Catherine the great and the cultural myth of the Potemkin village. How much was true and how much was fake? Only Potemkin knew for sure on that extravagant voyage down the Dnieper in 1787…
…Joseph II, who peevishly described the Empress as “that Catherinized princess of Anhalt-Zerbst,” contributed his share of suspicion and criticism: “The lord commands; hordes of slaves obey…in three years, fifty thousand persons were destroyed in these new provinces by the toil and the emanations from the morasses.” His sweeping charge that twenty thousand lives were destroyed in the building and fortification of Kherson was never substantiated, and his sour remarks at Ekaterinoslav proved wrong. The city did become one of Russia’s most prosperous industrial centers.
—Vasily Ivanovich Surikov (1848 -1916) was the foremost Russian painter of large-scale historical subjects. His major pieces are among the best-known paintings in Russia. He is principally noted for his treatment of episodes from the 17th century and the medieval period of Russian history. These works are remarkable for their thoroughly researched and detailed rendering of settings and costume and the drama of their presentation.—Read More:http://fefepana.wordpress.com/2010/page/4/
Catherine herself wrote a rebuttal to the charges against Potemkin: “The cities of Moscow and Peterburg, and even more so the foreign newspapers have invented a great deal during our trip…when one has come from afar, lying is easy…” She went on to parody the slanders reported in the press and diplomatic dispatches. She describes the Tauric mountains walking in heavy gait to bow to her with “a languishing expression.” She explains that this sort of fairy tale makes a far better story than the actuality of newly constructed roads that changed the impassable descents of the Tauric mountains into “comfortable slopes.” (to be continued)…
—Artist: Klavdy Lebedev
Completion Date: 1889
Place of Creation: Russian Federation
Style: Realism
Genre: history painting
Technique: oil
Material: canvas
Dimensions: 250.6 x 409.8 cm
Gallery: Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia—click image for source…
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…After Potemkin, the notion of façades was at the very heart of the Marquis de Custine’s La Russie en 1839, one of the most influential books ever written about Russia. To Custine, the vast empire was nothing but a gigantic “theater,” on whose stage Russians were less interested in being civilized than making Europeans believe they were so. To scratch a Russian European was to find an Asiatic Tatar. But European stereotypes about Asiatic Russia were embedded in a much broader and more consequential comparison between “Russia and the West.” During the rise of Russian national consciousness in the nineteenth century, assertions of superiority and inferiority became central on both sides of the European-Russian relationship. The Potemkin village myth tapped into this contest of mutual evaluation, which was heavily inflected by geopolitics. By exposing Russian achievements as staged, the accusations about Potemkin villages exposed Russia itself as mendacious.
In the period after 1917, the constant evaluations of superiority and inferiority, intertwined in complicated ways by Western visitors and Soviet cultural diplomats, became even more ubiquitous and more powerful, because for the first time large numbers of Westerners believed socialism (but not Russia) was in certain ways superior, and because of the controversial nature of Soviet ideological claims to be creating a more advanced society.
–Artist Sergey Kirillov (Rus). “Execuion of Russian rebbel Stepan Razin”.
This is one of best artworks about this subject. Rebbel Razin is rather popular person in Russian history, songs, painting.—Read More:http://artistlyssenko.blogspot.ca/2010_11_01_archive.html
Potemkin Villages in the 1920s… Thus, a remarkable resurgence of accusations about Potemkin villages occurred in the 1920s, when the Soviets invented a unique system of receiving foreign visitors that centered around model institutions. Foreigners who remained unconvinced frequently labeled these places Potemkin villages, implying that there was something primordially Russian about Soviet practices. The Hungarian poet Gyula Illyés wrote in
his travelogue from the early 1930s of a “Potemkin complex” in which “the eye becomes a magnifying lens making an elephant out of a flea, while at other times it turns a cow into a mole…” Read More:http://www.histoire.ens.fr/IMG/file/Coeure/David-Fox%20Potemkin%20villages.pdf
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