Translated material
What is our Sevastopol?
The exhibition “Events and Images of the Crimean War” opened in the Hall of Federal Archives
Historiographers have long and hopelessly debated at what point modernity turns into history. Is it necessary to introduce a moving formal boundary (for example, “fifty years ago”), or is it worth counting from a fixed point of the event: October 1917, August 1914, or even August 1991? There is no generally accepted opinion, and each country has its own starting points. However, it is clear that on a large scale the gap between the alluring, romantic past, where there were cloaks and swords, languid marquises in powdered hairstyles, duels, intrigues, brilliant hussars, balls and candles, and modernity with its cars, trains, electricity, machine guns lies where - sometime in the middle of the 19th century. One of the lines that marked this fault line (along with the construction of railways, the advent of penicillin and operations under anesthesia) was the Crimean War.In old historiography it was called Eastern (this is when viewed from Europe). Indeed, in addition to Crimea, the theater of military operations was the Black Sea, the Danube principalities; The English navy appeared in the Baltic and the Far East, attacked the Solovetsky Monastery and Petropavlovsk. Active military operations took place in the Caucasus. The war began as a Russian-Turkish war, England and France stood up for the Turks. The troops of these three powers landed in the Crimea; there were Scottish highlanders and zouaves (French colonial troops), Croats, Montenegrins... There were all kinds of people there.
Big wars have happened before. They drew in many countries and peoples, reshaping Europe. Napoleonic, for example. But it was during the Crimean War that the outcome began to depend not on brave cavalry raids, but on the ratio of smooth-bore and rifled guns, the sailing fleet and steamships. Technology was not everything. One could still think that courage and perseverance decide the matter. But Russian literature, represented by Leo Tolstoy, responded to the changes with lightning speed and sensitivity. “Sevastopol Stories” was strikingly different from all previous literature about the war and predetermined the subsequent one. No more cavalry beauties, hussar antics, pathos and beautiful death. Trench mud, mutilated bodies, bossy stupidity, the ultimate senselessness of what is happening.
The authors of the exhibition wisely decided that there was no point in starting a story about the course of the campaign once again: everyone learned the chronology and facts of the Crimean War at school and almost no one remembers. Those interested can read a compact and clear summary of the events in the booklet prepared for the exhibition (by the way, very nicely stylized as an old archival file, with worn binding, inventory numbers, bent corners, and a recognizable font). It's all about the images. Do you know what the Zouaves looked like? What were the notorious smoothbore and rifled guns like?
The subject range of the exhibition is based on a comparison of documents, drawings, photographs with museum items, and, which is not very common for exhibitions on the not-so-distant 19th century, the main role is given to archaeological finds. And it's an impressive decision.
The opposing armies stood in Sevastopol for a long time, their locations are indicated not only by military maps, reports, and descriptions of eyewitnesses: the scatterings of uniform buttons, cockades, and plaques lying in the soil of Sevastopol show where the camp of the British was, where the French were, where the Russian lines lay. Photographs of tents are juxtaposed with unearthed pots, spoons, and combs; in the photo the officers are drinking wine - here are the bottles.
The exhibition pays a lot of attention to the appearance of the troops and uniforms. Drawing tables of what the uniforms of various branches of troops and regiments, carts, and saddles should be. Next to it are photographs of how everything looked the same in life. Samples of cloth. Authentic uniforms and reconstructed caps with original metal parts found there, in Sevastopol. Guns of different designs.
This same technological change is perhaps best illustrated by two exhibition scenes. First, a collection of bullets. The gun mechanism is partly hidden in the barrel. You need to know its design, otherwise you can only find out whether the barrel is rifled or not by looking at the label. And the bullet is visible in its entirety: archaic round; modernized - with a cross-shaped thread; the one behind which the future is a curved cone. Here it is, a small, deadly detail that undermined the era.
Secondly, the proximity of drawings to photographs. Photographers have already arrived for the war, but drawing as a document, and not an act of pure creativity, has not yet lost its power.
Well, both objects and images sound and acquire meaning thanks to the written word. The exhibition is archival, and what is written on paper cements, glues, and links the rows of exhibits. Everything is understood completely differently when you see a notebook in the window with the title: “Formular list of the head of artillery of the light battery No. 8 of the 12th artillery brigade, Second Lieutenant Count L.N. Tolstoy." Service record, list of combat episodes, evidence of participation.