Safeguarding Russian culture as a cultural reality or as a cultural construct? The case of the news magazine Illustrated Russia

This paper will present some results of my PhD research on the mainstream Russian émigré news magazine Illustrated Russia (Illiustrirovannaia Rossiia, henceforth IR). IR is the ideal test case for the widely accepted idea that interwar Russian émigré culture was largely a preservationist culture, aimed at safeguarding pre-revolutionary and thus truly Russian culture and, hence, Russian identity. The Paris-based magazine, which ran from 1924 until 1939, was highly popular and had a broad scope, treating pre-revolutionary Russian, Soviet, émigré and Western topics, and both highbrow and middlebrow culture. Furthermore, it covered these topics in a wide variety of genre and media, ranging from short and longer articles, to literature, humor and many more. IR, thus, is an invaluable source of information on what the average émigré got to hear, see and read, and, hence, what may have interested him or her. As such, IR has the potential to offer insight into a question that is important for our understanding of interwar Russian émigré culture as a whole: is this culture really a preservationist culture? Does the assumption relate to high culture only (turning it into a kind of cultural myth or construct) or also to mainstream culture (making it a wide-ranging cultural reality)? By analyzing diverging types of content in IR, I will present a nuanced image of IR‘s approach to Russian (émigré) identity. Does IR present content that can be considered as preservationist? If so, where (which genres and topics), when (how often and at which occasions) and how is this the case? Does the preservationist content target specific audiences (e.g. women, children or art adepts)? And, by extension, what can the case of IR tell us about the émigré community’s approach to (pre-reveolutionary) Russian culture in everyday life