Folk Performances as a Museum Trend in the Early 20th Century: Back to the Romaskevich Collection of Persian Photographs

The present article is a continuation of a series of works devoted to the study of the collections of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (the Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences, in relation to the diversity of the Islamic world. Alexander Romaskevich (1885—1942), a student of Valentin Zhukovsky (1858—1918), a prominent specialist in Iranian studies of the St. Petersburg School of Oriental Studies, donated to the MAE several collections that he had brought from Iran in 1908 and 1912—1914. The collections include postcards and photographs, most of which were taken by Antoin Sevruguin (1851—1933), a renowned photographer at the Qajar court. Romaskevich's collections complement his study of the folklore of the peoples of Iran and Iranian dialectology. The interest in Persian daily life was largely connected with the implementation of the ideas of the Narodnik movement in the social, cultural and intellectual space of Russia. An important part of Romaskevich's collections is a series of works depicting traditional Iranian folk performances and their participants. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries there was a great interest in the art of folk entertainment. This interest was given new impetus by the Revolution of 1917, which placed folk culture at the forefront of intellectual and artistic activity. Young Soviet researchers such as Yuriy Marr (1893—1935) and Roman Galunov (1893—1938) actively continued to study Iranian daily life. Experimental ethnographic theatres that existed in Moscow and Petrograd / Leningrad in the 1920s and 1930s used reconstructions of folk performances within the framework of the most modern museum technologies of the time.