompanied by a strong Russification of Serbian culture, which was carried out through the mass procurement of Russian liturgical books and the arrival of many Russian teachers to Serbian schools. Ukrainian painters who came to the Metropolitanate of Karlovci brought new forms of baroque religious painting and introduced changes in the structure of the iconostasis. The cult of the Romanov dynasty among Orthodox Serbs in Hungary was amplified by their numerous portraits and engravings.

For the first time а complete correspondence between Leonid Zurov (1902 –1971), the writer of the Russian Diaspora, and Viktor Manuilov (1903 –1987), a famous literary researcher, is introduced into a scientific usage. The main theme of their letters is the problem of transferring to Russia Ivan Bunin’s manuscript and memorial heritage, of which Zurov became the owner. The publication clarifies the reasons why the long and hard negotiations ended without any success. It allows to define more exactly the details and circumstances of this case. The correspondence affects the names of many key figures of cultural life both of the Russian abroad and Metropolitan area. It characterizes those persons who actively supported the return of Bunin's legacy as well as officials who blocked the process. The material reflects the struggle of Russian writers, scientists, museum curators against the Soviet bureaucratic machine for which Bunin was always ideologically alien. It paints a picture of the public sentiment and the Soviet cultural policy of the 1960s. Some letters concern Zurov’s articles devoted to M. Lermontov as well as his work on the novel “Winter Palace”. The publication allows to clarify Zurov’s psychological portrait and to identify a number of significant episodes in the V. Manuilov’s scientific biography

Alexandre Yakovlev was a famous Russian painter, graphic and theatre artist, a graduate from the Imperial Academy of Arts and a member of the “World of Art”. In 1917 by the order of the Academy (material collection to decorate interiors of the Kazanian railway station) Yakovlev went to Beijing, then he traveled a lot throughout China, Mongolia and Japan. He explored Chinese and Japanese theaters, as a result he made many ethnographic sketches, portraits and photographs. He arranged the exhibition of his drawings in Shanghai (in 1919). Finding out about the revolution in Russia he emigrated to France. Since 1919 he lived in Paris. He showed multiple works of Far Eastern cycle at personal exhibitions in Paris (Barbazanges Gallery, 1920 and 1921; together with V. Shuhaev), London (Grafton Gallery, 1920) and Chicago (Art Institute, 1922). In 1922 the pub-lisher Lucien Vogel published an album Drawings and paintings of the Far East, which included 50 reproductions of Yakovlev’s Far-East cycle (the book was designed by Shuhaev). At the same time the artist produced an album on the Chinese theater with accompanying text by a Chinese author Zhu Kim-Kim. In 1931–1932 Yakovlev took part in the “Yellow Cruise” arranged by the “Citroen” company. From this expedition he brought some new series of drawings. At the end of the cruise he presented his artworks in Paris and at foreign exhibitions. This background of the artist’s life is subject to be studied better in Russia.

Saratov is justifiably called one of the most significant centers of the artistic culture of the Russian Near-Volga Region. When analyzing the condition of that domain of the plastic arts represented by painting and graphics, it is necessary to state that during the course of the entire 19th century (not to mention the previous century) the figures of the artists were merely episodic: Jean Baptiste Savin, a Frenchman in his origin (famous for his portraits and watercolors), watercolor painter Maria Zhukova, Andrei Godin (who was the first teacher of Mikhail Vrubel) and Feodor Vassiliev (the first instructor of Victor Borisov-Musatov), portraitists and church painters Lev Igorev and Nikolai Rossov. For the most part, the artists who worked beyond the confines of Saratov were its natives, who were veritably well-known artists – Vassily Zhuravlev and Alexei Kharlamov. The high flourishing of painting in Saratov at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century was prepared by the activities of Hector Baracchi, originally from Italy, and graduate from the St. Petersburg Academy of the Arts Vassily Konovalov. They exerted a decisive influence on the local artistic school, the main representatives of which were Victor Borisov-Musatov, Pavel Kuznetsov, Piotr Utkin, Alexander Savinov, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin (a native of Khvalynsk), as well as sculptor Alexander Matveyev. However, there were three names which have become the most “celebrated” for Saratov, which led the brilliant assemblage of remarkable artists pertaining to the visual arts and were in the vanguard of the so-called era of “cultural boom,” as the high artistic accomplishments of the late 19th and early 20th century are sometimes referred to. They are Victor Borisov-Musatov, Pavel Kuznetsov and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. The present essay is devoted to them.

Soon after the coup d’état of 1762, which brought Catherine II, also known as Catherine the Great, to power, Vigilius Erichsen painted the equestrian portrait of the Empress in the Life Guards’ uniform. Catherine wore this uniform during the coup that dethroned her husband, Peter III. This article analyses this episode of cross-dressing in the context of Catherine's legitimation narrative. It further examines the uniform dresses that she wore for various regimental occasions. The dresses combined elements of traditional Russian garments and European fashion. The final section of the article studies the regional uniforms that Catherine II introduced for nobles, civil servants and their wives as part of her regional reforms after Pugachev's rebellion (1773–1775). I discuss these uniforms in the context of a revival of interest in the regions and local civil service, and in the context of national and transnational processes in Europe in the late eighteenth century.

The article paints a literary portrait of the poet B. Nepomnyashchy against the background of Russian Acmeist poetics, defined by its preoccupation with the subject, constant lyrical self-reflection, and the fondness for the genre of a fragment. Particularly important for understanding Nepomnyashchy’s poetry is his connection with I. Annensky: the article centers on their creative dialogue and follows the transformation of Annensky’s reflections of a suffering mind into Nepomnyashchy’s resolute acceptance of fate and clear understanding of one’s poetic vocation. The latter becomes a leitmotif of Nepomnyashchy’s entire work: from his earlier to later poems, he considers his talent as a responsibility, an oracular duty, and faithfulness to God’s truth, hence his exacting approach to himself and his poetry, which he creates with absolute mastery, earning him a place among the most brilliant poets of the 20th c. In her detailed analysis of Nepomnyashchy’s poems in the collection In the Light of the North Star… [Pri svete Polyarnoy…] (1996, 2002), the author recreates a comprehensive idea of his artistic manner as well as the image of the lyrical hero, a resident of the later 20th c.

In Russian literary studies, the opinion about the excessive objectivity, if not dryness and coldness, of Ivan Goncharov as a writer, who did not want to show his personal attitude to the events and persons described by him in any way, was fixed. The article reveals the origins of this opinion about the author of "Oblomov", proves that it originates in the criticism of the natural school. It turns out that here was Vissarion Belinsky to start the party of considering Ivan Goncharov as someone who only portrays, paints, but does not lecture anyone and does not punish, does not expose his contemporary reality became the basis for subsequent criticism of the mid-19th century, represented by the names of Nikolay Dobrolyubov, Dmitry Pisarev, Nikolai Shelgunov. The article shows the change in the attitude of criticism of "Nikolai Gogol direction" to Ivan Goncharov from positive to negative – thus, if the first novel of the writer, "A Common Story" was perceived by supporters of the natural school very warmly, even enthusiastically, the second and the most famous – "Oblomov" – was not the same and caused a lot of controversy, and the last – "The Precipice" – was in fact misunderstood and considered to be a retrograde novel written by a man with very outdated views on the social life of Russia, the one who actually sang of Russia’s serfdom past and sharply condemned revolutionary-minded youth. Based on the materials of several critical articles, it is concluded that representatives of the "real" direction attributed Ivan Goncharov to the supporters of pure art, or "art for art's sake".

The Tibetan collection of the State Hermitage contains some of the gifts of the 13th Dalai Lama to the Russian Emperor Nicholas II. The State Archives of the Russian Federation has a document titled “A copy of the list of Tibetan gifts sent to the Winter Palace”. It consists of two lists, the first list describes 14 items, the second - 9. Almost all of these gifts were in the private rooms of Nicholas II in the Winter Palace. Of course, not all things have survived to this day. Number 1 in the first list is the chakra (wheel of teaching), the sign of the king offered to the Tibetan rulers upon accession to the throne, as a sign of goodwill (Inventory No. KO-884, Tibet, late 19th century); number 4 is a silver teapot, partially gilded (Inventory No. KO-896, Tibet, end of the 19th century); number 5 - men’s turquoise hoop earring; at number 9 - a gold reliquary gau (Tib. Ga'u), decorated with turquoise, such were worn and are worn by Tibetan women on the chest; at number 10 - women’s gold earrings decorated with turquoise. Earrings and a reliquary after the organization of the Oriental Department and the redistribution of exhibits were included in the collection of art objects of Central Asia. From the second list, presumably, there is a sculpture of Buddha Shakyamuni in the Hermitage collection. It is quite possible that enamel objects and some others have also been preserved in different collections of the Oriental Department. In addition, the collection contains two pencil portraits of the 13th Dalai Lama, painted by the Russian artist N. Ya. Kozhevnikov in 1905 in Urga (present-day Ulan Bator). The Dalai Lama was hiding in Mongolia during the British expansion into Tibet in 1903-1904. Thus, some of the gifts of the 13th Dalai Lama are presented in the Tibetan collection of the Hermitage. Some of them are masterpieces, such as the silver chakra, others are very typical ethnographic objects.

Kārlis Celmiņš (1894–1973) is one of the less famous Latvian artists. He was born in Cēsis as the fifth, the last child in his family, the only son. He received an artistic education at Stroganov School of Arts in Moscow. Still studying at this school, Celmiņš took part in the IV Exhibition of Latvian Art in Riga in 1914. After he had finished school, he was drafted into the Russian Empire’s army, where he was assigned a painter decorator of his regiment. Celmiņš returned to Latvia in 1918. After working as a teacher of drawing in Madona for two years, he moved to Jelgava. There he worked as a teacher of arts in Jelgava Classic Gymnasium. During the time of independent Latvia, Celmiņš actively took part in Jelgava’s artistic life. He regularly displayed his works at society’s “Zaļā Vārna” and other exhibitions and organized exhibitions himself together with students of the gymnasium. Celmiņš had many-sided artistic interests. He was not only painting and drawing but also doing graphics, applied arts, making silver jewelry, and writing poems in his leisure time. The monument devoted to the Latvian soldiers who fell in action in 1916–1917 was made after the artist’s project. Almost all works of the master were destroyed in the ruins of Jelgava during the war in 1944. Celmiņš felt very sorry about this loss. The artist and his wife and children moved to Dundaga after Jelgava was destroyed, but when the war was over, they settled in Tukums. There Celmiņš worked in a ceramics workshop as a decorator of ready-made plates and dishes. In 1946 the artist was invited to work at the School of Applied Arts in Liepāja. The rest of his life Celmiņš spent in this city. The artist painted portraits, landscapes, still-lifes, and decorative compositions with plants, flowers, and the sea all his creative life. He did his works with oil, watercolours, colour chalks, and pencil. The life of the free-thinking artist was not easy during the Soviet occupation. Many people did not understand the art of Celmiņš. At the end of his life, the master organised several personal exhibitions in Liepāja, Jelgava, Cēsis. Many interesting paintings of flowers done with watercolours, pastel, and colour oil chalks were displayed in his last exhibition, “Flowers” in 1973. Those were the paintings of gladioli, irises, calla lilies, and other flowers made during the last years of his life. Celmiņš died in Liepāja on 16 October 1973, leaving a wide range of works of his individual, unique style.

Настоящая статья раскрывает особенности малоизученного явления, связанного с русской иконописью второй половины XIX в. Одним из представителей этого направления был старший современник В. И. Сурикова - академик живописи Платон Семенович Тюрин (1816-1882). В Вологодском Государственном музее-заповеднике сохранилась написанная им для вологодской церкви Казанской Богоматери икона «Пречистая Богородица - помощница рождающим чад» (отреставрирована в 2016 г. О. В. Карпачёвой). Она отличается новаторством замысла: образ Богородицы с Младенцем на груди максимально приближен к человеку и далёк от идеализации. Тюрин работал во многих храмах России, но большинство его росписей и икон не сохранились вследствие антирелигиозных гонений советского времени. Представление о его иконописном творчестве может дать фотография С. А. Непеина 1905 г., которая хранится в ВГМЗ. Она воспроизводит интерьер домашней церкви в честь великомученицы Александры (придел храма в честь архангела Михаила в Верхней Вологде, здание не сохранилось). Документально иконостас датируется началом 1870-х гг. Анализ данного иконостаса помог раскрыть высокий уровень мастерства и связь художника с выдающимися представителями русской культуры XVIII-XIX вв., воплощёнными в образах святых на этих иконах. This article reveals the features of a little-studied phenomenon associated with Russian icon-painting in the second half of XIX century.An Academician of painting Platon Semenovich T’urin (1816-1882), who was a senior V. I. Surikov’s contemporary, became one of acknowledged representatives of this movement. In the Vologda State Museum-Reserve there is an icon «The Blessed Virgin Mary is the helper of giving birth» painted by T'urin for the Vologda church of Our Lady of Kazan. It was restored in 2016 by O. V. Karpacheva and remarkable for its innovative image that presents the Virgin with a Baby on her chest and stands closer to a portrait manner than iconic idealization. T’urin worked for many Russian churches but most of his paintings and icons were destroyed due to the anti-religious campaigns in Soviet times. Some traces of his icon-painting work we can find in a photo taken by S. A. Nepein in 1905, which is now in the Vologda State Museum-Reserve. It shows an interior of a home church in honor of the great martyr Alexandra, which was a chapel of a big church in honor of Archangel Michael in Upper Vologda and later demolished. According to archive data, an iconostasis dates from the early 1870s. Its detailed analysis helped to reveal a high-skilled artist’s hand and his representation of prominent Russian intellectuals in XVIII-XIX centuries embodied in the images of saints.

