Subscribe to this RSS feed
2025. Vol.10. №1.

Images of peasants in the cheap popular prints of the World War I

May 20 2025

Mikhalenko N.V. Images of peasants in the cheap popular prints of the World War I // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2025. V.10. №1. P. 70-76.

EDN: IEGIBS

Annotation

Propaganda cheap popular prints of the World War I were designed to raise the patriotic spirit of the defenders of the Fatherland, to praise the ingenuity, bravery and resourcefulness of both soldiers and people in the rear, to create an image of the weak and harmless enemy. One of the symbols of the people’s war in both military pictures of the 19th century and in popular prints of the 20th century was the peasant, most often in a red shirt, fighting an enemy with agricultural implements or with bare hands. The bravura signature and visual means of popular prints — the coloristic and dynamic juxtaposition of the hero and enemies, the contrast in size of figures — emphasized the power and strength of the peasant. The image of the peasant woman in a sarafan at war was intended to show the unity of the people fighting the enemy and to emphasize the strong character of the Russian woman. Popular prints of the World War I took many images and plot moves from the pictures of the Patriotic War of 1812; since in the early 20th century, in the artistic environment, interest in folklore and folk art was very high, satirical popular prints became a kind of synthetic genre that absorbed traditional content in new verbal and visual forms.

Keywords

Peasants, World War I, Patriotic War of 1812, collection of D. A. Rovinsky, folk pictures, “Today’s Lubok”, V. V. Mayakovsky, K. S. Malevich.

About the author

Natalia V. Mikhalenko, PhD (Philology), Senior Researcher, А. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Povarskaya St., 25a, Moscow, 121069, Russia.
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

Full text

 

Additional Info

2024. Vol.9. №3.

Peasant cosmos of the Russian avant-garde and N. F. Fedorov’s aesthetic supra-moralism

Oct 25 2024

Titarenko E. M. Peasant cosmos of the Russian avant-garde and N. F. Fedorov’s aesthetic supra-moralism // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2024. V.9. №3. P. 105-118.

DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2024-9-3-105-118

Annotation

The author conducts a comparative analysis of the peasant cosmos representations in the Russian avant-garde art and of Nikolai Fedorov’s aesthetic supra-moralism based on the works of visual art, articles, treatises, autobiographies and letters of K. Malevich, N. Goncharova, P. Filonov and V. Chekrygin. Aesthetic supra-moralism as the highest morality or “Universal Synthesis” is Fedorov’s religious-philosophical doctrine promoting the idea of cosmism as a project of world order based on the all-unity and a synthesis of science, art and religion. Avant-garde artists expressed their understanding of the human involvement in the multifaceted and complex spatial relationships through images of the peasant world. By comparing the anthropological projection of the Russian avant-garde art with Fedorov’s project of aesthetic supra-moralism, the author shows the similarity between the artistic images of peasant cosmos and the cosmic ideas about the correlation between macrocosm (universe) and microcosm (individuals). In this context, the author explains Malevich’s return to figurativeness and anthropocentrism in his second peasant cycle. The article also considers cosmic intuitions of the Russian avant-garde as related to the perception and interpretation of the sacred church space and of the nature as a temple. Feodorov’s ekphrasis of the Orthodox church describes the liturgical image of all-unity and kinship, uniting the peasant world as a cosmos. Malevich reduces this description to a color image or a feeling, in which the temple’s objectivity dissolves.

Keywords

Peasantry, Russian avant-garde of the first quarter of the 20th century, peasant cosmos in art, suprematism, K. S. Malevich, analytical art, N. F. Fedorov’s aesthetic supra-moralism, cosmism.

About the author

Evgeny M. Titarenko, PhD (Philosophy), Associate Professor, Faculty of Philology, Saint Petersburg State University; Senior Researcher, Center for Cosmism Studies, Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. Universitetskaya Nab., 7–9, Saint Petersburg, 199034, Russia.
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

Full text

 

Additional Info