The Visual Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia

Marcus C. Levitt

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781609090265
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

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.

Index

Abbé Dubos (Jean-Baptiste Dubos), 258–59

Abgar, king of Edessa, 324n56

Abraham (Biblical patriarch), 239

absolutism, absolute power, 122, 194, 223, 246, 280n32, 336n38

Academy of Fine Arts, 139, 254

Academy of Sciences, 126, 127, 254, 297n71

Adams, John, 140–41

Addison, Joseph, Cato (The Dying Cato), 118, 293n33, 330n33

adulthood, adult consciousness, 234, 251, 257

Aesop, Aesopian mode, 128, 292n22

aesthetics, as sensual perception, 75

Aetna, 59

Africa, 198

Ageeva, O. G., 277nn7–9

aggression (in odes), 36, 50–60

Akhmat, Khan, 202

Alekseev, Vladimir N., 299n12, 305n74

Alekseeva, N. Iu., 274n36, 281n1, 282n22, 283n29

Aleksei (“Man of God”), Saint, 208

Aleksei Mikhailovich, 82

Alexander I, 261, 332n76

Alexander Nevskii, Saint, 82

Alexander Nevsky Monastery Seminary, 217

Algarroti, Francesco, on the “window on Europe,” 22, 279n28

All-Seeing Eye, 35, 56, 110, 240–41, 331n55

Amazons, 267

America, 254, 265

Amvrosii (Zertis-Kamensky), Archbishop, 195, 196, 197, 198, 216–20, 322n25, 326n76, 326n79

Anacreon, Anacreontic poetry, 290n15, 315n87

Anchikov, Dmitrii, 302n33

Andreyev, Nikolay, 322n18, 326n82

Angiolini, Gasparo, 320n7

Anna (Empress), 28, 49–50, 52, 55, 56–57

Anna Leopol’dovna (regent), 57, 283n34

anticpated self, 25, 39, 51, 61, 64–65, 79, 251, 268

Apollo, 28, 35, 37, 49

Apollos (Baibakov), Iermonakh, Evgeont, or the Contemplation of Visible Divine Matters in Nature (Evgeont, ili sozertsanie v nature bozhikh vidiymkh del), 312n60

apophatic theology. See Eastern Orthodoxy

approbation, approbativeness, 128, 130, 132–33, 137–39, 142, 225, 248, 257, 267, 298n2, 334n9. See also Lovejoy, Arthur

Aquinas, Thomas, Saint, 167, 310n33

argument from design, 158, 165–83 passim

Aristarkh, Hegumen: “Chronicle of the Bogoliubov Monastery from 1158 to 1770” (“Letopis’ Bogoliubova Monastyria c 1158 po 1770 god”), 203–4, 206, 207, 221, 322n32

Aristotle, Aristotelianism, 18, 22, 24, 98, 160, 163, 166–70 passim, 273n16, 256, 289n48, 310n33, 311n36, 312n53

wonder: see Aristotelian versus sublime wonder

art, the arts, 6, 7, 12, 14, 22, 26, 30–31, 81, 83, 84, 100, 113–14, 124, 137, 142, 150, 161, 197, 218, 220, 225, 254, 260, 275n40, 299n9, 309n26, 310n30, 325n67

“total work of art” (Gesamkunstwerk), 367

the universe as a work of art, 168

Artem’eva, Tat’iana V., 273n17, 286n12

Artistona (character in Sumarokov’s Artistona), 98, 103, 113–14, 295n46

Asia, Asiatic, 198, 226, 257, 265

Aspafin (character in Rzhevsky’s The False Smerdius), 85, 108

astronomy, 35, 171, 190

atheists, atheism, 128, 133, 166, 175, 183, 217, 239, 302n33, 314n84, 319n6

Athena, 37, 283n43. See also Minerva

atom, atomism, ism, 167, 188, 190, 302n33, 311n47

Atrides, 83, 290n15

Augustus, Augustan age, 21, 83, 279n29

Aut...