Golburt Luba. The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination

University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. — xi, 387 p. — (Publications of the Wisconsin Center for Pushkin Studies). — ISBN 978-0-299-29813-5.Modern Russian literature has two "first" epochs: secular literature's rapid rise in the eighteenth century and Alexander Pushkin's Golden Age in the early nineteenth. In the shadow of the latter, Russia's eighteenth-century culture was relegated to an obscurity hardly befitting its actually radical legacy. And yet the eighteenth century maintains an undeniable hold on the Russian historical imagination to this day. Luba Golburt's book is the first to document this paradox. In formulating its self-image, the culture of the Pushkin era and after wrestled far more with the meaning of the eighteenth century, Golburt argues, than is commonly appreciated. Why did nineteenth-century Russians put the eighteenth century so quickly behind them? How does a meaningful present become a seemingly meaningless past? Interpreting texts by Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Pushkin, Viazemsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and others, Golburt finds surprising answers, in the process innovatively analyzing the rise of periodization and epochal consciousness, the formation of canon, and the writing of literary history.Derzhavin’s Moment
The Empresses’ Histories: Lomonosov and Derzhavin
Catherine’s Passing: Hybrid Genres of Commemoration
Poetry Reads Power: Overcoming Patronage
The Fictions of the Eighteenth Century
The Verisimilar Eighteenth Century: Historical Fiction in the 1830s
Mimetic Temporalities: Fashion from the Eighteenth Century to Pushkin’s «The Queen of Spades»
Contents
The Margins of History: Ivan Turgenev’s Eighteenth-Century Characters