Before he died, the dormitory supervisor’s husband saw a sign in a dream. Or rather, a poster. During his terminal illness, he had long resisted his wife’s attempts to get him to declare his faith in Christ. But, as she later recounted in her testimony in the Lutheran church where she was in charge of the dormitory for visitors, he slowly began to learn prayers, laughing when he forgot the words. Then, one day, he told her: “I saw a dream: a colorful poster [krasochnyj plakat], on which was written ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’” From this she had concluded that he died a believer, and was waiting for her in heaven.
In Russian, people “see” dreams instead of “having” them, so the visual nature of the divine sign is perhaps predetermined by grammar. But that it took the form of a poster with colorful writing and that the dying man’s wife interpreted it as making manifest the culmination of a complex spiritual process resonate in curious ways with other uses of visual materials in Soviet and post-Soviet pedagogy. The focus on calligraphic rather than pictorial depiction also departs from another visual imaginary that is reasserting its presence in the region: the icons of Russian Orthodoxy.
In the various secular and religious approaches to learning that competed for attention in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, the proper use and expected effects of visual materials were a prime area of methodological reflection. The creation and display of images and graphics were a matter of much effort and pride everywhere, at the same time as the proper use and potential dangers of visual interactions were debated between different groups. Reflections on the transformative value of visual interactions thus provide a good window onto the particular pedagogical traditions at play in the Volga region, highlighting affinities as well as tensions between their transformative ambitions.
In the Soviet advice literature for lecturers, known to many of today’s religious activists from previous professional training, a specific set of expectations was attached to the use of so-called nagljadnye posobija, visual teaching aids. Such aids were supposed to make a lecture intellectually accessible, persuasive, and emotionally engaging, thus facilitating the transfer between acquired knowledge and changed actions that propaganda was supposed to achieve. Through the specific semantics of the adjective nagljadnyj, which can be translated as “visual” but also as “intuitively persuasive,” the call for nagljadnost' included more than just a use of pictures. Figurative speech, effective examples, and statistics all counted as “visual” tools through which a lecturer could engage an audience and bring propaganda “closer to life.” Nagljadnost' thus encompasses material pictures that are put in front of an audience as well as images that arise in a listener’s head in response to the speech of a lecturer. This distinction turns out to be important to some of the religious traditions in Russia’s postsecular landscape. If we read the theory of nagljadnost' as an exploration of the connection between visual perception and persuasion, we can see post-Soviet religious debates as attempts to problematize that same link.
“Ten thousand words cannot replace one image,” states a Khrushchev era brochure on film in atheist propaganda, quoting a Chinese proverb to argue that the clarity and accessibility of visual media could help viewers give up “the idealist agnosticism characteristic of religion, that is the notion of the fundamental unknowability of the world” (Zil'berberg 1956: 4). In assuming a direct link between seeing and knowing, Soviet atheists may sound like uncritical heirs of what Martin Jay (1993) has called the “ocularcentrism” of the enlightenment. But the semantic range of the noun nagljadnost' and its derivatives points to ideas about the link between vision and human motivation that are more complex than they at first appear.
Most crucially, nagljadnost' belongs to the vocabulary of methodical approaches, where it is a recipe for making knowledge effective rather than simply a metaphor for knowing. That propaganda must be nagljadnaja was a recurrent statement in the advice literature for lecturers of the 1960s and ’70s, often supported by such standard authorities as recent party resolutions and the works of Lenin. An article on the use of visual aids in party study circles, published at the beginning of the 1972 academic year in the Russian-language newspaper of the Medvedevo district in the Mari ASSR, starts with a quote from Lenin: “The art of every propagandist lies precisely in this, to influence a given audience in the best possible way, making a known truth as convincing for it as possible, as easy to assimilate as possible, as nagljadnaja and impressive as possible.” The author, the facilitator of a school of basic economic knowledge at a state farm in the Mari ASSR, goes on to say that visual media (sredstva nagljadnosti) constitute “one of the effective means for the activation of cognitive activity among the participants,” especially in a heterogeneous group of students.1
Given what we have learned about didactic uses of textual media in Soviet propaganda networks, it will come as no surprise that not only audiences, but also instructors and cultural workers were among the targets of such “activation” by visual exposure. Checking on the “state of visual agitation” in a given work collective or institution provided a standard criterion for evaluating the performance of local propagandists.2 The advice literature for cultural enlightenment work contained detailed instructions on how to produce and display all kinds of visual aids from posters and wall newspapers to exhibitions and slides, thus relying on local generative competence in a manner similar to the lists of lecture titles (Luehrmann 2011). Since this literature often spelled out the intended effects of methodical devices, it provides insights into the ideas about human motivation underlying Soviet uses of visual media. The following description of an evening on the topic of “Science and religion” comes from a manual on atheist propaganda in cultural institutions written by Mikhail Nekhoroshkov, the biologist from the teachers college who also organized the Evenings of Miracles without Miracles. In preparation for the event about science and religion, conducted in 1966 in the Medvedevo district’s house of culture, visual media helped attract the audience and direct its attention to the seminar’s key themes:
In order to attract a wide audience, the House of Culture, in addition to colorfully designed signs [krasochno oformlennykh afish], uses the local radio, invitation cards, notifies the leaders of public organizations, firms and rural institutions by telephone…. Before the evening began, the listeners acquainted themselves with exhibitions of atheist literature, and of paintings by Russian and Soviet artists unmasking religion. The skillfully designed visual material [umelo oformlennaja nagljadnost'] attracted the attention of those present, caused not a few reflections and even disputes. (Nekhoroshkov 1967a: 8; my italics)
The combined intellectual and emotional effects of the visual impressions—attracting attention, causing “reflections and even disputes”—continued during the evening itself, where sights, music, and words all complemented each other. After the choir sang “March of the Enthusiasts” on a stage illuminated by a single beam of light, the cinematic projector was turned on, “and on the screen appear[ed] images from the newsreel on the launching of a space rocket.” This was followed by a talk on the topic of “Science and religion” by a teacher from a local school, an overview of scientific atheist literature in the holdings of the district library, a demonstration of chemical experiments unmasking religious miracles, a recital of atheist poetry, and a performance of the Russian genre of humorous folk song known as chastushki, with atheist texts sung by two female students “dressed in brightly colored Russian costumes.” The evening ended with a short dramatic sketch “about a fortune-teller and a trusting girl” (Nekhoroshkov 1967a: 8–9).
