Death and the Afterlife in Derzhavin, Karamzin and Radishchev

• In Event: The Power of Memory in Late Eighteenth-Century Russian Literary Culture

Abstract

The paper will discuss some key representations of death and memory in these writers, looking at their use of description and visual codes (iconography, statuary, and ekphrasis) in linking the ends of life and prospects for commemoration. The paper will relate the value of visual memorials to ideas of sympathy and tragedy important to each writer, and also connect these textual moments to the respective theories of mortality and immortality each may have held.

Author

• Andrew Kahn, U of Oxford (UK)