Icons and People: Discourses, Practices, and the Reassembling of Concepts in the 20th Century

Abstract

In this article, I describe Russian icons as religious “images-objects” (as defined by Jérôme Bache) and as actors involved in complex social interactions. Throughout their history, icons have been incorporated into religious practices related to reciprocal relationships and the strategy of appropriating holy power. They have been gifted, decorated, and “dressed,” and have been interacted with tactilely, such as being touched, kissed, and sometimes even fragmented (like the relics of a saint). Venerated icons have functioned as composite objects, where the image was just one component, complemented by a multitude of other elements, such as inlays, pendants, and frames. However, this situation changed dramatically in the early 20th century, when icons began to be cleaned and studied, with the removal of elements that obscured the images. This led to the emergence of new semiotic ideologies, such as the “museum” and “modern theological” ones, which began to perceive, describe, and position icons as “pure images.” Shortly after this, the activities of the Bolsheviks led to the almost complete disappearance of composite icons in the Russian Empire. As a result, there was a rapid and widespread shift in the optics, discourses, and languages used to describe Russian icons, and subsequently, in the various practices associated with icons. I analyze how these processes unfolded, how different semiotic ideologies emerged in the 20th century, and how they began to change in the post-Soviet space.