The icon as performer and as performative utterance: The sixteenth-century Vladimir Mother of God in the Moscow Dormition Cathedral

A Haymarket Khozhdenie na osliati: Raskolnikov’s Donkey Walk and the Failures of Iconic Performativity

“…33 Medieval Muscovites adopted this and other similar rituals from Byzantium, in order to transfer the sacred space to Moscow-in the words of Marie Gasper-Hulvat, to "fashion the Russian city upon the prototype of [ Jerusalem]-as if cities could model a prototype in the same way as icons." 34 In other words, just as an icon provides access to its unseen prototype, the "living pictures" generated through such rituals had the power to transport worshippers to the Holy City. 35 Lidov has written that Dostoevsky's "iconic consciousness" (ikonicheskoe soznanie) enabled him to perceive the visible world as an image of another, invisible one; indeed, in recent years, literary scholars have begun to apply his hierotopical approach to the study of sacred textual spaces, specifically those found in the works of Dostoevsky.…”