The experiences of Russians who fled their homeland after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution are chronicled in rare photographs on view at Columbia through Feb. 17 in an exhibition titled "Empire and Exile."
Selected from Columbia's Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European History and Culture, the more than 100 photographs on public display--many for the first time--depict life in Russia before the Revolution and the lives of Russian émigrés in exile.
Of special interest are a rare photograph of Rasputin at tea (ca. 1914) and snapshot views of the exile in Tobolsk of the last Czar of Russia, Nicholas II, and his family during the winter of 1917-18.
"'Empire and Exile' reflects the dynamic spirit and broad range of interests characteristic of the Russian émigrés whose personal papers now form the nucleus of the Bakhmeteff Archive," said Ellen Scaruffi, curator of the world-renowned archive and the exhibition. Founded in 1951, the archive has grown to become one of the largest repositories of Russian manuscript materials outside of Russia itself, containing 1,000 named collections and many rare and historically important photographs.
The exhibition is on display in the Kempner Exhibition Room of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library in Butler Library. It is free and open to the public Monday through Friday from 9:00 A.M. to 4:45 P.M. (Information: 854-5153; call for holiday closing days.)
The pomp and ceremony of Czarist Russia under Nicholas and his father, Alexander III, are symbolized in photographs of the Czar's "Life-Guards" in the Semonovsky Regiment and the Imperial Horse Guards, both in full regimental regalia, along with scenes of student life at the elite School of the Corps of Pages in St. Petersburg. Views of civilian activities at the time include family photographs of the middle class and studio portraits of tradespeople. Russian women are shown in a variety of roles, from mother, to chauffeur and aviator.
Images of war are included among stereopticon views of the bombing of Port Arthur by the Japanese in 1904, graphic photographs of a beheading in Manchuria the same year, pictures of Alexsandr Kerensky, prime minister of the provisional government, with Russian troops at the front in 1917, and White Army photographs of Bolshevik atrocities. A photograph of Nicholas II with nurse Elena Mogilat, who later emigrated to New York and became the first woman to teach Russian at Columbia, is one of several photos marking nurses' contributions during World War I.
Russian politics and diplomacy are represented by photographs of individuals from different ends of the political spectrum, ranging from Nicholas II's officials Count Paul Constantinovich Benckendorff, Marshall of the Court, and Count Sergei Yulevich Witte, Minister of Finance, to revolutionaries Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaia and Vera Figner. Boris Alexandrovich Bakhmeteff, the late businessman, diplomat and Columbia professor of engineering for whom the archive is named, is seen in his diplomatic role as ambassador from the Russian Provisional Government to the United States (1917-1922).
"A particular strength of the Bakhmeteff Archive is the information it contains on Russian emigration in the 1920's and 1930's," said Scaruffi. Photographs on view contrast the varied living conditions and activities of émigrés from Istanbul to Paris and illustrate the growth of Russian educational institutions abroad with scenes of the Russian Historical Archives in Prague and the Institute of Oriental and Commercial Sciences in Harbin.
"A major portion of the exhibition is devoted to a celebration of Russian culture," she said, "but instead of focusing upon the Russian avant garde, which is currently so fashionable with modern Americans, it reflects the more conservative tastes of émigrés who were nostalgic for the familiar traditions of their lost homeland." Representative of this theme is a series of photographs by the St. Petersburg photographer K.K. Bulla taken at the estate of Russian realist artist Ilya Repin from 1905 to 1915, showing Repin with authors Maxim Gorky and Leonid Andreev, critic Vladimir Stasov and opera singer Fedor Chaliapin, among others. Examples from the Bakhmeteff's extensive collection of émigré authors are photographs of Ivan Bunin, the first Russian author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and other writers and poets.
