Browsing by Author "Zitser, EA"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7

Open Access
A Full-Frontal History of the Romanov Dynasty: Pictorial 'Political Pornography' in Pre-Reform Russia
(2011-10) Zitser, EA
This profusely illustrated article expands the chronological and evidentiary basis of Boris Kolonitskii's argument about the role of scurrilous rumors and sexual innuendo in the desacralization of the Russian monarchy and demonstrates the complexity of the processes of reception, re-appropriation, and subversion of imperial “scenarios of power.” It does so by offering a close reading of what is arguably the earliest-known example of the genre of pictorial “political pornography” in Russia: a set of five, unique watercolors from the collection of the New York Public Library depicting eighteenth-century Russian emperors and empresses in flagrante delicto. The author presents evidence that suggests that this anonymous series of “folded” or “double pictures” (skladnye or dvoinye kartinki) was created in the first half of the nineteenth century by means of a subversive repurposing of Russian popular broadsheets, French revolutionary pornography, and official Russian royal portraiture. He argues that this artifact of male salon culture is the product of a deliberate attempt to create nothing less than an alternative, unexpurgated history of the House of Romanov: a sexually explicit, full-frontal assault that takes pleasure in exposing the “mysteries of state” that nineteenth-century royal apologists sought to conceal in official histories of the dynasty, which presented the children of Paul I and Maria Fedorovna as epigones of family values and models for the nation.
Open Access
Beyond LibGuides: The Past, Present, and Future of Online Research Guides
(Slavic and East European Information Resources, 2015-01-01) Giullian, JC; Zitser, EA
© 2015, Jon C. Giullian and Ernest A. Zitser.The proliferation of research guides created using the LibGuides platform has triggered extensive discussion touting their benefits for everything from assessment, engagement, and marketing, to outreach and pedagogy. However, there is at present a relative paucity of critical reflection about the product’s place in the broader informational landscape. This article is an attempt to redress this lacuna. Relying primarily on examples from the field of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies, the authors briefly describe the evolution of online research guides; identify reasons for the proliferation of Springshare’s product in academic libraries; question whether LibGuides improve learning or reinforce information inequality in higher education; and propose a way to move beyond LibGuides.
Open Access
For love and Fatherland: Political Clientage and the Origins of Russia’s First Female Order of Chivalry
(2011) Fedyukin, I; Zitser, EA
This article describes the origins and political significance of the Order of St. Catherine, or Deliverance: the second-oldest knightly order in the system of honors introduced during the reign of Peter I, the first Russian monarchical order to have its own set of statutes, and the only one reserved exclusively for women. The foundation of the Order of St. Catherine has traditionally been described as a project driven by, and reflecting the vision of the tsar himself. However, as the newly discovered archival documents analyzed in this article indicate, the key role in this episode actually belonged to Tsaritsa Catherine Alekseevna and her advisors and clients, while the tsar seems to have been at best a passive observer. Although Peter’s dynastic policy and his interest in lay monarchical orders obviously set the overall framework for what was possible, the specific design of this project reflected not the tsar’s will, but the personal agendas of such actors as the royal consort (Catherine), the royal favorite (A.D. Menshikov), and the tsar’s former brother-in-law (Prince B.I. K urakin). A reconstruction of the actual circumstances of the Order’s foundation thus provides the evidence for a detailed case study of the role of political clientage in shaping the scenarios of power at the early Imperial Russian court.