While the purpose of the sketch was to promote emotional engagement with the victim of religious deceit—all present reportedly “felt compelled to sympathize” with the girl (nevol'no perezhivali; Nekhoroshkov 1967a: 9)—Nekhoroshkov does not specify the intended effects of the newsreel images of the space rocket. Given the abundant references to Soviet space exploration in propaganda materials of the 1960s (Bazykin and Komarov 1961; Nekhoroshkov 1964: 31), he seems to take for granted that a technologically reproduced image of this triumph of Soviet science would predispose people to accept the assertions of the lecture that followed, namely that science and religion were opposed to each other and that science was superior in its ability to improve human life. Assuming that this was the rationale behind the clip from the newsreel, the evening on “Science and religion” used visual materials for three different purposes: to attract attention (the announcement posters and the exhibits of books and pictures), to elicit intellectual and emotional responses (the exhibits and the visually striking aspects of the performances), and to reinforce the persuasive effects of verbal arguments. All these effects presuppose a capacity of images to bundle information and emotional appeal with a degree of compactness that words cannot approach, making the whole available for intuitive apprehension.
A closer look at the semantic field of nagljadnost' shows that its unifying element is reference to just such an intutitive form of learning, which is based on demonstration and observation rather than verbal explanation. While the abstract noun nagljadnost' may be a Soviet era neologism, the adjective nagljadnyj and morphologically related terms were part of the prerevolutionary Russian language, combining meanings of seeing, supervising, and learning. The root -gljad- refers to the faculty of sight, as in the noun vzgljad (gaze) or the verb gljadet' (to look). The common spatial prefix na-adds a connotation of “on,” “over,” or “from above.” The 1905 edition of the dictionary of Vladimir Dal', the authoritative reference work for the Russian language up to the revolution, contains the verb nagljadet'/nagljadat' in the sense of “to look after, to supervise, to observe.” The derivative noun nagljadok or nagljadysh means “a foster child, someone one has taken on responsibility to look after.” Closer to the Soviet use of nagljadnost' is a related group of words which refer to a particular style of learning through observation: the nouns nagljaden'e and nagljadka refer to “the capacity of an autodidact [sposobnost' samouchki], a skill obtained by experience, through watching others [na drugikh gljadja].” The adjective nagljadnyj is defined as “learned by nagljadka; experienced, practical, applied; clear, comprehensible, reasonable.” Examples come from pedagogical practices: “the nagljadnyj method of teaching,” and “the geometrical method of proof is more nagljadnyj than the algebraic.” A second adjective, nagljadchivyj, describes a person “who has nagljadchivost', i.e., the capacity to learn by nagljadka.”
In Soviet literature, the adjective nagljadnyj is used in much the same way as defined by Dal', combining meanings of “visual” or “accomplished through visual demonstration” with those of “persuasive” and “immediately comprehensible” (comprehensible “at a glance,” to give an English analogy for the implied link between vision and speedy mental processing). By contrast, nagljadka as a designation of an informal way of learning through observation does not appear in Khrushchev and Brezhnev era literature. The new term nagljadnost' also refers to processes of intuitive learning, but presupposes a teacher who deliberately stimulates these processes by choosing appropriate visual aids. As part of a methodological discourse, the term encompasses both the materials used to visually enhance the learning process, and the quality that makes such materials effective. In the first sense, nagljadnost' might be translated as visual media (though it also includes figures of speech, statistics, and other ways to make information more accessible and relevant), in the second as “visuality,” “intuitive intelligibility,” or “persuasiveness.”
The rich semantics of nagljadnost' point to the complex pedagogical tradition from which this concern with perception and intuition in the learning process springs. The semantic range of the Russian word closely corresponds to the German Anschaulichkeit, a term from nineteenth-century romantic philosophy that denotes the capacity of objects of contemplation to stimulate a cognitive process that combines sensory perception and intellectual generalization. Whereas for Immanuel Kant, Anschauung (intuition) as sense perception was distinct from the generalizing cognitive activity that is based on intellectual concepts, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe developed the argument that visual contemplation could generate generalizations of a different kind. In his work on the morphology of plants and the perception of color, Goethe argued that contemplation could provide insights that were neither abstract ideas nor mere additions of empirically observed traits, but rather holistic visions of the essential features of a species or phenomenon. The Urpflanze (“original plant”) of his Metamorphosis of Plants (1790), for instance, was a construct that would combine the essential features of all existing plants, derived from observation of the infinite variety of plant life, without corresponding to any empirically observable specimen (Breidbach 2006; Burwick 1986).
Although natural scientists largely rejected Goethe’s approach, the influence of his thought on European reading publics was great enough to inspire twentieth-century Gestalt psychology and early German and Russian abstract art of the Bauhaus and Brücke movements (Ash 1995: 85–87; Vitz and Glimcher 1984: 100–103). His questions about the relationship between sensory perception and human ways of learning and meaning-making were also taken up by philosophers like Hegel and Schelling (both read avidly by Russian radicals from the mid-nineteenth century onward; Malia 1965) and attracted the attention of reformist pedagogues in Western Europe and in Russia (L. Froese 1963; Zander 2008). It is thus perhaps no coincidence that the semantics of a term from German idealist philosophy survived in Soviet era Russian as a part of pedagogical vocabulary.
