Wednesday, March 30th, 2016 The Trouble with Authenticity. Backwardness, Imitation, and the Politics of Value in Late-Imperial Russia

Description

This talk analyzes one of the most controversial cultural projects of the early 20th century – the creation of the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. The Museum, funded and organized by Ivan Tsvetaev, displayed plaster copies of the world’s most famous works of art. In this talk I will argue that Tsvetaev’s attitude to copies and his attempts to replace historical material authenticity with scientific authenticity of “mathematically” precise casts represented an important turn in the epistemology of humanities, an attempt to introduce the principles of mechanical objectivity in the history of art and archaeology.

Ekaterina Pravilova is a professor of history specializing in 19th century Imperial Russia. A native of St. Petersburg, Professor Pravilova received her Ph.D. from the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1997. She was a research scholar at the Academy of Sciences from 1995 to 2004 and an assistant professor of history at the European University at St. Petersburg from 2002 to 2006. She joined the faculty at Princeton in the fall of 2006.

Prof. Pravilova’s first book, Zakonnost’ I prava lichnosti: administrativnaia iustitsiia v Rossii, vtoraia polovina 19 veka – Oktiabr’ 1917 (Legality and Individual Rights: Administrative Justice in Russia, second half of the 19th century – October 1917), (Obrazovanie-Kul’tura, St. Petersburg, 2000) analyzes the legal regimes of governance in the Russian Empire. In her second book, Finansy Imperii: dengi I vlast v politike Rossii na natsionalnykh orkainakh (Finances of Empire: Money and Power in Russia’s National Borderlands), (Novoe Izdatel’stvo, 2006) she analyzes budgetary and monetary relations between Russian imperial core and its borderland regions – Poland, Finland, Turkestan and Transcaucasia.

Pravilova’s third book, A Public Empire: Property and the Quest for the Common Good in Imperial Russia (Princeton University Press, 2014), analyzes Russian property regimes from the time of Catherine the Great through World War I and the revolutions of 1917. The book shows the emergence of the new practices of owning “public things” in imperial Russia and the attempts of Russian intellectuals to reconcile the security of property with the ideals of the common good.