Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

In a reign best known for bloodshed and terror, one of Russia’s most intriguing cultural projects was initiated. Someone at the court of Ivan IV, aka “the Terrible,” financed an expensive and expansive effort to visualize world history and Russia’s place within it. Its overarching message was similar to other commissions and compilations of the era. It insisted that Russia’s ruling dynasty had inherited from Byzantium not only imperial regalia but also direct access to divine favor through its righteous rulers and venerable saints. Although the starting point, the moment of creation, was predetermined by the Christian world chronicle genre, the end point became a bone of contention. For unknown reasons, this ambitious project was abandoned before completion. This thought-provoking Kritika forum is dedicated to a “new” Muscovite source that has been hiding in plain sight for centuries.

Scholarly convention assigns the collective name Litsevoi svod (hereafter LLS), Illustrated [Chronicle] Compilation, to the output of this project. Only recently has this innovative experiment in textual compilation and visual adaptation garnered sustained scholarly attention. An explosion of interest was stimulated by its first publication in a facsimile edition in 2008 and the subsequent dissemination of digital versions. The interdisciplinary, international bibliography devoted to the compilation appears to have doubled in roughly a decade, but much about the LLS and its intended purpose remains to be discovered. The three articles offered here provide a multifaceted introduction to both the problems and possibilities of this “new” Muscovite source, which for centuries remained obscure due to its overwhelming scale and inaccessibility.

Ten richly illustrated volumes represent the surviving output (90 percent?) of the grand project initiated in Moscow during the reign of Ivan IV in [End Page 9] the 1570s.¹ They are now housed in St. Petersburg (Library of the Academy of Sciences and Russian National Library) and Moscow (State Historical Museum). As a compilation project, the LLS gathered and spliced together various chronicle texts to narrate sacred and Byzantine history from the creation of the world to the inception of Rurik’s rule in Russia and princely history from Rurik to the maturity of Ivan IV. As a visual adaptation project, it sought to translate text into coherent and narratively compelling imagery on almost every page. The extant tomes contain around 16,000 illustrations, many of which comprise multiple scenes. Thousands more may have been planned. Even in its unfinished state, the LLS represents one of the largest illuminated chronicles to be commissioned anywhere in the world.

Why did work abruptly stop? What explains the fact that heaps of elaborately illuminated manuscript leaves remained unbound? How come hundreds more were executed in outline but not painted? For several historians the unpredictable and violent personality of Ivan IV has provided a ready, but illusory, explanation. The most incomplete volume, which covers events from 1533 to around 1553, is known as Tsarstvennaia kniga. It was defaced by various editorial interventions, deletions, and marginal additions.

A few of the longest marginal additions contain parallels to incidents related by the tsar in the famous first letter to Prince Andrei Mikhailovich Kurbskii. They were once believed to have been added to the margins by Ivan IV himself.² A competing interpretation attributed them to a prominent courtier named Ivan Viskovatyi, who was executed in 1570.³ More recent studies have discredited both theories.⁴

There is at present no scholarly consensus about why the project was never finished. The forceful editorial interventions in the final volumes suggest that the depiction of more contemporary 16th-century events became highly contentious. Whole sequences of completed pages were rejected, [End Page 10] scuttled, and redesigned. Not all of them could be redrawn and repainted before the project was abandoned. The visualization of the marginal additions caused a kind of crisis of confidence for the illustrators.

The afterlife of the project suggests a continuing fascination with its engrossing imagery. Although many scholars have identified the death of Ivan IV in 1584 as a probable endpoint, the 18th-century historian Mikhail Shcherbatov claimed to have seen images of the coronation of Tsar Fedor (r. 1584–98) among the unbound manuscript leaves.⁵ This suggests that the project either continued or was revived under Ivan’s successor. Unbound leaves and groupings of leaves continued to be kept in royal chambers inside the Kremlin in the early 17th century.⁶ By the mid-17th century, most were relocated to other locations in the Kremlin or adjacent to it, but they appear to have occasionally been summoned back to be displayed for the edification of the children of the royal household.⁷ In 1660–61, Patriarch Nikon appropriated parts of the world chronicle, and in subsequent decades courtiers took possession of others. Peter I kept one of the biblical volumes in his chambers between 1683 and 1724. Catherine II appears to have consulted the extant volume devoted to the reign of Ivan IV.