Nineteenth-century Russian movements for pedagogical reform developed in dialogue with Central European currents such as the kindergarten movement, Johann Pestalozzi’s “object learning,” and the eurhythmic exercises of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophists, all of which involved ideas about integrating sensory experience into educational processes (Kirschenbaum 2001: 10–19; Maydell 1997). Even Lev Tolstoj, whose pedagogical efforts showed more Slavophile leanings, was aware of Western European reformist institutions, which he visited on a study tour in 1860–1861 (L. Froese 1963: 100–101). Although the relationship between pedagogical reformers trained before the revolution and the Bolshevik government of the 1920s and 1930s was fraught with mutual suspicion, some pedagogues placed such multisensory forms as the cultural excursion and the didactic spectacle in the service of socialist construction (Clark 1995; Fitzpatrick 1970; Johnson 2006: 97–123; Plaggenborg 1996: 217).
Postwar literature on nagljadnost' continued to explore the interaction of various senses in stimulating interest and understanding, both through theoretical studies on the combination of visual materials and speech in teaching (Zankov 1958) and through more practical advice literature on the use of visual materials in propaganda (Zil'berberg 1956; Gorfunkel' 1976). For example, instruction in the art of designing posters and decorating the interior of a clubhouse included rules about the different emotional tones created by colors from the warm and cold ends of the spectrum, recalling earlier pedagogical adaptations of Goethe’s color wheels (Shchipanov 1961: 34).
It is doubtful that Soviet cultural workers would have known much of the intellectual genealogy of nagljadnost'. But the literature they produced nonetheless dealt with complex philosophical questions about the link between perception and knowledge. It did so by transposing the discussion into a methodological key, providing instructors with tools for engaging and convincing an audience through visualization. In addition to still and moving images, the recommended “visual aids” included illustrative examples, numbers, and performances that appeal to senses other than sight. In the words of P. L. Gorfunkel', whose manual “Psychological foundations of nagljadnost' in propaganda lectures” was available to lecturers in the Mari republican library, nagljadnost' is not only “what people look at,” but “everything that enables the emergence of a visual image [vozniknoveniju zritel'nogo obraza]”:
If a person, looking at a chart, perceives only the visual image of the numbers placed on it, but not the phenomenon reflected through these numbers, then for him the chart is not a visual aid [ne javljaetsja nagljadnym posobiem]. On the other hand, if we play to the audience a recording of a speech by V. I. Lenin, then such a demonstration, addressed not to sight, but to hearing, has all the qualities of nagljadnost'. The listener is affected not only by the power of Lenin’s speech, with its characteristic simplicity, accessibility [dokhodchivost'], iron logic, passionate conviction. In him arises also the visual image of the leader, stored in memory from portraits, photographs, films, which enhances the propaganda effect manifold. (Gorfunkel' 1976: 15)
In this logic, tables and statistical charts as well as sound recordings can serve as “visual aids” when they enable the audience to visualize something more than what they immediately perceive—the course of development represented by numbers, the personality of a political leader. Another manual praises Lenin himself for having mastered these principles: the statistical charts in his book The Development of Capitalism in Russia are said to “allow the readers to see the processes, the tendencies of development standing behind the numbers” (Kirsanov 1976: 41). The same author speaks about descriptive and figurative speech as “interior nagljadnost',” and formulates the goal of the lecturer as speaking about remote events “as if everything said was also seen, experienced [perezhito]” (55).
The division between “interior” and “exterior” nagljadnost' recalls the multifaceted meanings of the word image in contemporary media studies. As William Mazzarella (2003) has pointed out, the advertising industry uses the term commodity image to refer both to visual depictions of a product and to the associations that come to people’s minds in connection with a brand name. Although pedagogical thought is absent from his genealogy of debates about the visual in nineteenth-century European philosophy, Mazzarella traces a dynamic, though sometimes antagonistic, relationship between state-sponsored didactic initiatives and commercial advertising in independent India, another society undergoing rapid modernization in which images were used to help audiences perceive the importance of abstract concepts and long-term processes. The difference between the pre-revolutionary nagljadka and the Soviet nagljadnost' seems to lie precisely in the problem of visualizing phenomena that are not readily accessible to the human eye, much like Goethe’s Urpflanze. Whereas learning by nagljadka assumes a situation where a pupil can see and imitate what a master does, socialist propaganda often described phenomena with no observable shape, because they were either abstract processes or promises of future attainments. The intuitive resonance of the power of science over nature or the benefits of the latest five-year plan cannot be taken as given, but has to be produced in the same way as a commercial advertisement might produce an association between a commodity and qualities such as sex appeal, intelligence, or cosmopolitanism.
In their quest to visualize the invisible and give local relevance to projects initiated elsewhere, Soviet propagandists drew on the methodological repertoire of multisensory pedagogy. Nothing about this repertoire is necessarily “secular,” and some influential pedagogical schools, such as Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, were in fact components of larger esoteric movements (Zander 2008). In their attention to the developmental effects of material qualities such as color and shape, these pedagogues opposed approaches that privilege learning as a purely cognitive process of understanding disembodied concepts. They thus present an alternative strand of nineteenth-century European thought that is often overlooked in genealogies that associate the development of liberal Western thought with an ever-increasing commitment to divorce symbolic representations from embodied practices (Asad 1993, 2006; Keane 2009; Mahmood 2005). Rather than any discomfort with materiality as such, it is their willingness to equate material images with imaginary representations that places reform pedagogues in an intellectual tradition with roots in Western European theology and philosophy, and brings their approaches into conflict with established uses of religious images in the Volga region.
The premises of multisensory pedagogy led Soviet atheists to take embodied interactions between religious practitioners and sacred images very seriously, while privileging sight over other channels of interaction. What separated the understandings of atheists from those of religious practitioners was not only the atheists’ lack of attention to the materiality of an image as something that can be touched, kissed, and hidden as well as seen, but also the role that each side assigned to the imagination. Didactic uses of visual aids involved a tendency to equate “exterior” perception and “interior” visualization, which Russian Orthodox critiques had long associated with Western Christian traditions. As these critiques are revived in post-Soviet religious debates, what results is not a simple confrontation between “secular” and “religious” camps. Rather, the visual culture of Soviet didacticism provides a common reference point for adherents of different denominations, as they draw on divergent theological traditions to debate the safety and desirability of particular means of transformation.
