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Russian Writer’s Album in XIXth Century: a Document of Epoch, a Fact of Biography

Sat, November 21, 10:00 to 11:45am, Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, Meeting Room 409

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The subject of consideration is the integration of verbal descriptions of events and their pictorial representation in the diaries, travel albums, notebooks and other working materials of "drawing writers." Such integration will be discussed on the example of two unpublished Russian albums of the first half of XIXth century: the family album of V.A. Zhukovsky (in the collection of NYPL) and the war album of A.V. Сhicherin (in the collection of SPHL, Moscow). Both ego-documents were for their creators the instruments of self-conceptualisation and self-reflection, the tools of selection and representation of biographical facts allowing to build a certain version of the Self (“pater familias” for Zhukovsky and “painter” for A.V. Сhicherin). Both albums include not only personal but also historical intentions: their content is defined by epoch’s image. The turbulent epoch of Napoleonic wars manifests itself in Сhicherin’s album and the quiet Biedermaier epoch, in Zhukovsky’s one. The writers form their albums on the intersection of the verbal and visual, the personal and historical, the internal and external. The paper presenters will analyze this phenomenon within the interdisciplinary approach (literature, history, arts). A comparison of new archive materials of V.A. Zhukovsky and his younger contemporary A.V. Chicherin reveals certain trends and patterns in an the attempts to use the image not only to fix, but also to analyze the reality in the first half of the 19th century.

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