"Seeing into Being: An Introduction"

C H A P TE R 1 Seeing into Being An Introduction Valerie A. Kivelson and Joan Neuberger llustrating publications and presentations is easier than ever. Digital technology, the easy transfer of images from the Internet, and the willingness of conference centers, businesses, schools, and universities to invest in projection equipment make it increasingly attractive to insert images into lectures and books, presentations and papers. The result has been paradoxical. Within the humanities and social sciences, a new visual discourse has grown up alongside conventional scholarly activities, but even as we employ visual aids, we, as students, teachers, readers, audiences, and presenters, rarely give enough thought to the specific ways that visual sources contribute to our understanding of history and culture or to the ways that visual experience shapes historical experience. All too frequently, images are used merely as accompaniment (for readers' viewing pleasure) or distraction (from the density of an academic monograph) or advertisement (read my book, take this course). One purpose of this book is to explore ways to use images more thoughtfully and integrate them more productively in historical and cultural analysis, to use images to enhance and not merely to illustrate. To that end, we hope this book will encourage readers to pay attention to the special qualities of the visual, to think about images as images. The second purpose is to explore Russia through its visual culture, to look at the range of visual images and material objects that Russians have produced throughout their history. Each essay provides a sustained, careful reading of an image or set of images to help us understand how Russians of different eras represented themselves visually, understood their own visual environment, and used images to construct identities and to exert or subvert power. The book covers the entire span of Russian history, from ancient Kiev to contemporary, post-Soviet society, and it examines the entire Russian/Soviet Empire: from famous monuments in the capitals, such as St. Basil's Cathedral, to family photograph albums from the Russian provinces, to the objects of Russian imperialism, such as Turkrnen rugs of Lenin and porcelain figurines of all the peoples of the empire, collected by Russians as consumer objects. The essays consider a wide variety of genres: material objects (stirrups, a snuffbox, the tsar's crown, painted distaffs, folk embroidery); architectural monuments (a cathedral, a war memorial, the Moscow metro); icons, paintings, and I VALERIE A. KIVELSON AND JOAN portraits; news and art photography; cheap popular prints, posters, and advertisements; films, fashions, money, and maps. In this book, visual culture is defined as including the visual products, practices, and experiences of a culture. It encompasses artifacts considered high culture, which are produced for a select audience, as well as objects and practices of mass culture. Our conception of visual culture also includes the meanings and values attributed to vision, to the act of seeing, and to the various objects viewed. Finally, visual culture embraces the interaction between producers and consumers of the visual- that is, the intentions, uses, and meanings imputed by producers and the understandings and practices of viewers and consumers. If culture was once thought to be shared by all members of a given community and at the same time to be virtually unchanging, cultural historians have become far more attuned to the ways that cultural practices and values are experienced differently by people in different social circumstances. The same can be said for visual culture, which can be imagined as a galaxy of vibrant, diverse, at times conflicting, at times complementary values, concepts, and practices expressed in visual form. Visual studies is the field devoted to studying visual culture. It differs from art history (although they are not incompatible) in its emphasis on seeing as an embedded social practice. Visual studies follows the also relatively new field of cultural studies in its attention to the shifting, fragmentary, culturally and individually specific responses to visual objects and in its awareness of visual artifacts as commodities produced in a world of exchange and power. APPROACHES TO VISUAL CULTURE Working within this broad conception of visual culture, the authors of the essays in this book adopt various methodological approaches and pose widely varying questions. Although most of the authors combine more than one approach, the essays fall into four rough groups, which together serve to outline a broad-ranging methodology of visual analysis. The four approaches are: (1) using the visual to uncover information not recorded in written sources; (2) decoding symbolic or connoted meanings in visual sources; (3) identifying historically specific modes of viewing and of attributing meaning to visual knowledge at a given time; and (4) studying seeing practices as formative and sometimes transformative aspects of historical experience. The first two approaches employ visual sources as supplementary to written ones and read them using the kinds of skills and questions traditionally used by historians. The second two set the visual itself as the question for investigation and push historical inquiry in