The visual dominant in eighteenth-century Russia / Marcus C. Levitt ; Shaun Allshouse, design.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Levitt, Marcus C., 1954- author.

Contributor:

Allshouse, Shaun, designer.

Series:

NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Russian literature--18th century--History and criticism.

Russian literature.

Visual perception in literature.

Vision in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (357 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

DeKalb, Illinois : NIU Press, 2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The Enlightenment privileged vision as the principle means of understanding the world, but the eighteenth-century Russian preoccupation with sight was not merely a Western import. In his masterful study, Levitt shows the visual to have had deep indigenous roots in Russian Orthodox culture and theology, arguing that the visual played a crucial role in the formation of early modern Russian culture and identity.Levitt traces the early modern Russian quest for visibility from jubilant self-discovery, to serious reflexivity, to anxiety and crisis. The book examines verbal constructs of sight—in poetry, drama, philosophy, theology, essay, memoir—that provide evidence for understanding the special character of vision of the epoch. Levitt's groundbreaking work represents both a new reading of various central and lesser known texts and a broader revisualization of Russian eighteenth-century culture.Works that have considered the intersections of Russian literature and the visual in recent years have dealt almost exclusively with the modern period or with icons. The Visual Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia is an important addition to the scholarship and will be of major interest to scholars and students of Russian literature, culture, and religion, and specialists on the Enlightenment.

Contents:

Introduction: An archaeology of vision

Prolegomena: Making Russia visible

The moment of the muses: Lomonosov's odes

Bogovidenie: Orthodox vision and the odes

The staging of the self

Virtue must advertise: The ethics of vision

The seen, the unseen, and the obvious

The icon that started a riot

The dialectic of vision in Radishchev's journey

Conclusion: Russian culture as a mirage.

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781501757983

1501757989

9781609090265

1609090268

OCLC:

868220376