Material Witnesses in Moscow is a web-based multimedia resource that enables visitors to learn about Russia through things.
Entry to Izmailovo Kremlin, a theme park constructed in the style of Russia before Peter the Great’s Westernizing reforms. The Izmailovo Kremlin is part of the complex that is also home to the Vernisazh market, the source of most of the objects exhibited on this website.
We present a virtual exhibit of Russian objects, from matryoshki to monuments, accompanied by descriptive information, analytical essays, interactive maps, timelines, as well as images, audio, and video. Navigating through photographs, maps, video, and text allows visitors to discover how each object is caught up in a complex web of cultural, historical, and political associations. Our site is devoted to illuminating the individual lives that these objects touched in historical context and exploring how the past manifests its presence through material and visual culture in the Russian-speaking world today.
At the Lefty (Levsha) flea market in the far outskirts of Moscow, we encountered a figurine of Lenin (countless examples of which were created throughout the Soviet period) embellished with a chain necklace and wearing a hat consisting of a bell covered with the patina of antiquity. Aficionados of historical irony may be struck by the fact that Lenin’s regime brought a wave of iconoclasm targeting religious objects such as church bells, many of which were melted down for the purpose of building socialism. Lenin himself ended up transformed into a sacred relic on display in the heart of Moscow, while his avatar keeps uneasy company with the bell resting upon his head.
Some of the objects in our virtual exhibit are quite old, while others were made recently; some are one-of-a-kind traditional crafts, while others are mass-produced objects that have traveled from hand to hand throughout their life spans. We illustrate ways in which these objects connect people to one another, as well as to culture, broadly defined as ways of thinking and being that people construct in order to understand themselves and create collective identities: history, literature, science, politics, and the world of ideas. Ultimately we aim to show how things, in the Russian context and beyond, testify about the multiple dimensions of being human.
Irina Frolova at work at the Vernisazh market among the old wooden wares salvaged and decorated by herself and her fellow artists. Some of the artwork pays tribute to Ivan Bilibin, who revived folk styles and added a modernist flair at the turn of the twentieth century in such works as the depiction of the mythological bird-woman Sirin, seen in the background on a wooden basin just to the left of Irina.
Places
A sign welcoming visitors to the Vernisazh. The blue floral designs evoke the style of porcelain painting named for the village of Gzhel, where it originated, hinting at the wares for sale at the market. The sign reads: “Thank you to everyone who loves the Vernisazh or is simply not indifferent [to it]! It is you who have preserved this unique cultural and historical landmark of Moscow!”
Our site also presents an opportunity to learn about the spatial contexts in which we are situating our objects, and the layers of history within them: the Vernisazh market; the Izmailovo Kremlin, the pre-Petrine theme park to which the market is adjacent; and the larger Izmailovo neighborhood in Moscow. We treat the market and its environs themselves as objects that we are exhibiting, aiming to convey the sensory experience of the market, and to provide encounters with the people who bring it to life. Our site strives to show what makes the Vernisazh market unique but also what makes it representative of such markets in post-Soviet space and beyond. We will situate the Vernisazh in the context of Moscow markets and European markets more broadly.
Guiding Questions and Goals
When we first set out to explore the Vernisazh market, a series of questions guided us and went on to shape the creation of this website
First, we wondered: for those who are selling their old belongings, what stories do they tell about these objects? As we came to know the market, we also met people who told stories about objects that they had made themselves, and this became just as interesting for us. Sometimes it was difficult to separate fact from fancy in the stories our merchants told, and we found that to be a notable thing in itself.
As we gazed at the objects for sale, we sought to learn through which channels and cultural pathways they had circulated across their object-biographies. And we sought to discover what the lives of these various objects could tell us about everyday culture as well as the individual lives they touched in historical context.
Turning to the Vernisazh itself, as we explored it we were curious about the role of this market in terms of forming a Russian identity. In a time of rising nationalism in Russia, fueled by both tsarist and Soviet nostalgia that the state manipulates effectively, is the Vernisazh a site where this sort of ideological memory-work takes place? Or does it serve to provide an alternative, unofficial vision of what it means to be Russian?
We certainly saw some ideologically charged artifacts for sale, including t-shirts depicting Putin as a punitive father-figure on the world stage; but other objects depicting Putin, like our presidential matryoshka, don’t convey pro-Kremlin sentiments in nearly the same way.
Two t-shirts for sale at the Vernisazh. On the left, the image of camouflage-wearing Putin astride a snarling bear is inscribed “Forward, Russia [Rossiia vperyod]” with the letters decorated in the floral khokhloma style associated with traditional culture and folk authenticity. On the right, we see Putin poised to inflict corporal punishment on world leaders Hollande, Merkel, and Obama, who are depicted as wayward children. The text reads: “Do you now finally understand how naughty you’ve been?”
The multiplicity of the types of objects at the market challenges a monolithic definition of Russianness; instead, a vibrant pluralism emerges. However, we did note some recurring motifs pertaining to nostalgia and the rebirth of traditional crafts. The Vernisazh market is constantly changing; for example, in recent years a section of the market has been transformed into what is now known as the New Vernisazh, a site explicitly aimed at younger generations and trafficking in nostalgia for the Soviet period, as opposed to the pre-Petrine period evoked by other parts of the Izmailovo Kremlin complex. The writings on our website thus draw upon a particular historical moment that we captured, and our continuing study of the Vernisazh market and its larger spatial context as these change and evolve.