A documentary photograph from the exhibition 15 Years of Artists of the RSFSR (Khudozhniki RSFSR za 15 let) that opened in Moscow in June 1933 shows the extent to which contemporaries perceived this show as a watershed, a moment when the last remnants of the bourgeois culture of prerevolutionary Russia definitively gave way to the proletarian culture of the rapidly modernizing Soviet Union. A clean-cut and athletic Soviet youth looks straight into the eyes of the refined symbolist poet, playwright, critic, and translator Mikhail Kuz'min as painted in 1926 by a fellow member of the artistic group World of Art (Mir Iskusstva), Nikolai Radlov. In this confrontation, Kuz'min seems to embody everything the Soviet Union had done away with. The height of his fame as a Symbolist poet was the 1900s and 1910s; in the early 1930s, he was still writing poetry, but was unable to publish and increasingly marginalized. In the painting's background, a mythic landscape set within an arched window typical of Renaissance portraits ties him to the Western humanist tradition. Kuz'min's bodily posture invites contact: Seated close to the picture plane with open arms, he appears to look out. Yet the poet also seems reserved and distant, perhaps because of his formal dress, and introspective: The lit cigarette at the level of his mouth and his semi-open book signal that he is preoccupied with a subject other than his interlocutor. The youth, on the other hand, has the confident, even somewhat condescending look of a master of the universe (khoziain zhizni), with folded arms and a slightly skeptical glance. Wearing a fashionable sports shirt on his fit body, he represents the ideal of the times: a healthy, physically strong, and ideologically prepared builder of a socialist society who, both literally and figuratively, embodies the Soviet future. Such an ideal is exemplified by Aleksandr Samokhvalov's contemporaneous painting Girl in a Soccer Jersey (Devushka v futbolke), which was displayed in the same exhibition and quickly became an iconic symbol of Soviet athletic youth. This seemingly antagonistic encounter between representatives of the Soviet past and future simultaneously reflects the change in the official rhetoric. By 1933 it was conciliatory in tone, having firmly replaced the open class conflict of the preceding years, and bourgeois specialists were not only welcomed back into the fold of Soviet society, they were offered privileges if they worked for the new state.

The second half of the 18th century was a time of active changes in the perception of art, rethinking many concepts and phenomena. One of them was the pictorial sketch, which transformed from a preparatory stadium work into an independent, complete piece of art. Many art theorists and critics, as well as painters themselves had contributed to this rethinking. Many young artists, bored of historical painting and indifferent to all the academic principles, were searching for new media of expressiveness, using the sketch-like pictorial manner to give their works a new dynamism and an impression of “easy production”. The article is dedicated to J.-H. Fragonard (1732—1806), an artist in whose works the “sketchiness” became a conscious artistic method used in small-format pieces, in large-scale canvases, and even in panels. The use of such a technique in grand scale works is considered to be an extreme unconventionality, which, however, was not appreciated by Fragonard’s contemporaries and even by scholars of the next two centuries. Fragonard’s series of ‘Fantasy Portraits’ attracted enough investigators’ attention, but his series ‘Progress of Love’ has only recently begun to be recognized by researchers as an unusual and bold for that time artistic experience. Based on the analysis of the artist’s selected works, the author builds her original research, designed to highlight Fragonard’s special role in the evolution of art on the way from the Modern Period to Contemporary History. The relevance of the present article is caused by too little examination of this topic: minimal in Russia and relatively small in France. Besides consultation with research literature, this required the author to constantly directly refer to the 18th-century sources, such as treatises by art connoisseurs and scholars, art criticism, and catalogues of exhibitions arranged by the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture or the Académie de Saint-Luc.

The Russian culture of the turn of the XX century is characterized by actualization of the prob-lems of intercultural dialogue. Thus, the analysis of the Silver age is impossible without considering the fact of such a dialogue as a cultural phenomenon. The problem of hispanism reception is considered in the aspect of creative genius in K. Bal-mont’s works. In the context of Balmont's symbolism, it is important to take into account his specific conceptualization of the artist's status and interpretation of creativity as dreaming. The task of the re-search is to study the implementation of this mental usus within the Spanish theme, the discourse of the painter as a genius-overman by Balmont, and the existentials of the poet's spiritual experience correlated with it. Spain by Balmont is primarily a country of great artists. He creates portraits-myths of the great Spaniards, almost overmen for him. In the article “Poetry of horror” Balmont calls Goya's “a poet-symbolist in painting”, and relates his genius with other representatives of world culture: Poe, Bosch, Teniers etc. Spanish artist is de-clared a predictor of a new art. Goya in Balmont’s interpretation is an actual genius-creator, artist of borderline, mystical experience. Goya’s grotesques are interpreted as a breakout to otherness. Artist's chimeras scare with credibility and live. Goya created an infernal world with the character of universality. Balmont calls “Capricious” a theodicy, as this hymn to the aesthetics of ugliness justifies the existence of evil. The poet highlights in Goya’s aesthetics something close to the era of the early ХХ century. Cultural fashion finds its source and consonance in Spaniard’s drawing (mysticism of terrible, “attraction” to demonism, themes of disease, suffering and dreams). Also, the great painter in the poet’s interpretation is a dreamer reflecting his prophetic dreams on canvas. If Goya’s dreams are marked by a dark, night element in the poet’s artistic metaphysics, the oneirism of Velasquez is marked as sunny. The artist’s mythological image is embodied in the rhyme “Velasquez”. Solar genius of Velasquez organically becomes one of the main figures in the artistic metaphysics of Balmont's poetic collection “Let's be like the Sun”. The last limit of the volitional effort called for in the title of the collection is specified with Velasquez’s image. By binary logic a dark genius should confront Velasquez-Sun. In the book this role is assigned to the painter José de Ribera, Goya’s analog in the context of Balmont’s works. A mythological image was created with reference to the stockpile of ancient myths, the antithesis of Prometheus and Epimetheus. Entering into a dialogue with the culture of Spain and creating myths of Spanish artists, Balmont was looking for a reflection of himself in the Spaniards. Regarding their heroes as the dreamers, he oneirically dreamed about the essence of the Spanish genius basing on his travel impressions but trusting much more his mythic-creative speculation and accentuating the central existentials of his experience.

The article examines typological intersections between the early works of Leo Tolstoy and the works of the 1850s of Egor Kovalevsky. The theme “Egor Kovalevsky and Leo Tolstoy” has not been studied comprehensively and systematically in Russian literary criticism. The research develops from the history of personal relationships between the writers during the Danube Campaign and the Sevastopol events to a comparative study of the writers’ works created during the Crimean Campaign. Tolstoy’s “Sevastopol in December” and in Kovalevsky’s “The Bombing of Sevastopol” reflected the similarities in the authors’ concepts, themes and images. The article justifies that the central theme developed in the writers’ oeuvre was a person and their role in history. Similarities and differences in the portrayal of the heroic events of the defense of Sevastopol by the writers are considered. Kovalevsky’s essay and Tolstoy’s first story are closely linked by one idea – the sense of civic exaltation, national identity. In describing the Russian soldier, his character, the heroism of the defenders of Sevastopol, the writers follow the “truth of life”. Kovalevsky captures the names of the direct participants in the war. With one detail or episode of the last minutes of their lives, Kovalevsky draws the reader’s attention to the “ordinary heroes” of Sevastopol, emphasizing the importance of their individual feat. Tolstoy’s heroes, on the contrary, are nameless: it is the general mood of the defenders of Sevastopol that is important for the writer. There are common features in the narrative manner of the two writers: ways of depicting heroes, accuracy and imagery of landscape sketches. A few strokes and precise details convey the state of Sevastopol. The mood associated with the state of the city is emphasized by the details of the landscape. The similarity in describing the heroes’ and the narrator’s psychology is expressed through the image of fog. The features of the authors’ creative manner and the role of the narrator are analyzed. There is an obvious difference in the creative methods of Kovalevsky and Tolstoy. Describing real details with historical accuracy, Kovalevsky paints a romantic picture with bright “strokes”. Kovalevsky uses concrete real details most often as a way to emphasize a bright feature he has noted in life, while Tolstoy seeks to show (highlight) the quality of life rather than its specific feature. The difference between Kovalevsky’s essay and Tolstoy’s story is also in the assessment of the historical event. Describing the bombing of Sevastopol as a historian, Kovalevsky does not abandon moral and political generalizations. Thus, the manner of narration and the ways of depicting heroes testify that both Tolstoy and Kovalevsky solve one problem with different artistic means – to truthfully portray the reality and the person as the “center of history”. In search of a true depiction of Sevastopol, Kovalevsky, a historian and romantic writer, moved towards realism embodied in Leo Tolstoy’s story.

Рубеж XIX–XX вв. выявляет интереснейшие особенности культурных векторов, показывает пути синтеза и интеграции различных направлений и видов искусств, стилей, философских базисов мировоззренческих систем. Творчество одного из самых ярких осетинских писателей Батырбека Туганова развивалось в русле реалистической системы, заложенной русской литературной традицией XIX в. При этом его художественное мышление выстраивается под сильнейшим влиянием особенностей национальной осетинской культуры. В целом культура реализма XIX в. стремится к демифологизации. Но Туганов живет и творит на рубеже столетий, когда, наоборот, возрождается интерес к мифу, символу, древним шифрам искусства. В произведениях Батырбека Туганова можно выделить ряд мифопоэтических конструктов, рожденных в недрах архаической культуры осетин и обладающих сакральной образностью. Картина мира этого писателя сложна, многоуровнева, удивительно органична и емка в своей архитектонике реалистического сюжета и мифопоэтической вневременной сути образов и событий. Особенность почерка Туганова в том, что он всегда выписывает образы очень цельно, выпукло, фактурно. Автор доводит портреты персонажей и сюжетные линии до масштаба мифологической цельности восприятия. Такому принципу работы над литературным текстом могло способствовать дарование Б. Туганова-художника, навыки скульптора, живописца и рисовальщика, реализованный внутренний творческий механизм визуализации вербального образа. При чтении произведений Туганова психология человека, далекого от эпохи архаики, монтируется с синкретическим базисом нашего подсознания. Реализм Туганова становится генетическим продолжением глубокого и древнего мифологизма осетинской культуры, усиливает свои позиции и выходит на новый образно-семантический уровень. При том, что в произведениях Батырбека Туганова «Ханифа» и «Пастух Баде» анализируется целый ряд особенностей мифологического текста, Туганов остается реалистом. Его реализм в том, что писатель выявляет сбой в системе координат традиционного миропорядка, нарушение мифологической гармонии человека и мира. Неореалистический метод как будто «взламывает» древние коды установленного миропорядка, заставляя нас еще острее воспринимать мифологемы нашей культуры. The frontier of the XIX-XX centuries reveals the most interesting features of cultural vectors, shows the ways of synthesis and integration of various areas and types of arts, styles, philosophical bases of worldview systems. The work of one of the brightest Ossetian writers Batyrbek Tuganov developed in line with the realistic system laid down by the Russian literary tradition of the 19th century. At the same time, his artistic thinking is built under the strongest influence of the features of national Ossetian culture. The culture of realism of the XIX century strive for demythologization. But Tuganov lives and works at the turn of centuries, when, on the contrary, interest in myth, symbol, ancient ciphers of art is revived. In the works of Batyrbek Tuganov, a number of mythopoietic constructs born in the bowels of the archaic Ossetian culture and having sacred imagery can be distinguished. The picture of the world of this writer is complex, multilevel and surprisingly organic and capacious in its architectonics of a realistic plot and mythopoietic timeless essence of images and events. The peculiarity of Tuganov’s handwriting is that he always writes out images very whole, convex, factual. The author brings portraits of characters and storylines to the scale of mythological integrity of perception. This principle of work on a literary text could be facilitated by the talent of B. Tuganov-artist, the skills of the sculptor, painter and draftsman, and the implemented internal creative mechanism for visualizing the verbal image. When reading the works of Tuganov, the psychology of a person far from the period of archaic is mounted with the syncretic basis of our subconscious. Tuganov’s realism becomes a genetic continuation of the deep and ancient mythologism of Ossetian culture, strengthens its position and reaches a new figurative-semantic level. Despite the fact that the works of Batyrbek Tuganov “Hanifa” and “Shepherd Bade” analyze a number of features of the mythological text, Tuganov remains a realist. His realism is that the writer reveals a failure in the coordinate system of the traditional world order, a violation of the mythological harmony of man and the world. The neorealist method seems to “crack” the ancient codes of the established world order, forcing us to even sharper perceive the mythologies of our culture.

