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13 1 Lubok and the Prerevolutionary Era The Icon The language of comics on Russian soil dates back to the country’s earliest religious icon-making tradition, which is to say, to the roots of Christianity and thus of the nation itself.1 According to Bruce Lincoln, “while frescoes and mosaics proclaimed the glory of God in Keiv’s churches, paintings done on panels of well-seasoned alder, cypress, or lime (over which a layer of linen had been stretched and covered with several thin coats of gesso) became the windows through which the people of Rus entered the world of the spirit to receive the grace of God” (22).2 Icons, having come to Rus (along with the new religion) by way of Byzantium in the tenth century, served both a religious (as objects of prayer and veneration) as well as an illustrative function: the severe, “transcendent” portraits of saints, the Madonna and the savior; heavenly scenes and biblical events, all brought to resplendent life before the eye of the illiterate believer a world he otherwise could only imagine.3 Indeed, the power of the icon, which functioned according to its own “unearthly” representational schema,4 exemplified early Russian culture’s strong inclination toward the visual.5 So strong was this predilection, in fact, that icons in Russia took on supernatural characteristics far beyond their representational role; in this recently (and in many senses enduringly) pagan culture, they were venerated as manifestations of the divine in and of themselves, possessed of miraculous healing and protective powers. Peasants knew them as bogi (“gods”). They even substituted to a degree for a weakened political culture in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a period when the Russians languished under the “Tatar yoke” of the conquering Mongols, while monastic icon-making flourished. As described by James Billington, “the omnipresent holy pictures provided 14 Historical Background an image of higher authority that helped compensate for the diminished stature of temporal princes. In Russia, the icon often came to represent in effect the supreme communal authority before which one swore oaths, resolved disputes, and marched into battle” (31). Since at least the thirteenth century, some icons included figures of saints in their margins, and, as in the Byzantine tradition, text identifying the subject.6 Icons depicting the Last Judgment, following the formulae of frescoes and other large-scale works, also organize large numbers of figures in tiers about Christ pantakrator (e.g., Icon of the Last Judgment, Novgorod school, seventeenth century, in Rice: 72). Sequential narratives, placing the same character in different temporal registers in the panel, are also not uncommon. Icons representing the story of St. Elias (Elijah) from the Novgorod and Northern schools (sixteenth century) typically show the saint being tended by an angel in the lower right, while in the upper portions of the image he is rising in glory on a chariot of fire, as his disciple strives to hold on to his mantle. The fiery chariot, incidentally, is often rendered as a red or yellow circle, in the manner of a graphic element, rather than “realistically.” This impulse toward longer-form narratives, deployed outright in panels, sees particular expression in the biographical (zhiteinyi) icons of saints. These feature a portrait of the subject, framed by a dozen or more incidents from his life along the margins, as in the hagiographic icon of the fourth-century Roman general St. Theodore (Fyodor) Stratelates, from the Novgorod school, early sixteenth century. These scenes, Rice reports, may have first introduced folkloristic motifs along with contemporary dress and other details (71). What also strikes the viewer of this work is the prominent role played by the fourteen sequential panels accompanied by text: not precisely “marginal,” they are large enough to form a prominent and unified design feature of the work. Theodore’s life—with its embrace of Christianity, various martyr’s tortures, and crucifixion—unfolds chronologically in the panels, while his central portrait, holding the sword “symbolizing sovereign power” (Rice: 73), embodies his dignified, eternal presence. The beholder immediately takes in both the historical and the transcendent at once, then turns back and forth from the particular to the overarching in the course of contemplation.7 As icons develop through the medieval era and secular subjects start to appear, the turn to sequential narrative strategies comes to the fore in some works—as if the framing “incidents” of St. Theodore’s portrait come to take over the center itself. This is especially marked in the...

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