o visual language invented to describe different human groups, and also as a mediator in the generation of new cultural and political communities (for example, to show the non-obvious “Russian people”). The book explores the mechanisms of translating ethnic stereotypes, scientific theories, speech topoi and fantasies of contemporaries into iconographic form. The reader will learn how agreements in the field of physiognomy and aesthetic agreements on the beautiful and the ugly were used to show the cultural and psychological properties of the people; he will see how the image gave rise to group mobilization in the audience and how an ambiguous understanding of what a “nation” was matured in the visual space. Thus, this study reveals the cultural boundaries between peoples that existed in the imagination of Russians in the “pre-national” era.

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