From Lubok to Libel: Nineteenth-Century Russian Historiography and Popular Memory in The Jester Wedding of Prince-Pope Nikita Zotov

This article discusses the origins and political significance of an anonymous Old Believer wall-poster depicting, in image and text, one of the most infamous public spectacles ever staged at the court of Peter the Great. Tracing its transition from the visual medium to the verbal, and back again, by way of nineteenth-century Petrine historiography, the article offers a new dating of this piece of Old Believer folk art, disputes its supposed debt to the “spirit of medieval laughter”, and, in the process, demonstrates the permeability of late Imperial Russian “elite” and “popular” cultures.