Blood and Laughter: Caricatures from the 1905 Revolution, by David King and Cathy Porter. Jonathan Cape, 1983 pbk £6.95
The 1905 revolution in Russia produced a powerful outburst of satirical journals. Despite the censorship which existed these journals multiplied during 1905-1907 and Tsarist censors were unable to control the flood of radical journalism, poetry, caricature and art. New journals sprang up daily — Hell-Post, Vampire, Bombs, Woodgoblin — their titles expressed the newly found courage to defy the censor. Many writers and illustrators were jailed only to carry on their activities from jail. During this period about 380 journals were registered with the official censor, many did not. Those that did register pushed to the boundaries what was permissable by the use of allusion, allegory, and aesopian language. Illustrators were often able to express the terror and oppression of Tsarism even more vividly by the use of red ink and death imagery; skulls, skeletons and vampires proliferated.
As the political hopes of 1905 were crushed and repression and exile dealt out to revolutionaries and radicals, the journals also declined. But the experience of those months was not lost. Many of the artists lived through and supported the 1917 revolution.
The story of this period is told and illustrated in a new book by David King and Cathy Porter. The text is excellent, the quality of the reproductions is good and the book is well worth buying and reading. This is the first time that extracts and illustrations from these journals have been published in the West and their impact today is still powerful. Some of the illustrations convey a sense of overwhelming sadness and oppression and some tend, as the text points out, to be passive in recording suffering. But others use wit and vitriol to attack the targets of Tsarism and reaction and prefigure in vitality, though not in form, the revolutionary developments in art some ten years later.