Katherine M. H. Reischl

By the mid-1930s, the literary works of the aging Russian naturalist author Mikhail Prishvin abounded in the Soviet press, from children’s books to literary journals. But despite a long list of publications, the author has been relegated to a secondary position in the Soviet literary canon. It has only been with the recent publication of his vast and detailed diaries that Prishvin’s authorial persona has sparked growing scholarship and interest. And it was not until December 2015 that viewers were able to see the first exhibition of his equally meticulous and remarkable photographs. The Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow (MAMM) mounted an exhibition of images taken by the writer with subjects ranging from the destruction of the bells in his beloved Sergiev Posad, to prisoners and guards at the White Sea Canal construction site, to intimate portraits of his faithful hunting dogs and delicate close-ups of spiderwebs. Illuminated by the bright lights of the gallery, and displayed next to minimalist iPad “guides” with recorded excerpts from the author’s stories and diaries, the enlarged photographs shone for the first time. In their straight-on presentation of subjects, Prishvin’s photographs seemed anachronistic in an exhibition hall bearing the name of the pioneer of modernist photography, Aleksandr Rodchenko. However, as the show made clear, the photographer’s contribution to modern art was not in innovation, but to see the old in the new—the persistent holdovers from a past way of life in Russian peasants, Old Believers, and the textures of nature. But even in this celebration of the photographer’s work on its grandest scale to date, his subjects were often overlooked in the young visitors’ rush to take selfies. Prishvin, the hunter, nature lover, and author of naturalist ocherki, was welcomed into the gallery’s avant-garde canon just as he was crowded out by the distractions of contemporary media. Prishvin was an avid photographer in the tumultuous years of 1925–1936, just as photography was providing new ways of documenting and mapping the rapidly changing political and social reality of the nascent Soviet state. A few years before Prishvin received his first Leica camera, Anatolii Lunacharskii, the Commissar of Enlightenment during the most open period of Soviet artistic expression, linked a vision of the new nation with photographic literacy, stating in 1926: “Just as every forward-looking comrade must have a watch, so must he be able to handle a camera. This will surely happen with time. Just as the USSR achieved universal literacy in general, so too will it have photographic literacy in particular.” Soviet citizens en masse would now have access to portable means of organizing both time (the watch) and space (the camera). This democratically empowering call would also inspire the worker photography movement, a burgeoning number of author-photographers, and well-known avant-garde artists to employ the camera in their own framings of a volatile Soviet experience.