scholarly journals "An Evening at Kantemir’s" (1816)

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 109-127
Author(s):  
Marcus Levitt
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
Russian Intellectual History ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Rewriting History ◽  
Harsh Climate

Konstantin Batiushkov’s “An Evening at Kantemir’s” (Vecher u Kantemira, 1816) is unique as a work of literature, a document of Russian intellectual history, and a cultural and artistic manifesto. The “Evening” takes its cue from the popular Enlightenment genre of “dialogues with the dead,” although Batiushkov brings together people who were contemporaries rather than widely separated historical figures, as was usual.  In it, the poet Antiokh Kantemir (1708-44) challenges Montesquieu’s argument from The Spirit of Laws that Russia’s harsh climate has resulted in its alleged lack of civilization.  Batiushkov was rewriting history with hindsight, and one of the charming aspects of the work is its slightly humorous and lightly ironic play with anachronism, as Batiushkov presents Kantemir as marvelously prophetic of the later successes of Russian literature. Typical is his interlocutor’s statement that “It is easier to believe that the Russians will storm Paris” than that Russia could produce a Lomonosov. Batiushkov himself was with the troops that took Paris in 1814, and the recent Russian victory was surely on readers’ minds as they read this piece.  “An Evening at Kantemir’s” attempted to integrate the “new” Russian literature with the eighteenth-century “classicist” literary and Enlightenment tradition. It also illustrates Batiushkov’s faith in poetry as a fundamental way to advance the cause of national progress.

scholarly journals Héroes nacionales como vehículos emocionales de conceptos / National Heroes as Emotional Vehicles of Political Concepts

2017 ◽  
pp. 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Isabel González Manso
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Siglo Xix ◽  
The Relationship

This article deals with the relationship between concepts, heroes and emotions. To that purpose it propounds an explicative mechanism through the comparative analysis of the use of heroes in Spanish politics in the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. The spread of some political concepts was facilitated by their association with heroes of the past, which not only provide legitimacy but also a strong emotional burden in terms of the values they represented. The proposed methodology is applied to the examination of political uses of two historical figures: Padilla and Pelayo.Key WordsEmotions, national heroes, intellectual history, nineteenth centuryResumenEl presente artículo examina la relación entre conceptos, héroes y emociones. Para ello propone un mecanismo que se sirve del análisis comparado del uso de héroes en la política española de finales del siglo XVIII y de la primera mitad del XIX. La difusión de ciertos conceptos políticos se vio facilitada por su asociación con héroes del pasado que no solo aportaban legitimidad y prestigio sino también una fuerte carga emocional dado los valores que estos héroes representaban. Las consideraciones metodológicas se aplican al análisis de los usos políticos de dos personajes históricos: Padilla y Pelayo.Palabras claveEmociones, héroes nacionales, historia intelectual, siglo XIX

Chaadaev's Evaluation of Peter the Great

Slavic Review ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-44
Author(s):  
Raymond T. McNally
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Russian History ◽  
Peter The Great ◽  
Russian Intellectual History ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Source Materials

The question “Did Peter the Great exert a beneficial or a harmful influence upon the development of Russian history and culture?” is one that has provoked debate ever since that monarch ruled Russia in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The varied answers to that question set up the general battle lines between Westernizers and Slavophiles during the first half of the nineteenth century. One of Russia's most critical intellectuals in that period, Peter Iakovlevich Chaadaev, answered the question in several ways. His answers provide a key to a peculiar kind of ideological westernization in Russian intellectual history. The discovery of hitherto unpublished source materials that fill an important gap in the documentation of Chaadaev's views on Peter the Great led to the writing of this article.

What is Prosveshchenie? Nikolai Novikov's Historical Dictionary of Russian Writers Revisited

2010 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 360-377
Author(s):  
Colum Leckey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Broad Context ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Unusual Combination ◽  
Religious Piety ◽  
Russian Intellectual History

AbstractScholars have long regarded Nikolai Novikov's Historical Dictionary of Russian Writers as an essential source for eighteenth-century Russia's literary and intellectual life. Beyond providing valuable information on hundreds of authors, the Dictionary also clarifies the meaning of enlightenment (prosveshchenie) for Novikov and his generation. This article examines the Dictionary's application and understanding of prosveshchenie in the broad context of Russian intellectual history. For Novikov, prosveshchenie bore little similarity to the skeptical and critical spirit of the European Enlightenment. Instead, it represented an unusual combination of religious piety, erudition, and commitment to the spread of learning—the same ideals Novikov would promote as a Freemason and pass on to the nineteenth-century intelligentsia.

Outside Ravel's Tomb

1999 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 465-530 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Abbate
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Human Subjectivity ◽  
Mechanical Reproduction ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Tombeau De Couperin ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Musical Modernism

In his 1956 study of Ravel, Vladimir Jankélévitch remarked that music machines and animated objects are pervasive motifs in the composer's oeuvre. These motifs shaped Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917) and L'Enfant et les sortilèges (1925), and are significant generally in musical modernism. To trace their historical and philosophical meanings, we begin with a peculiar visual icon: Rousseau's tomb in the Panthéon (1794), which symbolizes an Enlightenment sense of tombeau as "containing the dead" yet also "animated from within." This characterization, in an imaginative leap, could also be applied to a box that reproduces music: the musical automaton. Such automata were perfected in the eighteenth century, and musical performers were compared to them, suggesting the uncanny aspects of both; a full intellectual history of this phenomenon has yet to be written. But given this history, which assumed new forms by 1900, we understand more fully the meanings borne by symptoms of mechanism in Ravel's piano suite and his opera. They are modernist reflections on human subjectivity in music, its loss in mechanical reproduction, and the futility of seeking lost objects by breaking open a tomb.

Liberty, Property and Popular Politics

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British History ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Parliamentary History ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
The University

Few scholars can claim to have shaped the historical study of the long eighteenth century more profoundly than Professor H. T. Dickinson, who, until his retirement in 2006, held the Sir Richard Lodge Chair of British History at the University of Edinburgh. This volume, based on contributions from Dickinson's students, friends and colleagues from around the world, offers a range of perspectives on eighteenth-century Britain and provides a tribute to a remarkable scholarly career. Dickinson's work and career provides the ideal lens through which to take a detailed snapshot of current research in a number of areas. The book includes contributions from scholars working in intellectual history, political and parliamentary history, ecclesiastical and naval history; discussions of major themes such as Jacobitism, the French Revolution, popular radicalism and conservatism; and essays on prominent individuals in English and Scottish history, including Edmund Burke, Thomas Muir, Thomas Paine and Thomas Spence. The result is a uniquely rich and detailed collection with an impressive breadth of coverage.

Afterword

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abigail Williams
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Young People ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
The World ◽  
Sense Of Reality ◽  
Domestic Culture ◽  
The Way

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. This book offered a series of vignettes of reading lives and practices. It presented a cluster of historical figures and a range of historical books, and used them to try to reconstruct what literature has meant and what it has been used for. It showed that the way in which people used the books they read are closely bound up with other aspects of amateur, domestic culture. This book also showed that anxieties about forms of reading are not new. Eighteenth-century commentators worried about learning bought too easily and readers who could no longer engage with whole texts. Families encouraged reading together because they feared that young people were losing their sense of reality through their immersion in addictive imaginative fictions. The world of eighteenth-century reading was a very different land, but in some ways, perhaps not so far from our own as we like to think.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document