The Visual Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia

Abstract

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.