new directions. Many of the authors in this volume use the first approach, turning to the visual record to discover information that would otherwise remain inaccessible. The prosaic details of life rarely merit recording in the grand chronicles of history, but scholars can examine visual sourcessuch as wax drippings on manuscript pages or objects and practices depicted in paintings, embroideries, maps, and photographs-to unearth such information. Not surprisingly, the most glaring gaps in current knowledge of everyday life appear in the earliest centuries, so the most telling examples of this kind of visual examination are found in the essays on medieval Rus. But even in modern times, visual documents reveal everyday practices that have been hidden from view, especially in connection with private life. Visual and material culture can offer exciting insights into otherwise invisible communicative practices: unspoken social codes 2 SEEING NEUBERGER INTO BEING are embedded in middle-class fashions, and the social identities of merchants are represented in particular conventions of portraiture. The second way our authors put visual evidence to use for historical understanding involves reading visual materials for their embedded meanings, intended and unintended, and attempting to parse the ways they were viewed and understood in their own time. This approach is based on the assumption that viewing is not a natural, transparent process; rather, seeing and understanding are mediated through the cultural codes of specific times and places. Understanding visual material as historical evidence requires familiarity with conventions and symbols. By offering explanations of the meanings embedded in a particularly significant icon or a highly abstract Soviet-era film, the authors reconstruct the ways in which historical actors made sense of what they saw. This approach draws on many of the same skills required for carefully contextualized readings of written texts-dose reading and reading against the grainbut draws on a visual rather than (or in addition to) a verbal vocabulary. Third, several of the authors in this volume investigate the meanings attributed to vision itself in particular periods and for particular viewers. Approaches to the visual relate in integral ways to the epistemological orientations of given societies. In many times and cultures, the visual has been understood to provide solid, incontrovertible proof of the reality of that which is depicted or seen. The evidence of the eyes, whether the viewer is a religious visionary or an eyewitness to a crime, is inextricably linked with ways of establishing "truth." The formulaic visual codes employed by painters of Russian Orthodox icons, for instance, conveyed compelling evidence of the spirit of the divine. Regardless of the kind of visual experience deemed most true by a given society (or by discrete groups of people in a given society), believing one's eyes is not always a simple matter. Uncertainties about the reality of visual evidence- in connection with saintly apparitions, spectral photography, or more earthly visual encountersexemplify common cultural apprehensions about accepting the testimony of the eyes. Tension and doubt are not just products of the modern or postmodern age, where photography and virtual reality have introduced new ways of manipulating the depiction of objects and destabilizing the relation between the seen and the real. Contemporary distrust of the "reality" of the photographic record, however, has taken skepticism to a new level and may indicate a profound shift in the cultural meaning attributed to visual evidence and the changing framework in which visual knowledge is assessed. Some of the authors here work with textual material that explicitly addresses how seeing works, how the visual affects the viewer, and how visual impressions work differently than do those of the other senses. Twentieth-century filmmakers and painters, for example, wrote about how their works engaged with specific viewing practices. Other authors have excavated less explicit evidence to reconstruct the underlying assumptions about viewing as epistemology and process. Medieval miniaturists, for instance, clearly thought differently than modern viewers do about what visual information to include when illustrating their manuscripts. Formulaic and symbolic details were more important to them than strict realism was. A similar gulf in visual understanding surfaces in the mutual incomprehension of nobles and peasants in the late nineteenth century, who drew altogether different conclusions while viewing one and the same woodblock print. 