V. V. Vereshchagin and the «invention» of the north in literature and journalism of the late XIX- early XX century (part two)

The paper, based on the book “On the Northern Dvina. Through wooden churches”, considers the artist V.V. Vereshchagin’s perception of the North. It is shown that it is based on his professional and artistic interest in the monuments of traditional wooden architecture of the XVI-XVII centuries. The artist views the latter as a kind of classic - the pinnacle of Russian art, the personification of its tradition, destroyed or distorted by later stylistic experiments. Moreover, he even places them in a global cultural context, using very tendentious analogies based on his personal experience of acquaintance with the East. On the other hand, Vereshchagin is fully aware of and carefully records the ethnographic features of the Dvina area. Without dividing the North into regions or territories, perceiving it as a single nationally significant space, the artist resorts to subjective-emotional gradation as a means of differentiation: his assessment of the “quality” of a particular monument, settlement, or area is sometimes speculative, litereally depends on the mood. At the same time, the Vereshchagin text reveals key themes and motifs of the northern discourse of the 1890s-1910s, but otherwise articulated. Thus, the thesis that the North passed the peak of its development in the late Middle Ages is revealed through the interpretation of European and other borrowings in Russian architecture. The “remoteness” and “abandonment” of the region are shown as, on the one hand, the problem of “undermanagement”, inattention to the needs of the region, and on the other hand, a consequence of the weak infrastructure development of the northern provinces.