Comparing Literary Criticism and Art History: The Problem of Sentimentalism in Russian Historiography

Abstract

The article is devoted to the historiography of sentimentalism in the Russian scientific tradition. The purpose of the research is to compare the methods used in literary and art studies to overview this phenomenon. The uncertainty of ideas about sentimentalism in the visual arts requires an appeal to literary studies. A careful analysis of works on sentimentalism in this field revealed the special role of the works of M. M. Bakhtin and G. N. Pospelov, who created original concepts of this phenomenon, and has made it possible to state a wide range of methods. Consideration of the sentimentalism problem in the history of art has demonstrated not only the generality of ideas and a small number of methods in comparison with literary criticism, but also the main principles inherent in the scientific tradition. Firstly, the idea of sentimentalism is based on abstract theses. Secondly, the main approach is to compare sentimentalism with classicism and Romanticism, which prevents determining its place in the art of the 1790s. Thirdly, the pictorial system of sentimentalism is considered in the most general form and turns out to be devoid of a thorough art historical description. A critical analysis of historiography allowed to identify promising areas of modern research of sentimentalism in art criticism: a careful analysis of the artistic features of works, the study of the metamorphoses of the portrait genre as well as a comparison of the Russian portrait with European art of the 18th — early 19th centuries.