Background. А history of the development of the human community is at the same time a history of the relationship between men and women, their role in society, in formation of mindset, development of science, technology and art. A woman’s path to the recognition of her merits is a struggle for equality and inclusion in all sectors of public life. Originated with particular urgency in the twentieth century, this set of problems gave impetus to the study of the female phenomenon in the sociocultural space. In this context, the disclosure of the direct contribution of talented women to art and their influence on its development has become of special relevance. The purpose of the article is to summarize segmental of information that highlights the contribution of women to the treasury of world art, their creative and inspiring power. Analytical, historical-biographical and comparative studying methods were applied to reveal the gender relationships in art and the role of woman in them as well as in the sociocultural space in general. The results from this study present a panorama of gifted women from the world of art and music who paved the way for future generations. Among them are: A. Gentileschi (1593–1653), who was the first woman admitted to The Florence Academy of Art; M. Vigee Le Brun (1755–1842), who painted portraits of the French aristocracy and later became a confidant of Marie-Antoinette; B. Morisot (1841–1895), who was accepted by the impressionists in their circle and repeatedly exhibited her works in the Paris Salon; F. Caccini (1587–1640), who went down in history as an Italian composer, teacher, harpsichordist, author of ballets and music for court theater performances; J. Kinkel (1810–1858) – the first female choral director in Germany, who published books about musical education, composed songs on poems of famous poets, as well as on her own texts; F. Mendelssohn (1805–1847) – German singer, pianist and composer, author of cantatas, vocal miniatures of organ preludes, piano pieces; R. Clark (1886–1979) – British viola player and composer who created trio, quartets, compositions for solo instruments, songs on poems of English poets; L. Boulanger (1893–1918) became the first woman to receive Grand Prix de Rome; R. Tsekhlin (1926–2007) – German harpsichordist, composer and teacher who successfully combined the composition of symphonies, concerts, choral and vocal opuses, operas, ballets, music for theatrical productions and cinema with active performing and teaching activities, and many others. The article emphasise the contribution of women-composers, writers, poetesses to the treasury of world literature and art. Among the composers in this row is S. Gubaidulina (1931), who has about 30 prizes and awards. She wrote music for 17 films and her works are being performed by famous musicians around the world. The glory of Ukrainian music is L. Dychko (1939) – the author of operas, oratorios, cantatas, symphonies, choral concertos, ballets, piano works, romances, film music. The broad famous are the French writers: S.-G. Colette (1873–1954), to which the films were devoted, the performances based on her novels are going all over the world, her lyrics are being studied in the literature departments. She was the President of the Goncourt Academy, Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, a square in the center of Paris is named after her. Also, creativity by her compatriot, L. de Vilmorin (1902–1969), on whose poems С. Arrieu, G. Auric, F. Poulenc wrote vocal miniatures, is beloved and recognized as in France as and widely abroad. The article denotes a circle of women who combined the position of a selfsufficient creator and a muse for their companion. M. Verevkina (1860–1938) – a Russian artist, a representative of expressionism in painting, not only helped shape the aesthetic views of her husband A. Yavlensky, contributing to his art education, but for a long time “left the stage” for to not compete with him and help him develop his talent fully. Furthermore, she managed to anticipate many of the discoveries as for the use of light that are associated with the names of H. Matisse, A. Derain and other French fauvist. F. Kahlo (1907–1954), a Mexican artist, was a strict critic and supporter for her husband D. Rivera, led his business, was frequently depicted in his frescoes. C. Schumann (1819–1896) was a committed promoter of R. Schumann’s creativity. She performed his music even when he was not yet recognized by public. She included his compositions in the repertoire of her students after the composer lost his ability to play due to the illness of the hands. She herself performed his works, making R. Schumann famous across Europe. In addition, Clara took care of the welfare of the family – the main source of finance was income from her concerts. The article indicates the growing interest of the twentieth century composers to the poems of female poets. Among them M. Debord-Valmore (1786–1859) – a French poetess, about whom S. Zweig, P. Verlaine and L. Aragon wrote their essays, and her poems were set to music by C. Franck, G. Bizet and R. Ahn; R. Auslender (1901–1988) is a German poetess, a native of Ukraine (Chernovtsy city), author of more than 20 collections, her lyrics were used by an American woman-composer E. Alexander to write “Three Songs” and by German composer G. Grosse-Schware who wrote four pieces for the choir; I. Bachmann (1926–1973) – the winner of three major Austrian awards, author of the libretto for the ballet “Idiot” and opera “The Prince of Hombur”. The composer H. W. Henze, in turn, created music for the play “Cicadas” by I. Bachmann. On this basis, we conclude that women not only successfully engaged in painting, wrote poems and novels, composed music, opened «locked doors», destroyed established stereotypes but were a powerful source of inspiration. Combining the roles of the creator and muse, they helped men reach the greatest heights. Toward the twentieth century, the role of the fair sex representatives in the world of art increased and strengthened significantly, which led Western European culture to a new round of its evolution.

Александр Яковлевич Головин (1863–1930) принадлежит к числу крупнейших деятелей русской художественной культуры конца XIX – начала XX века. Его искусство получило широкую известность и признание. О А.Я. Головине написаны книги, очерки, немало статей. Но искусство А.Я. Головина-портретиста – это малоисследованная область творчества этого замечательного живописца. Обширное портретное наследие художника не только не изучено в значительной своей части, но до сих пор еще малоизвестно. Оно оказалось распыленным, разбросанным по частным коллекциям и многочисленным музеям. Ряд первоклассных работ находится в зарубежных музейных собраниях. Немало головинских портретов – в запасниках столичных музеев. Цель данной публикации – это анализ его портретного творчества, который даст возможность по-новому взглянуть на этого интересного живописца. Alexander Yakovlevich Golovin (1863–1930) is one of the greatest figures of Russian art culture of the late XIX – of the early XX century. His art became widely known and recognized. Books, essays, a lot of articles are written about. But, the art of Golovin – a portrait painter – is a little studied area of creativity of this wonderful painter. Extensive portrait heritage of the artist is not only not studied in large part, but still little known. It was dispersed, scattered throughout private collections and numerous museums. A number of first-class works are in foreign Museum collections. Many portraits by A.Y. Golovin are in the vaults of the capital's museums. The purpose of this publication is to analyze his portrait work, which will give an opportunity to take a fresh look at this interesting painter.

The article presents Lev Alperovich, a little-known to general public Belarusian painter of the beginning of the 20th century, who was Ivan Trutnev’s student in Vilnius Drawing School and a student of Ilya Repin in the Emperor’s Arts Academy in St. Petersburg. The works of Lev Alperovich that survived after the World War II are kept in the National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus. The analysis of the painter’s biography and creative heritage reveals a new vector which was gradually emerging in Minsk at the beginning of the 20th century, i.e remoteness from the academic late “peredvizhniki” realism and the ambition to find a niche in the evolving Russian modern style or the European Art Nouveau style and symbolism. Relatively sparse artistic heritage of Alperovich – single and group portraits, genrepainting, everyday life scenes and staffage landscapes – allows the author to single out this painter as a Belarusian painting phenomenon of the 20th century.

Николай Егорович (Георгиевич) Сверчков (1817 – 1898) – один из ранних представителей реалистической жанровой живописи. В своих картинах он запечатлел природу России, с ее величественными лесами и необъятными полями, бесконечными дорогами и проселками. Н.Е. Сверчков впервые в русском искусстве развил мотив удалой «птицы-тройки», с образом которой народ связывал свои мечты о лучшей, свободной жизни. Творчество художника многообразно. Он писал не только жанровые, но и исторические и батальные полотна, занимался скульптурой. Редкого мастерства Н.Е. Сверчков достиг в изображении животных, особенно лошадей. Его дорожные сцены, картины охоты, конные портреты сыграли видную роль в истории русской живописи. Nikolai Yegorovich (Georgievich) Sverchkov (1817-1898) was one of the early representatives of the realist genre painting. In his paintings he captured the nature of Russia, with its majestic forests and vast fields, endless roads and country roads. N.E. Sverchkov for the first time in Russian art has developed the motif of daring "bird-Troika", with the image which the people placed their dreams of a better, free life. The artist's work in many ways. He did not write both genre and historical and battle paintings, studied sculpture. Rare skill N.E. Sverchkov have achieved in the depiction of animals, especially horses. His travel scenes, hunting paintings, horse portraits played a prominent role in the history of Russian painting.

The article analyzes Repin’s art. Two conclusions are drawn on the basis of this analysis. First, the difference between contemporary and classical art is exaggerated. In the author’s opinion, any art, both realistic and abstract, makes the invisible visible. Secondly, Repin’s paintings depict the premonition of the catastrophe of Russian peasantry. Ruining of peasantry leads to what can be called the collapse of Russian soul. In essence, this idea is evident when comparing portraits by Repin. In the article the author compares portraits of Andreev, Gorky and Musorgsky painted by Repin and, examines the contrast between Russian “muzhik” (peasant) and intelligentsia in his paintings «The Unexpected Visitor» and «The Arrest of the Propagandist». The author also compares the portraits of the peasants by Perov and Kramskoy with the paintings of Repin.

Живописец, эссеист и мемуарист Сергей Голлербах является автором уникальных мемуаров о мастерах культуры второй волны эмиграции, преимущественно поколении ди-пи. В поле внимания рассматриваемых мемуаров – мир Русского Зарубежья послевоенного Нью-Йорка и его ярких представителей: Михаила Вербова, Ивана Елагина, Владимира Одинокова, Леонида Ржевского и других известных литераторов и художников. Мемуары Голлербаха приоткрывают тайну его становления как художника, знакомят читателя с его пониманием основных принципов искусства. Painter, essayist and writer Serge Hollerbach is the author of unique memoir essays about artistic talent of his time, the Russian emigration’s «second wave», primarily DP generation. The monograph is focused on the Russian diaspora of post-WW2 New York and its bright representatives: Mikhail Verbov, Ivan Elagin, Vladimir Odinokov, Leonid Rzhevsky and other famous writers and artists. Hollerbach’s memoir essays also unveil the mystery of his development as an artist and introduces the reader to the author’s understanding of art’s general principles.

The article deals with graphic illustrations of M. Gorky’s works as well as problems of the writer’s creative communication with the illustrators. In the article the authors specify Gorky’s requirements to the illustrators and demonstrate a unique creative approach to the works illustration that was developed even during M. Gorky’s life due to his aspirations, which has been maintained by contemporary illustrators of his books. The article notes that the first illustrations of M. Gorky’s prose were created by emigrant artists, namely by Jean Lébédeff who illustrated four stories by M. Gorky published in 1000 copies in Paris (1921). The authors single out B.A. Dekhteryov, D.A. Shmarinov, N.N. Kupriyanov, A.A. Brei, V.M. Konashevich, the Kukryniksy, U.A. Molokanov, N.M. Kochergin and A.Z. Itkin as the most significant illustrators of Gorky’s prose. The authors have proved that the present-day publications of M. Gorky’s works lack illustrations and no artists are engaged in the illustration process. Sometimes Russian publishers use successful unique illustrations created by the illustrators of the 1960s. They have performed original graphic cycles that even today remain modern. On the contrary, illustrated children books are published with artwork of the artists worked in the 1970s during the golden age of children literature illustration. Nowadays these illustrations are sometimes selected without any sense. At the same time, the last years many illustrators of M. Gorky’s children prose follow B. Dekhteryov’s experience offering their readers detailed, realistic and psychologically adjusted portraits of the main characters depicted at the culmination points of the plot.

