Landscape and identity in Russian and Soviet art: an introduction

Abstract

tainly in the natural order of these things that a ‘newer’ cultural geography already hovers somewhere on the disciplinary horizon, waiting for a propitious moment to reveal its existence and lay its claim to the mantle of scholarly innovation and the charisma of the cutting edge. This observation is not intended cynically, but rather to suggest that what is important at the end of the day is not the novelty of the epithet but rather the quality of the intellectual insight that goes along with it. And in this regard, we should appreciate that the legacy of the ‘new’ cultural geography is going to endure far longer than the term itself. For if ‘classical’ cultural geography taught us to examine a material landscape shaped by the social, economic and cultural forces of the inhabiting groups, and if ‘humanistic’ cultural geography went on to explore how such material landscapes were perceived and interpreted at a subjective cognitive level, then the ‘new’ cultural geography has opened our eyes critically to landscape as an act of representation. The epistemological readujstment here is appreciable, for we can consider landscape as representation only by directing our attention onto the agency responsible for the representing, an agency which routinely seeks to arrange natural imagery and manipulate an iconography for its own particular purposes. Political ideologies can act as such agencies, and terms such as ‘Tory landscapes’, ‘fascist landscapes’ and so on have become a part of our vocabulary; but better studied and more evocative is the representation of nature as part of the elaboration and articulation of social identities, most commonly expressed as national identities. The implicitly instrumental quality of landscape representation vis-à-vis the larger identity project should not obscure its vital significance, for a vast range of examples points to the unique effectiveness of landscape imagery in presenting visions of the nation.