Word: cossack
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...tribes that, like the Russians who colonized them, have long since lost much of their cultural distinctiveness. Another kind of excursion was plotted by the late English scholar Max Hayward, whose introduction covers the entire span of Russian history, with diverting digressions on such topics as peasant life, Cossack lore, the liberal intelligentsia and Russian tycoons. A 15-page miracle of compression, the essay is a learned, graceful and witty commentary on the book's fugitive images of every day life...