Levitt, Marcus C. The Visual Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia (review)

Abstract

Slavonic and East European Review, 94, 2, 2016 Reviews Levitt, Marcus C. The Visual Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2011. xii + 362 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliographic references. Index. $49.00. In his groundbreaking new book, Levitt pays special homage to the enthusiastic response that the so-called ‘Age of Enlightenment’ received in eighteenthcentury Russia. He summarizes such enthusiasm by what he terms to have been ‘the visual dominant’ permeating the various spheres of Russian cultural life at the time. Before unveiling the meaning of the term that he uses for his title, Levitt devotes the introduction — calling it ‘An Archaeology of Vision’ (pp. 3–14) — to a valuable overview of definitions connected to the philosophical underpinnings of the various ways vision was historically defined and used. To reach his stated goal, namely to revisit how eighteenth-century Russia dealt with the self-imposed ‘imperative to become visible, to be seen’ (p. 3), Levitt decides to ignore the questions related to the most immediate function that human eyes perform, namely seeing itself. In other words, he proposes ‘not to deal with what things look like or with formal visual analysis of material culture’, but rather focuses on ‘the discourse of vision and verbal constructs of sight (in poetry, drama, philosophy, moralistic essays, theology, memoirs, etc.)’ (p. 12). His book thus significantly enriches the habitual discussion of the paradigm of sight in studies on eighteenth-century Russia. At the same time, it broadens the very term, ‘the visual dominant’, first used by I. A. Esaulov in a study devoted to proving that Russia had a native, ‘iconic’ tradition of seeing, epistemologically different from the Western ‘ocularcentric’ notion of ‘Enlightenment’ (1998). In contradistinction to Esaulov, who would see Russia bending its conceptions to other ways of ‘seeing’ only in the twentieth century, Levitt powerfully demonstrates how productive the Russian embrace of the Western mode of vision in eighteenth-century Russia was. Showing complete command of the secondary sources that he uses to bolster his argument, Levitt turns to the primary works, which exhibit Russian unbridled ‘faith in enlightened reason’ (p. 27) and demonstrate the harmony of vision, under the spell of which Russian culture found itself after Peter’s reforms. This vision, as Levitt deftly shows, allows for uniting under one umbrella Lomonosov’s triumphal odes, Sumarokov’s plays, Trediakovskii’s Feoptia, Dashkova’s and Derzhavin’s ‘memoirs’ and other documents and events of the epoch, which were formerly discussed in separate terms. As his volume nears its ending, Levitt demonstrates how this early- and mid-century idealism about Russia’s self-imposed positioning in the grander scheme of European beliefs rapidly withered away toward the close of the century: the seemingly undisputable power of reason and universal values of enlightenment simply evaporated following the traumatic events of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. SEER, 94, 2, APRIL 2016 326 In his concluding chapter, ‘Russian Culture as a Mirage’, Levitt demonstrates the exceptionally traumatic paradigm shift that overwhelmed Russia as it began to ponder its own uniqueness over its former adherence to universal and ‘self-evident’ truths. Nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals began to devalue nearly everything that the Russian Empire highlighted among its supreme achievements. They viewed the former visual accomplishments of the Empire as ‘servile imitations’ of foreign models, Petersburg as a source of menace, rather than an object of admiration, and most former Russian verbal arts as irrelevant, unoriginal and pseudo-classicist. The last subsection, ‘Potemkin Villages’, briefly details the origin of ‘one of the most effective slanders in history’, as Levitt calls it (p. 266). In substance, the term refers to the presumably staged or artificially propped up villages that Catherine supposedly saw on her famous Crimea tour of 1787, arranged by her life-time partner Potemkin. Foreign diplomats and enemies of Potemkin, who were not invited to join this magnificent tour, marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Catherine’s reign, spread the vicious rumor of such ‘mirages’ in retribution. Their lie spectacularly cast a shadow on whatever the Russian throne attempted to accomplish in the eighteenth century. Apropos of the actual accomplishments of Russia’s turn to Enlightenment, it could have been...