Optical Play: Glass, Vision, and Spectacle in Russian Culture by Julia Bekman Chadaga (review)

How does material culture shape the way we see the world and operate in it? How do the objects around us take on symbolic meanings and, even more importantly, generate their own? In Optical Play: Glass, Vision and Spectacle in Russian culture, the pervasiveness of glass in modern Russian material culture draws Julia Bekman Chadaga into a rich, compelling exploration of the various dimensions of the culture of glass, from the details of its production and commerce to its symbolical domain in literature, architecture, and rhetorical discourse at large. While the book focuses on Russian culture, its claims resonate with the interests of a comparative study of literature, thanks to a well-balanced alternation between local details and broader historical, conceptual lines.

While Chadaga emphasizes, from the very title of the book, the visual effects and operations enabled by glass, her book does much more than focus on the optical properties that this material lends to the artistic imagination. If the notion of “spectacle” returns as a leitmotif of this engaging journey through the glass landscapes of Russian culture, Chadaga fills the notion with all the physical, haptic, and sensory qualities of glass: an ensemble not exhaustively captured by the title of the study. The book’s historical endpoints are roughly the Petrine era and the Soviet regime, with a few significant detours into earlier Russian history and contemporary Russian society. Each chapter is a fairly independent unit, constituted by case studies that deal with glass objects. While the book lacks a strong unifying conceptual framework, Chadaga weaves throughout the chapters a subtle narrative that emphasizes the concrete material ambivalences of glass.

Chapter one engages with one of the more widespread and symbolically charged uses of glass as architectural element: the window. In newly modernized Petrine Russia, windows became a crucial element of urban landscape, in stark contrast to the past centuries, where they were tiny apertures covered in different materials. Chadaga proceeds to read the effects of this profound architectonic transformation on the imagination in ways that greatly surpass the strictly visual idea of a “vista.” In the three narrative examples analyzed—stories by Pushkin, Turgenev, and Tolstoy—the close reading of the respective literary passages illuminates unexpected angles of the glass object under scrutiny. For example, in the analysis of a famous passage of Anna Karenina in which Anna touches her book knife to the train window, the window is shown as a physical barrier, a source of optical reflections and of an appealing, smooth coldness that compels Anna to lean with her cheek against its surface. Chadaga reads this scene by tying the protagonist’s actions toward the window to her development as a character. In emphasizing the deeply visual etymology of the Russian name for window (okno [window]/oko [eye]; 44–45), Chadaga underlines how “windows offer not only vistas, but also reflections, and at times a superimposition of various planes” (38). The account of Russian windows continues with an analysis of shop windows and their function as commodity spectacle, analyzed through the lens of literary passages. An analysis of the post-revolutionary ROSTA propaganda windows completes the exploration of Russian windows, showing the rhetorical implications of showcasing the revolution as a commodity. As all these examples indicate, Optical Play reads literary texts that employ images of glass objects alongside the glass objects themselves, generating a compelling textual continuity between world and literary text, which is also the most original methodological contribution of this study.

Chapter Two is dedicated to the analysis of “rhetorical objects” made of glass, following Mikhail Lomonosov’s obsession with glass and the history of a peculiar Petrine object: the zertsalo or “mirror of law.” Lomonosov’s enthusiasm with glass was at the center of the “Letter on the Usefulness of Glass” published in 1753, a real eulogy to that material under all its possible guises and uses, from mosaics tiles to optical lenses. The “beauty and usefulness” (51) of glass are at...