Winner of the Heldt Prize for Best Book in Slavic, East European, and
Eurasian Women's and Gender Studies 2021
There was a discontent among Russian men in the nineteenth century that
sometimes did not stem from poverty, loss, or the threat of war, but
instead arose from trying to negotiate the paradoxical prescriptions for
masculinity which characterized the era. Picturing Russia's Men takes
a vital new approach to this topic within masculinity and art historical
studies by investigating the dissatisfaction that developed from the
breakdown in prevailing conceptions of manhood outside of the usual
Western European and American contexts. By exploring how Russian
painters depicted gender norms as they were evolving over the course of
the century, each chapter shows how artworks provide unique insight into
not only those qualities that were supposed to predominate, but actually
did in lived practice.
Drawing on a wide variety of source material, including previously
untranslated letters, journals, and contemporary criticism, the book
explores the deep structures of masculinity to reveal the conflicting
desires and aspirations of men in the period. In so doing, readers are
introduced to Russian artists such as Karl Briullov, Pavel Fedotov,
Alexander Ivanov, Ivan Kramskoi, and Ilia Repin, all of whom produced
masterpieces of realist art in dialogue with paintings made in Western
European artistic centers. The result is a more culturally discursive
account of art-making in the nineteenth century, one that challenges
some of the enduring myths of masculinity and provides a fresh
interpretive history of what constitutes modernism in the history of
art.
