Conclusions

This book explored how Napoleon’s invasion of 1812 played a significant role in defining Russian national identity. The French invasion spurred on the articulation of a modern Russian national identity that would continue to find expression in Russian visual culture over the course of the nineteenth to twenty-first century. After the campaigns of 1812 and 1813–1814, works of art, especially battle painting, began to reflect and articulate the evolving and manipulated nature of this aspect of Russian national identity. This development was also recorded in popular prints, historic monuments, and public spectacles. Initially, official culture identified with Alexander I and his elite officers while more popular art forms, such as the lubki produced with imperial support stressed the “Russian spirit” found in images of the peasant and the Cossack. Russian heroism, intelligence, and military strength were the values extolled in the countless lubki that appeared in the wake of 1812. The apparent rift between Alexander I’s “divine victory” and the “people’s victory” had to be repaired, and so the narrative of 1812 soon came to stress the concept of the unity between “tsar and people.” The foreign Other who invaded Russia was a convenient image that helped support this myth of unity. Tsar, faith, and fatherland were the central concepts of Russianness around which national identity was articulated.