Abstract
"Serfdom and Empire: Annushka and Her World"
Annushka was the pet name for a Kalmyk woman living in the household of the Sheremetev family and eventually painted by the enserfed painter Argunov. This paper was an expanded version of a piece recently published in Valerie Kivelson, Sergei Kozlov, and Joan Neuberger (eds), Picturing Russian Empire (Oxford, 2023) that looked at what the portrait and the woman it portrayed can tell us about empire in the late eighteenth century. It is the beginning of a new research project that thinks about ways serfdom and other forms of bondage were linked to empire.
– Alison Smith, Toronto University
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