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Speaker(s): Molly Brunson (Yale University)

Whether in the fragmented fever dreams of St. Petersburg’s cityscape or during frenzied flights on country roads, Nikolai Gogol represents imperial Russia with a unique, often disorienting descriptive prose, a literary vision so unusual that it has been considered both striking in its realism and protomodernist in its abstraction. In this talk, Molly Brunson considers Gogol’s visual poetics within the context of Russian culture’s late and self-conscious appropriation of Renaissance perspective, drawing on contemporaneous developments in Russian art history and twentieth-century aesthetic theory. In particular, she compares Gogol’s view of the Russian countryside in Dead Souls to the modest rural subjects of Aleksei Venetsianov’s genre painting. Throughout his career, Venetsianov was dedicated to the mechanics of draftsmanship, especially the rules of perspective; and he was committed, as well, to the teaching of these mechanics in a democratic fashion and to a diverse audience. In both Venetsianov’s painting and Gogol’s prose, this concept of perspective—both linear perspective and deviations from it—made possible new ways of seeing rural reality and the advancing of a national tradition, which together would impact the rise of realism. Ultimately, Brunson asks whether this assimilation and occasional critique of western spatial systems reflect not only the conditions of Russia’s uneven historical and cultural development, but also a distinctly Russian, and surprisingly modern, point of view.
 
Molly Brunson is Associate Professor in the Departments of Slavic Languages and Literatures and History of Art at Yale University. She writes and teaches broadly on the literature and art of Russia’s long nineteenth century. Her first book, Russian Realisms: Literature and Painting, 1840­–1890, was published in 2016 by Northern Illinois University Press. Brunson is currently working on a second book, The Russian Point of View: Perspective and the Birth of Modern Russian Culture (under contract with University of California Press), for which she was named a fellow at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in summer 2016.