著者

巽 由樹子

出版者

公益財団法人 史学会

雑誌

史学雑誌 (ISSN:00182478)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.118, no.9, pp.1585-1616, 2009

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In this paper, I examine the royal articles that were published in the Russian illustrated journals of the late nineteenth century. There have been few studies on representations of the Tsar in modern Russian society, primarily because Soviet historiography has, so far, focused on only two elements of the Russian society-the intellectual high society and the world of the "people." In this paper, I analyze the representations of the Tsar in the illustrated journals of the late nineteenth century in order to fill the gap between the two aforementioned elements. Illustrated journals such as Niva, Vsemirnaia Illiustratsiia, and Rodina, which were entirely new variants of the Russian print media, became highly popular during this period. As most publishers were of Western origin and were familiar with the European tradition of entertaining visual magazines, they imitated the style of the European media when they started their own journals in Russia. The readers of these journals consisted of the urban dwellers in European Russia, who began to form a new social group after the Great Reforms of the 1860s. The images of Russian monarchs that were published in these European-style illustrated journals were quite different from the traditional representations of the saintly Tsar. First, royal portraits in these journals were influenced by the carte de visite style of taking celebrities' pictures, which was fashionable in Western Europe in the 1860s. Second, these journals juxtaposed the articles on the Tsar and his family with those on other European royal houses. Third, these royal articles focused on the private life and the body natural of the Tsar. Good examples of articles that combined all these three elements are the ones on the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Russian illustrated journals featured secularized, relative, and humanized images of the Tsar for the purpose of entertaining their readers. This tendency was in contravention to the strategy of representation pursued by Nicholas II, who intended to portray himself as a saintly Tsar and gave much importance to traditional rituals. Nicholas II planned to unite the Russian Empire on the basis of the age-old practice of worshipping the Tsar. In modern Russian society, however, the images of the Tsar had already been secularized through their circulation in these illustrated journals. This gap in the representation of the Tsar may have contributed to the difficulties that Tsarism had to face after the 1905 revolution.