Slavic Languages and Societies Commons^™

Visual Displays In Space Station Culture: An Archaeological Analysis, Justin St. P. Walsh, Alice C. Gorman, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Articles and Research

We offer an archaeological analysis of the visual display of “space heroes” and Orthodox icons in the Russian Zvezda module of the International Space Station (ISS). This study is the first systematic investigation of material culture at a site in space. The ISS has now been continuously inhabited for 20 years. Here, focusing on the period 2000–2014, we use historic imagery from NASA archives to track the changing presence of 78 different items in a single zone. We also explore how ideas about which items are appropriate for display and where to display them originated in earlier Soviet and Russian …

Archaeology Of The International Space Station, Justin Walsh, Alice Gorman, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Data Sets

The explicit goal of the International Space Station Archaeological Project (ISSAP) is to provide an understanding of material culture as a key component of life in space, on par with the research by biomedical and psychological scholars that has been ongoing since the 1960s. We take as our inspiration a phrase first used in the National Academy of Sciences report Human Factors in Long-Duration Spaceflight, which described a crewed spacecraft as “a microsociety in a miniworld” (Lindsley 1972, 23). One of our primary methods is the cataloguing of people and elements of material culture (objects and built spaces) from photographs …

Eternity In Low Earth Orbit: Icons On The International Space Station, Wendy Salmond, Justin Walsh, Alice Gorman

Art Faculty Articles and Research

This paper investigates the material culture of icons on the International Space Station as part of a complex web of interactions between cosmonauts and the Russian Orthodox Church, reflecting contemporary terrestrial political and social aairs. An analysis of photographs from the International Space Station (ISS) demonstrated that a particular area of the Zvezda module is used for the display of icons, both Orthodox and secular, including the Mother of God of Kazan and Yuri Gagarin. The Orthodox icons are frequently sent to space and returned to Earth at the request of church clerics. In this process, the icons become part …

Viktor Vasnetsov’S New Icons: From Abramtsevo To The Paris “Exposition Universelle” Of 1900, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Articles and Research

This essay examines Russian artist Viktor Vasnetsov’s search for a new kind of prayer icon in the closing decades of the nineteenth century: a hybrid of icon and painting that would reconcile Russia’s historic contradictions and launch a renaissance of national culture and faith. Beginning with his icons for the Church of the “Savior Not Made by Hands” at Abramtsevo in 1880–81, for two decades Vasnetsov was hailed as an innovator, the four icons he sent to the Paris “Exposition Universelle” of 1900 marking the culmination of his vision. After 1900, his religious painting polarized elite Russian society and was …

Ellis H. Minns And Nikodim Kondakov’S The Russian Icon (1927), Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"Kondakov’s magnum opus [The Russian Icon] failed to win an audience. Though it appeared just in time for a surge of popular interest in Russian icons abroad, it never became the book of choice for the English-speaking public seeking a guide through the ‘dark forest’ of the icon’s history... My chapter offers some suggestions for why this crude caricature of Kondakov’s work took hold in the 1920s and became axiomatic throughout the Soviet period. In particular, it considers the role that Minns’s translation may have played, however inadvertently, in cementing this impression. Minns’s interventions in and framing of …

Play This Paper: Forms Of Time In The Open World, Branching Narrative, Roleplaying Game, Jimmy Evans

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

This paper is an analysis of chronotopes in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt that reveals how the procedurality of video games might suggest a refined heteroglossic form. Synthesizing contemporary american philosopher Ian Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric with the materialist linguistic theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, this ultimately hypertextual and interactive article reflects on language as Bakhtin once did: as "agent and agency” (MPL 146). After detailing how the three major processes of the game coordinate spacetime, it is necessary to conclude that its kaleidoscopic nature provides new opportunities for the rendering of the geometry of thought in what is a …

Readers In Pursuit Of Popular Justice: Unraveling Conflicting Frameworks In Lolita, Innesa Ranchpar

English (MA) Theses

This thesis examines the competing frameworks in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita—the fictional Foreword written by John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. and the manuscript written by Humbert Humbert—in order to understand to what extent the construction manipulates the rhetorical appeal. While previous scholarship isolates the two narrators or focuses on their unreliability, my examination concentrates on the interplay of the frameworks and how their conflicting objectives can be problematic for readers. By drawing upon various theories by Michel Foucault from Power/Knowledge and Louis Althusser’s “On Ideology,” I look into how John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. and Humbert Humbert use authoritative voices to directly …

Embroidery In The Circle Of The Last Romanovs, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Articles and Research

This article essay examines the liturgical embroideries associated with the Empress Alexandra Fedorovna and her sister Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fedorovna. It suggests that the sisters’ needlework for sacred purposes was invested with a significance not seen in elite Russian society since the late seventeenth century. At a time when the arts of Orthodoxy were undergoing a state-sponsored renaissance, who was better suited to lead the resurgence of liturgical embroidery than the wife and sister-in-law of the Emperor, the last in a long line of royal women seeking to assert their piety and their power through traditional women’s work? In the …

Pavel Tretiakov’S Icons, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"Between 1890 and his death in 1898, the Moscow art collector Pavel Tretiakov acquired sixty-two icons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With this comparatively late entry into the world of icons, Tretiakov laid the foundation for one of the world’s greatest collections of medieval Russian paintings. Why is it, then, that Tretiakov’s icons are today so rarely mentioned and so hard to find? The most practical explanation is that they were simply swallowed up into the vast repositories of the reorganized State Tretiakov Gallery in 1930, along with thousands of icons from churches and private collections nationalized afer 1917. …

Stalin's Russia: Visions Of Happiness, Omens Of Terror, Mark Konecny, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Creative Works – Exhibitions

"In 1970 an American high school teacher began a thirty-year journey into Stalin’s Russia. The items you see here were selected from more than 8,000 artifacts conserved on that journey.

