Out in the Cold: Images of Siberia.
Two juxtaposed images could stand for the idea of Siberia with its icy confines in the Russian imagination: Levitin’s The Vladimirka (1892) and Perov’s Portrait of Fyodor Dostoevesky (1872). The portrait of the great Russian writer is calm and contemplative; Perov, the “Russian Courbet” has captured something of the resigned pessimism of the author of Crime and Punishment whose linked hands may recall wearing the manacles in Siberia.[1] In that novel the famous student murderer Raskolnikov is sent to Siberia for his crime, a fictional episode that mirrors Dostoevsky’s own experience of the penal colony in his early life. Implicated in an anti-Imperial plot, Dostoevsky was put before a firing squad in 1849 but was reprieved at the eleventh hour. Profoundly influenced by the horrific mock-firing squad and its aftermath, Dostoevsky was changed forever.[2] Perhaps Dostoevsky travelled the bleak thoroughfare that Levitan painted in the Vladimirka or Vladimir Road which shows the road leading from Moscow to Vladimir, and then Nizhny Novgorod. Beyond that lay Siberia or “the sleeping land” (above) which was the locus of the fur trade during the era of Ivan the Terrible. Surinov’s Ermak’s (Yermak) Conquest of Siberia shows the eponymous Cossack fighting the inhabitants of Siberia which was a rich asset for the fur-trade. Ermak was employed by the powerful Siberian Stroganoff family whose coat of arms has two sables on either side of an eschuteon. Trading in furs would continue into the era of Catherine the Great who moved fur trade accounts from the Siberian Chancellery to her Personal Cabinet (her private treasury), thus possibly financing the acquisition of the Hermitage collection. Russia became increasingly important for the fur-trade with the deforestation of Europe, though Russia would lose trade from London in the fifteenth-century due to changes in fashion and the depletion of forest reserves. Finally due to changing patterns of trade and various other reasons, the Siberian fur trade went into decline Henceforth fur would be replaced by other commodities such as wheat. With the benefit of hindsight we are aware as we read of Tolstoy’s other ego Lëvin scything in the fields, or as we inspect Repin’s images of Tolstoy ploughing, that images of the landscape and its denizens, this idealised, measured view of Russia, the Slavic-inspired commune would eventually be swept aside by a brutalising, efficient machine in the form of Stalin’s collectivisation of agriculture within his Five Year Plan; these kolkhoz or collective Soviet farms were drastically different from the Russian communes of the previous century. As for Siberia, the word would no longer recall the fur trade, but would become shorthand for a cold, lonely exile often resulting in death and social oblivion at the hands of misguided ideologues.
[1] Bunt, Russian Art: From Scyths to Soviets, 209.
[2] Dostoevsky fell into the net of the minister Liprandi who detected links between the St Petersburg intellectual elite and “folk Schismatics” in the Russian communes.
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