In a republic inhabited by adherents of religions that have long been in opposing camps during ongoing controversies about the role of images in worship, one would hardly expect a single religious response to the visual culture introduced by Soviet modernity. Among the monotheistic traditions, both icon venerators, such as Russian Orthodox Christians, and iconoclasts, such as Muslims and evangelical Protestants, are represented. For all three groups, Chimarij neighbors who venerate sacred trees and other natural features are part of lived reality, rather than simply objects of polemics against Pagan “idolatry.” But regardless of the diversity of theological stances on images, religious worship shares with modernist propaganda what Matthew Engelke calls the “problem of presence” (2007), a concern with giving some form of perceptible presence to phenomena and beings that are not immediately accessible to human senses. From this perspective, the difference between making divinity present in a tree or envisioning socialist construction in a chart may lie merely in the degree of abstraction. Valerie Kivelson and Joan Neuberger restrict the analogy to specific artistic traditions when they argue that an approach they sum up as “seeing into being” is characteristic both of “the transcendent viewing experience associated with medieval and early modern [Russian Orthodox] religious imagery” and of “the transformative quality ascribed to Soviet socialist realism” (2008: 6).
Suggestive as such analogies are, it is important to note that from the point of view of some of Russia’s religious traditions, the capacity of an image to represent an already-existing spiritual reality does not necessarily depend on its visual qualities. And even where visual contemplation is important, the desired effect may be to restrain the viewer’s imagination, rather than to stimulate her to visualize the future outcomes of a social transformation.
In spite of their overall commitment to sharp distinctions between “scientific atheism” and “religion,” atheist scholars did much to popularize analogies between religious and socialist imagery, often describing religious images as dangerous competition to their own offerings of “transcendent viewing experience.” Post-Soviet theological debates, however, tend to distinguish sharply between the visual culture brought by socialist modernization and religious uses of sacred images, with charges of idolatry being aimed at both sides, depending on the confessional identity of the speaker. Since these debates revolve around the relationship between images (exterior nagljadnost') and the imagination (interior nagljadnost'), they show how different religious traditions engage the legacies of Soviet visual culture in their own decisions about transformative methodologies.
Since most Mari and Russian inhabitants of the region were at least formally considered Orthodox before the revolution, atheist propagandists worked in an environment where images of the saints and Jesus Christ were a crucial vehicle for religious sensibilities and permeated everyday life. Before the revolution, and far beyond it in many places, virtually every house in Orthodox villages had a “red” or “beautiful corner” (krasnyj ugol) where icons were kept on a shelf or in a case (bozhnitsa), before which the inhabitants of the house performed their prayers (Tsekhanskaia 2004). As late as 1967, the commissioner for religious affairs in the Mari ASSR claimed that most houses in the republic had icons.3 Icons were also found in churches and were carried outside during processions (which Soviet law restricted to church grounds) and funerals. They were thus a visible and potentially public symbol of religious practice and belief, and it is not surprising that much anti-religious work targeted them. Denouncing the veneration of bleeding, weeping, or oil-exuding icons was a standard feature of atheist propaganda. In the Mari ASSR and elsewhere, chemical experiments demonstrating how substances resembling blood, tears, and oil could be deliberately made to appear by deceptive priests were part of the Evenings of Miracles without Miracles (Nekhoroshkov 1964).
As we have seen, the effectiveness of the denunciatory approach of the Evenings of Miracles was disputed even among atheist propagandists, and the more thoughtful among them certainly realized that the persistence of icon veneration could not be explained by deception alone. Taking recourse to theories of nagljadnost' which emphasized the psychological influence of images on viewers, alternative explanations interpreted icons as propaganda tools of the church, analogous to Soviet posters and banners. In a characteristic analysis, Nekhoroshkov repeatedly mentioned processes of sight as channels of interaction between humans and icons, in order to argue that the icon was a way for “church people” to influence people’s thoughts and behavior in an even more efficient way than a propagandist could, because it happened in the intimate sphere of the home:
The veneration of icons was inculcated in children from the earliest age. As a rule, icons were colorful, with a shiny wreath around the image, which unwittingly attracted the interest and attention of the children. In all the most important events in a person’s life the icon inevitably participated…. All family members went down on their knees and prayed several times daily, looking at the icon, asking god to grant them better life and health…. Everyone who came into the house turned his eyes first of all towards the god-shelf [bozhnitsa], to the icons, and finding them, crossed himself, bowed and only after this greeted the inhabitants of the house. (Nekhoroshkov 1967b: 15; my italics)
Fully crediting the material effects of the icon’s color and shininess, Nekhoroshkov interprets the image as a visual teaching aid, a tool to enhance the impact of ideological messages by making an audience emotionally receptive.
Post-Soviet religious critiques of icon veneration often display similar psychological understandings of icons, seeing them as persuasive tools to induce the viewer to worship the object depicted. For instance, the Finnish pastor of the Lutheran church pointed out that Orthodox churches have images of “many, many saints,” whereas the interior of the Lutheran church was simply and unambiguously dominated by the cross and the image of Jesus. He thus implied that icons made it difficult to concentrate on the real object of worship, or even to identify it. In a more far-ranging critique, the Chimarij high priest told me that “Jesus Christ is an image painted by someone.” His phrasing clearly evoked icons: obraz, kem-to napisannyj—a “written,” religious image rather than a “painted” secular picture, which would be referred to as kartina. But he went on to talk about the ways the apostles had distorted Jesus’ original teachings in the Bible, thus suggesting that it was not the veneration of icons as such that was problematic about Orthodox Christianity, but rather the church’s reliance on human memory, transmitted in textual as well as pictorial form.
In these interreligious critiques, what is at issue is often the concern that material images can reinforce a demand for false concretizations of the divine. A final example comes from a Friday sermon by the mufti of Marij El. Pointing to the danger of “Wahhabi” infiltration with its literalist interpretation of the Quran, the mufti accused a dissenting faction within the mosque of asking: “It is written: ‘Allah ascended on his throne.’ How did he ascend? Where is the throne?” By looking for literal reference points for such passages, these Muslims forgot that “God has no beginning and no end, he was not born, he has no son and no father. They are already imagining an image [predstavljajut obraz], like Christians. The next thing they’ll do is draw this image in the prayer niche.”
