'All Turned to Rot and Gape': The Picturesque Ruin in Gogol’s Dead Souls and 'Old World Landowners'

• In Event: Masks of Reality: The Many Faces of Russian Realism

Abstract

Imperial Russia metabolized the cult of the picturesque ruin when this aesthetic sensibility was already ripe—overripe, perhaps. In Western Europe, the picturesque had reached a degree of banality by the turn of the nineteenth century, and its affect had exerted its influence in literature, painting, landscape design, and tourism since the mid-eighteenth century. But in many cases the ruin as a material site recedes from view; it is a prospect, not a place.
The fruit borne by the unsteady absorption of the picturesque brings to the fore the question of materiality. What happens to this sensibility when there are ruins that are uncomfortably material but resistant to the picturesque? Reading the ruins in chapter six of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls and his “Old World Landowners” suggests a threatening anti-picturesque in which the ruin registers the expansion of matter, rather than the condensation of meaning.

Author

• Dario Lucero, New York U