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Cultural Texts: Polish and Russian Albums in the Age of Romanticism

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Beinek J.

Rocznik Antropologii Historii

2011

issue 1-2

173-192

This article examines albums from the Romantic period – scrapbooks containing captions autographs, drawings, and personal memorabilia – both as artefacts, and as polysemic, heterogeneous “texts” of early nineteenth-century Russian and Polish culture. Albums flourished in the age of Romanticism because of their location in the nexus of literature and fine arts, social life and domesticity, high and low culture. Flexible and open-ended, albums facilitated discourse about memory, national identity, and authorship. The history of the album shows it to have originated in ancient Rome, where it was called the album amicorum, and it was introduced into Slavic culture via the German Stammbuch as early as the sixteenth century. After an introductory presentation of the album as a cultural object, the article focuses on the album’s textual structure: form, multifarious content, and the internal languages that govern its arrangement and decoding. Thus the album is a cultural text in two senses: it is a collection that encapsulates philosophical, sociopolitical, and the aesthetic concerns of Romanticism, but it is also a physical verbal/pictorial text that also frequently approximates a literary work, a book, or an art object.

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1 Rocznik Antropologii Historii

1 Beinek J.

1 2011

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Cultural Texts: Polish and Russian Albums in the Age of Romanticism