Marcus Levitt 
Early Modern Russian Letters 
Texts and Contexts

Early Modern Russian Letters: Texts and Contexts brings together twenty essays by Marcus C. Levitt, a leading scholar of eighteenth-century Russian literature. The essays address a spectrum of works and issues that shaped the development of modern Russian literature, from authorship and philosophy to gender and religion in Russian Enlightenment culture. The first part of the collection explores the career and works of Alexander Sumarokov, who played a formative role in literary life of his day. In the essays of the second part Levitt argues that the Enlightenment’s privileging of vision played an especially important role in eighteenth-century Russian self-image, and that its “occularcentrism” was profoundly shaped by Orthodox religious views. Early Modern Russian Letters offers a series of original and provocative explorations of a vital but little studied period.

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Foreword. Part One: SUMAROKOV AND THE LITERARY PROCESS OF HIS TIME. Preface. 1. Sumarokov: Life and Works. 2. Sumarokov’s Reading at the Academy of Sciences Library. 3. Censorship and Provocation: The Publishing History of Sumarokov’s “Two Epistles”. 4. Slander, Polemic, Criticism: Trediakovskii’s “Letter from a Friend to a Friend” of 1750 and the Problem of Creating Russian Literary Criticism. 5. Sumarokov’s Russianized “Hamlet”: Texts and Contexts. 6. Sumarokov’s Drama “The Hermit”: On the Generic and Intellectual Sources of Russian Classicism. 7. “The First Russian Ballet”: Sumarokov’s “Sanctuary of Virtue” (1759) Defining a New Dance. 8. Was Sumarokov a Lockean Sensualist? On Locke’s Reception in Eighteenth-Century Russia. 9. Barkoviana and Russian Classicism. 10. The Illegal Staging of Sumarokov’s Sinav and Truvor in 1770 and the Problem of Authorial Status in Eighteenth-Century Russia. 11. Sumarokov and the Unified Poetry Book: His Triumphal Odes and Love Elegies Through the Prism of Tradition. 12. The Barbarians among Us, or Sumarokov’s Views on Orthography. Early Modern Russian Letters: Part Two: VISUALITY AND ORTHODOXY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY RUSSIAN CULTURE. Preface.13. The Rapprochement between “Secular” and “Religious” in Mid to Late Eighteenth-Century Russian Culture. 14. The “Obviousness” of the Truth in Eighteenth-Century Russian Thought. 15. The Theological Context of Lomonosov’s “Evening” and “Morning Meditations on God’s Majesty”. 16. The Ode as Revelation: On the Orthodox Theological Context of Lomonosov’s Odes. 17. An Antidote to Nervous Juice: Catherine the Great’s Debate with Chappe d’Auteroche over Russian Culture. 18. The Polemic with Rousseau over Gender and Sociability in E. S. Urusova’s Polion (1774). 19. Virtue Must Advertise: Self Presentation in Dashkova’s Memoirs. 20. The Dialectic of Vision in Radishchev’s Journey from Petersburg to Moscow. Sources

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Marcus Levitt (Ph.D. Columbia University, 1984) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Southern California. Dr. Levitt is known for both his work on eighteenth-century Russian culture and on Pushkin. Major publications include: Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (Cornell University Press 1989), Early Modern Russian Writers, Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, (Volume 150) in the series The Dictionary of Literary Biography (1995; Editor and contributor) and Making Russia Visible: The Status of the Visual in Eighteenth-century Russian Literature (forthcoming).