Thinking Eighteenth Century: Between Repulsion and Attraction

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel focuses on how the eighteenth century was perceived in early nineteenth-century Russia. It aims to provide insight into the constructing and contesting of the past in terms of linguistics, poetry, and journalism. We show how the nineteenth century sought to transgress the previous epoch’s remnant bounds by reinterpreting old and new, archaic and innovatory. Analyzing these categories, the panel traces how the tension of old vs. new was reflected in Czech-Russian philology and literary relations of the late eighteenth-early nineteenth centuries. Additionally, it discusses how Russian national self-positioning towards the West, which would grow to be a full-blown ideological preoccupation of the nineteenth century (‘narodnost’, national identity etc.), was first conceptualized in eighteenth-century satirical journals. We conclude with an analysis of the representation and mythologisation of the eighteenth century in the unpublished poetry of the early nineteenth-century poet Stepan Shevyryov.

Sub Unit

• Literature: Russian and Eurasian

Chair

• Alexander Averbuch, U of Toronto (Canada)

Papers

• Linguistic Purism and Transgression in Russia and the Czech Lands: Enunciating the National Identity and Domesticating the World Literature - Anastasia Tsylina, Brown U

• The Polemics on Russian Identity in the 18th Century Journals: Catherine II, Fonvizin, Plavilshchikov - Irina Avkhimovich, St. Olaf College

• Stepan Shevyryov and the Creation of a Myth of the Eighteenth-Century Russia - Igor Vishnevetsky, Carnegie Mellon U

Discussant

• Valeria Sobol, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign