More from the 1905-1906 Russian Underground Press

A few months back I posted images from 1905-1906 Russian revolutionary periodicals that I found at Yale University’s digital library. Recently I (accidentally) came across a related book called Blood and Laughter: Caricatures from the 1905 Revolution that contains more illustrations of the 1905-1906 Russian underground press.


from Leshii (Woodgoblin) No. 2, 1906

"Sunday 9 January 1905: Hundreds of thousand of workers assemble in the streets of St Petersburg. They are in their Sunday best and accompanied by their elderly relatives and children. There are no banners or slogans though some carry icons or church emblems, for this is to be a peaceful demonstration led by an Orthodox priest, Father Gapon. They set off for the Winter Palace, bearing to the Tsar their petition for a constitution. ‘Sire!!’ it reads. ‘We workers have come to you to seek justice and protection. We are in great poverty, we are oppressed and weighed down with labors beyond our strength. We are insulted, we are not recognized as human beings…’

For two cold hours they stand waiting in the snow for Tsar Nicholas to appear and receive their petition. A shot rings out, and they stamp their feet. Another, and they laugh that it must be blanks. A third, and suddenly women and children slump lifeless int eh snow. Still they assure themselves that this must be a mistake, for the Tsar would not shoot down unarmed civilians. But now the gendarmes are galloping in the crowd, and the slaughter has begun. The shooting continues all day long. The dead are counted in the hundreds, the wounded in the thousands, their blood spilt on the Schlusselberg Highway, the Troitsky Bridge and the Nevsky Gates. But the police cart away the bodies so quickly that it is impossible to know the full toll.

Bloody Sunday killed superstition, the old faith in a just Tsar, and unleashed a tumultuous rage among the masses. Father Gapon was soon forgotten, ‘his priestly rode’, wrote Trotsky, ‘a mere prop in the drama whose true protagonist was the proletariat’. A huge wave of strikes swept the country, paralyzing more than 100 towns and drawing in a million men and women. Throughout the summer peasants rioted while terrorists struck at figures of authority.

Alongside the struggle in street and factory was the struggle for the free press. Ministers and clerics suffered assassination more by the pen than the bullet as the revolution strove for the expression of powerful emotions long suppressed. A flood of satirical journals poured from the presses, honouring the dead and vilifying the might. Drawings of frenzied immediacy and extraordinary technical virtuosity were combines with prose and verse written in a popular underground language, veiled in allegory, metaphor and reference to the past.

Russia had a rich history of satirical journalism. In the 1770s, in the reign of Katherine the Great, an elite of intellectuals close to the court developed a new ‘aesopian’ language – deeply subversive to the enlightened autocracy – to express their opposition to the old regime. The satire of the court flourished until the shadow of revolution in Europe drove the Empress to suppress it. Again in the 1860s highly popular satirical journals sprang up, drawing consciously on their courtly predecessors to curse the Crimean War and Tsar Alexander II’s empty promises of reform. While populist revolutionaries went ‘to the people’ to make common causes with the peasants, radical journalist set out to collect folk-stories, popular sayings, soldiers’ songs and workers’ ballads. The old allegorical vocabulary was joined to the language of popular satire. By the 1870s these journals has been closed down, but this language was now part of the everyday speech. Satirical writing returned to the underground, where it flourished, rooted in popular protest, until 1905. It was then that satire achieved its full power.

Fore a few brief months the journals spoke with a great and unprecedented rage that neither arrest nor exile could silence. At first their approach was oblique, their allusions veiled, and they often fell victim to the censor’s pencil. But people had suffered censorship for too long. Satirist constantly expanded their territory and their targets of attack, demolishing one obstacle after another as they went, thriving on censorship. The workers’ movement grew in boldness, culminating in the birth of the St Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, the people’s government. For fifty days the Tsar and his ministers were confronted by another power, another law. Journalist and printers seized the right to publish without submitting to the censor. The satirical journals then reached their apotheosis, until the revolution died as it had risen, bathed in blood.