3 VALERIE A. KIVELSON AND JOAN NEUBERGER Along these lines, several essays show that images themselves take on entirely different meanings when viewed in different contexts. The potential meanings contained in images become legible only when the ways viewers saw and used them are understood. A painting presented with great fanfare in a museum and widely discussed in the press strikes viewers differently than does a painting hung on the wall of a merchant's parlor or tucked inside a private album. A commemorative church modeled on medieval Russian antecedents loses meaning and comprehensibility when revolutionary politics and a modernist aesthetic replace monarchist politics and nostalgic aesthetics. Non-Russians looked at images of themselves produced by Soviet authorities with very different eyes than did the purveyors of socialist enlightenment. Photographs of the victims of Nazi atrocities mean different things when published in a 1940s Soviet newspaper or displayed in a Holocaust museum. SEEING INTO BEING In some ways, this periodization repeats and confirms traditional continuities and ruptures in Russian history. The objects and images from the pre-petrine period that are examined here reflect the hieratic and formulaic productions of a state and society suffused with religious thought and restricted in form and genre by Orthodox Christianity's suspicion of graven images. The reign of Peter the Great predictably brought an unmistakable change, with the introduction of Western imagery and the beginnings of more secular visual expression. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ushered in still more innovations, most dramatically with the development of new technologies (notably photography and film) and new systems of distribution in an expanding commercial market for mass-produced images. The Soviet era was characterized by greater political control and a sharply limited and highly directive range of messages. Again predictably, rampant consumerism and commercialized capitalism dominate the visual sphere in the post-Soviet period. In spite of the enduring power of this familiar periodization, some of the essays and images pose challenges to the reigning master narratives of Russian history and suggest alternative chronologies. Soviet visual culture, for instance, replicated some pre-petrine practices: in both periods, forms and meanings were highly regulated and deliberately limited. The increasingly vital public sphere of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where images and their meanings were routinely debated by diverse audiences, persisted, if in an attenuated form, into the Soviet era. The essays on the Soviet period also demonstrate the degree to which impeccable socialist concepts could be expressed through visual forms open to a surprising range of interpretations and robust, if often surreptitious, debate. Visual appeals to commerce and consumption lie at the heart of some of the most orthodox socialist creations examined here. Conversely, as Fredric Jameson and others have pointed out, commercial advertising looks a lot like propaganda for capitalism. The chronological organization of the chapters also allows readers to enter an ongoing discussion in the theoretical literature concerning the proposition that different eras of human history (usually implicitly western European and U.S. history) have variously esteemed or denigrated the visual. The essays compiled here indicate more continuity than discontinuity in the primacy of the visual in the hierarchy of the senses. Even as the modes and meanings of visual communication shift over time, and as the density of manufactured images increases with new technologies, the visual consistently remains a highly valued ingredient in the construction of identities, power structures, and forms of social communication. Different kinds of questions would arise if the essays were categorized non-chronologically. Clustering them by genre, for example, would allow paintings, buildings, or ceremonial regalia to be examined for information about their distinctive natures and histories. The essays here show that Russian painting, for instance, mediated between powerful institutions and viewing publics through the centuries. Painting played a prominent role in constructing national identity by representing Russia's relations with its divine protectors, its imperial acquisitions, and its western European allies and competitors. In other contexts, painting offered an opportunity for individuals to insert themselves on the historical stage. By examining this particular genre over time, readers can consider painting as an arena for communication between powerful institutions and viewing publics and as a method of normalizing, disseminating, and appropriating political power. The technologies involved in producing and disseminating images provide another basis for thinking about thematic links among the essays. In Russia's early history, few representational genres met the approval of the Orthodox Church, and little from the quotidian world of crafts production survives, leaving a limited visual legacy. The expansion of the range of visual genres in later centuries, especially with the appearance of mass production, raises questions about the changing historical conditions of visual cultures. Walter Benjamin famously argued that the 4 5 The fourth and final set of questions raised by our authors revolves around the idea of seeing as experience. These essays investigate questions raised by Walter Benjamin in his musings on the knowledge constructed by the flaneur strolling through the arcades of Paris. They offer exciting insights into the ways that the experience of seeing can be constructed as visual knowledge by those actively viewing the painted hall of a palace, toying with a bejeweled snuffbox, mingling with the well-dressed crowds at an elegant St. Petersburg musical soiree, or walking into a Soviet metro station. Beyond constructing knowledge, the experience of seeing can operate as a transformative force in history. The experience of looking at an icon's representation of an ideal reality or at a socialist realist evocation of a brave new world, the experience of participating in an eschatological ceremony on Red Square or looking at revolutionary crowds on Nevsky Prospect-all of these can change the parameters of the possible, the conceivable, and hence change actions and outcomes. This in itself offers a new angle on the study of Russian history and opens new possibilities for understanding how religious commitment, emancipation, imperial encounter, revolutionary transformation, or other crucial historical processes were shaped as human actors encountered the visual world around them. ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGIES The wide range of images and approaches represented here highlights the importance of the visual in Russian history and culture and the richness of the visual as an analytical sphere. The material could be organized in any number of ways, each drawing attention to a different set of issues and questions. Some confirm conventional interpretations; others show how a focus on visual culture challenges reigning paradigms. We have arranged the essays in conventional chronological order, which allows readers to picture Russia through time and to understand how ways of seeing and attitudes toward the visual changed over time. VALERIE A. KIVELSON AND JOAN NEUBERGER saturation of the visual field with mass-produced images resulted in new practices of seeing in the modern era. Essays in this book allow readers to compare viewing practices in a variety of technological contexts, revealing both changes over time and some unexpected similarities. For example, mass-produced images created for a consumer market connect filmgoers with movie stars much as religious icons connected worshippers with the divine, and as socialist realist works linked soviet spectators with a communist utopia. Clustering the essays by producer opens another set of questions. When does it matter that objects and images were created by the church or by the state, by commercial enterprises or by folk artisans, by men or by women, by dissidents or by defenders of the establishment? Do viewing practices differ when images are directed at elites in possession of arcane knowledge or at mass viewers, or at a national or international audience? Does the status of images as evidence change when they are meant to allure potential purchasers or when they are meant to convince viewers of the truth of a religious or political message? Linear chronology is convenient for thinking about the sweep of Russian history, but alternative linkages may refresh or even shift our understanding of the historical narrative and enable us to come up with new questions and new insights. RUSSIAN VISUAL CULTURE In a volume devoted to the artifacts of one national culture, it is hard to resist the urge to search for cultural uniqueness. In compiling these essays we found ourselves repeatedly asking if there was something uniquely Russian in the historical trajectory of the images or viewing practices analyzed here. Asking such a question poses significant intellectual dangers. We are wary of drawing broad conclusions based on a collection of essays that is not intended to provide definitive coverage of Russia's visual history. We are also reluctant to suggest that any trends we find might constitute a new master narrative. Nor do we wish to suggest that we have discovered fundamental or unchanging markers of what it means to be Russian, a condition that is surely fragmentary, diverse, and in flux. In global terms, we cannot declare particular elements of visual culture to be uniquely Russian without an extended comparative study. Nevertheless, in spite of these caveats, a number of trends emerge from the essays that seem to us important ways to rethink Russian history and culture. We present them here to stimulate discussion both about visual constructions of national identity and about visual experiences that transcend or subvert national traditions and issues of identity. Most striking to us is a conspicuous predisposition, across most of the thousand years covered in this book, for Russians to turn to the visual in order to summon a new reality into being, for them to use the experience of viewing as an engine of historical or eschatological transformation. This visual practice, which we call seeing into being, is most pronounced in the transcendent viewing experience associated with medieval and early modern religious imagery and in the transformative quality ascribed to Soviet socialist realism, but it appears in many other visual experiences discussed in this book. The recurrent and powerfully effective idea that it is possible to depict what exists just out of reach, just out of sight, was a central feature of Orthodox and Soviet iconography, but it also crops up in nineteenth-century painting, photography, and commercial artifacts, including popular woodcuts. The prevalence of seeing into 6 SEEING INTO BEING being in these essays makes a compelling case for a transformative, and perhaps particularly Russian, way of viewing. We do not mean to assert that all Russians adopted this mode of visual transcendence, or that it was equally in effect at all times, or that it was in effect only in Russia and never elsewhere, but the commitment to seeing into being accords well with a