Kunt Ernő szerk.: Kép-hagyomány – Nép-hagyomány (Miskolc, 1990)

I. RÉSZTANULMÁNYOK - Marina Peltzer: A lubok - az orosz vallásos népi fametszet - a 18-19. század fordulóján: avagy a látomások és látásmódok változásáról

it is impossible to lay down the boundaries beyond which a print comes into or out of the popular world";

28 consequently, the authority (in this instance the police) to which one would want to entrust this additional censorship of all the popular stock would be devilishly embarrassed. The only measure to take would be to set up a censorship, prior to the printing, for new popular images and to submit to it the old ones, appearing not to be sufficiently in accordance with the recognized norm. This view was approved by the law department on 12 February 1851. It was then that the military governor of Moscow, count Zakrevskij, ruled that all copperplates be suppressed. The "official death" of popular imagery prompted a widespread interest in this unrecognized side of Russian art. It also prompted its stylistic, thematic and lipguistic renewal, henceforward strictly controlled by the censors. This digression on censorship shows us that is was principally concerned with religious images, their truthfulness to the canon, their artistic quality and their production in the official or semi-official network of the monopolies. In the 19th century, the harmful influence of the sects of the old believers on „uneducated country people" was particularly feared.

29 Secular images, which at first enjoyed a certain amount of freedom, caused some alarm in the 19th century by their potential social and political implications. The secular lubok allows for a whole gamut of visions of the peasantry, ranging from the grotesque to idealization. It also reveals perfectly the widespread awareness of this particular social class, which plays the leading part in the image. If the religious lubok allows less for this kind of investigation, its part should not be neglected and may even have been predominant if one judges by D.A. Rovinskij who made an inventory of most of the prints at the end of the 19th century. His catalogue lists 1782 numbers but this can already be multiplied by four, taking into account the different printings, also those mentioned in the addenda, put together under the same number with a different letter. If we limit ourselves to the basic data, 1097 numbers i.e. more than 61% refer to religion and its by-products; 292, that is less than 17%, relate to humorous images, tales and fables; and 393, i.e. 22%, cover history, caricatures of 1812, portraits, views of towns, calendars and alphabet primers. This division is meaningful, even if it remains approximate, for in his passion for collection, Rovinskij did not limit himself to prints of popular technique and did not include lithographs.

30 Fedorov-Davydov went over the data of his predecessor in 1927 and concluded that, whatever the criterion considered, religious images outnumbered the historical or entertaining ones; however he stressed the rapid advance of secular imagery in the 18th century, in the face of a decline of the religious image which repeats itself by taking up the same subjects.

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' One has to bear in mind - in order not to be led astray by facts - that Rovinskij has included in his atlas of facsimiles which comes with the five volumes of text, a thematic division inversely proportional to that of his catalogue, i.e. about 200 entertaining pictures, 100 historic ones and 100 religious ones. Religious imagery is full of contrasts. It cannot be denied that the use of colour, the taste for narrative and for the apocryphal, establish a link between some of these images and secular production. However it seems to me that icons on paper (woodcuts or copperplates, lithographs) kept their religious function. The few ornamental or iconographical liberties taken with regard to the iconic model were intended to facilitate a contact with the „divine" and to gain familiarity with it. These pictures generally present the text of a prayer. In fact this is one of the advantages of the icons on paper over those painted on wood. That is to say they tell in a specific way how to use them and how to have a dialogue with the „divine". They are often hymns and the specific religious melody (glas) is then indicated. The tone is very respectful, also at times pathetic, a kind of call for help from above; official prayers