SUMMARY:

The article examines sixty-four cases of defamation of images depicting members of the Romanov dynasty between 1884 to 1914, found in the files of the Vilna Circuit Court whose jurisdiction included Vilna, Kovna, Grodna, and Minsk provinces. Russian imperial law classified verbal or physical assault on the tsar’s portrait as a political crime, along with other forms of “insult of the emperor.” Although public disrespect of royal portraits accounted for a small fraction of all the registered acts of lèse-majesté, the studied cases offer a unique perspective on the semiotics of power in the Northwest Region of the empire and expose the attitude of its multicultural population to the supreme authority. These cases also suggest a fairly wide proliferation of the tsar’s portraits in the region. A portrait of the monarch was a mandatory symbol of state authority in public places, but this was by no means the main usage of the royal portraits. Ordinary people – peasants, workers, and small traders – bought lithograph images of the emperor to decorate their private quarters. As the author elaborates based on her cases, their motives were not so much political and ideological as pragmatic. She concludes that, in the Northwest Region, at the turn of the twentieth century owning a tsar’s image was an integral part of the popular legal culture and practice.