Images and the Making of the Russian Empire, 1471-1721

(Hardback)

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Exploring the visual record of the Muscovite tsardom, this book demonstrates that, in imperial settings, images actually do things. Richly illustrated with 120 arresting, little-known images, it considers how those images functioned as active agents for and against empire. Images and the Making of the Russian Empiremoves out from the throne room of the Kremlin to engravers workshops of Chernihiv and Kyiv, to the Amur River basin, to the icy peaks of Kamchatka, wherever imagery and empire intersected which was everywhere.

The book presents an unexpected array of pictorial material, including Muscovite illuminated histories, Ukrainian political-theological prints, and Siberian reindeer herders pictographic signature marks. Valerie A. Kivelson demonstrates how pictures created by conquerors and conquered, by elites and subjects, by the powerful and the disempowered, advanced and shaped the tsardom as it grew into an ethnically and religiously diverse empire, in ways that have remained unnoticed until now. Through its novel visual methodology, it offers original perspectives on both Moscows ambitions and the ways in which populations coming under tsarist control pushed back and reshaped the regimes own understanding of what it meant to be an imperial state.

Reviews

This is lively and innovative contribution to historical thinking about Early Modern Russia. Rooted in original scholarship, packed with engaging material, the book takes us on a series of journeys into the diverse and powerful ways in which images work in (and on) the world. * Simon Franklin, Emeritus Professor of Slavonic Studies, University of Cambridge, UK *
Val Kivelson delivers another masterpiece on the history of early modern Russia and its empire, this time attributing agency to images to explore not only how the empire acquired and transformed the lands it had conquered, but also how those encounters reshaped the imperial core and its image of itself. * Serhii Plokhy, Professor of Ukrainian History, Harvard University, USA *

Author Bio

Valerie A. Kivelson is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History and Thomas N. Tentler Collegiate Professor at the University of Michigan, USA. She is the author of Russias Empires (2016; with Ronald Suny), Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia (2006) and Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (2013). She is also the co-editor of Russian Empire (2023; with Joan Neuberger and Sergei Kozlov) and Picturing Russia (2008; with Joan Neuberger).