Open Access
From lubok to libel: Nineteenth-century Russian historiography and popular memory in the Jester wedding of Prince-Pope Nikita Zotov
(Russian Literature, 2014-01-01) Zitser, EA
This article discusses the origins and political significance of an anonymous Old Believer wall-poster depicting, in image and text, one of the most infamous public spectacles ever staged at the court of Peter the Great. Tracing its transition from the visual medium to the verbal, and back again, by way of nineteenth-century Petrine historiography, the article offers a new dating of this piece of Old Believer folk art, disputes its supposed debt to the "spirit of medieval laughter", and, in the process, demonstrates the permeability of late Imperial Russian "elite" and "popular" cultures. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Open Access
Il parlait assez bien français et plusieurs langues: Foreign Language Acquisition and the Diplomatic Self-Fashioning of Prince Boris Ivanovich Kurakin
(Quaestio Rossica, 2023-01-01) Zitser, EA
Using the example of Prince B. I. Kurakin (1676-1727), the Imperial Russian diplomat who served as extraordinary and plenipotentiary ambassador to France (1724-1727), this article seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion about the possible reasons for the adoption of French as the language of international communication in general and eighteenth-century diplomacy in particular. It asks when the Moscow-born Gediminid prince learned to speak French and how this non-native speaker of the language became proficient enough to impress a finicky and fastidious interlocutor like Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon (1675-1755). The author suggests that the answer to these questions lies not in Russia or France, but in Poland and Italy; and not in the halls of formal educational institutions, but in the networks of personal connections that were sustained as much by face-to-face communication as by written correspondence. This brief biographical survey of the development of Prince Kurakin’s “linguistic personality” demonstrates the mediating role of modern, vernacular languages (Russian, Polish, Italian) in the transition from Latin to French as the lingua franca of international diplomacy. It also emphasizes the intimate connection between foreign language acquisition and diplomatic self-fashioning, showing how linguistic knowledge could be instrumentalized for both personal and professional advancement. In doing so, it illustrates the active role that individual brokers - especially, but not exclusively, aristocratic royal servitors with broad linguistic skills and extensive international connections, like Prince Kurakin and the duc de Saint-Simon - played in creating the very notion of an early modern “European” style of diplomacy based on the cultural dominance of the French language.
Open Access
Politics in the state of sober drunkenness: Parody and piety at the court of Peter the great
(Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas, 2003) Zitser, EA
Open Access
The Vita of Prince Boris Ivanovich "Korybut"-Kurakin: Personal Life-Writing and Aristocratic Self-Fashioning at the Court of Peter the Great
(2011) Zitser, EA
This article argues that the autobiographical "Vita del Principe Boris Korybut-Kurakin de la Familia de Polonia et Litoania," an astrologically-inflected, macaronic, personal chronicle of the life of one of the leading diplomats of Peter the Great, is not merely the first eighteenth-century Russian memoir, nor simply an eyewitness account of the reformist reign of Russia's first emperor. It also constitutes a unique, early modem "ego-document," which expresses how one extraordinary member of Muscovy's hereditary service elite understood and experienced the processes of "modernization" and "secularization" that were the hallmarks of Peter's "cultural revolution." Kurakin's Vita not only enriches our understanding of these long-term cultural processes, but also offers an unprecedented opportunity to examine them from the inside-out, so to speak, that is, from the point of view of a member of a social group (dvorianstvo or shliakhetstvo) frequently depicted as a blank slate upon which a reforming tsar and faceless historical forces left their indelible marks. In Kurakin's case, these marks included not only the prominently-displayed insignia of the chivalrous Order of St. Andrew, or the cravat and periwig that he sported in his personally-commissioned, engraved portrait (1717), but also the oozing, "scorbutic" sores and "melancholic" thoughts concealed in plain sight among all these fashionable trappings of worldly success, like the anamorphic death's head in Hans Holbein's "The Ambassadors" (1533). Indeed, from a certain angle of vision, Kurakin's complaints can be seen as psychosomatic manifestations of a disaffected courtier's desperate and, ultimately, not unsuccessful attempt to use all the tools at his disposal - including practices associated with such arcane and esoteric fields of knowledge as iatromathematics and balneology - to reconcile his astrological 'complexion' with his professional aspirations, and thereby to take control of his own fate. From this perspective, Kurakin's personal "book of nativity" (kniga rozhdeniia or libro della mia nascita) constitutes not only an act of self-justification (designed to counter the impression that its author was a shirker of duty), but also of aristocratic 'self-fashioning.'