The Visual Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia

Notes

N O T E S Introduction 1. Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,” Knowledge and Society 6 (1986): 10. Latour is discussing Svetlana Alpers’s description of Dutch visual culture in the age of Rembrandt (The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983]), and, more generally, trying to define the changes in visual understanding that define modern (post-Renaissance) scientific culture. 2. The term is Martin Jay’s. See his Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 3. James R. Russell, “Truth Is what the Eye Can See: Armenian Manuscripts and Armenian Spirituality,” in Treasures in Heaven: Armenian Art, Religion, and Society, ed. Thomas F. Mathews and Roger S. wieck (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, 1998), 160n1. 4. Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1960). On the Greek tradition, see Andrea wilson Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). On the relationship between seeing and knowing in Russian, see Maks Vasmer, Etimologicheskii slovar’ russkogo iazyka, trans. O. N. Trubachev, ed. B. A. Larin, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 1996), 1:283 and 312. 5. See, for example Marx w. wartovsky, “Picturing and Representing,” in Perception and Pictorial Representation, ed. C. F. Nodine and D. F. Fisher (New York: Praeger, 1979), 272–83. In the eighteenth century, George Berkeley came to a similar, and at the time a minority view, that vision is a language that must be learned; and (in C. M. Turbayne’s words) “since vision is a language, it follows that a foreigner to visual language cannot at first understand it.” C. M. Turbayne, introduction to Works on Vision, by George Berkeley (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), xxx. 6. See, for example Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), which focuses on “the place of Louis XIV in the collective imagination” (1). His place in the eighteenth-century Russian imagination awaits study. 7. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, la transparence et l’obstacle (Paris: Plon, 1957); L’oeil vivant: Corneille, Racine, La Bruyère, Rousseau, Stendhal, rev. ed., Collection Tel 301 ([Paris]: Gallimard, 1999); Starobinski, 1789, les emblèmes de la raison (Paris: Flammarion, 1973). See the discussion in Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes, 85–89. 8. See note 7. 9. See, for example, the essays in David Michael Levin, ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 272 Notes to Page 5 10. R. J. Snell, Through a Glass Darkly: Bernard Lonergan and Richard Rorty on Knowing Without a God’s-Eye View (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2006), chap. 1, esp. 11–12. On “intuitionism,” Snell cites Giovanni Sala, Lonergan and Kant: Five Essays on Human Knowledge, ed. Robert M. Doran, trans. Joseph Spoerl (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 81. 11. In the conclusion to his study of The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), James Cracraft, after abundantly documenting Russia’s “visual transformation” (294), cites the “immensely problematic” nature of determining “the importance of the visual as distinct from the verbal” as the reason why historians—himself included—have not attempted to do so. Hence for Cracraft, Russia’s “visual transformation” remains mostly unexplained as anything other than westernization. Among the works on avant-garde visuality, see especially Gerald Janecek, The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Of the five collections of articles in English published on Russian visual culture in recent years—Alla Efimova and Lev Manovich, eds., Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Roger B. Anderson and Paul Debreczeny, eds., Russian Narrative & Visual Art: Varieties of Seeing (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994); Catriona Kelly and Stephen Lovell, eds., Russian Literature, Modernism and the Visual Arts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); D. M. Greenfield, ed., Depictions: Slavic Studies in the Narrative and Visual Arts in Honor of William E. Harkins (Dana Point, CA: Ardis, 2000); and Valerie A. Kivelson and Joan Neuberger, eds., Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008)—only the last includes material on the eighteenth century. On icons and literature, see especially Leonard J. Stanton, The Optina Pustyn Monastery in the Russian Literary Imagination: Iconic Vision in Works by Dostoevsky...