Books: Russia Under the Volcano

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THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE: A PORTRAIT IN PHOTOGRAPHS by Chloe Obolensky; Random House; 345 pages; $24.95

In a typical 19th century Russian novel, "We open the door and find ourselves in a room full of Russian Generals," said Virginia Woolf, who evidently failed to read on. Just as disconcerting is the immediate impression created by the pictures of prerevolutionary Russians in this remarkable book. Some have an aura that seems to owe more to taxidermy than to photography. In some respects, no medium was less appropriate for chronicling old Russia than the primitive camera. The dead stillness required of the subject, though unnatural to everyone, was singularly unsuited to the Russians' vitality, spontaneity and general rambunctiousness. How stolid they look, gathered silently and ceremoniously around the samovar in the garden at tea time, when, as we can guess from Chekhov and Turgenev, they were surely spellbinding talkers. The trouble with such snapshots from a nation's family album is that they must be viewed with a head full of literary and historical associations, while fiction may draw even the most unknowing into its universe.

Russia's early photographers were sometimes responsible for distorting reality. Many were foreigners who roamed the gigantic empire seeking ethnographic oddities, the odder the better. Precursors of Soviet socialist realism, these photographers turned real people into "typical specimens" for the fashionable genre pictures of the times. The wandering holy man, the street musician, the Cossack and especially the peasant, in all his scruffy permutations, were persuaded to assume artful poses. One French photographer of the 1880s in Russia was fixated on funny-looking hats, which he set askew on his subjects' heads when it suited his composition. The result often verged on caricature.

In one way, however, the petrified images produced by late 19th and early 20th century photography are tragically apposite. The Russian people were living under a volcano: "A rumbling, fire-spitting mountain, down whose sides, behind clouds of ashes, roll streams of red-hot lava," as the poet Alexander Blok perceived Russia in 1908. When the final eruption came in October 1917, it engulfed the nation's past. The Russian Empire's vigorous intellectual life, its fantastic cultural diversity—even the distinctive imprint of its history—were effaced.

Thus the picture that emerges from this book is of Pompeii on a far vaster scale. The photos are imbued with more than the familiar charm of things past; they are reflections of Russia's interrupted life story. That would explain the particular poignancy of the emotion experienced by the book's editor, Chloe Obolensky, as she studied the many photos she had unearthed from various libraries and private collections. She recalls in her preface that as the volume took shape, she was moved to see the photographs assume an unexpected "coherence and truth." Few readers can fail to be moved as well.

Obolensky calls her book "a portrait in photographs" of the Russian Empire between the mid-1850s and 1914. Her selection is, as it should be, highly personal, with quality and design elements as the governing considerations. Large, thick, and superbly laid out on beautiful paper, the book is a triumph of commercial publishing.