Question about lubki

[jeff brooks]

Dear Marcus, if i may:
The lubok novels or stories were printed on multiplies of a printer's sheet,
as I think I explain in when Russia Learned to Read. Each sheet was folded
into 32 pages or multiples there of to create small-format volume. The
reader had to cut the pages, as I did when I originally read them in the old
Lenin Library. The lubok print which resembles the form of an icon in some
respects with text and images displayed around a central image was sold as a
single picture, often to be stuck on a wall. It was not intended to be cut.
I discuss various versions of one such print that appeared in both separate
lubok prints and also as a story in various versions of varying page lengths
in:

“How a Soldier Saved Peter I: A Kudzu Vine of Russia’s Popular
Fiction” in *Russian
*

*History/ Histoire Russe* Vol. 35 Part 2 (summer, 2008), 1-19.

Stephen M. Norris in A War of Images provides a good discussion of lubok
prints and sources, particularly with respect to war and national identity.
He notes some recent Russian studies of the lubok as I think I do in several
articles.

I should add that I recently produced an online collection of 200 lubok
works with Brill that is available for libraries to purchase. I assume that
Brill would let you sample it if your library were interested in it. I do
not receive any royalty from it. It was fun to do, however, and it is useful
for my own work. The titles go back to the origins of the Russian novel in
the late 18th century up to and including WWI. Here is the link for it:
http://www.primarysourcesonline.nl/c49/

I should add that some lubki have various times built into the print as do
some icons so that there is a storyline even though the print is not divided
into separate panels. In other cases a story is told even though the picture
represents a single moment in time.  I hope this is helpful.

I discuss lubki of various sorts in a couple of recent essays:

“Chekhov, Tolstoy, and the Illustrated Press in the 1890s,” *Cultural and
Social History*

            (journal of the Social History Society), Vol. 7, No. 2 (2010),
213-232.

“The Russian Nation Imagined: The Peoples of Russia as Seen in Popular
Imagery,

            1860s-1890s,” *Social History* (spring, 2010), 535-557.


Cheers,

Jeff Brooks

On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 12:42 PM, Marcus Levitt <levitt at college.usc.edu>wrote:

> Dear Colleagues,
>
> What is the difference between a lubok print of a complete story that is
> divided into panels, each with text and illustration, and a "lubochnyi
> roman" (that is commonly referred to as a "knizhka")?  Is it simply that the
> multi-sectioned print is folded and cut into a booklet, or are these
> different artifacts?  Schaarschmidt writes that lubok novels "ran from one
> to three printer's sheets of thirty-two pages each" (pp. 427-8 in "The Lubok
> Novels: Russia's Immortal Best Sellers," Canadian Review of Comparative
> Literature [Sept. 1982]), while the lubok story I am looking at is one sheet
> in eight panels.
>
> Thanks for your help,
> Marcus
>
>
>
>
> Marcus Levitt, Associate Professor
>
> Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
> University of Southern California College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
> Los Angeles, CA 90089-4353
> Fax (213) 740-8550
> Tel  (213) 740-2736
> Departmental Pages: http://college.usc.edu/sll/
> Personal Web Pages:
> http://college.usc.edu/levitt/
> http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~levitt/ <http://www-rcf.usc.edu/%7Elevitt/>
>
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