Monday, February 1, 2010

Russian students 100 years ago

English Russia never lets me down. I found some pages from a book published in 1900 about Russian students. It has drawings of students in different disciplines and of various nationalities, all male of course. I kind of want to see the rest of this book; it starts out normally enough, with pictures of a physics student, medical student, law student and a student from "the Academy," who looks like a soldier to me. Then it just delves into ethnic/nationality stereotypes. There is a "Ukranian student," a "Polish student," a "student from the South/Armenia/Azerbaijan," and the obligatory Jew. I'd like to know what the target audience was for this particular work of, um, art.

There are all kinds of things I could say about these drawings but none of them would really do justice to the pictures themselves, so here is a link. Click!

1 comment:

Olga Winfrey said...

Ха-ха. It's really funny!