Marcus Levitt - The Visual Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia

2011 by Northern Illinois University

Published by the Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, Illinois 60115

Manufactured in the United States using acid-free paper.

All Rights Reserved

Design by Shaun Allshouse

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Levitt, Marcus C., 1954

The visual dominant in eighteenth-century Russia / Marcus C. Levitt.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-87580-442-2 (clothbound : acid-free paper)

1. Russian literature18th centuryHistory and criticism.
2. Visual perception in literature. 3. Vision in literature. I. Title.

PG3007.L486 2011

891.709002dc23

2011016778

Etching by Giacomo Zatta after Pietro Novelli, Tsar Peter the Great Founds the City of St. Petersburg in Ingria, at the mouth of the Neva on the Baltic, in the Spring of the Year 1703 (1797), published by Antonio Zatta e Figli, Venice. 36.6 x 40.8 cm. Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

Contents

An Archaeology of Vision

Making Russia Visible

Lomonosovs Odes

Orthodox Vision and the Odes

The Ethics of Vision

Russian Culture as a Mirage

Acknowledgments

This engraving, the cover illustration for the July 1758 issue of Ezhemesiachnyia sochineniia ( Monthly Compositions ), the journal of the Academy of Sciences, depicts the sun coming up over the globe, which is neatly laid out in a longitudinal-latitudinal grid. More specifically, the sun is rising over RUSSIAclearly mapped as part of Europeand over the city of St. Petersburg, and its beneficial rays make Russia and its accomplishments, as broadcast by the journal, visible to the worldFOR EVERYONE. The celestial vignette is encircled by a laurel garland, suggesting peace and prosperity, as well as imperial political hegemony. It is capped by the traditional double-headed eagle bearing the monogram and crown of Empress Elizabeth. The imperial eagles motherly perch and cosmic wingspan seem to both protect and support the earth.

An Archaeology of Vision

The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each others eyes for an instant?

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

The Enlightenment emphasis on vision as the privileged means of understanding the world played a particularly important role in the development of modern Russian culture, for which the imperative to become visible , to be seen was a central motivation and goal. This, in short, is the central proposition of this book. The French philosopher Bruno Latour has written that a new visual culture redefines both what it is to see, and what there is to see, and the goal of this book is to demonstrate the new Russian eighteenth-century mode of visionhow Russians saw the world, the special power they accorded sightand, correspondingly, to reconstruct what they saw. The trauma of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic period, which had a profound intellectual impact on Russia, led to the discrediting of Russias quintessential Enlightenment ocularcentrism. This occasioned the remarkable inability of later generations to see what had earlier seemed so self-evident and undeniable. By the 1830s, eighteenth-century Russian culture had become irrelevant, unworthy of consideration, and invisible, as if it had never existed. The goal of this work is to clear away some of the anachronistic barriers to sight and to begin to reconstruct that erato try, as far as possible, paraphrasing Thoreau, to look through their eyes for an instant. This archaeological project aims to reconstruct the eighteenth-century Russian paradigm of sight as a unique formation, to explore this eras mode of vision and to recover a cultural tradition heretofore largely unseen.