Protestant, Chimarij, and Muslim critics thus join Nekhoroshkov in identifying icons as visual stimuli that lure the imagination into unsafe directions. While both secularist and interdenominational polemics against icon veneration predate the Bolshevik Revolution (H. Coleman 2007), what is striking about these post-Soviet debates is that all sides overlook the important nonvisual components of popular interactions with icons. In Marij El as elsewhere in rural Russia, devotees touch icons, pass under them, or place objects on them to absorb their power, all ways of obtaining blessing and healing that do not require looking at the icon (Tsekhanskaia 2004). Taking up W. J. T. Mitchell’s distinction between “pictures” as physical media that hang on the wall and the “images” that are visually perceptible on them, one can say that an icon’s character as a flat, rectangular, tangible picture matters at least as much as the image represented (Mitchell 1994).
Even icons kept in the house, contrary to Nekhoroshkov’s description, remain largely unseen for much of the year in the rural areas of the Volga region. In Mari villages, most houses I visited had icon corners, whether or not the inhabitants were baptized Christians. In most cases, the shelf supporting one or more icons, along with other powerful objects such as Palm Sunday twigs, Easter eggs, and vials of holy water, was fitted into the corner opposite the entrance door and shielded by a lavishly embroidered curtain that created a niche in which the icons were barely discernible. The curtain was lifted during feast days and family events, but for most of the year the flowers on the curtain were far more visible than the images behind it, making the corner a visually dominating feature of the room, but preventing the kind of intense visual interaction with the icons that was crucial to atheist interpretations of their effect.
Curtained icon corners are by no means unique to the Mari, but are also common in Russian households of the Volga region and parts of central Russia. In other regions, icons are decorated with embroidered kerchiefs, which may also be used to cover them. Various ways of shielding the icons from view are often explained by the desire of the inhabitants of a house not to be seen by “the gods” in all their daily undertakings, i.e., to limit and direct the contact with divine forces which the icons make present (Tsekhanskaia 2004: 130–131). A slightly different rationale was suggested by an Old Believer in the Jurino district in Marij El, who told folklorist Marina Kopylova in 2004 that she closed off her icons with a curtain because “they can still see us anyway,” whereas passersby looking in from the street would not see the icons and be tempted to steal them (Kopylova, personal communication, January 4, 2007). Both explanations treat sight as an important aspect of the relationship between the residents of a house and their icons—but what matters is the image’s own capacity to see, a dimension of visuality that is at least theoretically absent from Soviet understandings of images,4 and also largely missing from the explanations of contemporary defenders of icon veneration. For some rural residents, sacred corners could even work without any image in them at all, as was the case in one house in Shorun'zha, the village known for its Chimarij ceremonialism. Here, the familiar embroidered curtain partitioned off a corner that contained no icon, but merely a candle fixed to a narrow board fitted across the angle. When I asked why there were no icons, the owner’s sister, herself visiting, answered: “Oh, they simply haven’t bought one.” Her sister-in-law added: “We’ll have to order one. Or no, they sell them in the church, you can buy them there.”
I later learned that she and her husband had built the house seventeen years ago, so they obviously felt no great need for icons, and their professed intention to buy one may have been mainly for my benefit as a stranger with unknown religious sympathies. But the point is that the corner worked well for them without an image in it. Family videos showed that the curtain was lifted and the candle lit for birthdays and other important events in the lives of family members, as would be done in front of the icon in other households. Even though residents of villages where Orthodoxy has more of a foothold would probably not consider icons so dispensable, the fact that the use of an icon-less corner can be very similar to one with an icon seems to resonate with Margaret Paxson’s observation that, in rural Russian households, “it is not strictly the case that the corner of the home is powerful because the icon resides therein; but the icon is powerful at least in part because of its placement in the corner” (2005: 219). The invisible forces that make the corner a powerful place in the house add a dimension to the icon that goes beyond the visual image depicted, but also beyond its material qualities as a picture.
What atheist critics failed to notice about rural icon corners is that they simultaneously create a perceptible divine presence and help restrict that presence to a particular location and to ritually sanctioned occasions for interaction. Far from presenting a constant avenue for “church people” to extend their influence into family life, these icons are part of rhythms of invisibility and appearance that are governed by communal standards for when and how to seek contact with the divine. Among religious critics, the mufti perhaps comes closest to this insight when he links attempts to depict God verbally or graphically to an urge to contain divine transcendence. Post-Soviet Orthodox defenders of icon veneration, by contrast, affirm the impulse to impose limits on human interaction with the divine, although they also ignore most folk uses of icons. Like their critics, these defenders focus on visual interactions with icons, but interpret these as necessary restraints in the rampant visual imaginaries of secular culture.
