The Barber-Surgeon and the Schismatic: Reframing an Icon of Russian Modernity

Abstract This article presents a new reading of one of the most famous images of Russian visual culture: the anonymous, untitled, eighteenth-century popular print ( lubok ) known as “The Barber Wants to Cut the Beard of the Old Believer.” After reviewing the existing historiography and offering evidence for an alternative dating, I argue that this xylograph is less a folksy illustration of Peter I’s “cultural revolution” than a manifestation of the tastes of mid-eighteenth-century Russian Orthodox city-dwellers, the social group that was the primary audience for this cheap, commercially-produced, consumer product. A contextualized reading of this artifact of early modern Russian print culture provides a concrete example of how the re-circulation of negative stereotypes about religious dissenters contributed to the construction of an imagined community of “pious and reasonable” sons of the imperial church and state. It also leads us to consider why the Petrine-centric interpretation first offered by the nineteenth-century creators of the Russian national canon still informs our understanding of this popular print, and what, if anything can be done about it.