familiar Russian maximalist idealism, a belief in the perfectibility of humanity and in the possibility of transforming reality to match an ideal form. The very diversity of the images and analyses collected in this book, however, serves as a brake on overgeneralization. Seeing into being was less prominent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and in the post-Soviet years, when other modes of viewing became dominant. In these eras, perfectionist visionaries coexisted with people whose viewing practices were based on connoisseurship, consumerism, humor, erudition, and nostalgia. Some Russian viewers glared critically at the world around them while others looked at the accoutrements of middle-class life with hungry and approving eyes. And yet these types of viewing, which seem so secular and non-apocalyptic in other cultural contexts, seem marked (perhaps in hindsight) by a heightened transformative quality, by a special effort to bring another reality into being. Such caveats serve as a reminder that viewing practices are always historically situated and that seeing occurs in varying registers at different times, or even in the same time in different contexts. Overall, we believe that the recurrence of seeing into being in Russian visual experience is a significant finding. Two more specific, less sweeping aspects of a particularly Russian visuality emerge from these essays: the progressive westernization or modernization of the visual field and the overwhelming role of reigning authorities-the church, the state, and the party-in producing, shaping, and controlling images. Organized chronologically, the artifacts and images in this book show an unmistakable transition from something evidently Russian and premodern to something recognizably of a piece with the modern visual universe, much of which originated in western Europe. Identifying precisely what constitutes the Russian and premodern character of the earlier images or the Western, modern content of the later ones poses one kind of challenge. Explaining how that westernizing and modernizing of the visual field took place and what that transformation means constitutes a second. Although our authors, probably wisely, do not directly tackle the first, definitional question, they do address the second by attempting to identify a visual component in the interaction between Russia and the West. A number of authors find pockets of easy, unselfconscious appropriation of Western imagery, quite different from the intensely conscious and culturally fraught polarizing polemics familiar from other sources. Bourgeois photography and fashions in clothing, for instance, and the creation of fin-de-siecle stars of screen and stage served more as signifiers of prosperity, respectability, urbanity, sophistication, or up-to-the-minute modernity than as indicators of a specifically Russian cultural identification or a stance in the westernization debates. The unmistakable dominance of the ruling authorities in the production of the images and artifacts discussed in this volume raises another set of questions. This anthology conveys the impression that the state, with its ideological partners of church and then party, played a crucial role in producing Russian visual culture. That conclusion would support long-standing historical claims about the hypertrophy of the state in Russian history, but that impression 7 VALERIE A. KIVELSON AND JOAN NEUBERGER may be misleading. The conspicuous presence of the authorities may reflect the selection bias of scholars predisposed to take an interest in political power, or it may reflect the ability of the state to control the preservation of its own visual products. Many of our authors, however, stress their subjects' independence from state institutions. On this question, our suspicion is that the overriding presence of church, state, and party reflects a genuine and significant aspect of Russian visual history, rather than a spurious by-product of authorial focus. VISUAL CULTURE AND NEW HISTORICAL QUESTIONS If the essays in this book confirm familiar stories - of periodization, westernization, or state control- they also show that the visual can open up new lines of inquiry that enhance the study of history and culture. Attention to the visual introduces new topics as worthy historical ones and brings new aspects of the past under the historical gaze. This is one of the most productive contributions that any theoretical literature can make: to provoke new questions and new directions for investigation. Everyone interested in visual culture struggles to understand what distinguishes sight from the other senses, what gives seeing its unique power. People seem to have an instinctive sense that visual images are different from anything else, but defining that difference turns out to be devilishly hard. This subject has bothered and inspired thinkers since ancient times and has generated a huge literature that nonetheless leaves many questions unresolved. We do not intend to address the issues involved in the philosophical investigation into the nature of images or the physiological study of perception. Instead, the essays here demonstrate that images have been used differently and function differently than do texts. Such differences lead us to ask: What is being conveyed visually at any given time? What is being said visually