To venerate icons in post-Soviet Russia is to be necessarily aware of a multitude of possible criticisms, both secular and religious. In polemical literature on the subject, theologically educated defenders of icon veneration have pursued a dual strategy of argumentation. On the one hand, they draw analogies between icons and familiar visual forms, not unlike their critics. “A mother who kisses the photograph of her son,” one “anti-sectarian notebook” encourages the defender of Orthodoxy to reply to Protestant questions, “does not cause you disgust. Why then is an Orthodox Christian kissing the image of the Savior an idol-worshiper?” (Rubskii 2003: 94). On the other hand, defenders of icon veneration have turned the charge of illicit psychological influence against secular visual culture, claiming that icons serve to protect people from being overwhelmed by visual stimuli. During a dispute in the Christian Center between representatives of Joshkar-Ola’s Protestant churches and Orthodox clergy, Father Oleg Stenjaev from Moscow answered critical questions about icon veneration by relating a conversation he once had with a Baptist woman:
She says: “I don’t need icons, Christ is in my heart.” I asked her: “And what does he look like?” You know, this woman gets a little confused, and says: “He is not very tall, red-headed.” And somehow got even more disturbed. I say: “What is bothering you?” She says: “He looks like one man. When I was young I knew this one man. He was some kind of accountant, very religious.” … When we speak about Christ, whether we want to have icons or not, in the mind of each of us some kind of image arises. One young Orthodox boy, he was thirteen, went to see the film by Zeffirelli, Jesus of Nazareth. And then for a whole month he could not free himself from that hallucination. He says: I get on my knees to pray and I have, he says, that actor before my eyes, and there’s nothing I can do about it. The icon exists to filter out this sensual image, sensual apprehension. It shows another world, in a way. And sensuality goes to the sidelines a little bit.5
This priest was drawing a distinction between ordinary sense perception and the kinds of sensations one should have while praying, a distinction important to Orthodox liturgical practices. Within this distinction, he described icons as a barrier to the visual influences that might assault even the most iconoclastic worshiper. In this highly selective view of traditions of icon veneration, critiques of secular visual culture merge with themes from nineteenth-century Orthodox analyses of Western Christianity, which often focused on the tendency of Catholic and Protestant spiritual practices to give free rein to the human imagination. In a provocative turn of phrase, Father Stenjaev went on to ask if the visualizing rhetoric of Protestant preaching is really so different from a veneration of images: “And what if not icon painters are pastor Timofej and pastor Sergij [Old Slavonic versions of the names of his Protestant opponents] when they tell about Christ in their sermon? He is crucified, the hands, legs pierced by nails, a crown of thorns on his head?”
The Orthodox priest was pointing out that images in today’s world are unavoidable, and that Protestant critics of Orthodox “idolatry” themselves do not hesitate to appeal to visual imaginaries. As if to confirm this diagnosis, Protestants in Joshkar-Ola enthusiastically used films to propagate their faith. In 2005, a Baptist church showed Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ on Orthodox Maundy Thursday, and a montage of mute scenes from the same film formed the visual backdrop to a lengthy song about the sufferings of Christ during the Easter evangelizing concert organized by a Pentecostal church. Immediately following these views of Christ being flagellated, carrying his cross through the streets of Jerusalem, and dying painfully on the cross, the pastor’s exhortation verbally developed the imagery and encouraged listeners to go even further in their visual imagination:
You know, it was no coincidence that Jesus died in just the way that you saw today in the scene from the movie. He was flogged, he was simply torn to pieces, the skin taken off, there was not a living piece of flesh on him, the blood was flowing and pouring in streams, maybe he would even have died from loss of blood most of all. So much blood all around! Why such a death? Why blood? No forgiveness without bloodshed. You remember what we said in the beginning? Passover—that is the lamb which had to be presented as a sacrifice for sin, sacrifice for salvation.
This style of preaching is intriguingly close to what Charles Hirschkind (2006: 156–161) terms word-as-camera preaching in the equally iconoclastic tradition of contemporary Egyptian Islam, and illustrates well what Stenjaev was referring to when he called Protestant preachers “icon painters.” The visualizing descriptions in the sermon presuppose a familiarity of speaker and audience with portrayals of violent scenes in film. Recalling the rhetorical style described as “interior nagljadnost'” in Soviet manuals, verbal imagery is used to stimulate the visual imagination and elicit emotional responses.
There is an ironic undertone in Stenjaev’s analogy between preaching and icon painting, because these examples of Protestant nagljadnost' seem to be just what he had in mind when he claimed that icons are necessary to filter out sensual images that get in the way of prayer. As a priest known for his public arguments with various Protestant and Protestant-derived groups, Stenjaev is without doubt familiar with Orthodox polemics against the Western Christian tradition of visualizing biblical scenes, in particular those involving the suffering and death of Christ. Orthodox reactions to Mel Gibson’s film have often appealed to these reservations about visualization as spiritual practice. Valerij Dukhanin, an instructor at a Siberian seminary writing with the blessing of his archbishop,6 points out in a polemical tract that the idea of actors impersonating Christ’s suffering on the screen is an outgrowth of the long history of uncontrolled “daydreaming” (mechtanie) in Western visual arts and spiritual practices, a common accusation from nineteenth-century Orthodox polemics against Catholicism (Dukhanin 2005: 99). In the Western tradition of such visionaries as St. Teresa of Avila or the painters of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, “the spiritual was … replaced by the soulful, prayerfulness was replaced by romanticism and sentimentality, contemplation by daydreaming” (92).
Using a common Orthodox distinction between the spiritual and the soulful that we will return to in the next chapter, Dukhanin urges viewers to question the sources for visual imaginaries of the divine. By challenging the legitimacy of portraying biblical events in film, his analysis stands in marked contrast to Western criticism of Mel Gibson’s controversial film, which largely focused on the politics of its contents, for instance its alleged antisemitism (Burston and Denova 2005). Dukhanin argues that Western Christians have to resort to their own imaginations because they lack canonically established styles of icon painting and have departed from early Christian traditions of spiritual discipline. As examples, he cites the tendency of post-Renaissance Western art to portray saints with the faces of living human beings,7 and juxtaposes Western spiritual disciplines with the warnings of Byzantine church fathers and their nineteenth-century Russian interpreters against allowing images to arise in the mind during prayer. In particular, he quotes from the polemics of the nineteenth-century bishop Ignatij (Brjanchaninov, 1807–1861) against Teresa of Avila and Ignatius of Loyola, whose Spiritual Exercises contains instructions to visualize Christ, events from the Gospels, and heaven and hell (Dukhanin 2005: 98).
When I told educated Orthodox laypeople about certain Protestant practices of prayer and Bible study that aimed at “seeing God face-to-face,” they often repeated to me that the Byzantine church fathers had warned against imagining scenes during prayer. Like Dukhanin, they were drawing on the nineteenth-century rediscovery of Byzantine monastic practices associated with the translation of a Greek compilation of spiritual texts known as the Philokalia (Love of Goodness; Slavonic: Dobrotoljubie). Consisting mainly of texts dealing with monastic ascetic practices, the counsels of the Philokalia were adapted to lay lives in the writings of St. Ignatij and Feofan the Recluse (1815–1891; see A. I. Osipov 2001). These Orthodox theologians and their contemporaries, concerned with recovering specifically Eastern Christian traditions after centuries of orientation toward Catholic theology, constitute major sources of inspiration for post-Soviet Orthodox publications (Stöckl 2006).