More clearly than any party resolution or government proclamation, the caricatures of 1905 tell the story of that heroic failure – and they are a symptom of that failure too…they chronicle with incredible vividness that moment of the transition from Tsarist despotism to Bolshevik revolution." -by Cathy Porter, from Images of Revolution: Graphic Art from 1905 Russia


from K Svetu (Towards the Light) No. 3 1906


"In the State Duma. 'Interpellation'"by Alexander Kudinov. Leshii No. 1, 1906


from K Svetu (Towards the Light) No 2, 1906


Strana Mechty (Land of Dreams) No. 1, 1906


"The Moscow Vampire" - Volshebny Fonar No. 2, 1906 (depiction of Governor-General Fedor Vasilevich Dubasov)


from Kosa No. 4, 1906


from Pchela No. 3, 1906


from Zarnitsy No. 8, 1906 (Witte and Durnovo burning the books)


Krasny Smekh (Red Laughter) No. 2 1906, by Boris Kustodiev


Satiricheskoe Obozrenie (Satirical Review) No. 1, 1906


"The Triumphant Pig" - Maski (Masks) No. 8, 1906


"The Treacherous Neva Reflected Everything" - Volshebny Fonar (Magic Lantern). No. 1, 1906


"Christmas Tree" - Burelom (Storm-Wood), Christmas 1905


"31 December 1905" Burelom (Storm-Wood), Christmas 1905. Facing is Drubasov, the Governor-General of Moscow and organizer of the suppression of the Moscow uprising, and Prime Minister Witte is shown with his back turned, playing with death.


from Zarevo (Dawn) No. 3, 1906


from Zarnitsy (Summer Lightning) No. 1, 1906


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All of the images come from David King and Cathy Porter's Blood and Laughter : Caricatures From the 1905 Revolution [link]
I haven't yet got my hands on it but David King and Cathy Porter also published Images of Revolution: Graphic Art from 1905 Russia [link]
also, once again, see Yale University's collection at Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library [link]
my previous post on the subject [link]
see Trixie Treat's post on the journals [link]

Relating to Quacks, Quackery and Nostrums, Part 1

"Quack is a pejorative term, disparagingly, albeit sometimes defensively, applied by a member of the establishment, the orthodox, regular, professional, credentialed and accepted class to describe the unorthodox, unlicensed, disapproved member of a fringe or irregular group. It is a term of condemnation employed when one wants to belittle another. Above all, the term has become associated with the sellers of medicines and the marketers of medical systems, those with the "true" method of curing specific ills or, in an earlier day, all the ills of mankind.

While the origins of the term are obscure, the term "quack" probably came from the Dutch Quacksalber, a charlatan, mountebank, empiric or itinerant seller of medicine. It may also have been derived from the sounds made by a duck, the term applied to the hawker of nostrums whose excessive zeal in describing the merits of his or her cure may well have sounds similar to the squawking of a duck. The chatter of the quack, in most cases more like torrent s of words, would have been familiar to both town and rural populations even in the ancient periods, for quacks have long been well known in every society. Over the past four hundred years they have been representative figures in folktales, stories and especially in prints, drawings and political caricatures..." –William H. Helfand, from Quack Quack Quack


Detail from "Quid hic nobis lumine satium", c. 1670, Anonymous


Detail from advertisement for Dr. Rock's Tincture, 1738, Anonymous


"The Dance of Death: the Undertaker and the Quack." 1816, by Thomas Rowlandson (from Wellcome Library)


"Nancy Linton: A faithful representation of her actual appearance & condition after having been cured by the use of Swann's Panacea", c. 1833, by C Hullmandel (from a drawing by WH Kearney)


"Singular Effects of the Universal Vegetable Pills on a Green Crocer! A Fact!", 1841, by Charles Jameson Grant


Detail from "The Great Lozenge Maker", 1858, by John Leech - from Punch


"Dr S.B. Collins' Painless Opium Antidote" Advertisement, 1874


"Quackery - Medical Minstrel Performing for the Benefit of Their Former Patients - No other Dead-heads Admitted", 1879, by Joseph Keppler - from Puck


"Death's-Head Doctors - Many Paths to the Grave", 1881, by Joseph Keppler - from Puck


Detail of "Death's-Head Doctors - Many Paths to the Grave", 1881, by Joseph Keppler - from Puck


Detail of "Death's-Head Doctors - Many Paths to the Grave", 1881, by Joseph Keppler - from Puck


"Death in the Pestle", c. 1885, by Henry Nappenbach - from The Wasp


Detail of "Death in the Pestle", c. 1885, by Henry Nappenbach - from The Wasp


"The Travelling Quack", 1889, by Tom Merry


An itinerant medicine vendor known as Medicine Jack carrying his wares in a knapsack on his back. (from Wellcome Library)


"William Radam, Microbes and the Microbe Killer", 1890


"The Great American Fraud, an investigative article by Samuel Hopkins Adams", 1907


Quack advertisement for the cure of cancer, 1912 (from Wellcome Library)

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Unless noted all of these come from Quack, Quack, Quack: The Sellers of Nostrums in Prints, Posters, Ephemera, & Books by William Helfand - @ Open Library [link]
Wellcome Library has a good collection of quackery related images [link]
The excellent blog The Quack Doctor [link]
The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices [link]
see the blog Quack Cogitations [link]
Quack cartoons at cartoonstock [link]
BBC slideshow: Quacks and Cures [link]

George Cooke Caricatures

George Cooke was a caricatures artist who drew Edwardian music hall performers for the Grand Theatre of Varieties, in Hanley Worcestershire. He compiled them in a series of albums.


