Rebuses (Russian Empire)

Rebuses 🇷🇺
Location: Russian Empire
Definition: A visual puzzle made of images, letters, numbers, and other signs whose names and sounds combine to form encoded words or phrases, known in Europe since the late fifteenth century, introduced to the Russian Empire in the mid-nineteenth century, and popular there and beyond to the present day.
Keywords: Rebus – Puzzle – Print – Visual Culture – Imperialism – Gender – the Long Nineteenth Century
Clusters: Russian Empire – Games – Occult – Informal Art – Daily life – Militarism
Author: Ksenia Butuzova
Affiliation: University of Oxford, United Kingdom

By Ksenia Butuzova, Postdoctoral Associate, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Rebuses are visual puzzles in which images, letters, numbers, and symbols are combined to encode words, phrases, or entire sentences. The term derives from the Latin res (“thing”), reflecting the basic principle of rebus construction: things stand for sounds (Céard and Margolin 1986). Although rebuses are now commonly associated with children’s entertainment, they were a common leisure activity in the nineteenth-century culture. They started appearing in newspapers, illustrated journals, books, advertisements, postcards, design objects, and works of art in nineteenth century, with some of the earliest surviving examples appearing in late fifteenth-century France (Brantley 2015). In the Russian Empire, solving rebuses, or visual-verbal puzzles, became widespread practice of informal entertainment, engaging literate readers across social classes, genders, ages, and regions. Yet despite their popularity, they remained largely outside official cultural institutions and hierarchies of taste. This position on the margins made rebuses not only a leisure activity, but also a particularly revealing example of informal artistic practice.

Rebuses entered Russian culture in the mid-1840s through illustrated periodicals inspired by French models (Butuzova 2023); Langbein 2018). Their appearance coincided with major technological changes in printing, especially the introduction of end-grain wood engraving, which allowed images to be reproduced cheaply and in large numbers (Pavlova 2018). The first Russian rebuses appeared in the illustrated magazine Illiustratsiia in 1845. Baron Konstantin Clodt von Jürgensburg (1807–1879), who was responsible for all images in Illiustratsiia, played a key role in popularising the rebuses in the magazine. A hereditary military officer, the first Russian wood engraver, and the founder of an influential school of wood engraving that trained an earliest generation of professional wood engravers, Clodt worked alongside the magazine’s publisher, Aleksandr Bashutskii (1803–1876), one of Russia’s earliest creative entrepreneurs. Together, they transformed the rebus into a commercial tool for attracting subscribers. Through the efforts of Clodt and Bashutskii, rebuses quickly became a regular feature in popular journals.

The technological foundations of rebus culture were themselves informal. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, wood engraving remained largely absent from the official curriculum of the Imperial Academy of Arts. Instead, it was taught through workshops and apprenticeships. Clodt trained generations of engravers outside formal academic structures (Ivleva 2010). The production of rebuses belonged to the same workshop culture in which young engravers learned to design and reproduce images for mass print.

One of the earliest contributors to Illiustratsiia was Nikolai Petrovich Wagner (1829–1907), later a zoologist, writer, editor, and one of the central figures of the Russian spiritualist movement. As a student in Kazan in the 1840s, Wagner submitted rebuses to the journal despite having no formal artistic training. His career illustrates one of the defining characteristics of rebus culture: it offered access to cultural production for individuals who might otherwise remain outside professional artistic institutions.

The most ambitious development of rebuses occurred in the spiritualist journal Rebus (1881–1918), founded by retired naval officer Viktor Ivanovich Pribytkov (1840–1910) and intellectually shaped by Wagner (Butuzova 2023). Wagner appears to have sought to elevate rebuses into “high” art by enlisting the professional painter Baron Mikhail Clodt von Jürgensburg (1835–1914), a professor at the Imperial Academy of Arts, to produce rebuses for Rebus (Butuzova 2023); Pavlova 2020). Together, they transformed the genre from simple sequences of images into unified artistic compositions. Mythological figures, historical references, literary quotations, and allegorical motifs were integrated into increasingly complex visual structures.

As rebuses became more prestigious and visually sophisticated, their production increasingly shifted into the hands of educated male professionals. The same movement that elevated the rebus also made participation more difficult for non-professional creators. Although rebus production was dominated by men, the informality of the genre simultaneously created unusual possibilities for women’s creative and intellectual agency.

“Zagadka 4,” Illiustratsiia, no. 4 (1848): 64 Rebus attributed to Konstantin Clodt (solution: “Vse damy, kotorye za i pod sorok, iskusstvenno vozstanovliaiut svoiu molodost’” [“All ladies around forty artificially restore their youth”]).

An important example is Anna Nikanorovna Paskhalova-Mordovtseva (1823–1885), poet, ethnographer, and public intellectual. In 1872 she published Zagadka. Sbornik rebusov, zagadok, sharad i pr under the pseudonym R. Merlina, producing one of the earliest Russian books devoted entirely to rebuses. The publication demonstrated that rebus-making could serve as a form of creative labour for women otherwise excluded from public debate as well as academic and artistic institutions (Butuzova and Mannherz 2026).

Niva (1869–1918, the most popular weekly of the Russian Empire, turned rebuses into a genuinely widespread cultural phenomenon. A turning point came with the publication in 1880 of a large rebus by artist, writer, military officer, and imperial propagandist Nikolai Nikolaevich Karazin (1842–1908). Within Niva, rebuses became mechanisms for creating an audience, an empire-wide public. Solved by thousands of women, children and men, rebuses connected readers in St Petersburg and Moscow with those in provincial towns, borderlands, and distant regions (Butuzova 2026).

Informal practices tend to have a subversive but also enabling element. Some of the most widely circulated rebuses of the Russian Empire were published on the pages of Niva and created by the former serf artist Ivan Vasilievich Volkov (1847–1893). Excluded from many opportunities within the imperial art market because of his social origins, Volkov found in rebus-making both a major source of income and a central component of his artistic career (Stoliarova 2020). His success demonstrates how illustrated publishing created alternative routes into professional visual culture for individuals who lacked access to elite artistic institutions.

Despite their leisurely appearance, rebuses were deeply connected to imperial and military structures. Many of the genre’s key figures emerged from imperial service. Clodt was trained as an artillery officer, Karazin served in the military and worked as a war correspondent, and Pribytkov was a naval officer. Military imagery, cartographic thinking, and imperial narratives are evident in rebus culture. Rebuses often incorporated maps, military symbols, and representations of imperial expansion. Their circulation in Russian also connected the genre to the empire’s broader structures of linguistic and cultural integration.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, rebuses had become omnipresent within the visual culture of the Russian Empire. They appeared not only in magazines but also in advertising, postcards, and commercial design. At the same time, artists of the avant-garde began to adopt the visual logic of the rebus within their own work. For example, Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962) and Sergei Podgaevskii (1889–1953) transformed rebus logic into artistic method.

Together, these developments laid the foundations for the extraordinary popularity of rebuses in the Soviet Union. The Soviet campaign for literacy made use of rebuses, thus importing many visual conventions and cultural functions established in the Russian empire. Rebuses provided spaces for permissible nostalgia for the imperial past while also serving as instruments of Bolshevik propaganda. This ambivalence ensured the survival and mass popularity of the genre for another century. This legacy remains visible in the continued presence of rebuses across the former Soviet republics, while the genre appears to have largely declined elsewhere in Europe after its nineteenth-century popularity.