The Image Responds: Photographic Aura in Aleksandr Ivanov’s “Stereoscope”

Abstract

Abstract:The narrator-protagonist of Aleksandr Ivanov’s novella “Stereoscope. A Twilight Story” (1909) stumbles upon a portal into a three-dimensional photographic world—the uncanny “ bygone spaces” that cause him to veer between “ fear” and nostalgic “rapture.” These emotions are contradictory but also inseparable, which becomes clear when the narrator’s experiences are read through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura. The story as a whole prefigures Benjamin’s “definition of the aura as the aura of distance opened up with the look that awakens in an object perceived”: the photograph in “Stereoscope” is endowed with a gaze, at once threatening and beguiling, that saps the protagonist’s agency. Because Ivanov’s text seeks to enact the protagonist’s adventures for the reader, the“Twilight Story” not only testifies to the enduring power of the photographic image, but also showcases the auratic possibilities of language.