In the reprints of the Philokalia for sale in many Orthodox churches, readers find such lines as “Blessed is the intellect [Greek: nous; Russian: razum] that is completely free from forms during prayer…. Blessed is the intellect that has acquired complete freedom from sensation during prayer.”8 According to the works of nineteenth-century authors also available as reprints, ways to put this injunction into practice range from concentrating on the texts of the prayer books (Feofan 1991) to reciting a short invocation of the name of Jesus in a formula such as “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” (Ignatii 2000). As Kallistos Ware (1985: 400) points out, this insistence on imageless prayer privileges a particular strand of spirituality, eclipsing other traditions of prayer in medieval Eastern Christianity that recommended imaginative meditation upon events from the life and passion of Jesus. Besides, all forms of prayer are usually carried out facing one or several icons, and thus have a visual dimension, albeit one that is carefully controlled by the canonically approved image.
One way to understand the critique of visualizing practices in this icon-venerating tradition is with reference to the distinction between material and imaginary visual signs, as made by media theorist Lambert Wiesing (2005). Distinguishing between two different aspects of what Mitchell calls an “image,” Wiesing differentiates those visual signs that we perceive in the outside world from those that we form in our imagination. The imaginary signs are suspect in the tradition of Orthodox criticism discussed here, because they might be the consequence not of divine inspiration, but of pride or demonic possession. Protestant instructors traveling through post-Soviet Marij El, by contrast, actively encouraged exercises of imaginary visualization, in that respect showing a greater affinity with the Soviet methods of nagljadnost'. For example, during the Baptist video seminar on life principles, a lesson on “The Means of Success” extolled the benefits of memorizing biblical passages and mentally visualizing their content while reciting them aloud. According to Bill Gothard, it is through this meditative practice that the central “message of success and victory” of any passage of scripture becomes clear to the believer. One of the cumulative consequences of unrepented sin is an inability to visualize scenes from scripture, a state in which the devil could easily overcome a person.
The video lecture demonstrates the saving power of visualization with the help of animation. While expounding on the importance of imagining scenes from scripture, instructor Bill Gothard is shown making a chalk drawing of the “tree planted by streams of water” from the opening lines of Psalm 1. Once the drawing of trees in front of a radiant sunset is complete, the sunset gradually transforms into the face of Christ. This use of video animation to achieve an effect that would not have been possible in a live classroom resonates with Wiesing’s observation that video and computer imagery more closely approximates the features of mental imaginaries than do traditional painting and photography (Wiesing 2005). Video and animated film share the capacity of the human imagination and dreams to visualize beings and objects that shift shapes and otherwise escape the laws of object constancy and gravity to which static pictures are more closely bound. As Birgit Meyer notes in her work on video production among Ghanaian Pentecostals, these technical possibilities make video a particularly suitable medium for reproducing the kinds of visions of divine and demonic powers that some forms of Protestant worship encourage (Meyer 2006).
From this foray into theological disputes, the role accorded to the visual imagination emerges as a crucial point of difference or convergence between various religious uses of images and the Soviet pedagogical tradition of nagljadnost'. Perhaps because they have common roots in Central European traditions of visual contemplation, Protestant and Soviet practices appear to be much closer to each other than current Orthodox understandings. This affinity may point to a dialogue between nineteenth-century reform pedagogy and older religious practices from both within and outside of Europe. The Orthodox position is influenced by the nineteenth-century Russian revival of Byzantine spiritual practices, which aimed to correct perceived Western influences in theology and liturgical art. But neither side of the debate can completely detach human learning from the capacity for visual perception.
Orthodox polemics against daydreaming notwithstanding, neither the Soviet nor the Protestant approach advocates an entirely free play of the imagination. In both views, learners are directed by authoritative teachers and texts, and in Baptist and Pentecostal understandings the ability to visualize depends on the purity of one’s heart and the fervency of one’s prayer. Likewise, Orthodox authors who seek to distinguish icons from imaginary signs cannot rule out the ways in which any publicly available image will also become part of popular imaginaries. The historian Vera Shevzov (2004: 174–175, 177, 232–233) notes several cases from nineteenth-century Russia in which icons of Mary appeared, and sometimes spoke, to people in dreams or visions. In other cases, Mary or another saint appeared as a human being, but directed the dreamer to an icon that was hidden or had been forgotten (224–225). In these dreams, icons seem to have an imaginary agency not so different from Wiesing’s videos. They may also crystallize psychological processes in a way similar to the calligraphic poster that reportedly appeared to the dormitory manager’s dying husband. Not surprisingly, revelatory dreams and the icons to whose discovery they sometimes led were subject to careful scrutiny by church authorities. Different from the poster, however, icons were effective because of their ability to mediate the presence of actual persons (the saints and divine figures depicted on them). Here lies the difference in the kinds of didactic relationships that icons and posters were supposed to encourage.
In the Mari countryside and elsewhere in Russia, icons differ from posters in being not always and exclusively visual media, and not always and exclusively didactic tools. Rather, the treatment of icons is reminiscent of what the art historian Hans Belting calls an idea of image-as-presence. In this understanding, which Byzantine icon venerators shared with more widespread traditions in the Mediterranean world and beyond, the image is not primarily a visual reminder of a loved or venerated person (as it is in the understanding of image-as-representation more familiar to contemporary readers), but a medium through which absent beings—be they ancestors, the emperor, or gods—could extend their persons across ontological, geographical, and temporal divides. The visual resemblance of image and prototype is not necessarily decisive for images to work in this way, nor are channels of sight the most important way of interacting with them. An image might be hidden in a sanctuary, behind a curtain, or in a box, visible only to certain people or at certain times; touching the image or an object that has been in contact with it may be an integral part of partaking in its power, in addition to or even instead of looking at it (Belting 2000 [1990]: 54–59; Belting 2001; see also Gell 1998). While this understanding seems to emphasize the image as a material medium (or “picture”), the example of the empty corner in Shorun'zha shows that sometimes a delineated space alone can work to create a presence, with no need for any perceptible image at all.
