Early Modern Russian Letters: Texts and Contexts (Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures, and History)

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.

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).