Статья посвящена анализу творчества и уникальности пути художественных исканий в начале ХХ века талантливого русского живописца А.О. Никулина (1878-1945), внесшего значительный вклад в развитие русской изобразительной культуры, но в силу сложившихся исторических условий и жизненных обстоятельств, разрозненности собрания, выпавшего из поля зрения ведущих отечественных искусствоведов. Яркая и самобытная личность, художник с европейским образованием, всю свою жизнь отстаивавший право на индивидуальность, искавший свой путь и свои темы в искусстве, он формировался как творческая личность не в столичной среде, а в российской провинции. В творчестве мастера, как в зеркале, нашли отражение искания художников эпохи модерна. Так сложилось, что имя А.О. Никулина не стало хрестоматийным в истории русского искусства, более того, на долгие годы было забыто. Коллекция работ А.О. Никулина, собранная стараниями нескольких поколений музейных сотрудников Алтайского государственного художественного музея, не только является гордостью собрания, но и создает сегодня все предпосылки для полного и масштабного представления деятельности художника. Пейзаж, портрет, театральная декорация, журнальная и оригинальная графика, литературное творчество полно представляют наследие живописца. Настало время вернуть в художественное историческое пространство имя А.О. Никулина, расширив и обогатив наши представления о многообразии и специфике художественного процесса в России рубежа ХIХ – ХХ веков. The article is devoted to the analysis of the creative work and to the unique way of artistic searches of the talented Russian painter Andrei Nikulin (1878-1945) in the early 20th century who made a significant contribution to the development of Russian visual culture, but due to the prevailing historical conditions and life circumstances, and fragmentation of the collection he was neglected by leading national art historians. Being a bright and original personality, a European educated artist who was asserting his right for individuality, all his life looking for his way and his own themes in art, Nikulin was formed as an artist not in the environment of the capital, but in provincial Russia. Searches of Art Nouveau style artists are reflected in the creative work of the artist. It happened so that the name of Andrei Nikulin didn’t become a textbook one, furthermore it was neglected for many years. The collection of Nikulin’s works, assembled by the efforts of several generations of museum’s employees of the Altay State Art Museum, is not only a pride of the museum but also creates the prerequisites for a full and large-scale presentation of the artist’s activities. The heritage of the painter comprises landscape, portrait, theatrical decoration, journal and original graphic art, and literary work. It is time to return the name of Andrei Nikulin into the art and historical environment having enlarged and enriched our concept about the variety and specific features of art process in Russia at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Tatyana Alekseyevna Mavrina (1900-1996) was by nature generously endowed not only with the ability to fine art, but, above all, with love and interest in life, understood as a great good and great happiness. This feeling colored the artist's work in such unique colors, determined her Hobbies and allowed her to find her own, always recognizable painting "Mavrin" style. Among the easel works of the master's extensive creative heritage, one can distinguish still-lifes and landscapes, images of ancient Russian cities and portraits. The book graphics include numerous illustrations to Russian folk tales and the highly successful design of Pushkin's fairy tales. Like many other major masters of the XX century, T.A. Mavrina early felt the need for a deep study of Russian folk art. Children's impressions, seemingly forgotten, came to life after many years and, supported by an active collection of folk art, helped T.A. Mavrina to preserve her identity and originality in her art. The originality of the artist's creative handwriting was formed gradually, and it was not immediately found their own pictorial and plastic language, based on a deep knowledge of the laws of decorative folk art, understanding, national identity and beauty, enclosed in large and small forms, from the old monastery walls to a painted spoon or button. T.A. Mavrina perfectly mastered the techniques that distinguish the folk primitive – expressive decorativeness, flatness, brightness and juiciness of local color. Such were her splints, spinning wheels, and trays. A professional artist has mastered the secrets of artisanal craftsmen not for imitation, not for rough and vulgar forgery, but for creating his own colorful and joyful world. The tradition of her works is organic and natural and can be considered as an example of an extremely subtle and deep understanding of the peculiarities of national visual culture. In the early 1940-ies, T.A. Mavrina turned to a new motif – a complex architectural landscape, which was followed by a change in the method of work – not from nature, but from memory. The first were images of ancient monuments of Zagorsk (Sergiev Posad) and Moscow. After Sergiev Posad (Zagorsk), the first of the old Russian towns that T.A. Mavrina loved, many others followed. In the post-war decades, a series of drawings, watercolors and gouaches appeared dedicated to Suzdal and Zvenigorod, Rostov the Great and Vologda, Dmitrov and Kasimov, Uglich and Borisoglebsk. T.A. Mavrina was in a hurry to stop the beauty of the moment, sought, in her words, to portray "life itself", as it flows and will flow without a trace if it is not drawn".

