Imperial Russia's Illustrated Press Online

Advisor: Jeffrey Brooks

Nothing illuminates the lost world of late Imperial Russia better than the pictorial magazines of the era. The illustrated weeklies gathered in this collection open a wide window on Russian cultural, social, and political life. Their editors traced the sweep of the Russian imagination at the apogee of Russian cultural power from the peak years of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy to the modernist era and the chaos of 1917. They captured imperial expansion, cultural innovation, high fashion, graphic arts, performing arts, grand funerals and anniversaries, occasions of state, wonders of science, and domestic and foreign politics. In addition, the weeklies inscribed the changing image of Russia’s great cities, its landscapes, and its multinational citizenry, together with literary life and a visual and verbal chronicle of all and sundry occasions and events. Each issue of these magazines contains surprises for historians and scholars of culture alike.