Instagram background at the New Vernisazh, styled as a Soviet apartment interior complete with ancient rotary phone and iconic wall rug.
This website is for everyone interested in Russia: both area specialists and the broader public. Visitors who have a specific topic in mind can enter it into the Search box in the sidebar; to explore what this site has to offer, please peruse the menu and tabs.
Our site is devoted to promoting learning and collaboration; it serves as a freely-available teaching resource (akin to the Seventeen Moments in Soviet History site) that brings together scholars to share ideas and projects, as well as more broadly enables visitors to learn about Russia, and Russians, through material and visual culture.
As you explore our exhibits, you will meet individual merchants who ply their trade at the Vernisazh. Others whose stories we would like to tell include sellers of old restored toys who have mixed feelings about Americans; construction workers who are players in the market’s shadow economy; a fur hat maker from the Caucasus; a self-taught wood sculptor; former actors peddling wares in the flea market area of the market; and makers of model lighthouses and banya (Russian sauna) accessories who reminisce about a time of warmer relations between our two countries.
Abdul, a fur hat maker from Dagestan in the North Caucasus.
The objects that we display here provide ways to talk about people through whose lives these objects have traveled— whether they made the object; found it, spruced it up, and sold it; or whether they cherish it as a prized possession—to draw out the humanity of people who might otherwise be seen as stereotypes or abstractions. We foreground stories of creativity and creation in often challenging circumstances, as we strive to have distinctive individuals emerge from the abstraction known (and often scorned, distrusted, feared) as Russia. Enabling visitors to learn about Russia through its art and artifacts can promote understanding across borders, an idea that our interlocutors in Russia met with great enthusiasm.
A merchant who initially approached us to chastise us for our gullibility in purchasing what was sold to us as an antique, but what appeared to her experienced eye to be an obvious forgery. On a subsequent visit to the market, we spoke to her again, and found her to have a warm personality and a radiant smile.
The U.S. and Russia have long had a rocky relationship, and while this adversarial dynamic sometimes threatens to dominate how Americans perceive Russia, our project aims to contribute to a much-needed counter-narrative. We are not seeking to idealize nor sugarcoat Russia. Our approach combines a critical lens on the system and a compassionate view of the people. For Anglophone readers of the mainstream press, it can be difficult to see Russia in ways other than through the filter of that nation’s malicious hackers and saber-rattling leadership. We aim to give visitors a more nuanced picture of Russia and the people who dwell there, and in this way our research is part of a larger project of cultural diplomacy.
We believe that projects in the Digital Humanities (DH), including this one, have the potential to advance the mission of cultural diplomacy –that is, to foster intercultural understanding even among individuals whom geopolitics have pitted against one another. Cultural diplomacy can range from government-sponsored programs (such as the Cold-War-era programs of cultural exchange between U.S. and USSR) to grassroots-based citizen diplomacy. We are interested in exploring what new possibilities the digital world presents. Our site will be freely available, and we are eager to cultivate broader participation as well as to build intellectual community that extends to Russia as well as the U.S., where we are situated. We envision this site as a public resource and an on-going conversation.
Our virtual exhibition of artifacts illuminates how these objects serve as embodiments of collectively-held values, and tells the stories of the people who made and used these objects, in the hope that doing so can help to connect people across cultures. DH projects can contribute to cultural understanding and dialogue through their outreach to broad audiences. For many today, digital connectivity amplifies expressions of xenophobia in response to anxieties around major social shifts. DH efforts in the Slavic field can serve as a countervailing force to foster an ethos of empathy rather than intolerance. Making and interacting with objects of beauty and utility are universal human experiences, and foregrounding these can help to challenge perceptions of Russian people as enigmatic and hostile Others.
A painter specializing in religious and folk imagery decorating wooden eggs at the Vernisazh.
Material Objects as Cultural Portals
We have found that providing a guide to a foreign culture in a digital medium is somewhat paradoxical task, in that at times we find ourselves taking something that already seems overly familiar and defamiliarizing it—taking apart the cliché—while immersing visitors in knowledge about it, thus making it more familiar. We invoke here the concept of defamiliarization, or ostranenie (making strange) in the original Russian, which the Russian Formalist theorist Victor Shklovsky introduced to the world in 1917 in his influential essay “Art as Technique.” Shklovsky saw defamiliarization as the feature that distinguishes artistic language from more humdrum applications of it, such as a memo you might receive from your work supervisor. The effect of art, as Shklovsky saw it, was to make things strange, to strip away the coarse blanket of habitualization that deadens our perceptions, and to make us see the world anew. In Shklovsky’s lines about what defamiliarization wages battle against– “Habitualization devours objects, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. If all the complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been”–we detect an ethical imperative, and it is one that we share.
Sources
Svetlana Boym, “Living in Common Places: The Communal Apartment” in Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia
Jules David Prown, “The Truth of Material Culture: History or Fiction” in History from Things: Essays on Material Culture, ed. Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery
Victor Shklovsky “Art as Technique”
Laurel Ulrich, Tangible Things: Making History through Objects
This illuminating photo essay contains historical images of the budyonovka hat, which it turns out was originally designed by artist Viktor Vasnetsov for the tsar’s army and modeled on the helmet of the Russian epic heroes known as the bogatyrs.
Openwork refers to ornamental patterns of openings created using various materials.
