Russian popular prints (lubok) in the context of the Western European printmaking

Speaker(s): Manfred Schruba (University of Milan)

Many Russian popular prints (lubok) of the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century are connected in different ways (genetically and typologically) with Western European sources and counterparts – from archetypical parallels, the borrowing of separate motifs and themes, through paraphrase and imitation of picture subjects, up to more or less exact copying of the Western original. The lecture discusses the genetical aspect of the connection between the Russian lubok and Western European prints. It gives an overview of the most important research work on this topic from D.A. Rovinskii up to the present and introduces some new finds of hitherto not identified Western sources of Russian popular prints.
The lecture discusses also the introduction of the libertine culture in eighteenth century Russia which found its expression in the art of lubok. Most of these prints range from frivolous to bluntly erotic, while being humorous and pursuing satirical purposes. A detailed analysis of the representation of fops in the folk picture Pan Tryk and Khersonia and in other cheap prints demonstrates the German, French and English origins of these pictures
 
Professor Manfred Schruba is the author of the monographs Studien zu den burlesken Dichtungen V.I. Majkovs (Wiesbaden 1997), Literaturnye ob’’edineniia Moskvy i Peterburga 1890– 1917 (Moscow 2004) and Slovar’ psevdonimov russkogo zarubezh’ia v Evrope (1917–1945) (Moscow 2018). He is coauthor and co-editor of an annotated 4-volume edition of the editorial correspondence of the most important Russian emigré literary review, Sovremennye zapiski (1920–1940). Manfred Schruba had taught in Münster, Bochum, and Cologne (Germany) and at the University Ca’ Foscari in Venice (Italy) before his appointment to Professorship at the University of Milan (Università degli Studi di Milano) in 2017. He is a member of the editorial council of the international scholarly journals Literaturnyj fakt (Moscow), Studia litterarum (Moscow). Ezhegodnik Doma russkogo zarubezh’ia (Moscow) and Rusistica Latviensis (Riga), member of the editorial board of the series Literaturnoe nasledstvo (Moscow) and Biblioteka zhurnala “Quaestio Rossica” (Ekaterinburg).