For contemporary scholars, an unprecedented abundance of unexamined visual evidence both complicates the task of studying the LLS and creates new opportunities for scholarship on Muscovite visual culture. We still do not know how many artists worked on the project.⁸ The task of definitively assigning all images to individual artistic hands, styles, and manners continues. We do not yet have a convincing and comprehensive study of major overarching patterns in the visual narrative. Although one often senses a close relationship between text and image, as these articles suggest, significant examples of divergence also appear. Should such divergences be attributed to artistic [End Page 11] license or to deliberate choices of design? Do they represent court consensus or individual idiosyncrasy?

As Nancy Kollmann demonstrates in her stimulating and wide-ranging consideration of 16th-century visual culture, the LLS was a grandiose artistic endeavor on an unprecedented scale. Calling it a kind of “graphic novel” (55), Kollmann demonstrates that it was an important step forward in the creation of visual narratives in Russia. She proposes that its dynamic and visually dense style of illustration should be linked to innovative trends in Russia from the 1540s to the early 1570s. As she notes, to date the search for direct Western influences have yielded only modest results.⁹

Focusing on narrativity, Kollmann identifies the project’s particular visual hallmarks. Multiepisodicity became a defining feature of the LLS. By creatively using landscape features (ravines, craggy outcrops, lakes, and rivers) and architecture (gates, walls, buildings) to delineate several episodes on a single page, artists were able to construct multiple scenes and accommodate multiple time frames.

Nonetheless, in my view, the missing links to earlier commissions and outside influences remain elusive. A similar strategy, encompassing three episodes in one illustration, occurs in the Chudov manuscript cycle devoted to the miracles of the Archangel Michael.¹⁰ Similar diagonals and divisions of space, though not time, appear in mid-15th-century Western chronicles such as the Spiezer Chronik.¹¹

Sergei Bogatyrev and Isolde Thyrêt provide compelling case studies of discrepancies between text and image. Their close comparisons offer insightful examples of how taking a closer look at the LLS can both enlighten and surprise modern scholars of Muscovite history and culture. Bogatyrev compares [End Page 12] and contrasts three Muscovite representations of the Monomakh legend and uncovers fascinating variations. He concludes that Muscovite culture was more creative and open to interpretation of key ideological texts than scholars have previously assumed. Thyrêt explores shifting verbal and visual representations of Evdokiia Donskaia and finds complex changes in how she was portrayed. Remarkably these changes mirror her own innovative scholarship on how the tsaritsa’s role at court was reimagined during the reign of Ivan IV.

Bogatyrev draws our attention to experimentation in Muscovite visual culture and explores “changes in the designs of royal headgear” (37). Representations of the origin legend of Muscovy’s coronation regalia, the Cap of Monomachus (depicted as a miter) and other attributes of sovereignty, demonstrate intriguing variations. Sixteenth-century visualizations could conflate dynastic ancestors, evoke sacred image typologies, and delineate hierarchies of headgear. He argues that variations in adaptation reveal perspectives on rulership. Unfortunately, our knowledge of Ivan’s reign is insufficient to determine whose perspectives are reflected in these interesting adaptations.

Thyrêt emphasizes the importance of royal women in the LLS. She sees acknowledgment of the fact that Grand Princess Evdokiia Donskaia, the virtuous widow of Dmitrii Donskoi, wielded “a superior authority with regard to matters of the realm” (99) and finds patterns of emphasis, addition, and omission that diverge from the source text. In particular, the depiction of male courtiers as witnesses to Evdokiia’s piety mark her as “superior to the governmental authority of her male court advisers” (105). This observation raises important questions about the function of secondary figures, whether mentioned in the text or not, and the role of witnessing versus action in the structuring of the manuscript’s visual narrative.