The curtain rose. The howling of desert wind filled the performance hall in the Shanghai Grand Theatre. Into the center stage, where a scenic construction of a mountain cliff and a desert landscape was dimly lit, entered the character of the Daoist priest Wang Yuanlu (1849–1931), performed by Chen Yizong. Dressed in a worn and dusty outfit of dark blue cotton, characteristic of Daoist priests, Wang began to sweep the floor. After a few moments, he discovered a hidden chambre sealed inside one of the rock sanctuaries carved into the cliff.Signaled by the quick, crystalline, stirring wave of sound from the chimes, a melodious Chinese ocarina solo joined in slowly from the background. Astonished by thousands of Buddhist sūtra scrolls, wall paintings, and sculptures he had just accidentally discovered in the caves, Priest Wang set his broom aside and began to examine these treasures. Dawn had not yet arrived, and the desert sky was pitch-black. Priest Wang held his oil lamp high, strode rhythmically in excitement, sat crossed-legged in a meditative pose, and unfolded a scroll. The sound of the ocarina became fuller and richer and the texture of the music more complex, as several other instruments joined in.Below is the opening scene of the award-winning, theatrical dance-drama Dunhuang, My Dreamland, created by China’s state-sponsored Lanzhou Song and Dance Theatre in 2000. Figure 1a: Poster Side A of Dunhuang, My Dreamland Figure 1b: Poster Side B of Dunhuang, My DreamlandThe scene locates the dance-drama in the rock sanctuaries that today are known as the Dunhuang Mogao Caves, housing Buddhist art accumulated over a period of a thousand years, one of the best well-known UNESCO heritages on the Silk Road. Historically a frontier metropolis, Dunhuang was a strategic site along the Silk Road in northwestern China, a crossroads of trade, and a locus for religious, cultural, and intellectual influences since the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.). Travellers, especially Buddhist monks from India and central Asia, passing through Dunhuang on their way to Chang’an (present day Xi’an), China’s ancient capital, would stop to meditate in the Mogao Caves and consult manuscripts in the monastery's library. At the same time, Chinese pilgrims would travel by foot from China through central Asia to Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, playing a key role in the exchanges between ancient China and the outside world. Travellers from China would stop to acquire provisions at Dunhuang before crossing the Gobi Desert to continue on their long journey abroad. Figure 2: Dunhuang Mogao CavesThis article approaches the idea of “abroad” by examining the present-day imagination of journeys along the Silk Road—specifically, staged performances of the various Silk Road journey-themed dance-dramas sponsored by the Chinese state for enhancing its cultural and foreign policies since the 1970s (Kuang).As ethnomusicologists have demonstrated, musicians, choreographers, and playwrights often utilise historical materials in their performances to construct connections between the past and the present (Bohlman; Herzfeld; Lam; Rees; Shelemay; Tuohy; Wade; Yung: Rawski; Watson). The ancient Silk Road, which linked the Mediterranean coast with central China and beyond, via oasis towns such as Samarkand, has long been associated with the concept of “journeying abroad.” Journeys to distant, foreign lands and encounters of unknown, mysterious cultures along the Silk Road have been documented in historical records, such as A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (Faxian) and The Great Tang Records on the Western Regions (Xuanzang), and illustrated in classical literature, such as The Travels of Marco Polo (Polo) and the 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West (Wu). These journeys—coming and going from multiple directions and to different destinations—have inspired contemporary staged performance for audiences around the globe.Home and Abroad: Dunhuang and the Silk RoadDunhuang, My Dreamland (2000), the contemporary dance-drama, staged the journey of a young pilgrim painter travelling from Chang’an to a land of the unfamiliar and beyond borders, in search for the arts that have inspired him. Figure 3: A scene from Dunhuang, My Dreamland showing the young pilgrim painter in the Gobi Desert on the ancient Silk RoadFar from his home, he ended his journey in Dunhuang, historically considered the northwestern periphery of China, well beyond Yangguan and Yumenguan, the bordering passes that separate China and foreign lands. Later scenes in Dunhuang, My Dreamland, portrayed through multiethnic music and dances, the dynamic interactions among merchants, cultural and religious envoys, warriors, and politicians that were making their own journey from abroad to China. The theatrical dance-drama presents a historically inspired, re-imagined vision of both “home” and “abroad” to its audiences as they watch the young painter travel along the Silk Road, across the Gobi Desert, arriving at his own ideal, artistic “homeland”, the Dunhuang Mogao Caves. Since his journey is ultimately a spiritual one, the conceptualisation of travelling “abroad” could also be perceived as “a journey home.”Staged more than four hundred times since it premiered in Beijing in April 2000, Dunhuang, My Dreamland is one of the top ten titles in China’s National Stage Project and one of the most successful theatrical dance-dramas ever produced in China. With revenue of more than thirty million renminbi (RMB), it ranks as the most profitable theatrical dance-drama ever produced in China, with a preproduction cost of six million RMB. The production team receives financial support from China’s Ministry of Culture for its “distinctive ethnic features,” and its “aim to promote traditional Chinese culture,” according to Xu Rong, an official in the Cultural Industry Department of the Ministry. Labeled an outstanding dance-drama of the Chinese nation, it aims to present domestic and international audiences with a vision of China as a historically multifaceted and cosmopolitan nation that has been in close contact with the outside world through the ancient Silk Road. Its production company has been on tour in selected cities throughout China and in countries abroad, including Austria, Spain, and France, literarily making the young pilgrim painter’s “journey along the Silk Road” a new journey abroad, off stage and in reality.Dunhuang, My Dreamland was not the first, nor is it the last, staged performances that portrays the Chinese re-imagination of “journeying abroad” along the ancient Silk Road. It was created as one of many versions of Dunhuang bihua yuewu, a genre of music, dance, and dramatic performances created in the early twentieth century and based primarily on artifacts excavated from the Mogao Caves (Kuang). “The Mogao Caves are the greatest repository of early Chinese art,” states Mimi Gates, who works to increase public awareness of the UNESCO site and raise funds toward its conservation. “Located on the Chinese end of the Silk Road, it also is the place where many cultures of the world intersected with one another, so you have Greek and Roman, Persian and Middle Eastern, Indian and Chinese cultures, all interacting. Given the nature of our world today, it is all very relevant” (Pollack). As an expressive art form, this genre has been thriving since the late 1970s contributing to the global imagination of China’s “Silk Road journeys abroad” long before Dunhuang, My Dreamland achieved its domestic and international fame. For instance, in 2004, The Thousand-Handed and Thousand-Eyed Avalokiteśvara—one of the most representative (and well-known) Dunhuang bihua yuewu programs—was staged as a part of the cultural program during the Paralympic Games in Athens, Greece. This performance, as well as other Dunhuang bihua yuewu dance programs was the perfect embodiment of a foreign religion that arrived in China from abroad and became Sinicized (Kuang). Figure 4: Mural from Dunhuang Mogao Cave No. 45A Brief History of Staging the Silk Road JourneysThe staging of the Silk Road journeys abroad began in the late 1970s. Historically, the Silk Road signifies a multiethnic, cosmopolitan frontier, which underwent incessant conflicts between Chinese sovereigns and nomadic peoples (as well as between other groups), but was strongly imbued with the customs and institutions of central China (Duan, Mair, Shi, Sima). In the twentieth century, when China was no longer an empire, but had become what the early 20th-century reformer Liang Qichao (1873–1929) called “a nation among nations,” the long history of the Silk Road and the colourful, legendary journeys abroad became instrumental in the formation of a modern Chinese nation of unified diversity rooted in an ancient cosmopolitan past. The staged Silk Road theme dance-dramas thus participate in this formation of the Chinese imagination of “nation” and “abroad,” as they aestheticise Chinese history and geography. History and geography—aspects commonly considered constituents of a nation as well as our conceptualisations of “abroad”—are “invariably aestheticized to a certain degree” (Bakhtin 208). Diverse historical and cultural elements from along the Silk Road come together in this performance genre, which can be considered the most representative of various possible stagings of the history and culture of the Silk Road journeys.In 1979, the Chinese state officials in Gansu Province commissioned the benchmark dance-drama Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road, a spectacular theatrical dance-drama praising the pure and noble friendship which existed between the peoples of China and other countries in the Tang dynasty (618-907 C.E.). While its plot also revolves around the Dunhuang Caves and the life of a painter, staged at one of the most critical turning points in modern Chinese history, the work as a whole aims to present the state’s intention of re-establishing diplomatic ties with the outside world after the Cultural Revolution. Unlike Dunhuang, My Dreamland, it presents a nation’s journey abroad and home. To accomplish this goal, Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road introduces the fictional character Yunus, a wealthy Persian merchant who provides the audiences a vision of the historical figure of Peroz III, the last Sassanian prince, who after the Arab conquest of Iran in 651 C.E., found refuge in China. By incorporating scenes of ethnic and folk dances, the drama then stages the journey of painter Zhang’s daughter Yingniang to Persia (present-day Iran) and later, Yunus’s journey abroad to the Tang dynasty imperial court as the Persian Empire’s envoy.Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road, since its debut at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on the first of October 1979 and shortly after at the Theatre La Scala in Milan, has been staged in more than twenty countries and districts, including France, Italy, Japan, Thailand, Russia, Latvia, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and recently, in 2013, at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York.“The Road”: Staging the Journey TodayWithin the contemporary context of global interdependencies, performing arts have been used as strategic devices for social mobilisation and as a means to represent and perform modern national histories and foreign policies (Davis, Rees, Tian, Tuohy, Wong, David Y. H. Wu). The Silk Road has been chosen as the basis for these state-sponsored, extravagantly produced, and internationally staged contemporary dance programs. In 2008, the welcoming ceremony and artistic presentation at the Olympic Games in Beijing featured twenty apsara dancers and a Dunhuang bihua yuewu dancer with long ribbons, whose body was suspended in mid-air on a rectangular LED extension held by hundreds of performers; on the giant LED screen was a depiction of the ancient Silk Road.In March 2013, Chinese president Xi Jinping introduced the initiatives “Silk Road Economic Belt” and “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” during his journeys abroad in Kazakhstan and Indonesia. These initiatives are now referred to as “One Belt, One Road.” The State Council lists in details the policies and implementation plans for this initiative on its official web page, www.gov.cn. In April 2013, the China Institute in New York launched a yearlong celebration, starting with "Dunhuang: Buddhist Art and the Gateway of the Silk Road" with a re-creation of one of the caves and a selection of artifacts from the site. In March 2015, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top economic planning agency, released a new action plan outlining key details of the “One Belt, One Road” initiative. Xi Jinping has made the program a centrepiece of both his foreign and domestic economic policies. One of the central economic strategies is to promote cultural industry that could enhance trades along the Silk Road.Encouraged by the “One Belt, One Road” policies, in March 2016, The Silk Princess premiered in Xi’an and was staged at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing the following July. While Dunhuang, My Dreamland and Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road were inspired by the Buddhist art found in Dunhuang, The Silk Princess, based on a story about a princess bringing silk and silkworm-breeding skills to the western regions of China in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) has a different historical origin. The princess's story was portrayed in a woodblock from the Tang Dynasty discovered by Sir Marc Aurel Stein, a British archaeologist during his expedition to Xinjiang (now Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region) in the early 19th century, and in a temple mural discovered during a 2002 Chinese-Japanese expedition in the Dandanwulike region. Figure 5: Poster of The Silk PrincessIn January 2016, the Shannxi Provincial Song and Dance Troupe staged The Silk Road, a new theatrical dance-drama. Unlike Dunhuang, My Dreamland, the newly staged dance-drama “centers around the ‘road’ and the deepening relationship merchants and travellers developed with it as they traveled along its course,” said Director Yang Wei during an interview with the author. According to her, the show uses seven archetypes—a traveler, a guard, a messenger, and so on—to present the stories that took place along this historic route. Unbounded by specific space or time, each of these archetypes embodies the foreign-travel experience of a different group of individuals, in a manner that may well be related to the social actors of globalised culture and of transnationalism today. Figure 6: Poster of The Silk RoadConclusionAs seen in Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road and Dunhuang, My Dreamland, staging the processes of Silk Road journeys has become a way of connecting the Chinese imagination of “home” with the Chinese imagination of “abroad.” Staging a nation’s heritage abroad on contemporary stages invites a new imagination of homeland, borders, and transnationalism. Once aestheticised through staged performances, such as that of the Dunhuang bihua yuewu, the historical and topological landscape of Dunhuang becomes a performed narrative, embodying the national heritage.The staging of Silk Road journeys continues, and is being developed into various forms, from theatrical dance-drama to digital exhibitions such as the Smithsonian’s Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottes at Dunhuang (Stromberg) and the Getty’s Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China's Silk Road (Sivak and Hood). They are sociocultural phenomena that emerge through interactions and negotiations among multiple actors and institutions to envision and enact a Chinese imagination of “journeying abroad” from and to the country.ReferencesBakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1982.Bohlman, Philip V. “World Music at the ‘End of History’.” Ethnomusicology 46 (2002): 1–32.Davis, Sara L.M. Song and Silence: Ethnic Revival on China’s Southwest Borders. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.Duan, Wenjie. “The History of Conservation of Mogao Grottoes.” International Symposium on the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Property: The Conservation of Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes and the Related Studies. Eds. Kuchitsu and Nobuaki. Tokyo: Tokyo National Research Institute of Cultural Properties, 1997. 1–8.Faxian. A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms. Translated by James Legge. New York: Dover Publications, 1991.Herzfeld, Michael. Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.Kuang, Lanlan. Dunhuang bi hua yue wu: "Zhongguo jing guan" zai guo ji yu jing zhong de jian gou, chuan bo yu yi yi (Dunhuang Performing Arts: The Construction and Transmission of “China-scape” in the Global Context). Beijing: She hui ke xue wen xian chu ban she, 2016.Lam, Joseph S.C. State Sacrifice and Music in Ming China: Orthodoxy, Creativity and Expressiveness. New York: State University of New York Press, 1998.Mair, Victor. T’ang Transformation Texts: A Study of the Buddhist Contribution to the Rise of Vernacular Fiction and Drama in China. Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, 1989.Pollack, Barbara. “China’s Desert Treasure.” ARTnews, December 2013. Sep. 2016 <http://www.artnews.com/2013/12/24/chinas-desert-treasure/>.Polo, Marco. The Travels of Marco Polo. Translated by Ronald Latham. Penguin Classics, 1958.Rees, Helen. Echoes of History: Naxi Music in Modern China. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.Shelemay, Kay Kaufman. “‘Historical Ethnomusicology’: Reconstructing Falasha Liturgical History.” Ethnomusicology 24 (1980): 233–258.Shi, Weixiang. Dunhuang lishi yu mogaoku yishu yanjiu (Dunhuang History and Research on Mogao Grotto Art). Lanzhou: Gansu jiaoyu chubanshe, 2002.Sima, Guang 司马光 (1019–1086) et al., comps. Zizhi tongjian 资治通鉴 (Comprehensive Mirror for the Aid of Government). Beijing: Guji chubanshe, 1957.Sima, Qian 司马迁 (145-86? B.C.E.) et al., comps. Shiji: Dayuan liezhuan 史记: 大宛列传 (Record of the Grand Historian: The Collective Biographies of Dayuan). