The Visual Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia

ISBN-13: 9780875804422 / Angielski / Twarda / 2011 / 374 str.

Marcus C. Levitt

Opis

The Enlightenment privileged vision as the principle means of understandingthe world, but the eighteenth-century Russian preoccupationwith sight was not merely a Western import. In his masterful study, Levitt shows the visual to have had deep indigenous roots in RussianOrthodox culture and theology, arguing that the visual played a crucialrole in the formation of early modern Russian culture and identity.Levitt traces the early modern Russian quest for visibility from jubilantself-discovery, to serious reflexivity, to anxiety and crisis. The bookexamines verbal constructs of sight--in poetry, drama, philosophy, theology, essay, memoir--that provide evidence for understanding thespecial character of vision of the epoch. Levitt's groundbreaking workrepresents both a new reading of various central and lesser known textsand a broader revisualization of Russian eighteenth-century culture.Works that have considered the intersections of Russian literature andthe visual in recent years have dealt almost exclusively with the modernperiod or with icons. The Visual Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russiais an important addition to the scholarship and will be of major interestto scholars and students of Russian literature, culture, and religion, andspecialists on the Enlightenment.