Tom Ferris (the teacher) began collecting early, and he collected just about everything. But in 1970 Tom found a focus for his collecting and a new love and passion – Russia herself...

Tom’s dream was that his collection of Russian memorabilia be preserved, kept safe, and made available for study so people could understand how Stalin came to be; so Soviet history would be real, not abstract; so future generations …

Review Of Isaak Levitan: Lyrical Landscape By Avril King, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Articles and Research

Wendy Salmond reviews Isaak Levitan: Lyrical Landscape by Avril King.

An Imperial Collection: Exploring The Hammers' Icons, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"Changing hands one last time, in the 1950s, for many years the icons at BJU lived as it were incognito, the details of their glamorous origins largely forgotten. Reuniting this core group-the cream of the Hammers' imperial icons--with others that passed into American museums in the 1930s allows us to appreciate the full significance of Armand and Victor Hammer's foray into marketing icons Americans.Viewed in isolation, most of their "imperial icons" are perhaps no mo than a poignant reminder of the vast destruction and dislocation of Orthodox culture during the Soviet Cultural Revolution. Taken together, however, they paint a vivid …

Foreword To Irina Yazykova, Hidden And Triumphant: The Underground Struggle To Save Russian Iconography, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Books and Book Chapters

Wendy Salmond's foreword to Irina Yazykova's Hidden and Triumphant: The Underground Struggle to Russian Iconography, in which Yazykova discusses how the art of icon painting survived during years of Russian Communism and is now poised to launch a new era that reflects modern experience.

Introduction To Visualizing Russia: Fedor Solntsev And Crafting A National Past, Wendy Salmond, Cynthia Hyla Whittaker

Art Faculty Books and Book Chapters

Wendy Salmond and Cynthia Hyla Whittaker's introduction to Visualizing Russia: Fedor Solntsev and Crafting a National Past, which "elaborates the origins of the Russian style in the 1830s and 1840s and celebrates the seminal role that Fedor Grigorevich Solntsev (1801-1892) played in its development."

How America Discovered Russian Icons: The Soviet Loan Exhibition Of 1930-32, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Books and Book Chapters

On 14 October 1930, the first exhibition of Russian icons ever to take place in the United States opened at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Over the next nineteen months it traveled to nine venues across the country, introducing the American public to a form of medieval painting virtually unknown outside Russia. Billed as the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Loan Exhibition," its avowed goal was to share with the outside world the full story of Russian icon painting's evolution from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries, thereby adding a vital missing chapter to the history of medieval …

Russian Icons And American Money, 1928-1938, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Articles and Research

The article explores the marketing tactics and consumer expectations with regards to icons released in the street markets and provincial cities of Soviet Russia and acquired by American collectors from 1928-1938. These icons, including those from Byzantium in the tenth century, were seen as cultural commodities during the Russian revolution and the subsequent socialist construction. The Soviet apparatus Antikvariat was tasked with appraising the icon collections held by the Gosmuzeifond or the State Museum Reserve for exports.

Review Of The Iconostasis Of Peter The Great In The Peter And Paul Cathedral In St. Petersburg (1722-1729), Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Articles and Research

Wendy Salmond reviews The Iconostasis of Peter the Great in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg (1722-1729) by Julia Gerasimova.

A Matter Of Give And Take: Peasant Crafts And Their Revival In Late Imperial Russia, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Articles and Research

Discusses the movement to revive peasant crafts in late imperial Russia. Resurrection of the handicrafts by the local peasant women in the 1870's, Russian artist Elena Penelova and her designs such as the bedside table with rosette motif and the interior of a peasant hut, Abramtsevo experiment, School of Folk Arts's teachings on drawing and traditional women's handwork to peasant girls.

Arts And Crafts In Late Imperial Russia: Reviving The Kustar Art Industries, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Books and Book Chapters

Arts and Crafts in Late Imperial Russia is the first account of the revival of Russia's kustar art industriespeasant crafts of wood carving, toy production, lacemaking, embroidery, and weaving - from its origins in the populist debates and philanthropic impulses of the early 1870s to its climax in 1913, with the display of its achievements at the Second All-Russian Kustar Exhibition in St. Petersburg. Like every Western nation in the late nineteenth century Russia experienced a widespread movement to revive its traditional arts and crafts. This study uncovers the complex motivations that led a broad cross section of educated Russian …

Review Of Russian Housing In The Modern Age: Design And Social History, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Articles and Research

Wendy Salmond reviews Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History, edited by William Craft Brumfield and Blair Ruble.

Design Education And The Quest For National Identity In Late Imperial Russia: The Case Of The Stroganov School, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Articles and Research

Traces the history of the Russian arts and crafts school in Moscow, from its prehistory (1825-1859) as a drawing school founded by Count Sergei Stroganov, through the directorships of Victor Butovsky and Nikolai Globa, to the years after 1917 when the school was subsumed into the VHUTEMAS. Explores the theories of design and craft taught at the school, and the art nouveau-like style developed there in the later years of the 19th c.

Review Of The Origins Of Modernism In Russian Architecture By William C. Brumfield, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Articles and Research

Wendy Salmond reviews The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture by William C. Brumfield.

The Solomenko Embroidery Workshops, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Articles and Research

This article reevaluates the Solomenko Embroidery Workshops in the context of late nineteenth century Russia's rapid establishment of art colonies and centers dedicated to restoring the handicraft industries of the kustar.