Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on October 23, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a Russian History Workshop with Ernest A. Zitser. Moderated by Catherine Evtuhov.
This talk will offer a new reading of one of the most famous images of Russian visual culture: the eighteenth-century popular print (lubok) known as “The Barber Wants to Cut the Beard of the Old Believer.” After reviewing the existing historiography and offering evidence for an alternative dating, the speaker will argue that this xylograph is less a folksy illustration of Peter I’s “cultural revolution” than a manifestation of the tastes of mid-eighteenth-century Russian Orthodox city-dwellers, a social group that was the primary audience for this cheap, mass-produced, consumer product, and the one that would have found it amusing and entertaining. From this perspective, the printmaker’s use of a religious slur was not metaphorical or incidental to the design of the lubok. The othering of cultural outsiders was as integral to the meaning of this composition as the literary tropes of commedia dell’arte and the visual conventions for representing popular wrestlers.
Ernest A. Zitser is the co-founder and general editor of ВИВЛIОθИКА (ISSN 2333-1658), the online journal of the Eighteenth Century Russian Empire Studies Association (ECRESA). A native of Soviet Ukraine, Dr. Zitser received his Ph.D. in Russian History from Columbia University. He has worked as the Davis Center Collection Librarian at Harvard University and the Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Librarian at Duke University. He has also held fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the UCLA Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies, and Columbia’s Harriman Institute. He is the author of The Transfigured Kingdom: Sacred Parody and Charismatic Authority at the Court of Peter the Great (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004; Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2008), and has published in both historical and library journals on a wide variety of topics, including Russian political pornography and the Catherinian equine myth.
Interested participants should contact Erin Forrest (ef2847@columbia.edu) for a copy of the paper.
Image: New York Public Library Digital Collections.