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959.Sivak, Alexandria and Amy Hood. “The Getty to Present: Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China’s Silk Road Organised in Collaboration with the Dunhuang Academy and the Dunhuang Foundation.” Getty Press Release. Sep. 2016 <http://news.getty.edu/press-materials/press-releases/cave-temples-dunhuang-buddhist-art-chinas-silk-road>.Stromberg, Joseph. “Video: Take a Virtual 3D Journey to Visit China's Caves of the Thousand Buddhas.” Smithsonian, December 2012. Sep. 2016 <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/video-take-a-virtual-3d-journey-to-visit-chinas-caves-of-the-thousand-buddhas-150897910/?no-ist>.Tian, Qing. “Recent Trends in Buddhist Music Research in China.” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 3 (1994): 63–72.Tuohy, Sue M.C. “Imagining the Chinese Tradition: The Case of Hua’er Songs, Festivals, and Scholarship.” Ph.D. Dissertation. Indiana University, Bloomington, 1988.Wade, Bonnie C. Imaging Sound: An Ethnomusicological Study of Music, Art, and Culture in Mughal India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.Wong, Isabel K.F. “From Reaction to Synthesis: Chinese Musicology in the Twentieth Century.” Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology. Eds. Bruno Nettl and Philip V. Bohlman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. 37–55.Wu, Chengen. Journey to the West. Tranlsated by W.J.F. Jenner. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2003.Wu, David Y.H. “Chinese National Dance and the Discourse of Nationalization in Chinese Anthropology.” The Making of Anthropology in East and Southeast Asia. Eds. Shinji Yamashita, Joseph Bosco, and J.S. Eades. New York: Berghahn, 2004. 198–207.Xuanzang. The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions. Hamburg: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation & Research, 1997.Yung, Bell, Evelyn S. Rawski, and Rubie S. Watson, eds. Harmony and Counterpoint: Ritual Music in Chinese Context. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Bracketed by a quotation from famed 1950s West German soccer coach S. Herberger and the word "Ende", the running length of the 1998 film Run Lola Run, directed by Tom Tykwer, is 9 minutes short of the official duration of a soccer match. Berlin has often been represented, in visual art and in cinematic imagery, as the modern metropolis: the Expressionist and Dadaist painters, Walter Ruttmann, Fritz Lang and Rainer Werner Fassbinder all depicted it as the modernising city. Since the '60s artists have staged artworks and performances in the public space of the city which critiqued the cold war order of that space, its institutions, and the hysterical attempt by the German government to erase a divided past after 1990. Run Lola Run depicts its setting, Berlin, as a cyberspace obstacle course or environment usually associated with interactive video and computer games. The eerie emptiness of the Berlin of Run Lola Run -- a fantasy projected onto a city which has been called the single biggest construction site in Europe -- is necessary to keep the protagonist Lola moving at high speed from the West to the East part of town and back again -- another fantasy which is only possible when the city is recast as a virtual environment. In Run Lola Run Berlin is represented as an idealised space of bodily and psychic mobility where the instantaneous technology of cyberspace is physically realised as a utopia of speed. The setting of Run Lola Run is not a playing field but a playing level, to use the parlance of video game technology. Underscored by other filmic devices and technologies, Run Lola Run emulates the kinetics and structures of a virtual, quasi-interactive environment: the Berlin setting of the film is paradoxically rendered as an indeterminate, but also site specific, entertainment complex which hinges upon the high-speed functioning of multiple networks of auto-mobility. Urban mobility as circuitry is performed by the film's super-athletic Lola. Lola is a cyber character; she recalls the 'cyberbabe' Lara Croft, heroine of the Sega Tomb Raider video game series. In Tomb Raider the Croft figure is controlled and manipulated by the interactive player to go through as many levels of play, or virtual environments, as possible. In order for the cyber figure to get to the next level of play she must successfully negotiate as many trap and puzzle mechanisms as possible. Speed in this interactive virtual game results from the skill of an experienced player who has practiced coordinating keyboard commands with figure movements and who is familiar with the obstacles the various environments can present. As is the case with Lara Croft, the figure of Lola in Run Lola Run reverses the traditional gender relations of the action/adventure game and of 'damsel in distress' narratives. Run Lola Run focusses on Lola's race to save her boyfriend from a certain death by obtaining DM 100,000 and delivering it across town in twenty minutes. The film adds the element of the race to the game, a variable not included in Tomb Raider. Tykwer repeats Lola's trajectory from home to the location of her boyfriend Manni thrice in the film, each time ending her quest with a different outcome. As in a video game, Lola can therefore be killed as the game unwinds during one turn of play, and on the next attempt she, and also we as viewers or would-be interactive players, would have learned from her previous 'mistakes' and adjust her actions accordingly. The soundtrack of Run Lola Run underscores the speed and mobility of Berlin by means of the fast/slow/fast rhythm of the film, which proceeds primarily at the pace of techno music. This quick rhythm is syncopated with pauses in the forward-moving action brought on by Lola's superhuman screams or by the death of a protagonist. These events mark the end of one turn of 'play' and the restart of Lola's route. Tykwer visually contrasts Lola's linear mobility and her physical and mental capacity for speed with her boyfriend Manni's centripetal fixity, a marker of his helplessness, throughout the film. Manni, a bagman-in-training for a local mafioso, has to make his desperate phone calls from a single phone booth in the borough of Charlottenburg after he bungles a hand-off of payment money by forgetting it on the U-Bahn (the subway). In a black and white flashback sequence, viewers learn about Manni's ill-fated trip to the Polish border with a shipment of stolen cars. In contrast to his earlier mobility, Manni becomes entrapped in the phone booth as a result of his ineptitude. A spiral store sign close to the phone booth symbolizes Manni's entrapment. Tykwer contrasts this circular form with the lines and grids Lola transverses throughout the film. Where at first Lola is also immobilised after her moped is stolen by an 'unbelieveably fast' thief, her quasi-cybernetic thought process soon restores her movement. Tykwer visualizes Lola's frantic thinking in a series of photographic portraits which indicates her consideration of who she can contact to supply a large sum of money. Lola not only moves but thinks with the fast, even pace of a computer working through a database. Tykwer then repeats overhead shots of gridded pavement which Lola follows as she runs through the filmic frame. The grid, emblem of modernity and structure of the metropolis, the semiconductor, and the puzzles of a virtual environment, is necessary for mobility and speed, and is performed by the figure of Lola. The grid is also apparent in the trajectories of traffic of speeding bikes, subway trains,and airplanes passing overhead, which all parallel Lola's movements in the film. The city/virtual environment is thus an idealised nexus of local, national and global lines of mobility and communication.: -- OR -- Tykwer emphasised the arbitrariness of the setting of Run Lola Run, insisting it could easily have been set in any other urban centre such as New York City or Beijing. At no point does the film make explicit that the space of action is Berlin; in fact the setting of the film is far less significant than the filmic self-reflexivity Tykwer explores in Run Lola Run. Berlin becomes a postmodernist filmic text in which earlier films by Lang, Schlöndorff, von Sternberg and Wenders are cited in intertextual fashion. It is not by chance that the protagonist of Run Lola Run shares the name of Marlene Dietrich's legendary character in von Sternberg's The Blue Angel. The running, late-20th-century Lola reconnects with and gains power from the originary Lola Lola as ur-Star of German cinema. The high overhead shots of Run Lola Run technologically exceed those used by Lang in M in 1931 but still quote his filmic text; the spiral form, placed in a shop window in M, becomes a central image of Run Lola Run in marking the immobile spot that Manni occupies. Repeated several times in the film, Lola's scream bends events, characters and chance to her will and slows the relentless pace of the narrative. This vocal punctuation recalls the equally willful vocalisations of Oskar Matzerath in Schlöndorff's Tin Drum (1979). Tykwer's radical expansions and compressions of time in Run Lola Run rely on the temporal exploitation of the filmic medium. The film stretches 20 minutes of 'real time' in the lives of its two protagonists into the 84 minutes of the film. Tykwer also distills the lives of the film's incidental or secondary characters into a few still images and a few seconds of filmic time in the 'und dann...' [and then...] sequences of all three episodes. For example, Lola's momentary encounter with an employee of her father's bank spins off into two completely different life stories for this woman, both of which are told through four or five staged 'snapshots' which are edited together into a rapid sequence. The higher-speed photography of the snapshot keeps up the frenetic pace of Run Lola Run and causes the narrative to move forward even faster, if only for a few seconds. Tykwer also celebrates the technology of 35 mm film in juxtaposing it to the fuzzy imprecision of video in Run Lola Run. The viewer not only notes how scenes shot on video are less visually beautiful than the 35 mm scenes which feature Lola or Manni, but also that they seem to move at a snail's pace. For example, the video-shot scene in Lola's banker-father's office also represents the boredom of his well-paid but stagnant life; another video sequence visually parallels the slow, shuffling movement of the homeless man Norbert as he discovers Manni's forgotten moneybag on the U-Bahn. Comically, he breaks into a run when he realises what he's found. Where Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire made beautiful cinematographic use of Berlin landmarks like the Siegessäule in black and white 35 mm, Tykwer relegates black and white to flashback sequences within the narrative and rejects the relatively meandering contemplation of Wenders's film in favour of the linear dynamism of urban space in Run Lola Run. -- OR -- Tykwer emphasised the arbitrariness of the setting of Run Lola Run, insisting it could easily have been set in any other urban centre such as New York City or Beijing. Nevertheless he establishes the united Berlin as the specific setting of the film. While Run Lola Run does not explicitly indicate that the space of action is Berlin, viewers are clear of the setting: a repeated establishing shot of the Friedrichstrasse U-Bahn stop, a central commuting street near the Brandenburg Gate in the former East Berlin which has undergone extensive reconstruction since 1990, begins each episode of the film. The play between the locality of Berlin and its role as the universal modernist metropolis is a trope of German cinema famously deployed by Fritz Lang in M, where the setting is also never explicitly revealed but implied by means of the use of the Berlin dialect in the dialogue of the film1. The soundtrack of Run Lola Run underscores the speed and mobility of Berlin by means of the fast/slow/fast rhythm of the film which proceeds primarily at the pace of techno music. Techno is also closely identified with the city of Berlin through its annual Techno Festival, which seems to grow larger with each passing year. Quick techno rhythm is syncopated with pauses in the forward-moving action brought on by Lola's superhuman screams or by the death of a protagonist. Berlin is also made explicit as Tykwer often stages scenes at clearly-marked street intersections which identify particular locations or boroughs thoughout east and west Berlin. The viewer notes that Lola escapes her father's bank during one episode and faces Unter den Linden; several scenes unfold on the banks of the river Spree; Lola sprints between the Altes Museum and the Berlin Cathedral. Manni's participation in a car-theft ring points to the Berlin-focussed activity of actual Eastern European and Russian crime syndicates; the film features an interlude at the Polish border where Manni delivers a shipment of stolen Mercedes to underworld buyers, which has to do with the actual geographic proximity of Berlin to Eastern European countries. Tykwer emphasised the arbitrariness of the setting of Run Lola Run, insisting it could easily have been set in any other urban centre such as New York City or Beijing. Nevertheless he establishes the united Berlin as the specific setting of the film. While Run Lola Run does not explicitly indicate that the space of action is Berlin, viewers are clear of the setting: a repeated establishing shot of the Friedrichstrasse U-Bahn stop, a central commuting street near the Brandenburg Gate in the former East Berlin which has undergone extensive reconstruction since 1990, begins each episode of the film. The play between the locality of Berlin and its role as the universal modernist metropolis is a trope of German cinema famously deployed by Fritz Lang in M, where the setting is also never explicitly revealed but implied by means of the use of the Berlin dialect in the dialogue of the film1. The soundtrack of Run Lola Run underscores the speed and mobility of Berlin by means of the fast/slow/fast rhythm of the film which proceeds primarily at the pace of techno music. Techno is also closely identified with the city of Berlin through its annual Techno Festival, which seems to grow larger with each passing year. Quick techno rhythm is syncopated with pauses in the forward-moving action brought on by Lola's superhuman screams or by the death of a protagonist. Berlin is also made explicit as Tykwer often stages scenes at clearly-marked street intersections which identify particular locations or boroughs thoughout east and west Berlin. The viewer notes that Lola escapes her father's bank during one episode and faces Unter den Linden; several scenes unfold on the banks of the river Spree; Lola sprints between the Altes Museum and the Berlin Cathedral. Manni's participation in a car-theft ring points to the Berlin-focussed activity of actual Eastern European and Russian crime syndicates; the film features an interlude at the Polish border where Manni delivers a shipment of stolen Mercedes to underworld buyers, which has to do with the actual geographic proximity of Berlin to Eastern European countries. Yet the speed of purposeful mobility is demanded in the contemporary united and globalised Berlin; lines of action or direction must be chosen and followed and chance encounters become traps or interruptions. Chance must therefore be minimised in the pursuit of urban speed, mobility, and commications access. In the globalised Berlin, Tykwer compresses chance encounters into individual snapshots of visual data which are viewed in quick succession by the viewer. Where artists such Christo and Sophie Calle had investigated the initial chaos of German reunification in Berlin, Run Lola Run rejects the hyper-contemplative and past-obsessed mood demanded by Christo's wrapping of the Reichstag, or Calle's documentation of the artistic destructions of unification3. Run Lola Run recasts Berlin as a network of fast connections, lines of uninterrupted movement, and productive output. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that Tykwer's idealised and embodied representation of Berlin as Lola has been politically appropriated as a convenient icon by the city's status quo: an icon of the successful reconstruction and rewiring of a united Berlin into a fast global broadband digital telecommunications network4. Footnotes See Edward Dimendberg's excellent discussion of filmic representations of the metropolis in "From Berlin to Bunker Hill: Urban Space, Late Modernity, and Film Noir in Fritz Lang's and Joseph Losey's M." Wide Angle 19.4 (1997): 62-93. This is despite the fact that the temporal parameters of the plot of Run Lola Run forbid the aimlessness central to spazieren (strolling). See Walter Benjamin, "A Berlin Chronicle", in Reflections. Ed. Peter Demetz. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken, 1986. 3-60. See Sophie Calle, The Detachment. London: G+B Arts International and Arndt & Partner Gallery, n.d. The huge success of Tykwer's film in Germany spawned many red-hair-coiffed Lola imitators in the Berlin populace. The mayor of Berlin sported Lola-esque red hair in a poster which imitated the one for the film, but legal intercession put an end to this trendy political statement. Brian Pendreigh. "The Lolaness of the Long-Distance Runner." The Guardian 15 Oct. 1999. I've relied on William J. Mitchell's cultural history of the late 20th century 'rebuilding' of major cities into connection points in the global telecommunications network, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. Cambridge: MIT P, 1995. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Claudia Mesch. "Racing Berlin: The Games of Run Lola Run." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.3 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php>. Chicago style: Claudia Mesch, "Racing Berlin: The Games of Run Lola Run," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 3 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Claudia Mesch. (2000) Racing Berlin: the games of Run Lola run. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(3). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php> ([your date of access]).