that could not or would not be articulated in words or in print? These new questions enable rigorous comparison of the functions of the visual and the textual on a historical level. One of the most controversial aspects of the visual is the extent to which images are more open to interpretation than texts are. Because words are thought to express finite meanings, images can seem more open to interpretation than words are, but conversely, because words bear only an abstract and conventional relation to the objects they signify, images can seem more fixed in meaning. In this book we consider the ways images function as open or closed signifiers ill specific historical contexts and, in comparison with textual documents, whether they suffer more or less restriction in a controlled society, whether they can be read more or less subversively, and whether they can on occasion be subject to more blatant misreadings and misunderstandings. Some of the authors address these issues head on. A number of the essays analyze visual propaganda, which presupposes an ability to create closed or directed messages. Propaganda loomed large in Soviet life and in that era, as in the premodern era, images were assumed to have more or less set meanings with a range of relatively closed and predictable interpretations. Although today viewers may be alert to possible counter-readings and subversive interpretations of the visual, propagandists of all kinds assume that their scripted ceremonies and directive images can lead the viewer to the desired conclusion. Essays in this book provide evidence to confirm that propagandistic images were indeed frequently read in the prescribed manner, 8 SEEING INTO BEING which we, in our desire for subversive subtlety and heroism, are sometimes reluctant to accept. Although we tend to scoff at the simplistic efforts of propagandists, the images they produce often work in frighteningly effective ways, suggesting a power and a mystery inherent in the viewing process that continue to elude efforts to explain. Conversely, several of the authors here make the case that in politically constricted times, artists and filmmakers played on the inherent ambiguities of visual address to complicate and challenge the prevailing orthodoxy. Even the most conventional socialist realist films and paintings contained opportunities for diverse readings. Several essays on posters and popular prints illustrate how propagandistic images were read, misread, or parodied by their target audiences. Others show how messages were embedded-sometimes deliberately, at other times accidentally-in visual imagery that contradicted, undermined, or destabilized the official verbal scripts. Architects in the 1950s, for instance used unimpeachable socialist rhetoric in textual descriptions of their work while incorporating prohibited modernist visual forms in their structures. Stalinism and Nazism could be subtly linked visually at a time when verbal comparisons were out of the question. These instances of visuals functioning against the thrust of official discourse suggest, first, that images can sometimes operate in a more open, less prescriptive mode than words can and, second, that in a society like the Soviet Union, where communication was closely monitored, the visual can be used to convey complex, multivalent ideas. The ambiguity that characterizes the visual allows multiple messages to be expressed safely in a dangerous context. Some of the images that move us most potently or intrigue us most hauntingly are those whose ambiguity overrides the prevailing political or cultural binaries. One finding that surfaces frequently in our authors' analyses is that producers of images expressed their ambivalence and anxieties, acknowledged or unacknowledged, in specifically visual form because the visual can encompass dialectical tensions or conflicts without requiring that they be sorted out, analyzed, or resolved. Here, visual images function like humor, incorporating not only what artists and others cannot say out loud but also what they do not want to confront fully. In Andrei Bolotov's domestic album, watercolor landscapes were skillfully contoured to embody the landlords' subliminal fears of serfs' latent anger, fears that found no expression in the accompanying texts and had no place within the conventions of the arcadian idyll that the album purports to celebrate. The capacity of the visual to express unresolved or unacknowledged contradictions makes images particularly suitable for expressing ambivalent and layered views of time itself. The chronological layout and sweep of the essays collected here emphasize the degree to which images can engage with the past, whether in nostalgic, anguished, celebratory, humorous, or critical mode. The past appears frequently in visual artifacts, where it is consciously or unconsciously appropriated, redeployed, reinvented, and reimagined. Even images that aggressively deny the existence or the relevance of a historical legacy are haunted by that past through its conspicuous absence. The integral connection between history and the visual is not only fundamental to our explorations here but is inscribed in the artifacts themselves. Images create particular kinds of dialogue with the past, whether consciously or unconsciously. The Cap of Monomakh, for instance, a crown of medieval steppe origin, acquired