The process of replacing consecutive images in the Tsarstvennaia kniga demonstrates an almost uncanny attention to the issues discussed in this forum.

In line with Sergei Bogatyrev’s focus on the “designs of royal headgear,” the zealous editor of Tsarstvennaia kniga ordered a whole series of images from Ivan’s minority to be redrawn in order to depict him not in a cap but in a multipronged crown. Would such glitches in visual continuity be considered political errors? Could it be that artists were not attuned to the potential political pitfalls of representing Ivan in a cap before his coronation? While we cannot be certain, headgear was clearly a point of heightened attention in the editing process.

Motivated by the kinds of vivid interest in the wives and mothers of Muscovite rulers that is analyzed by Thyrêt, the zealous editor ordered [End Page 13] changes to the portrayal of the death of Elena Glinskaia, the wife of Vasilii III and the mother of Ivan IV. He ordered the deathbed scene of Elena Glinskaia to be redrawn as two images rather than one. Crowns and crowds were added to the new images. In the original image Elena was mourned by two male and around eight female attendants. In the revised image a great multitude (at least seventy seemingly covered heads) stands in attendance. In the second revised image Elena is depicted in her coffin, but she still wears her crown as the lid is carried toward it to suggest imminent burial.¹² Once again, a great multitude has gathered to honor her. Comparatively speaking, this was a more elaborate scene than the one created to portray the death of Ivan’s first wife, Anastasiia, which features five times fewer attendants.¹³ Does this editorial upgrade of Elena Glinskaia automatically imply a downgrade of Anastasiia? Intriguingly, the designer of the LLS followed the chronicle in depicting Anastasiia’s death as natural, even though Ivan IV apparently came to believe that she was poisoned.

The very next altered image portrays the kind of scene that Kollmann calls “the justice of the grand prince’s cause” and “his righteous use of force” (62). The original image, a graphic depiction of the beheading of the d´iak Fedor Mishurin by boyars, did not include the grand prince.¹⁴ The image was revised to more clearly demonstrate that Mishurin was taken into custody and unclothed by a group of boyars.¹⁵ In the replacement image beheading was suggested rather than fully represented. In the middle of the top register the replacement image adds a young, front-facing Tsar Ivan in a multi-pronged crown.

In a recent article in Russian Review, Kollmann interpreted the addition of the young Ivan as designed to suggest that he is “above the fray, consulting with his men with no gesture of verdict.”¹⁶ Decades earlier, the prominent Russian historian Sigurd Shmidt interpreted the same scene, evidently through the lens of the First Letter from Tsar Ivan to Prince Andrei Kurbskii, as a visual reminder that the young Ivan was witness to the enmity of the boyars.¹⁷ Thus two scholars who are well versed in the history of the period do not agree on the purpose of this image. Our zealous editor clearly saw deficiencies [End Page 14] in the original image, but centuries later we cannot be quite certain about what looked wrong to a powerful Muscovite beholder.

Such cases remind us of the beholder’s share in the interpretation of imagery. The understanding of ideology, politics, and visual culture that a person brings to an image shapes what he or she takes away from it. Art historians have been grappling with this problem for decades. In his influential Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, Ernest Gombrich emphasized the importance of taking “account of the interplay between the artists and the beholder.”¹⁸ The reading of images requires the beholder’s collaboration. It involves a relationship between expectation and experience. As these articles demonstrate, the visual adaptation of court narratives in Muscovy sometimes generated unexpected results. The process of explaining paradoxes in the awarding of five-point crowns and exploring variations in the representation of royal wives and mothers enriches our understanding of Muscovite culture. Together these articles demonstrate that Muscovite visual culture was far from monolithic. [End Page 15]