Rites of Place: Public Commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe

The Portrait Mode: Zhukovsky, Pushkin, and the Gallery of 1812

 The Portrait Mode: Zhukovsky, Pushkin, and the Gallery of 1812 Luba Golburt The aim of any commemoration is to define and perpetuate popular historical knowledge. Thus, the forms commemoration takes are also essentially forms of knowledge that entail different modes of engagement and different objects of knowing, and the study of commemoration is of necessity also an epistemological project.Originating from these general premises,this essay considers a specific commemorative genre—the portrait; a specific period when it emerges as one of the most compelling such genres in Russia and all across Europe—the early 1800s; the history of the best-known Russian commemorative space that has housed portraits for nearly two centuries— the War Gallery of 1812 in St. Petersburg; and the epistemological mode that focalizes the issues of access to and representation of history raised by the portrait and the gallery—what I will here call the portrait mode.1 ——— One of the most powerful symbols of post-Napoleonic Russian nationhood , the War Gallery of 1812 was commissioned in the fall of 1818 at the Aachen Congress, in the midst of negotiations over the withdrawal of Allied troops from France and the confluence of several spectacular royal entourages.2 The congress put on display the victorious faces of European power and became the venue where many portrait painters sought lucra-  luba golburt tive commissions. A painter who arrived in Aachen in the retinue of the Duke of Kent, George Dawe (1781–1829) met Tsar Alexander I through the intercession of Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830), the most famous English portraitist in attendance,and quickly received an invitation to travel to St. Petersburg and execute some 332 portraits of Russian generals who had fought in the Napoleonic campaign.The Gallery of 1812 was to be an entirely new undertaking, comparable in spirit only to Windsor Castle’s Waterloo Chamber, which was then in its early stages of construction and was to showcase fewer than thirty portraits of the conquering European royalty and High Command,as commissioned from Lawrence by the future King George IV in 1814. Far exceeding the Waterloo Chamber in size, the Russian gallery—in its portraits’ sheer numerousness, broad membership, and orderly alignment—articulated new and distinctive conceptions of history , commemoration, and the national body, even as it also aimed to conserve and affirm earlier, monarch-centered and rank-based hierarchies of heroism. The gallery space was designed by Carlo Rossi (1775–1849),the Italianborn Russian architect responsible for many of St.Petersburg’s empire-style buildings. It opened with great pomp on December 25, 1826, the date (Christmas) deliberately chosen to commemorate the banishment of the Grande Armée from Russian territory.The product of an international creative team—Rossi,Dawe,and his Russian assistants Vasilii (Wilhelm) Golicke (1802–1848) and the serf painter Aleksandr Poliakov (1801–1835)— the gallery was an artistic and political manifesto as much for foreign as for domestic consumption. It paraded a nation and a leadership that were numerous, uniform, masculine, and heroic, while also ritualizing a particular form of engagement with national history: through the idealized and theatricalized faces of romantic portraiture, experienced both one at a time and en masse. Much about the gallery was new and unique, but its commission also crystallized preexisting and ongoing developments in high-art circulation, historical representation, and commemorative practice—all subjects of ambivalence and conceptual flux that this essay seeks to define. The gallery ’s evolution through the past two centuries reveals it as an uncontested patriotic space, a stable yet accommodating commemorative model that has suited very dissimilar political regimes and changed little over time.3 Leaving aside the gallery’s two-hundred-year-long history and its resulting present-day palimpsestic structure,this essay reconstructs its conceptual origins in the post-Enlightenment explorations of new historical forms and pinpoints the cultural assumptions that the gallery as a space and as a genre shared with Russian romanticism, particularly with the single most influ- the portrait mode  ential lyric articulation of the 1812 campaign: Vassily Zhukovsky’s “The Bard in the Camp of Russian Warriors” (“Pevets vo stane russkikh voinov,” 1812).The conception of history underlying the gallery was ambiguous. It emphasized, on the one hand, the power of ordered and ranked assemblies united in a single national cause and the resultant image of a homogeneous nation and yet, on...