an 9 VALERIE A. KIVELSON AND JOAN overlay of Russian Orthodox and dynastic ornamentation, which has allowed diverse political and symbolic appropriations by later rulers up to and including President Vladimir Putin. In market-driven contexts as well, the humorous redeployment of familiar images-using Viktor Vasnetsov's nineteenth-century painting Bogatyrs in post-Soviet advertising, for example-can evoke feelings about history, gender, and nation without explicitly labeling them. In a highly self-conscious return to one of the key moments in the history of Russian painting, a number of late Soviet nonconformist artists reimagined and repainted Kazimir Malevich's Black Square to position themselves in the Russian artistic tradition. Through their creative dialogue with this visual icon, they defined themselves as artists and, in so doing, redefined Malevich's legacy. Representational media, such as painting, seem to promise easy access to a static and transparent past, but they often simultaneously underscore the elusiveness of the past and the difficulties of recovering historical experience. Their ability to fix a single moment can make viewers aware of the invisible, unknowable instants before and after the one depicted, evoking a poignant sense of the distance of the past. What the art historian James Elkins wrote about painting rings true for other media: "The ephemeral instant and the unending duration are forced very close together." 1 Obsolescence, decay, and reconstruction all play important roles in shaping images and their meanings in the present. Photographs of the northern Russian forest engulfing the sites of an abandoned Soviet prison camp illustrate this paradox. Images of the natural beauty that surrounds the unnatural prison enhance understanding of the prison experience, while at the same time, the sight of the vibrant forest overtaking the ruined barracks makes the harsh realities of the prison regime seem irretrievably distant in time. All historical sources reach out across a chasm in time. Photographs and films appear to bridge this gulf because celluloid bears the molecular imprint of the light that once reflected off the photographic subject. This physical property creates a tension, identified by Roland Barth es, between a sense of the irrefutable reality of the moment captured in a photograph and an awareness of the constructed nature of images and the vagaries of visual perception. In spite of the ever-increasing sophistication of technologies for altering photographs and in spite of vigorous popular suspicion of the authority of photographic evidence, people today still tend to view historical photographs and films as direct links to the past. The persistent impression that photographs and films depict an unmediated past distinguishes these visual media from other historical documents. The essays in this book that treat photographic sources offer a variety of strategies for reading them, for acknowledging their contingencies while still valuing the extraordinary information they contain. The idea that technology can create entirely new modes of visual experience leads back to the question of whether there is something special about the modern in visual terms. Defining the modern is not a new problem, but multiple and conflicting answers arise when it is posed in connection with visuality. While we share the thinking of current Soviet historians who stress the USSR's participation in a pan-European modernity, we also see visual continuity or, rather, striking throwbacks to Muscovite visual practices. In specifically visual terms, distinctively modern technologies of power were put to use in the Soviet drive for mass mobilization, but the actual visual instruments of modern power operate very much like premodern ones in their use of the time-tested Russian practice of seeing into being. As Benjamin argued, the 10 SEEING NEUBERGER INTO BEING permeation of commercial and urban settings with mass-produced posters, newspapers, and other mass media affected the way viewers experienced modernity, in particular by desacralizing the visual field. Nonetheless, the essays in this book show that the evocative, inspirational, transformative use and reception of images carries across the divide between hand-painted icons and the most casually produced advertisements. Seeing exerts a potent force on the human imagination, a force that is conditioned by the kinds of cultural, historical, and aesthetic forces addressed by essays in this book. Our vulnerability to searing images in the morning paper demonstrates this power, as does the way that certain images come to encapsulate particular moments and events. Videos of the collapsing World Trade Center, photographs of humiliated prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and inflammatory though largely unseen newspaper cartoons of Muhammad provide the most recent instances as we write this introduction, but by the time this book is published, equally indelible images will displace them. In everyday life, people imagine themselves, their surroundings, their present, and their past through what they see. Focusing on visuality adds an entirely new dimension to the study of Russian literature, history, art, and culture. NOTES-1. James Elkins, Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings (New York: Routledge, 2004), 140. 11