The first epoch
Subtitle: the Eighteenth Century and the Russian cultural imagination
By: Luba Golburt
Series: Publications of the Wisconsin Center for Pushkin Studies; Publications of the Wisconsin Center for Pushkin Studies
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Number of pages: 387
ISBN-13: 9780299298142
Copyright date: 2014
Subjects: History and criticism; Theory; Russian literature
Description: Modern Russian literature has two "first" epochs: secular literature's rapid rise in the eighteenth century and Alexander Pushkin's Golden Age in the early nineteenth. In the shadow of the latter, Russia's eighteenth-century culture was relegated to an obscurity hardly befitting its actually radical legacy. And yet the eighteenth century maintains an undeniable hold on the Russian historical imagination to this day. Luba Golburt's book is the first to document this paradox. In formulating its self-image, the culture of the Pushkin era and after wrestled far more with the meaning of the eighteenth century, Golburt argues, than is commonly appreciated. Why did nineteenth-century Russians put the eighteenth century so quickly behind them? How does a meaningful present become a seemingly meaningless past? Interpreting texts by Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Pushkin, Viazemsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and others, Golburt finds surprising answers, in the process innovatively analyzing the rise of periodization and epochal consciousness, the formation of canon, and the writing of literary history.--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 337-356) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction. The eighteenth century as a vanishing point; title: Part I. Derzhavin's moment; title: 1. The empresses' histories: Lomonosov and Derzhavin; title: 2. Catherine's passing: hybrid genres of commemoration; title: 3. Poetry reads power: overcoming patronage; title: Part II. The fictions of the eighteenth century; title: 4. The verisimilar eighteenth century: historical fiction in the 1830s; title: 5. Mimetic temporalities: fashion from the eighteenth century to Pushkin's "The queen of spades"; title: 6. The margins of history: Ivan Turgenev's eighteenth-century characters.