As I round the corner from Church Street onto Vesey, I am abruptly met with the façade of St. Paul’s Chapel and by the sudden memory of two things, both of which have not yet happened. I think about how, in a couple of decades, the area surrounding me will be burnt to the ground. I also recall how, just after the turn of the twenty-first century, the area will again crumble onto itself. It is 1759, and I—via my avatar—am wandering through downtown New York City in the videogame space of Assassin’s Creed: Rogue (AC:R). These spatial and temporal memories stem from the fact that I have previously (that is, earlier in my life) played an AC game set in New York City during the War for Independence (later in history), wherein the city’s lower west side burns at the hands of the British. Years before that (in my biographical timeline, though much later in history) I watched from twenty-something blocks north of here as flames erupted from the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Complicating the situation further, Michel de Certeau strolls with me in spirit, pondering observations he will make from almost this exact location (though roughly 1,100 feet higher up) 220 years from now, around the time I am being born. Perhaps the oddest aspect of this convoluted and temporally layered experience is the fact that I am not actually at the corner of Church and Vesey in 1759 at all, but rather on a couch, in Virginia, now. This particular type of sudden arrival at a space is only possible when it is not planned. Prior to the moment described above, I had finished a “mission” in the game that involved my coming to the city, so I decided I would just walk around a bit in the newly discovered digital New York of 1759. I wanted to take it in. I wanted to wander. Truly Being-in-a-place means attending to the interconnected Being-ness and Being-with-ness of all of the things that make up that place (Heidegger; Haraway). Conversely, to travel to or through a place entails a type of focused directionality toward a place that you are not currently Being in. Wandering, however, demands eschewing both, neither driven by an incessant goal, nor stuck in place by introspective ruminations. Instead, wandering is perhaps best described as a sort of mobile openness. A wanderer is not quite Benjamin’s flâneur, characterised by an “idle yet assertive negotiation of the street” (Coates 28), but also, I would argue, not quite de Certeau’s “Wandersmünner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it” (de Certeau 93). Wandering requires a concerted effort at non-intentionality. That description may seem to fold in on itself, to be sure, but as the spaces around us are increasingly “canalized” (Rabinow and Foucault) and designed with specific trajectories and narratives in mind, inaction leads to the unconscious enacting of an externally derived intention; whereas any attempt to subvert that design is itself a wholly intentional act. This is why wandering is so difficult. It requires shedding layers. It takes practice, like meditation.In what follows, I will explore the possibility of revelatory moments enabled by the shedding of these layers of intention through my own experience in digital space (maybe the most designed and canalized spaces we inhabit). I come to recognise, as I disavow the designed narrative of game space, that it takes on other meanings, becomes another space. I find myself Being-there in a way that transcends the digital as we understand it, experiencing space that reaches into the past and future, into memory and fiction. Indeed, wandering is liminal, betwixt fixed points, spaces, and times, and the text you are reading will wander in this fashion—between the digital and the physical, between memory and experience, and among multiple pasts and the present—to arrive at a multilayered subjective sense of space, a palimpsest of placemaking.Before charging fully into digital time travel, however, we must attend to the business of context. In this case, this means addressing why I am talking about videogame space in Certaudian terms. Beginning as early as 1995, videogame theorists have employed de Certeau’s notion of “spatial stories” in their assertions that games allow players to construct the game’s narrative by travelling through and “colonizing” the space (Fuller and Jenkins). Most of the scholarship involving de Certeau and videogames, however, has been relegated to the concepts of “map/tour” in looking at digital embodiment within game space as experiential representatives of the place/space binary. Maps verbalise spatial experience in place terms, such as “it’s at the corner of this and that street”, whereas tours express the same in terms of movement through space, as in “turn right at the red house”. Videogames complicate this because “mapping is combined with touring when moving through the game-space” (Lammes).In Games as Inhabited Spaces, Bernadette Flynn moves beyond the map/tour dichotomy to argue that spatial theories can approach videogaming in a way no other viewpoint can, because neither narrative nor mechanics of play can speak to the “space” of a game. Thus, Flynn’s work is “focused on completely reconceiving gameplay as fundamentally configured with spatial practice” (59) through de Certeau’s concepts of “strategic” and “tactical” spatial use. Flynn explains:The ability to forge personal directions from a closed simulation links to de Certeau’s notion of tactics, where users can create their own trajectories from the formal organizations of space. For de Certeau, tactics are related to how people individualise trajectories of movement to create meaning and transformations of space. Strategies on the other hand, are more akin to the game designer’s particular matrix of formal structures, arrangements of time and space which operate to control and constrain gameplay. (59)Flynn takes much of her reading of de Certeau from Lev Manovich, who argues that a game designer “uses strategies to impose a particular matrix of space, time, experience, and meaning on his viewers; they, in turn, use ‘tactics’ to create their own trajectories […] within this matrix” (267). Manovich believes de Certeau’s theories offer a salient model for thinking about “the ways in which computer users navigate through computer spaces they did not design” (267). In Flynn’s and Manovich’s estimation, simply moving through digital space is a tactic, a subversion of its strategic and linear design.The views of game space as tactical have historically (and paradoxically) treated the subject of videogames from a strategic perspective, as a configurable space to be “navigated through”, as a way of attaining a certain goal. Dan Golding takes up this problem, distancing our engagement from the design and calling for a de Certeaudian treatment of videogame space “from below”, where “the spatial diegesis of the videogame is affordance based and constituted by the skills of the player”, including those accrued outside the game space (Golding 118). Similarly, Darshana Jayemanne adds a temporal element with the idea that these spatial constructions are happening alongside a “complexity” and “proliferation of temporal schemes” (Jayemanne 1, 4; see also Nikolchina). Building from Golding and Jayemanne, I illustrate here a space wherein the player, not the game, is at the fulcrum of both spatial and temporal complexity, by adding the notion that—along with skill and experience—players bring space and time with them into the game.Viewed with the above understanding of strategies, tactics, skill, and temporality, the act of wandering in a videogame seems inherently subversive: on one hand, by undergoing a destination-less exploration of game space, I am rejecting the game’s spatial narrative trajectory; on the other, I am eschewing both skill accrual and temporal insistence to attempt a sense of pure Being-in-the-game. Such rebellious freedom, however, is part of the design of this particular game space. AC:R is a “sand box” game, which means it involves a large environment that can be traversed in a non-linear fashion, allowing, supposedly, for more freedom and exploration. Indeed, much of the gameplay involves slowly making more space available for investigation in an outward—rather than unidirectional—course. A player opens up these new spaces by “synchronising a viewpoint”, which can only be done by climbing to the top of specific landmarks. One of the fundamental elements of the AC franchise is an acrobatic, free-running, parkour style of engagement with a player’s surroundings, “where practitioners weave through urban environments, hopping over barricades, debris, and other obstacles” (Laviolette 242), climbing walls and traversing rooftops in a way unthinkable (and probably illegal) in our everyday lives. People scaling buildings in major metropolitan areas outside of videogame space tend to get arrested, if they survive the climb. Possibly, these renegade climbers are seeking what de Certeau describes as the “voluptuous pleasure […] of ‘seeing the whole,’ of looking down on, totalizing the most immoderate of human texts” (92)—what he experienced, looking down from the top of the World Trade Center in the late 1970s.***On digital ground level, back in 1759, I look up to the top of St. Paul’s bell tower and crave that pleasure, so I climb. As I make my way up, Non-Player Characters (NPCs)—the townspeople and trader avatars who make up the interactive human scenery of the game—shout things such as “You’ll hurt yourself” and “I say! What on earth is he doing?” This is the game’s way of convincing me that I am enacting agency and writing my own spatial story. I seem to be deploying “tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised” (de Certeau 96), when I am actually following the program the way I am supposed to. If I were not meant to climb the tower, I simply would not be able to. The fact that game developers go to the extent of recording dialogue to shout at me when I do this proves that they expect my transgression. This is part of the game’s “semi-social system”: a collection of in-game social norms that—to an extent—reflect the cultural understandings of outside non-digital society (Atkinson and Willis). These norms are enforced through social pressures and expectations in the game such that “these relative imperatives and influences, appearing to present players with ‘unlimited’ choices, [frame] them within the parameters of synthetic worlds whose social structure and assumptions are distinctly skewed in particular ways” (408). By using these semi-social systems, games communicate to players that performing a particular act is seen as wrong or scandalous by the in-game society (and therefore subversive), even when the action is necessary for the continuation of the spatial story.When I reach the top of the bell tower, I am able to “synchronise the viewpoint”—that is, unlock the map of this area of the city. Previously, I did not have access to an overhead view of the area, but now that I have indulged in de Certeau’s pleasure of “seeing the whole”, I can see not only the tactical view from the street, but also the strategic bird’s-eye view from above. From the top, looking out over the city—now The City, a conceivable whole rather than a collection of streets—it is difficult to picture the neighbourhood engulfed in flames. The stair-step Dutch-inspired rooflines still recall the very recent change from New Amsterdam to New York, but in thirty years’ time, they will all be torched and rebuilt, replaced with colonial Tudor boxes. I imagine myself as an eighteenth-century de Certeau, surveying pre-ruination New York City. I wonder how his thoughts would have changed if his viewpoint were coloured with knowledge of the future. Standing atop the very symbol of global power and wealth—a duo-lith that would exist for less than three decades—would his pleasure have been less “voluptuous”? While de Certeau considers the viewer from above like Icarus, whose “elevation transfigures him into a voyeur” (92), I identify more with Daedalus, preoccupied with impending disaster. I swan-dive from the tower into a hay cart, returning to the bustle of the street below.As I wander amongst the people of digital 1759 New York, the game continuously makes phatic advances at me. I bump into others on the street and they drop boxes they are carrying, or stumble to the side. Partial overheard conversations going on between townspeople—“… what with all these new taxes …”, “… but we’ve got a fine regiment here …”—both underscore the historical context of the game and imply that this is a world that exists even when I am not there. These characters and their conversations are as much a part of the strategic makeup of the city as the buildings are. They are the text, not the writers nor the readers. I am the only writer of this text, but I am merely transcribing a pre-programmed narrative. So, I am not an author, but rather a stenographer. For this short moment, though, I am allowed by the game to believe that I am making the choice not to transcribe; there are missions to complete, and I am ignoring them. I am taking in the city, forgetting—just as the design intends—that I am the only one here, the only person in the entire world, indeed, the person for whom this world exists.While wandering, I also experience conflicts and mergers between what Maurice Halbwachs has called historical, autobiographical, and collective memory types: respectively, these are memories created according to historical record, through one’s own life experience, and by the way a society tends to culturally frame and recall “important” events. De Certeau describes a memorable place as a “palimpsest, [where] subjectivity is already linked to the absence that structures it as existence” (109). Wandering through AC:R’s virtual representation of 1759 downtown New York, I am experiencing this palimpsest in multiple layers, activating my Halbwachsian memories and influencing one another in the creation of my subjectivity. This is the “absence” de Certeau speaks of. My visions of Revolutionary New York ablaze tug at me from beneath a veneer of peaceful Dutch architecture: two warring historical memory constructs. Simultaneously, this old world is painted on top of my autobiographical memories as a New Yorker for thirteen years, loudly ordering corned beef with Russian dressing at the deli that will be on this corner. Somewhere sandwiched between these layers hides a portrait of September 11th, 2001, painted either by collective memory or autobiographical memory, or, more likely, a collage of both. A plane entering a building. Fire. Seen by my eyes, and then re-seen countless times through the same televised imagery that the rest of the world outside our small downtown village saw it. Which images are from media, and which from memory?Above, as if presiding over the scene, Michel de Certeau hangs in the air at the collision site, suspended a 1000 feet above the North Pool of the 9/11 Memorial, rapt in “voluptuous pleasure”. And below, amid the colonists in their tricorns and waistcoats, people in grey ash-covered suits—ambulatory statues; golems—slowly and silently march ever uptown-wards. Dutch and Tudor town homes stretch skyward and transform into art-deco and glass monoliths. These multiform strata, like so many superimposed transparent maps, ground me in the idea of New York, creating the “fragmentary and inward-turning histories” (de Certeau 108) that give place to my subjectivity, allowing me to Be-there—even though, technically, I am not.My conscious decision to ignore the game’s narrative and wander has made this moment possible. While I understand that this is entirely part of the intended gameplay, I also know that the design cannot possibly account for the particular way in which I experience the space. And this is the fundamental point I am asserting here: that—along with the strategies and temporal complexities of the design and the tactics and skills of those on the ground—we bring into digital space our own temporal and experiential constructions that allow us to Be-in-the-game in ways not anticipated by its strategic design. Non-digital virtuality—in the tangled forms of autobiographical, historic, and collective memory—reaches into digital space, transforming the experience. Further, this changed game-experience becomes a part of my autobiographical “prosthetic memory” that I carry with me (Landsberg). When I visit New York in the future, and I inevitably find myself abruptly met with the façade of St Paul’s Chapel as I round the corner of Church Street and Vesey, I will be brought back to this moment. Will I continue to wander, or will I—if just for a second—entertain the urge to climb?***After the recent near destruction by fire of Notre-Dame, a different game in the AC franchise was offered as a free download, because it is set in revolutionary Paris and includes a very detailed and interactive version of the cathedral. Perhaps right now, on sundry couches in various geographical locations, people are wandering there: strolling along the Siene, re-experiencing time they once spent there; overhearing tense conversations about regime change along the Champs-Élysées that sound disturbingly familiar; or scaling the bell tower of the Notre-Dame Cathedral itself—site of revolution, desecration, destruction, and future rebuilding—to reach the pleasure of seeing the strategic whole at the top. And maybe, while they are up there, they will glance south-southwest to the 15th arrondissement, where de Certeau lies, enjoying some voluptuous Icarian viewpoint as-yet unimagined.ReferencesAtkinson, Rowland, and Paul Willis. “Transparent Cities: Re‐Shaping the Urban Experience through Interactive Video Game Simulation.” City 13.4 (2009): 403–417. DOI: 10.1080/13604810903298458.Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Ed. Rolf Tiedmann. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002. Coates, Jamie. “Key Figure of Mobility: The Flâneur.” Social Anthropology 25.1 (2017): 28–41. DOI: 10.1111/1469-8676.12381.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.Flynn, Bernadette. “Games as Inhabited Spaces.” Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture and Policy 110 (2004): 52–61. DOI: 10.1177/1329878X0411000108.Fuller, Mary, and Henry Jenkins. “‘Nintendo and New World Travel Writing: A Dialogue’ [in] CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community.” CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Ed. Steve Jones. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1994. 57–72. <https://contentstore.cla.co.uk/secure/link?id=7dc700b8-cb87-e611-80c6-005056af4099>.Golding, Daniel. “Putting the Player Back in Their Place: Spatial Analysis from Below.” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 5.2 (2013): 117–30. DOI: 10.1386/jgvw.5.2.117_1.Halbwachs, Maurice. The Collective Memory. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2016.Heidegger, Martin. Existence and Being. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1949.Jayemanne, Darshana. “Chronotypology: A Comparative Method for Analyzing Game Time.” Games and Culture (2019): 1–16. DOI: 10.1177/1555412019845593.Lammes, Sybille. “Playing the World: Computer Games, Cartography and Spatial Stories.” Aether: The Journal of Media Geography 3 (2008): 84–96. DOI: 10.1080/10402659908426297.Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.Laviolette, Patrick. “The Neo-Flâneur amongst Irresistible Decay.” Playgrounds and Battlefields: Critical Perspectives of Social Engagement. Eds. Martínez Jüristo and Klemen Slabina. Tallinn: Tallinn University Press, 2014. 243–71.Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002.Nikolchina, Miglena. “Time in Video Games: Repetitions of the New.” Differences 28.3 (2017): 19–43. DOI: 10.1215/10407391-4260519.Rabinow, Paul, and Michel Foucault. “Interview with Michel Foucault on Space, Knowledge and Power.” Skyline (March 1982): 17–20.