This is the frontispiece for the first of several albums of caricatures of music hall performers by George Cooke. The Dame figure in a roundel is probably a caricature of Cooke himself. The performers below represent the comedian Edwin Boyde, right, and the mimic Leo Tell, left. [link]


Carl Hertz, or Leib Morgenstern, when he was performing at the Grand Theatre of Varieties, Hanley, during the week of 9 January 1905. He was billed as ‘The Famous Carl Hertz. In his gigantic show of Marvellous Illusions and Surprises. The most elaborate and sensational conjuring show ever presented. Assisted by Mlle. Dalton’. His acts at Hanley included making a birdcage and canary disappear and discovering the canary in the pocket of an audience member. He also performed there the ‘mystifying movements of a clock dial, which stops at any time spectators may desire, and records the numbers of a throw of a dice before the dice have actually been used’. [link]


Juno Salmo, ‘The Golden Mephisto’, when he was performing at the Grand Theatre of Varieties, Hanley. This was either during the week of 2 January 1905 or 16 April 1906. The contortionist Juno Salmo was known as the homme grenouille or ‘frog-man’ when he performed in Paris with the Nouveau Cirque in a frog costume. He dislocated his shoulders, hopped around the aquatic part of the ring and did acrobatic contortions on a trapeze that appeared to be made of bamboo. He is seen here doing a similar act, but balancing on a pole dressed as a yellow devil. [link]


Comedian Edwin Boyde performing the sketch ‘Bread and Jam’ at the Grand Theatre of Varieties, Hanley, during the week of 12 December 1904. He was billed enthusiastically as ‘London’s Greatest Comedian’. From all the principal London music halls’. [link]


The Three Meers when they were performing at the Grand Theatre of Varieties, Hanley, during the week of 17 October 1904. They were billed as ‘An Eccentric Wire Act. Fifteen Minutes of Continuous Laughter’. [link]


Woody Kelly as a whiskered tramp character. He was performing at the Grand Theatre, Hanley, during the week of 10 June 1907. The act was billed as ‘Kelly and Gilette in the sketch “Fun in a Billiard Room”’. [link]


Dr Carl Hermann when he was topping the bill at the Grand Theatre of Varieties, Hanley, during the week of 26 February 1906. He was billed as ‘The Man who Tamed Electricity! The Human Resistance Coil! The Modern Miracle Worker! Hypnotist! Electrician! Scientist! Performs the Feat of Passing over 10,000 Volts of Electricity Through his Body! The Sensation of the Century! Doctor Amazed! Scientists Puzzled!’. [link]


Comedian Will Manning of Manning’s Entertainers. He was performing at the Grand Theatre of Varieties, Hanley, during the week of 19 December 1904. The company had appeared there the previous March, and now they were billed as ‘The Welcome Return of Manning’s Entertainers in the Convulsing Carnival of Uproarious Mishaps’. [link]


Comedian George Gilbey when he was performing at the Grand Theatre of Varieties, Hanley, during the week of 26 December 1904. He was billed as ‘Mr George Gilbey. From the Principal London Variety Theatres’. [link]

Caricature of the contortionist George Antill, who performed at the Grand Theatre of Varieties, Hanley, during the week of 15 August 1904. He was billed as ‘Comedian. The Evening Shadow’. [link]

Morris & Morris when they were performing at the Grand Theatre of Varieties, Hanley, during the week of 1 August 1904. They were billed as ‘a pair of real good comedians’. When they appeared previously at the Grand in September 1903, the review noted that, ‘Their fun in the trapeze is equal to anything that has been seen here’. [link]


Comic duo Burns & Evans performing spoof acrobatics at the Grand Theatre of Varieties, Hanley, during the week of 8 August 1904. They were billed as ‘American comedians, as Alfonso and Gasten in "Funnambulism" [link]


Caricature of the American performer Wieland when he was topping the bill at the Hippodrome, Stoke-on-Trent, during the week of 24 July 1905. He was billed as ‘The Great Wieland. America’s Foremost Comedy Juggler’. [link]


Sam Mayo, ‘The Immobile One’, when he was performing at the Grand Theatre of Varieties, Hanley, during the week of 29 May 1905. He was billed as ‘the Original Immobile Comedian’. [link]
And here is a 1922 song that I very much enjoy by Sam Mayo, called Things Are Worse In Russia

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all of these come from the Victoria and Albert Museum [link]