Storytelling in Pictures as a Form of Visual Narrative in the Old Believer Manuscript Illustrated Miscellany of the 18th Century

Abstract

The article examines the form of the relationship between text and drawing in the Old Believer illustrated miscellany of the 18th century, which presents hagiographic and prologue articles describing the martirdom of early Christian saints. Consistently arranged drawings of various sizes to the stories of early Christian ascetics allow one to “read” the entire course of the plot, covering it in detail, episode by episode. The analysis of the visual language of the miscellany showed an important stage in the development of Russian miniatures, when the image becomes not just an addition to the text, but begins to be formed according to the rules of the text and tell its own story in the drawings. Drawn plot stories consisted of separate illustrative fragments and, together with the text, represented a single narrative space. Such a pictorial principle is characteristic of the development of not only book miniatures, but also other types of folk culture of the 18th-19th centuries (the design of the hagiographic icon with separate images-brands, the art of Russian drawn popular print pictures), for which similar types of combining text and drawing are also relevant. The presence of such a form of illustrated stories in the manuscript, in which individual illustrative fragments merge into a single narrative space, works to more fully reveal the plot. Using the example of an 18th century miscellany, we have the opportunity to trace the process of the emergence and development of this form, which became quite widespread in the Old Believers’ book culture in the second half of the 19th century.