Winner of the Heldt Prize for Best Book in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Women's and Gender Studies 2021 There was a discontent among Russian men in the nineteenth century that sometimes did not stem from poverty, loss, or the threat of war, but instead arose from trying to negotiate the paradoxical prescriptions for masculinity which characterized the era. Picturing Russia's Men takes a vital new approach to this topic within masculinity and art historical studies by investigating the dissatisfaction that developed from the breakdown in prevailing conceptions of manhood outside of the usual Western European and American contexts. By exploring how Russian painters depicted gender norms as they were evolving over the course of the century, each chapter shows how artworks provide unique insight into not only those qualities that were supposed to predominate, but actually did in lived practice. Drawing on a wide variety of source material, including previously untranslated letters, journals, and contemporary criticism, the book explores the deep structures of masculinity to reveal the conflicting desires and aspirations of men in the period. In so doing, readers are introduced to Russian artists such as Karl Briullov, Pavel Fedotov, Alexander Ivanov, Ivan Kramskoi, and Ilia Repin, all of whom produced masterpieces of realist art in dialogue with paintings made in Western European artistic centers. The result is a more culturally discursive account of art-making in the nineteenth century, one that challenges some of the enduring myths of masculinity and provides a fresh interpretive history of what constitutes modernism in the history of art.

"The sense of estrangement felt by men during the nineteenth century has been called many things - a crisis in masculinity, the mal de siáecle, even a psychological disorder known as neurasthenia - but as a phenomenon, such masculine discontent has gone largely unexplored outside of the western European and American contexts. In this ground-breaking new investigation, Allison Leigh explores how Russian painters sought to depict the new psychological struggles associated with modernity and the implications such visual manifestations of anxiety had for masculinity at the time. Drawing on a wide variety of source material, including previously untranslated letters, journals, and contemporary criticism, Leigh investigates how men's lives changed as they experienced the cultural upheavals of the nineteenth century. In so doing, she introduces readers to Russian artists such as Pavel Fedotov, Karl Briullov, Il'ia Repin, and Ivan Kramskoi, all of whom produced masterpieces of realist art in dialogue with paintings made in European artistic centers at the time. The result is a more culturally discursive account of art-making in the nineteenth century, one that challenges some of the enduring myths of masculinity and provides a fresh interpretive history of what constitutes modernism in the history of art"--

An important and eye-opening contribution to the Slavic field and our studies of modernism in Russia. Through an examination of male portraiture, it traces the breakdown, between 1825 and 1881, of various myths surrounding masculinity-from the solid heroic code of virtuous, courageous manhood to the ambiguities of doubt-ridden individualism.