One fall evening in 1880, Russian painter Ilya Repin welcomed an unexpected visitor to his home: Lev Tolstoy. The renowned realists talked for hours, and Tolstoy turned his critical eye to the sketches in Repin's studio. Tolstoy's criticisms would later prompt Repin to reflect on the question of creative expression and conclude that the path to artistic truth is relative, dependent on the mode and medium of representation. In this original study, Molly Brunson traces many such paths that converged to form the tradition of nineteenth-century Russian realism, a tradition that spanned almost half a century-from the youthful projects of the Natural School and the critical realism of the age of reform to the mature masterpieces of Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the paintings of the Wanderers, Repin chief among them. By examining the classics of the tradition, Brunson explores the emergence of multiple realisms from the gaps, disruptions, and doubts that accompany the self-conscious project of representing reality. These manifestations of realism are united not by how they look or what they describe, but by their shared awareness of the fraught yet critical task of representation. By tracing the engagement of literature and painting with aesthetic debates on the sister arts, Brunson argues for a conceptualization of realism that transcends artistic media. Russian Realisms integrates the lesser-known tradition of Russian painting with the familiar masterpieces of Russia's great novelists, highlighting both the common ground in their struggles for artistic realism and their cultural autonomy and legitimacy. This erudite study will appeal to scholars interested in Russian literature and art, comparative literature, art history, and nineteenth-century realist movements.

About the Author

Molly Brunson is associate professor of Russian literature at Yale University.

Reviews

Molly Brunson has written a provocative, sophisticated, and illuminating study that focuses on the making of Russian realism through the collaborative effort of literature and painting in the period 1840 to 1890.

* The Russian Review *

A substantial achievement of this study is that it indulges, excites and greatly enhances modern insights into nineteenth-century Russian realist painting.

* The Slavonic and East European Review *

In this splendid study, Molly Brunson sets out to reshape how we look at and think about nineteenth-century realist painting and the relationship between painting and narrative realism. Brunson succeeds masterfully at dislodging assumptions about Russian nineteenth-century Realism that are most stubbornly ensconced in accounts of visual art.

* Slavic and East European Journal *

Brunson's book underscores the power of close looking (and close reading). As she does, she weeds out the evolving urgency of Realism, pulling out both the historical and the transhistorical aspects of the movement. In doing so, she makes a convincing case not only for Russian Realism's place in the wider European and American discourse, but also for Realism as an ambitious project in its own right.

* The Burlington Magazine *



Book Information
ISBN 9780875807386
Author Molly Brunson
Format Paperback
Page Count 264
Imprint Northern Illinois University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 907g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 16mm