When post-Soviet defenders of icon veneration such as Oleg Stenjaev present icons as visual barriers to restrain the imagination while praying, they privilege aspects of the theology of the icon that fail to account for tactile interactions with the present-making image. At the same time, they are not completely assimilating icon veneration to secular didactic practices. The Orthodox theology of icon veneration can provide ancient precedents for a number of different understandings, including that of icons as didactic media. Learning, in this understanding, has important visual components, but it happens through a relationship of personal emulation, rather than the imaginary abstractions encouraged by nagljadnost'. This idea of learning by example can be seen in a letter written by Byzantine emperor Leo III to Caliph Omar II between 717 and 720, in answer to the Muslim ruler’s challenge of such Christian practices as the adoration of the cross and of images:
We honor the cross because of the sufferings of the Word of God incarnate…. As for pictures, we do not give them a like respect, not having received in Holy Scriptures any commandment whatsoever in this regard. Nevertheless, finding in the Old Testament that divine command which authorized Moses to have executed in the Tabernacle the figures of the cherubim, and, animated by a sincere attachment for the disciples of the Lord who burned with love for the Savior Himself, we have always felt a desire to conserve their images, which have come down to us from their times as living representations. Their presence charms us, and we glorify God who has saved us by the intermediary of his Only-Begotten Son, who appeared in the world in a similar figure, and we glorify the saints. (quoted in Meyendorff 2001a [1964]: 107; his ellipses)
This letter, written on the eve of the iconoclastic crisis which would preoccupy Byzantine politics and theology for much of the remainder of the eighth century, can lend ancient authority to post-Soviet analogies between icons and photographs of loved ones. The idea that icons authoritatively represent what a saint actually looked like has gained renewed importance in the post-Soviet revival of “Byzantine” and “Old Russian” styles of icon painting (Kuteinikova 2005), reversing the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century trend toward adopting conventions of Western painting. As visually accurate, though stylized, reminders of saints who live on in heaven, icons enable viewers to sustain a relationship with their saint, who becomes a guide in a learning process more akin to the prerevolutionary meaning of learning through nagljadka than to the abstract representation of invisible phenomena implied in late Soviet nagljadnost'.
Leo seems to consider visual resemblance to be crucial for the present-making capacities of images, but Stenjaev’s claim that icons allow a special kind of vision, different from ordinary sensory perception, is entirely absent from this letter. Scholars have argued that it was in reaction to the iconoclastic controversies which Leo himself unleashed a few years later, and to the later hesychast debate over the nature of the light that Jesus’ disciples perceived during the transfiguration on Mount Tabor, that the idea that icons allow a spiritual vision of divine reality became widespread (Belting 2000 [1990]: 166–177; Meyendorff 2001b [1982]). Such mystical interpretations of icons are common in twenty-first-century publications that advocate for the Byzantine revival in iconography (Yazykova 2010). The painters of the icon workshop of the Mari diocese participated in this quest to recreate a visual language specific to icons (Kudriavtseva 2002). As post-Soviet Christians encounter a range of visual media, the theological and aesthetic division between icons and ordinary objects of perception gains renewed importance.
It would thus be wrong to claim that Orthodox defenders of icon veneration are entirely untouched by Soviet theories of nagljadnost'. Rather, the debate traced in this chapter exemplifies an antagonistic kind of affinity, brought about when evolving concerns from two separate areas of expertise suddenly speak to each other: icon veneration as an alternative approach to personal transformation has gained urgency and salience among people immersed in pedagogical discourses that emphasize the importance of visual interactions. All sides agree that what is in front of a person’s eyes is uniquely important for their inner state and motivation for action. Instead of the elective crossing-over of chemical elements from old amalgamations into new, this antagonistic affinity implies a mutual reinforcement of elements from two different discourses that enter into critical dialogue with one another. Stenjaev’s warning about the potential for visual contemplation to lead to idolatry, even when the medium in question has a morally beneficial message (“I get on my knees to pray and I have … that actor before my eyes”), is an instance of this antagonistic reinforcement of pedagogical and theological traditions.
Soviet historian Richard Stites reminds us that Lenin, though critical of unqualified utopianism, wrote in What Is to Be Done (1902) that political activists need the kind of dreaming that “may run ahead of the natural march of events” (quoted in Stites 1989: 42). Communist daydreaming, in this view, encouraged the bold vision of a changed future that religious prejudice foreclosed. Keeping this in mind, we might see the religious controversies about the possibilities and perils of visual stimuli as concerned with the proper stance toward twentieth-century transformations: should religious practices parallel secular mobilizations, or should they form persons and communities that would be resistant to promises of radical change? Should images attract people’s attention and commitment to the causes of evangelical outreach, or should they lead them slowly on a path to inner transformation? Should a religious community sanction the use of images, and if so, should these images differ in form from those proliferating in secular contexts?
Part of what gives these debates their vigor is the renewed ideological competition after the end of Soviet era restrictions on religious and philosophical expression. But the different positions also have roots in particular pedagogical traditions—selective lines of thought about the means and ends of human transformations. Soviet methodical literatures on nagljadnost' took up complex ideas about the developmental significance of human sense perceptions, and Soviet activists tended to understand religious images in light of those theories. Post-Soviet religious debates about images, by contrast, highlight a question that the Soviet literature rarely broaches directly: should an instructor use images in order to persuade and engage audiences? What could the unintended effects of such methods be? If these doubts play themselves out in debates about the imaginary, not just in the stances toward material practice that much of the literature in the anthropology of secularism explores, the reason may lie in secularism’s special concern with untold human futures. Recognizing no extrahuman partners in the effort to either change or maintain the world, secularism perhaps cannot afford to distrust the human imagination too much. When facing the issue of how and to what degree to encourage citizens to daydream about change, atheists came closest to debating broader questions about the ethics of persuasion.