Connections between 18th-Century Russian and European Culture

Abstract

Both of the books reviewed here share commonalities not only in their essaycollection format but also in their subject (cultural interactions between Russia and Europe in the 18th century). Russian-language scholarly work on this problem in the field of art history owes much to the pioneering research of D. V. Sarab ́ianov, who studied 19th-century Russian painting in the context of European schools.1 Before this book, scholars of art tended to consider Russian and European art in isolation from one another. Sarab ́ianov aimed both to identify the general features of artistic processes common to both and to reveal the national specifics of concrete phenomena; in the process, he uncovered a variety of links among different traditions, inaugurating a methodologically novel approach. He considered not only general problems (the specifics of Russian Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, and Modernism in the European context) but more specific ones as well (comparing artists of A. G. Venetsianov’s circle and German Biedermeier art, A. A. Ivanov and the