Visualizing Russia - (Russian History and Culture) by Cynthia Hyla Whittaker (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book elaborates the origins of the famed Russian style and celebrates the seminal role that Fedor Solntsev plays in its development, thus rescuing from near obscurity this pioneer in the arts of the nineteenth century and in the formation of the defining image of Imperial Russia.

Book Synopsis

The Romantic search for a national past was a European preoccupation in the first half of the nineteenth century. In Russia, this process led to the formation of the Russian style that has to today so captivated the world's imagination. While the manifestations of this style are easily recognizable in gleaming gilt, vibrant colors, onion domes, peasant costume, and tsarist regalia, hardly anyone has realized the pioneering and defining role that Fedor Solntsev (1801-1892) played in the development of a Russian national aesthetic. This book rescues Solntsev from obscurity and celebrates his major contributions to the arts, archaeology, architecture, ethnography, icon painting, restoration work, and Russian nationalist ideology as well as place his work in a general European context.

Contributors include: Marc Raeff, Wendy Salmond, Richard Wortman, Anne Odom, Irina Bogatskaia, Marina Evtushenko, Olenka Pevny, Irina Reyfman, Nathaniel Knight, Lauren M. O'Connell, and J. Robert Wright.

About the Author

Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, Ph.D (1971), Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, is Professor History at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and chair of the department at Baruch. She has published widely on Russian history and culture of the 18th and 19th centuries.