Who from the imperial family was hiding behind drawings on a popular deck of playing cards

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Check which deck of cards you have in your drawer at home. It is quite possible that this one! Probably each of us has seen this deck of cards ("Russian style") - in the days of the USSR, these cards were one of the most common. At first glance, there is nothing unusual in them - we are so accustomed to these drawings that we probably did not even pay attention to the clothes of the card heroes. This is where the strangeness lies: the prototypes for kings and ladies in this deck were not proletarians and collective farmers, but participants in the last costume ball at the imperial court of the Romanovs in 1903. Anti-Soviet?

In February 1903 a costume ball took place. The main requirement for those invited was to appear in costumes from the 17th century. The luxurious celebration in the Winter Palace of St. Petersburg went down in history as the most famous and grandiose ball during the reign of Nicholas II and as the last court ball in imperial Russia. Photographers captured all the famous participants of this event, thanks to which it became possible to recreate these images in playing cards.

All 390 guests of the imperial ball were dressed in the style of courtiers of all stripes, boyars and boyars, streltsy and townspeople, governors and peasant women of the pre-Petrine era. The sketches of the costumes were developed by the artist Sergei Solomko, and they were sewn by the best tailors of the Russian Empire.

The maps were created based on the photographs collected in the Album of the Costume Ball in the Winter Palace. The costumes of the kings, jacks and queens on the playing cards completely repeated the costumes of the participants in the masquerade ball. The aces depict shields surrounded by ancient Russian weapons and armor.

In 1911 the German masters of the Dondorf factory developed sketches for the maps, and in 1913 they were printed in St. Petersburg at the Aleksandrovskaya Manufactory. The release of the deck called "Russian Style" was timed to coincide with the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. After the revolution, the manufactory was closed, in 1923 it resumed work and again began to issue maps based on pre-revolutionary sketches. Later, the Soviet illustrator Yuri Ivanov copied the Russian Style cards from the original deck for offset printing.

It is surprising that this particular deck remained the most popular in the USSR and continued to be produced. After all, even the cards were often used for propaganda purposes - they printed "Anti-religious cards", "Maps of the peoples of the USSR", "Antifascist cards", etc. But they could not compete with the "Russian style". And the memory of the last costume ball of the empire “Legally” was preserved throughout the entire twentieth century.