In one of the earliest films about a whistleblower, On the Waterfront (1954), the dock worker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), who also works for the union boss and mobster Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), decides to testify in court against him and uncover corruption and murder. By doing so he will not only suffer retribution from Friendly but also be seen as a “stool pigeon” by his co-workers, friends, and neighbours who will shun him, and he will be “marked” forever by his deed. Nonetheless, he decides to do the right thing. Already it is clear that in most cases the whistleblowers are not simply the ones who reveal things, but they themselves are also revealed.My aim in this article is to explore the depiction of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange in fiction film and its connection to what I would like to call, with Slavoj Žižek, “Hollywood ideology”; the heroisation of the “ordinary guy” against a big institution or a corrupt individual, as it is the case in Snowden (2016) on the one hand, and at the same time the impossibility of true systemic critique when the one who is criticising is “outside of the system”, as Assange in The Fifth Estate (2013). Both films also rely on the notion of individualism and convey conflicting messages in regard to understanding the perception of whistleblowers today. Snowden and AssangeAlthough there are many so called “whistleblower films” since On the Waterfront, like Serpico (1973), All the President’s Men (1976), or Silkwood (1983), to name but a few (for a comprehensive list see https://ew.com/movies/20-whistleblower-movies-to-watch/?), in this article I will focus on the most recent films that deal with Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. These are the most prominent cases of whistleblowing in the last decade put to film. They are relevant today also regarding their subject matter—privacy. Revealing secrets that concern privacy in this day and age is of importance and is pertinent even to the current Coronavirus crisis, where the question of privacy again arises in form of possible tracking apps, in the age of ever expanding “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff).Even if Assange is not strictly speaking a whistleblower, an engagement with his work in this context is indispensable since his outsider status, up to a point, resembles those of Snowden or Manning. They are not only important because they can be considered as “authentic heroe[s] of our time” (Žižek, Pandemic, 7), but also because of their depiction which differs in a very crucial way: while Snowden is depicted as a “classic” whistleblower (an American patriot who did his duty, someone from the “inside”), Assange’s action are coming from the outside of the established system and are interpreted as a selfish act, as it is stated in the film: “It was always about him.”Whistleblowers In his Whistleblower’s Handbook, Kohn writes: “who are these whistleblowers? Sometimes they are people you read about with admiration in the newspaper. Other times they are your co-workers or neighbours. However, most whistleblowers are regular workers performing their jobs” (Kohn, xi). A whistleblower, as the employee or a “regular worker”, can be regarded as someone who is a “nobody” at first, an invisible “cog in the wheel” of a certain institution, a supposedly devoted and loyal worker, who, through an act of “betrayal”, becomes a “somebody”. They do something truly significant, and by doing so becomes a hero to some and a traitor to others. Their persona suddenly becomes important.The wrongdoings that are uncovered by the whistleblower are for the most part not simply isolated missteps, but of a systemic nature, like the mass surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) uncovered by Snowden. The problem with narratives that deal with whistleblowing is that the focus inevitably shifts from the systemic problem (surveillance, war crimes, etc.) to the whistleblower as an individual. Moretti states that the interest of the media regarding whistleblowing, if one compares the reactions to the leaking of the “Pentagon Papers” regarding the Vietnam War in the 1970s by Daniel Ellsberg and to Snowden’s discoveries, shifted from the deed itself to the individual. In the case of Ellsberg, Moretti writes:the legitimate questions were not about him and what motivated him, but rather inquiry on (among other items) the relationship between government and media; whether the U.S. would be damaged militarily or diplomatically because of the release of the papers; the extent to which the media were acting as watchdogs; and why Americans needed to know about these items. (8)This shift of public interest goes along, according to Moretti, with the corporate ownership of media (7), where profit is the primary goal and therefore sensationalism is the order of the day, which is inextricably linked to the focus on the “scandalous” individual. The selfless and almost self-effacing act of whistleblowing becomes a narrative that constructs the opposite: yet another determined individual that through their sheer willpower achieves their goal, a notion that conforms to neoliberal ideology.Hollywood IdeologyThe endings of All the President’s Men and The Harder They Fall (1956), another early whistleblower film, twenty years apart, are very similar: they show the journalist eagerly typing away on his typewriter a story that will, in the case of the former, bring down the president of the United States and in the latter, bring an end to arranged fights in the boxing sport. This depiction of the free press vanquishing the evil doers, as Žižek states it, is exactly the point where “Hollywood ideology” becomes visible, which is:the ideology of such Hollywood blockbusters as All the President’s Men and The Pelican Brief, in which a couple of ordinary guys discover a scandal which reaches up to the president, forcing him to step down. Corruption is shown to reach the very top, yet the ideology of such works resides in their upbeat final message: what a great country ours must be, when a couple of ordinary guys like you and me can bring down the president, the mightiest man on Earth! (“Good Manners”)This message is of course part of Hollywood’s happy-ending convention that can be found even in films that deal with “serious” subject matters. The point of the happy end in this case is that before it is finally reached, the film can show corruption (Serpico), wrongdoings of big companies (The Insider, 1999), or sexual harassment (North Country, 2005). It is important that in the end all is—more or less—good. The happy ending need not necessarily be even truly “happy”—this depends on the general notion the film wants to convey (see for instance the ending of Silkwood, where the whistleblower is presumed to have been killed in the end). What is important in the whistleblower film is that the truth is out, justice has been served in one way or the other, the status quo has been re-established, and most importantly, there is someone out there who cares.These films, even when they appear to be critical of “the system”, are there to actually reassure their audiences in the workings of said system, which is (liberal) democracy supported by neoliberal capitalism (Frazer). Capitalism, on the other hand, is supported by the ideology of individualism which functions as a connecting tissue between the notions of democracy, capitalism, and film industry, since we are admiring exceptional individuals in performing acts of great importance. This, in turn, is encapsulated by the neoliberal mantra—“anyone can make it, only if they try heard enough”. As Bauman puts it more concretely, the risks and contradictions in a society are produced socially but are supposed to be solved individually (46).Individualism, as a part of the neoliberal capitalist ideology, is described already by Milton Friedman, who sees the individual as the “ultimate entity in the society” and the freedom of the individual as the “ultimate goal” within this society (12). What makes this an ideology is the fact that, in reality, the individual, or in the context of the market, the entrepreneur, is always-already tethered to and supported by the state, as Varoufakis has successfully proven (“Varoufakis/Chomsky discussion”). Therefore individualism is touted as an ideal to strive for, while for neoliberalism in order to function, the state is indispensable, which is often summed up in the formula “socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor” (Polychroniou). The heroic Hollywood individual, as shown in the whistleblower film, regardless of real-life events, is the perfect embodiment of individualist ideology of neoliberal capitalism—we are not seeing a stylised version of it, a cowboy or a masked vigilante, but a “real” person. It is paradoxically precisely the realism that we see in such films that makes them ideological: the “based on a true story” preamble and all the historical details that are there in order to create a fulfilling cinematic experience. All of this supports its ideology because, as Žižek writes, “the function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel” (Sublime Object 45). All the while Snowden mostly adheres to Hollywood ideology, The Fifth Estate also focuses on individualism, but goes in a different direction, and is more problematic – in the former we see the “ordinary guy” as the American hero, in the latter a disgruntled individual who reveals secrets of others for strictly personal reasons.SnowdenThere is an aspect of the whistleblower film that rings true and that is connected to Michel Foucault’s notion of power (“Truth and Power”). Snowden, through his employment at the NSA, is within a power relations network of an immensely powerful organisation. He uses “his” power, to expose the mass surveillance by the NSA. It is only through his involvement with this power network that he could get insight into and finally reveal what NSA is doing. Foucault writes that these resistances to power from the inside are “effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised; resistance to power does not have to come from elsewhere to be real … It exists all the more by being in the same place as power” (Oushakine 206). In the case of whistleblowing, the resistance to power must come exactly from the inside in order to be effective since whistleblowers occupy the “same place as power” that they are up against and that is what in turn makes them “powerful”.Fig. 1: The Heroic Individual: Edward Snowden in SnowdenBut there is an underside to this. His “relationship” to the power structure he is confronting greatly affects his depiction as a whistleblower within the film—precisely because Snowden, unlike Assange, is someone from inside the system. He can still be seen as a patriot and a “disillusioned idealist” (Scott). In the film this is shown right at the beginning as Snowden, in his hotel room in Hong Kong, tells the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) his name and who he is. The music swells and the film cuts to Snowden in uniform alongside other soldiers during a drill, when he was enlisted in the army before work for the NSA.Snowden resembles many of Stone’s typical characters, the all-American patriot being disillusioned by certain historical events, as in Born on the 4th of July (1989) and JFK (1991), which makes him question the government and its actions. It is generally of importance for a mainstream Hollywood film that the protagonist is relatable in order for the audiences to sympathise with them (Bordwell and Thompson 82). This is important not only regarding personal traits but, I would argue, also political views of the character. There needs to be no doubt in the mind of American audiences when it comes to films that deal with politics, that the protagonists are patriots.Stone’s film profits from this ambivalence in Snowden’s own political stance: at first he is more of a right winger who is a declared fan of Ayn Rand’s conservative-individualist manifesto Atlas Shrugged, then, after meeting his future partner Lindsey Mills, he turns slightly to the left, as he at one point states his support for President Obama. This also underlines the films ambiguity, as Oliver Stone openly stated about his Vietnam War film Platoon (1986) that “it could be embraced by … the right and the left. Essentially, most movies make their money in the middle” (Banff Centre). As Snowden takes the lie detector test as a part of the process of becoming a CIA agent, he confirms, quite sincerely it seems, that he thinks that the United States is the “greatest country in the world” and that the most important day in his life was 9/11. This again confirms his patriotic stance.Snowden is depicted as the exceptional individual, and at the same time the “ordinary guy”, who, through his act of courage, defied the all-powerful USA. During the aforementioned job interview scene, Snowden’s superior, Corbin O’Brian (Rhys Ifans), quotes Ayn Rand to him: “one man can stop the motor of the world”. Snowden states that he also believes that. The quote could serve as the film’s tagline, as a “universal truth” that seems to be at the core of American values and that also coincides with and reaffirms neoliberal ideology. Although it is undeniable that individuals can accomplish extraordinary feats, but when there is no systemic change, those can remain only solitary achievements that are only there to support the neoliberal “cult of the individual”.Snowden stands in total contrast to Assange in regard to his character and private life. There is nothing truly “problematic” about him, he seems to be an almost impeccable person, a “straight arrow”. This should make him a poster boy for American democracy and freedom of speech, and Stone tries to depict him in this way.Still, we are dealing with someone who cannot simply be redeemed as a patriot who did his duty. He cannot be unequivocally hailed as an all-American hero since betraying state secrets (and betrayal in general) is seen as a villainous act. For many Americans, and for the government, he will forever be remembered as a traitor. Greenwald writes that most of the people in the US, according to some surveys, still want to see Snowden in prison, even if they find that the surveillance by the NSA was wrong (365).Snowden remains an outcast and although the ending is not quite happy, since he must live in Russian exile, there is still a sense of an “upbeat final message” that ideologically colours the film’s ending.The Fifth EstateThe Fifth Estate is another example of the ideological view of the individual, but in this case with a twist. The film tries to be “objective” at first, showing the importance and impact of the newly established online platform WikiLeaks. However, towards the end of the film, it proceeds to dismantle Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) with the “everyone has secrets” platitude, which effectively means that none of us should ever try to reveal any secrets of those in power, since all of us must have our own secrets we do not want revealed. The film is shown from the perspective of Assange’s former disgruntled associate Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl), who wrote a book about his time at WikiLeaks on which the film is partly based on (Inside WikiLeaks). We see Assange through his eyes and delve into personal moments that are supposed to reveal the “truth” about the individual behind the project. In a cynical twist, it is Daniel who is the actual whistleblower, who reveals the secrets of WikiLeaks and its founder.Assange, as it is said in the film, is denounced as a “messiah” or a “prophet”, almost a cult leader who only wants to satisfy his perverse need for other people’s secrets, except that he is literally alone and has no followers and, unlike real cult leaders, needs no followers. The point of whistleblowing is exactly in the fact that it is a radical move, it is a big step forward in ending a wrongdoing. To denounce the radical stance of WikiLeaks is to misunderstand and undermine the whole notion of whistleblowing as a part of true changes in a society.The cult aspects are often referred to in the film when Assange’s childhood is mentioned. His mother was supposed to be in a cult, called “The Family”, and we should regard this as an important (and bad) influence on his character. This notion of the “childhood trauma” seems to be a crutch that is supposed to serve as a characterisation, something the scriptwriting-guru Robert McKee criticises as a screenwriting cliché: “do not reduce characters to case studies (an episode of child abuse is the cliché in vogue at the moment), for in truth there are no definitive explanations for anyone’s behaviour” (376).Although the film does not exaggerate the childhood aspect, it is still a motive that is supposed to shed some light into the “mystery” that is Assange. And it also ties into the question of the colour of his hair as a way of dismantling his lies. In a flashback that resembles a twist ending of an M. Night Shyamalan thriller, it turns out that Assange actually dyes his hair white, witnessed in secret by Daniel, instead of it turning naturally white, as Assange explains on few occasions but stating different reasons for it. Here he seems like a true movie villain and resembles the character of the Joker from The Dark Knight (2008), who also tells different stories about the origin of his facial scars. This mystery surrounding his origin makes the villain even more dangerous and, what is most important, unpredictable.Žižek also draws a parallel between Assange and Joker of the same film, whom he sees as the “figure of truth”, as Batman and the police are using lies in order to “protect” the citizens: “the film’s take-home message is that lying is necessary to sustain public morale: only a lie can redeem us” (“Good Manners”). Rather than interpreting Assange’s role in a positive way, as Žižek does, the film truly establishes him as a villain.Fig. 2: The Problematic Individual: Julian Assange in The Fifth EstateThe Fifth Estate ends with another cheap psychologisation of Assange on Daniel’s part as he describes the “true purpose” of WikiLeaks: “only someone so obsessed with his own secrets could’ve come up with a way to reveal everyone else’s”. This faux-psychological argument paints the whole WikiLeaks endeavour as Assange’s ego-trip and makes of him an egomaniac whose secret perverted pleasure is to reveal the secrets of others.Why is this so? Why are Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men depicted as heroes and Assange is not? The true underlying conflict here is between classic journalism; where journalists can publish their pieces and get the acclaim for publishing the “new Pentagon Papers”, once again ensuring the freedom of the press and “inter-systemic” critique. This way of working of the press, as the films show, always pays off. All the while, in reality, very little changes since, as Žižek writes, the “formal functioning of power” stays in place. He further states about WikiLeaks:The true targets here weren’t the dirty details and the individuals responsible for them; not those in power, in other words, so much as power itself, its structure. We shouldn’t forget that power comprises not only institutions and their rules, but also legitimate (‘normal’) ways of challenging it (an independent press, NGOs, etc.). (“Good Manners”)In the very end, the “real” journalism is being reinforced as the sole vehicle of criticism, while everything else is “extremism” and, again, can only stem from a frustrated, even “evil”, individual. If neoliberal individualism is the order of the day, then the thinking must also revolve around that notion and cannot transcend that horizon.ConclusionŽižek expresses the problem of revealing the truth in our day and age by referring to the famous fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, where a child is the only one who is naive and brave enough to state that the emperor is in fact naked. But for Žižek today,in our cynical era, such strategy no longer works, it has lost its disturbing power, since everyone now proclaims that the emperor is naked (that Western democracies are torturing terrorist suspects, that wars are fought for profit, etc., etc.), and yet nothing happens, nobody seems to mind, the system just goes on functioning as if the emperor were fully dressed. (Less than Nothing 92)The problem with the “Collateral Murder”, a video of the killing of Iraqi civilians by the US Army, leaked by Wikileaks and Chelsea Manning, that was presented to the public, for instance, was according to accounts in Inside Wikileaks and Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, that it did not have the desired impact. The public seems, in the end, to be indifferent to such reveals since it effectively cannot do anything about it. The return to the status quo after these reveals supports this stance, as Greenwald writes that after Snowden’s leaks there was no substantial change within the system; during the Obama administration, there was even an increase of criminal investigations of whistleblowers with an emergence of a “climate of fear” (Greenwald 368). Many whistleblower films assure us that in the end the system works; the good guys always win, the antagonists are punished, and laws have been passed. This is not to be accepted simply as a Hollywood convention, something that we also “already know”, but as an ideological stance, since these films are taken more seriously than films with similar messages but within other mainstream genres. Snowden shows that only individualism has the power to challenge the system, while The Fifth Estate draws the line that should not be crossed when it comes to privacy as a “universal” good because, again, “everyone has secrets”. Such representations of whistleblowing and disruption only further cement the notion that in our societies no real change is possible because it seems unnecessary. Whistleblowing as an act of revelation needs therefore to be understood as only one small step made by the individual that in the end depends on how society and the government decide to act upon it.References All the President’s Men. Dir. Alan J. Pakula. 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