Russian lubok prints, produced from the 17th to the early 20th century, may at first appear simple and straightforward. Yet their seemingly obvious—even naïve—imagery often conceals deeper meanings that were readily understood by contemporaries but can seem obscure to us today.
Before venturing into the terra incognita of lubok subjects, we will consider some essential questions: How were these prints made? Who created them? What were they used for, and who bought them? What themes and subjects did they typically depict?
Finally, we will examine a selection of early popular prints and discover that their subjects are not always as simple—or as innocent—as they might appear. Over time, some of these images have even lost their original meanings entirely.
When: Tuesday 27 October 2026, 18:30-20:00 (GMT)
Format: Online via Zoom
Language: English
Tickets: £6 – Standard, free – CamRuSS Members
Please book via AllEvents
Dr Julia Khodko is an Assistant Professor in Art History, based at the School of Arts and Cultural Heritage at the European University at St Petersburg, Russia. She was a Visiting Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge, during Easter Term 2026.
Her doctoral thesis examined the evolution of the usage, techniques, and iconography of intaglio prints in Moscow Cyrillic books of the 1700–1730s.
For more than thirty years, she worked with Russian prints at the Print Department of the Russian Museum in St Petersburg, where she produced numerous scholarly publications and curated museum exhibitions devoted to eighteenth-century engravings, accompanied by comprehensive catalogues.
Her research focuses on visual culture in Early Modern Europe, with particular attention to cross-European contacts in the culture of printmaking during the ‘long eighteenth century’. Recent studies examine the transmission of images and figurative ideas from Europe to Russia through printed media, with particular emphasis on popular prints and devotional engravings. She has a further interest in investigating the process of the liberalisation of engraving within European Academies of Arts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing on models adopted by the Imperial Academy of Arts in Russia.
In addition, she studies models of political representation in printed imagery during the reigns of Peter I and Catherine II of Russia and their European origins. She has presented the results of her projects at conferences held at the University of Cambridge, at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia (USA), the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia (UK). At the European University at St Petersburg, she teaches the course “Russian Printmaking in the Eighteenth Century: Intercultural Transfer of Images and Ideas between Europe and Russia”.
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